Life After Scrap

Many recyclers can’t imagine ever leaving the scrap industry. Here are the stories of six who did. 

By Jim Fowler

You hear it all the time among recyclers: “Scrap gets in your blood. I could never leave the industry.” And for many, the scrap business does indeed become more than a career—it becomes the only career, a giant extended family they never want to leave.
   Yet people do leave the business, of course. They leave for greater opportunity in other fields. They leave due to unfortunate circumstances. They leave by taking a buyout offer that’s too good to refuse, among other reasons.
   Of those who leave, some miss the industry while others don’t. Some would consider reentering the business while others are perfectly happy with their scrap memories. Each story is unique, as the following profiles of six former scrap professionals show.

A Tap on the Shoulder
John Linder was born into the scrap business. His father Ed (along with partner Leonard “Bud” Frank) started United Alloys & Steel Corp. in Buffalo after World War II with a pickup truck and a dime in his pocket.
   Growing up, John would visit the yard, though he didn’t work there until his last two summers in high school. He loved being in the scrap “trenches,” noting that “it was a very important experience for me. I was working alongside people a 16-year-old in my world would otherwise never get to meet.”
   After college, John worked six years as a community and labor organizer for Massachusetts Fair Share and the Hospital and Health Care Employees Union, 1199, AFL-CIO. Though he was passionate about his job, it was challenging for him to thrive in an environment where work was placed high above the family. As a newlywed at the time, John clearly saw the challenges of balancing a family and a career. Fortunately, the doors were open for John to come into the family scrap business. And so, in 1986, John—then 28—joined his father and brother Peter at United Alloys.
   “I loved my experience in the scrap business,” he says, recalling his 10-year run with the company. After the birth of his son in 1991, however, John found himself discovering his religion. Up to that point, Judaism hadn’t been an active part of his life. But as John and wife Nancy considered how they wanted to raise their son David, he was reintroduced to the local synagogue.
   That reintroduction would change the course of his life. “As I began to learn about my faith, it became a calling,” John says, adding that this realization was “a tap on my shoulder” leading him in a new direction. “I felt like the greatest contribution I could make was to become a rabbi. In making that decision, I asked myself, ‘John, are you willing to throw away this security blanket and begin a new career as a rabbi?’” With the support of his wife, John’s answer was “yes,” and he worked hard to make the six-month transition out of the family business as smooth as possible.
   In 1997, he spent a year working as an intern at Temple Beth Zion in Buffalo, then began his five years in rabbinic school at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform movement seminary with headquarters in Cincinnati. Since the college requires all students to study in Israel for their first year, John and his family moved to Jerusalem in 1998. After this “great experience connecting to the land and its people,” they returned to the United States and settled in Cincinnati to complete his rabbinic program. John, who will interview with congregations this March, will be ordained May 31 and begin his new career at 45. 
   “I’m anxious to know where we’ll be opening the next chapter in our lives,” he says, “but I’m much more filled with excitement and gratitude that I’m able to do this. It’s a very exciting time in our lives.”
   Does he miss the scrap business? “Yes,” he admits. “I miss the relationships with family, people in the industry, employees, and my involvement with ISRI. I loved the day-to-day action of the business. I can’t imagine it being duplicated in many other industries. It’s also a business, unlike many, where ‘street-smarts’ are an asset.”
   Reflecting on his time in the scrap industry, John says that he “gained a lot—the business gave me some wonderful gifts for what I’m doing now. In building relationships, the most successful and satisfying are those based on respect and trust—that lesson is a blessing.”
   From a practical viewpoint, he notes, the scrap business teaches you that what you plan to do on any given day isn’t necessarily what you’ll end up doing. “You always had to be prepared to regroup and keep moving,” he says. “If unmet expectations ruin your day, then every day will be miserable.”
   What doesn’t John miss about scrap life? “The pressure to meet the month-ly nut,” he states. “There are lots of families depending on the decisions you make, and that makes the business difficult. Also, it’s not easy to compete when the playing field isn’t even—when you’re dealing with competitors who are willing to work on a profit margin that won’t sustain a business or those who take the low road to make a buck.”
   Perhaps most notably, John says his scrap experience offered a real-world perspective to Jewish wisdom. “There’s a story from our tradition that says when one reaches the pearly gates, the first question that God will ask is, ‘How did you conduct yourself in business?’” he explains. “This isn’t to diminish other high expectations of how we live our lives, but Judaism understands that business pressures present the greatest challenges to our moral character.”
   Having been in the scrap business and now embarking on life as a rabbi, John says he understands, in a real way, how difficult it is to stay on the high road. “Judaism both acknowledges the challenge and points to the priceless reward of self-esteem and the legacy left to family and community by doing so,” he says.
Ironically, United Alloys was sold last year. As a result, John’s father Ed is retiring at 80 while brother Peter, 47, is deciding what to do in his next career.

