March/April 1996
A growing number of today’s scrap executives pursued other interests before joining the recycling industry, including the four profiled here—a former pro football player, an FBI agent, a therapist, and a prosecutor.
By Michele Savage
Michele Savage is a writer based in Arlington, Va.
In January 1975 and 1976, when the Pittsburgh Steelers made their first two Super Bowl appearances, linebacker Ed Bradley was on the field, helping his team roll over, first, the Minnesota Vikings, then the Los Angeles Rams, for back-to-back victories.
Two decades later, Bradley is still a team player, though in a field far removed from Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium and professional sports. These days, he’s part of the scrap squad at Brenner Iron & Metal Co. (Winston-Salem, N.C.), where, as a vice president of the company, he’s more concerned with metals than pigskin.
Transferring from professional football to scrap recycling may sound like an unlikely career leap, but Bradley’s past is really not much more shocking than that of other recycling executives who pursued other interests before joining the scrap business. Kenneth W. Puckett, a regional director of commercial operations for Tube City Inc. (Pittsburgh), for instance, was an FBI agent, then a private investigator, before accepting a job with a Cleveland scrap firm more than 30 years ago.
Then there’s Marilyn Alper Davidson, who enjoyed a successful career as a public prosecutor in Philadelphia before recently moving back to her hometown to run Southern Metals Recycling Inc. (Wilmington, N.C.), her family’s scrap business. And Rik Kohn, a former math teacher and social worker, now does his professional talking as vice president of Federal Metal Co. (Bedford, Ohio).
While such former “outsiders” may not represent the majority among today’s scrap executives, the recycling business is clearly drawing in a growing number of professionals from diverse previous work experience these days.
“It’s true, much of the industry is occupied by people whose families started their businesses,” Puckett notes. “But I increasingly find the business is attracting people from many backgrounds. I know I’ve met several people who now work in the scrap industry who come from engineering and legal backgrounds.”
Rik Kohn agrees. “So many people in this industry have grown up in it, in family businesses,” he says. “Now it’s changing, I think—going from a family-run industry to a professionally run one. You find that more and more today, even in family-owned companies.”
Influenced by Injury
For Bradley, the decision to move on to the recycling field was a practical one. The Connecticut native had attended Winston-Salem’s Wake Forest University on a football scholarship, which then opened the door to a football career spanning four seasons with the Steelers (1972-1975), one with the Seattle Seahawks (1976), and three with the San Francisco 49ers (1977-1979). But he was forced into retirement by a career-ending injury.
“Once my playing days were over, I was unsure what direction my career was going to take,” Bradley recalls. Then one day he was talking it over with Michael Brenner, one of his business partners in a health club they owned together. Brenner, president of Brenner Iron & Metal, “suggested I come and learn the scrap business. That was 15 years ago, and here I am.”
Though he admits he probably would have continued playing professional football for a few more seasons if injury hadn’t stopped him, Bradley says working in the scrap industry has certain advantages over professional sports—particularly in terms of the security offered by the decades-old Brenner company and the industry itself.
“I loved football, but it’s a mercurial existence. You’re always living on the edge. It can be over in the bat of an eye,” he says. “You become accustomed to that—not knowing day to day, week to week, year to year if you’re going to have a job, either due to injury or to someone more talented coming along. You always know the woods are full of hundreds of guys hungry for your job.” His current career is a whole different animal, he points out. “I like the sense of stability this company and the business represent,” he explains. “Recycling has been around for a long time, and it continues to grow along with public awareness.”
Fascinated From Afar
Like Bradley, Tube City’s Puckett never imagined he’d wind up in the scrap industry. Then again, before he joined the FBI, he never really imagined himself in that line of work either.
In fact, while growing up in Mobile, Ala., Puckett aspired to be a commercial artist. Upon graduating from high school, however, the bureau recruited him for a clerical job in Washington, D.C. He accepted the post and held it for six years while attending college, then the FBI academy at Quantico, Va., where he trained to be an agent.
In 1961, after three years as an FBI investigator—assigned to offices in Washington, Boston, and Cleveland—Puckett made the career shift that eventually led him to the scrap business. His new job wasn’t any more like recycling than the old—he had gone to work for a Cleveland- area private investigation agency operated by other former FBI officials. But, during a successful investigation he conducted for the firm, he came in contact with a scrap recycling business.
The rest, as they say, is history. “I just became fascinated with the industry, which ultimately led to my joining a scrap company,” he recalls. “I took a job there as director of purchasing, and I just fell in love with the business.” And, indeed, since taking that first step into recycling, Puckett has worked for several companies in the industry, most of them in the Pittsburgh area, where he has spent the last 25 years. He joined Tube City last April.
Looking back on his two very different vocations, Puckett notes that his work as an investigator was both rewarding and “very interesting,” but says that he enjoys the greater opportunities for creativity he has found in his current profession.
“One of the main differences between scrap and investigations is the freedom with which you are allowed to pursue this job,” he says, pointing out that each person in a company tends to be responsible for finding their own solutions to the various difficulties they may encounter—whether in terms of marketing scrap or finding material to process or dealing with a quality issue. Beyond that, he points out, “in the scrap community, our primary consideration, when all is said and done, is making a profit.” Needless to say, his goals at the FBI were quite different.
Third Career’s the Charm
Kohn of Federal Metal also had a few different ideas about his profession before he settled on scrap.
