Dawn of the Stainless Age

The stainless steel industry at the start of the 1950s was as new, mysterious, and exciting as the computer industry is today. And when one considers that U.S. stainless production in 1949 was less than 500,000 tons a year compared with a preliminary 1995 total of more than 2.2 million tons, it is easy to see the vast distance this industry has traveled.

It is therefore difficult to imagine a time when you would hear questions as preposterous as, “So what the heck are stainless alloys anyway?” It raises eyebrows and makes one feel ancient. Yet in history’s time frame, stainless appeared on the metals scene only yesterday, making its debut around World War I and gaining momentum in the mid-1950s and early 1960s.

My own discovery of stainless occurred in the early 1950s, when I was employed by a well-known metals trade paper. At that time, I was fully steeped in aluminum, copper, lead, tin, and zinc—the metals that dominated the market scene. Copper, in fact, was the metal of the day, and if you had told a copper trader then that aluminum scrap shipments would soon rival those of copper scrap, he would have smiled incredulously and thought you were ripe for the booby hatch. Had you even mentioned stainless scrap, a puzzled look would have crossed his face. Stainless? Yes, he’d heard the word somewhere, but he didn’t exactly know what it was.

We at the trade paper were therefore intrigued when a series of full-page ads began to appear in our publications and others asking for stainless steel scrap. These ads said simply “Young of Youngstown” repeated several times down the page, and “Stainless Steel Scrap” at the very bottom.

It whetted one’s curiosity.

Who was Young? What was stainless steel scrap? Where was it being bought and sold, and in what quantities? I called a few iron and steel scrap dealers and learned that some processors had been handling something called stainless, but they conceded that even they didn’t know exactly what it was and had little idea how to test it.

Of course, there were already some forward-looking scrap companies, such as H. Klaff & Co. Inc. in Baltimore, where Marvin Plant could foresee stainless’s glittering future, or Samuel G. Keywell Co. Inc. in Detroit and a few others who were becoming known as “stainless scrap specialists,” later establishing themselves as giants in this field. These companies led the way in what was to become a veritable gold rush into stainless scrap in the 1970s and 1980s.

Spark testing of alloys became a required course at seminars and workshops as the identification of stainless scrap broadened interest in the industry. In related fields, for example, individuals such as Meyer Pashelinsky soon published their delineations of such complex metals as cobalt alloys.

But back to my story.

Seeking more information on stainless steel, I managed to find some books in the public library that gave me a cursory look at this new metal. Everything I read or heard only made me want to learn more. What course to follow, then, but to track down Mr. Young of Youngstown, talk to him, wring out all possible available data, and then write it up for the magazine?

Looking back, I can see that my quest for Mr. Young was a kind of pilgrimage. I don’t know what I imagined I would find when I got to Youngstown. Based on the prominence of the ads, I thought I would encounter a tremendous plant processing huge quantities of stainless scrap. I had visited some of the large iron and steel scrap yards in Pittsburgh and Chicago, and I believed that I would find as impressive a stainless plant in Youngstown, particularly since the new metal had the keyword “steel” in its name.

I arrived in Youngstown on a nasty rainy day, and I drove aimlessly through the streets looking for the mysterious Young plant, which nobody seemed to know about. Suddenly, I came upon a small, white, low-slung building between two older-looking red-brick buildings that disappointingly appeared to be the object of my search. Above one of the bells the words “Young of Youngstown”—by now a familiar logo—were stamped out. Somewhat chastened, I rang the bell.

The Maury Young who opened the door was indeed young. He was also handsome and articulate and looked like a movie actor playing the part of a scrap executive. He ushered me into a small office jammed with several desks, chairs, magazine racks, and about four or five telephones strewn around the room. There was no one else in the office, and it was soon apparent that Maury himself was Young of Youngstown. During the course of that morning, I saw and heard Maury negotiate some remarkable tonnage business over those phones, constantly talking, buying, and selling, constantly developing a market for stainless scrap.

It was my first encounter with a stainless scrap broker whose use of the phone was to become a consummate art. (Later on, I think Maury became joint owner of some processing plants, but at that time he was simply a broker who transacted business from his modest office.) The role of the broker in the scrap industry was not a new one. I was familiar with a few copper scrap brokers in New York, and I was beginning to see the impending wave of aluminum brokers. Mostly, however, brokers were an integral part of the ferrous scrap industry. I had even met some of them, but I had never encountered such a smooth-talking, convincing, telephone-adept personality as Maury Young. Listening to his palaver, watching him in action, hearing—in between his business dealings—about 18-8 stainless and the varieties of alloy scrap was like taking a crash course in the mysterious subject.

Adding to my luck, at lunch I had the opportunity to meet Joseph Filner—an authentic pioneer of the stainless scrap business, a New Yorker, and fellow City College of New York alumnus—and hear him talk impressively about the future of the stainless scrap industry.

Mention Youngstown to me today, so many years later, and I don’t think of a geographical entity on a map. Instead, a curtain rises in the theater of my memory, the scene shifts, and I am back again on a rain-soaked morning in Ohio, sitting in a small office, watching Maury Young transact business over the phone at one of the scrap industry’s awesome moments—the dawn of the stainless age. •