Call it Destiny

John Thalheimer is royalty in the Philadelphia nonferrous scrap market, and—even at 69—he continues to oversee his immense Thalheimer Brothers kingdom.

By Eileen Zagone 

One cold December day, the two owners of a scrap recycling business in Staunton, Va., both suffer heart attacks, and their executive secretary/bookkeeper—not a family member—is called upon to make or break the business.

Sounds pretty outlandish—like the stuff of movies or the pilot episode for a new television sitcom. Maybe so, but for Revonda Crawford, it’s the true story of how she wound up running the scrap recycling company she owns today.

The blustery December day was in 1982, and Crawford’s bosses, Milton Klotz and Ralph Degen, indeed had heart attacks within 24 hours of each other—a coincidence that wrought change on the two men and their family scrap recycling operation, Klotz Brothers. 

Both survived their heart attacks, but the scare convinced Klotz to retire and forced Degen to face the fact that it would be several months at least before he would be healthy enough to make it back to work. That presented a sizable challenge for the tiny-staffed business and the two owners’ wives, now charged with devising a company plan. So they turned to Crawford, the firm’s only full-time office employee, and asked her if she would be willing to run the business solo for three months. 

Crawford accepted the challenge and, less than five years later, ended up as the proud owner of the very scrap business that took a chance on her.

Twists of Fate

The unusual turn of fortune that led to Crawford’s ownership of the company—now called Staunton Metal Recyclers Inc.—could be considered the second time fate has intervened in deciding the firm’s direction. The first time was in 1899. At that time, an uncle of Crawford’s former bosses was on his way from Maryland to Kentucky when one of his horses died on the journey. Looking upon this as a sign that his trek should end at that particular spot—Staunton, Va., located amid the picturesque Blue Ridge mountains—he decided to stay there and established Klotz Brothers.

Of course, the circumstances that led Crawford to work for Klotz Brothers in the first place might also be considered destiny. She began her working experience at the age of 13, pumping gas after school at her family’s filling station. Before long, she was handling the company’s bookkeeping, and this led her to attend business school following high school.

Upon graduation from business school in 1965, she was hired as the executive secretary and bookkeeper for Klotz Brothers and thus began her education in scrap. “Milton and Ralph were great mentors to me, as well as great friends,” Crawford recalls, noting that they welcomed her into their family business as one of their own. “It was sort of like having two more fathers.” 

And they were two fathers who truly believed in her business capabilities. At a time when women were scarce in the business world in general and the scrap industry in particular, Crawford’s supervisors recognized her natural talent with customers and her innate curiosity about the business and encouraged her to learn as much about the scrap recycling industry as she could. Accordingly, her duties were expanded well beyond the usual realm of executive secretary. “I started learning about metals, dealing with customers and brokers, and learning about buying and selling scrap,” she recalls. “Ralph and Milton taught me everything they knew.”

Thrown Into the Fire

One thing they hadn’t prepared her for, however, was the potential catastrophe the company would have to face following that fateful heart-attack day 14 years ago.

While the opportunity to manage the operation for three months clearly demonstrated the faith Degen, Klotz, and their families had in Crawford and her ability to keep the business afloat, she wasn’t quite so confident initially.

“I felt nervous,” she remembers, “I had never sold scrap before and had never been required to set the price of scrap before. It was quite an adventure.” Add to this the pressure to show a profit in those three months, explain the situation to brokers used to dealing with her on a decidedly more clerical basis, and the obligations that come with having a young family at home, and Crawford’s plate was more than full.

The first thing she did was hire a secretary. Not knowing where else to look, she asked her baby sitter to help out. Luckily the sitter had had some secretarial training, was very flexible, and helped ease the burden immediately. (She still works there today.)