After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in business, the Cleveland native took a job teaching junior high school math. This experience led him to volunteer at a drop-in center for teenagers, which, in turn, soon inspired him to seek his master’s in social work. And once he had that advanced degree in hand, Kohn divided his second career between a Jewish counseling center and a small private practice.
Then, a friend—former stockbroker David Nagusky—made him “the proverbial offer I couldn’t refuse.” It was to join Nagusky’s family firm, Federal Metal, and Kohn has been there, handling scrap, for the 15 years since. It might seem like a surprising career move after devoting the time and energy to obtaining his master’s degree, but Kohn doesn’t see it that way. “I had always assumed I’d end up in business somewhere,” he says. “The other careers were the sidetrack, if you will, though a sidetrack that lasted 10 years. I enjoyed what I did as a therapist, but it was time for me to move on to something different.”
For Kohn, the change in careers meant a change in workplace language and goals. “It’s a different focus,” he notes. “You’re dealing with a much more realistic world than in therapy, where you’re trying to help people reach their ideal. In business, you’re dealing with practicalities.”
But perhaps the most dramatic contrast he has found between his past and present vocations has been an emotional one. As a therapist, Kohn says, he found it difficult to leave the office at the office. He frequently came home with a heavy load of emotions collected in his day’s work—a burden he found he had to “dump” before he could get on with his personal life. “Now, I find it either has to be an extraordinarily good day or a very bad one for me to want to talk about the office when I get home,” he says.
Back to Her Roots
Unlike Kohn, Puckett, and Bradley, attorney Alper Davidson was no stranger to the industry when she went to work as president of Southern Metals. She was, as they say, born into the business.
Even so, she says, “working for the company wasn’t really something I had ever thought about doing until a little over four years ago.” Instead, after graduating from college and moving to Pennsylvania, Alper Davidson initially pursued a career as a medical social worker and then as a full-time mother.
But when her marriage broke up and she decided to return to the work force, Alper Davidson found herself looking in an entirely different professional direction: law. “That was where my interests had been when I was an undergraduate,” she says. So Alper Davidson enrolled in law school, and, after graduating in 1984, spent a year clerking for a judge before taking a position with the district attorney’s office.
“I loved being a prosecutor,” she says. “It was a wonderful job.” Following seven years in the fast-paced world of Philadelphia’s courtrooms, however, she felt ready for a change of pace and scenery. And as luck would have it, both were part of the package in an unexpected invitation from her father: to take over the portion of the family business then operated by Alper Davidson’s 84-year-old uncle, who was ready for retirement.
“They wanted someone from the family to run the scrap end of the business,” she notes. (Southern Metals includes three steel warehouses and a steel fabricating business in addition to scrap recycling facilities.) “I told my father I’d try it for a year. That was four and a half years ago, and I’m still here because I really love it. Learning the business has been fun.”
Finding Similar Similarities
All four of these scrap professionals draw parallels between their former and current occupations.
Alper Davidson, in fact, says what she enjoys most about her job at Southern Metals mirrors what she enjoyed about working as a prosecutor. “No two days are the same,” she says. “You’ve got to always be thinking; things are always changing.” At the same time, she welcomes the differences, especially “living in a wonderful city with a slower pace and a more relaxed lifestyle,” as she puts it. “This has been very positive for me.”
But while the city’s pace may be slower, in running a scrap business, Alper Davidson says she finds herself constantly recycling many of the fast-paced skills she used as a trial attorney. “As a lawyer, you learn to always be on your toes. It’s the same type of thing with this job,” she reports. “You always have to make sure you know what’s going on.” Her current profession also calls on her knowledge of the law, which has not only remained polished, but has even increased, she says. “I’ve learned more about environmental law than I ever knew before,” she explains, particularly emphasizing what she’s learned about Superfund law since joining the family company.
For Puckett, the similarities between what he does today and what he did in his former career as an investigator are clear as well. To put it simply, he says, “when scrap comes into the yard, you must investigate the proper use for it. And from a sales standpoint, you need to understand your customers—both generators and consumers of scrap—which requires a degree of investigative skills too.” Plus, he adds, “this job requires the ability to work with people and to have a knowledge of details, of chemistry—just as conducting an investigation does.”
Comparing his last two jobs, Kohn says he relies today on the same knowledge of people, negotiating techniques, and other relating skills he employed every day in counseling his former clients. In other words, he says, “working in this business is still working with people.”
Furthermore, as a former therapist, “I’m the one at the company whom others come to when they have a problem, be it work-related or personal,” Kohn notes. “I no longer do therapy, but I still draw on the skills I learned as a therapist.”
Bradley, too, says he has found endless use in his current position for the people skills he cultivated playing for three different professional football teams in different parts of the country. “You learn to work with literally thousands of people of different backgrounds in a team-oriented environment,” he says. “I feel very comfortable in confronting any situation—dealing with customers, putting out fires, so to speak. I do a lot of fire-fighting.”
The simple fact that he had such an unusual former profession also has come in handy in a number of business situations, he says.
“I don’t flaunt it exactly, but I do have two Super Bowl rings that are about the size of manhole covers,” Bradley says. “I don’t wear them on a daily basis—just for social occasions and some business calls. When you’re making cold calls, they can be a great door opener. There have been times when a purchasing agent who wasn’t interested in what I had to say at first noticed the rings and says, ‘What are those things?’ And I tell him, ‘Oh, those are Super Bowl rings.’ They’re a lot more interested all of the sudden.” •
A growing number of today’s scrap executives pursued other interests before joining the recycling industry, including the four profiled here—a former pro football player, an FBI agent, a therapist, and a prosecutor.