The second thing Crawford did was turn to the many friends she had made in the industry during her then-17 years with Klotz Brothers. In an industry based on personal relationships, this link proved vital to the initial—and long-term—success of the company. “I knew a lot of the brokers already—but as a secretary, not as a scrap buyer. It was a very different relationship,” Crawford says understatedly. 
The result: Crawford rose to the formidable task of making the best out of less-than-ideal circumstances. Not only did she earn the respect of customers, but, perhaps more important, she kept the company in the black.
She’d shown she could run the business.

Changing of the Guard

With Klotz Brothers intact after conditions that would have signaled the death knell for many a small business, Degen returned to the operation more than grateful to Crawford—and more than willing to augment her scrap education. He wanted her to continue handling the firm’s bookkeeping, which she was happy to do, but he also wanted to capitalize on one of her most inherent proclivities: her people skills. So, she continued dealing with customers and brokers, excelling at this arguably most important of industry skills, while Degen continued sharing his lifetime of scrap industry knowledge with her.

Then one day in 1986, Degen told Crawford of his intention to retire the following year.
But with no relatives to take over the business, he couldn’t foresee retiring without selling the company. Still, knowing that Crawford had spent all of her adult life working in his scrap facility, and feeling that she was more than capable to command the business, he hoped she and her husband, James, would express interest in purchasing it. They had a year to think about it.

As Crawford recalls, they thought and thought ... and thought some more. “I still had one child at home and I knew how much time and effort it would take to run this business,” she says. On the other hand, she figured, “I didn’t know what else was out there for me. This was all I had known. And this business really gets in your blood. I wanted it, and I thought I knew enough about the industry to run the company
successfully.”

So with the blessings of Degen, she and James decided to make a go of it and acquired the firm in late December 1987. 

Still a Family Business

Since then, the Crawfords, with Revonda serving as president and James as vice president, have expanded Staunton Metal Recyclers into an even larger and more successful operation than certainly the owner of that dead horse could have imagined nearly 100 years ago. 

Not that the road to expansion has been easy. “It has required even more hard work and long hours than I ever thought,” says Revonda, not sounding even slightly fatigued. 

Each of the couple’s five children has worked there, “whether they liked it or not,” and one of them, V.J. Dedrick, continues to work at the plant full time with the intention of taking over when Revonda and James retire or, more likely, put more of their seemingly endless energy into building up another of their five businesses. 

During her tenure as president and owner of the company, Revonda has improved and upgraded the facility’s equipment, as well as increased the breadth of scrap materials the company handles. Although the company long ago stopped handling the furs and skins she remembers were common in her early days with Klotz Brothers, her business has been able to adapt to both the changing recycling industry and the needs of the community. For instance, when a growing number of citizens in and around Staunton asked for an opportunity to recycle household scrap, the company added curbside recyclables to its diet. “We are a full- service recycler,” Crawford proudly declares, boasting that the firm processed between 15,000 and 16,000 tons of metallic and nonmetallic scrap last year on its three acres.

She’s also been able to expand the company’s customer base, a formidable task in an industry based on trust, friendship, and business/family relationships that frequently span generations. What helped her in this area, she explains, is that by the time she became the owner and president, she had been well-groomed by Degen, and, let’s face it, she’d spent more than 20 years in the industry. “I knew how to deal with things,” she says. “I already had a good rapport with my customers, so we did not lose any when I took over. We gained customers.”

With regard to the particular challenges she’s faced as a woman in the male-dominated scrap industry, Revonda lingers only briefly on some of the unpleasantness she’s had to deal with over the years because of her gender. She prefers to dwell on the positive side of the story, stating, “There is still a bit of a stigma about a woman running a scrap business, but things are getting better all the time. I think, if anything, this industry is wide open with opportunity for women.” 

Further, she says, the men she has come to know through her business have lent her great support, advice, and in the case of Degen and Klotz, the opportunity of a lifetime. An opportunity, she says, that she continues to be thankful for, concluding, “I owe my heart and soul to this business, and I try to give it back.” •

Eileen Zagone is an associate editor of Scrap.