It Wasn't Fun Anymore
Brothers Dennis and David Gahagen woke up every morning smack dab in the middle of the scrap business. Their mom and dad had started Gahagen Iron & Metal Co. in Commerce City, Colo., from scratch in 1936, and the scrap yard had evolved around their house. As David recalls, “There was the house, the lawn and trees, and scrap yard around it. The railroad siding was 15 feet from our front door.” 
   The brothers did everything in the business, “from pulling nails out of boards to pulling copper out of burned autos,” David says. While he enjoyed the work overall, there were times he would have rather been playing with the other kids, he notes.
   Dennis and David continued to work summers in the family business through high school and college. When Dennis finished college, though, his Army ROTC training took him to Hawaii, Vietnam, and Germany. David also graduated with Army ROTC training, parlaying that experience into a position as a helicopter pilot. While both intended to make a career of the military, Army politics changed their minds.
   It was 1973 and, at the time, their father’s right-hand man happened to be leaving the company. The brothers decided to leave the Army and return home to run the family business with their parents. Soon thereafter their sister Debbie returned to the business as well, making Gahagen Iron & Metal one big happy family. “I loved it,” David says.
   So why did the brothers ultimately decide to exit the business? In short, because it got to the point where “it wasn’t fun anymore,” Dennis states. 
   First, their dad Kenneth died in 1990, then their sister died in 1993 after a five-year battle with cancer. It seemed that Dennis and David would have to work harder to keep the family business afloat.
Instead, they decided to take more time off, Dennis says, noting that they should have made that decision earlier in their business lives. Still, even with a reduced work schedule, the brothers couldn’t sustain their interest in the business.
“We’d had enough,” Dennis says. “OSHA and EPA rules and regulations were coming down in an unending flurry. We were spending too much time appeasing the government, and it got real old.” David concurs, noting that in their final five years “it wasn’t fun to go to work anymore.”
   In the end, the brothers found themselves tired of the business, yet with no family members interested in taking over the company. So, in 1997, they sold the business (which continues to operate under the name Rocky Mountain Recycling).
   Neither Dennis nor David miss the scrap business one bit. “Industry friends said I’d be dying to come back after two years,” David says, answering, “Not so. I lived the scrap business. I was really into it, six days a week. Once, I went two years and never took a day off. I was burned out. Then, with the threat of Superfund, it just became overwhelming.”
   Beyond those drawbacks, however, David admits that he does miss “the camaraderie of ReMA at the national level,” noting that he was just stepping up his involvement in the association when they sold the business. He also acknowledges that he enjoyed working with Nasco-op.
   These days, David buys, sells, and trades hobby trains at shows and on the Internet, and he has a train layout in his home. It’s not a business, he says, just fun. David has also pursued his interest in golf. “I used to play maybe six times a year at meetings and conventions,” he notes, “but now I play a lot more. My handicap has dropped from 20 to 8.”
   Dennis volunteers one day a week at the Colorado Historical Society, cataloguing antique firearms, and manages a small military antiques business that he runs through the mail. He also goes on archeological digs with the National Park Service, including one at the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana. Such projects are “a lot of work, but a lot of fun,” he says.

A Means to an End
Bob Lewon says his life runs in 10-year spans. Judging from his career in the scrap industry, that certainly seems to be true.
   Bob’s experience in the scrap business began in 1963 when he was 20. That year, he went to work for Levin Metals Corp. (later renamed LMC Metals) in San Jose, Calif., a family scrap firm owned jointly by his father and maternal uncles. Bob worked for that company while finishing college and for the next 10 years from 1963 to 1973, moving “all over” as the firm expanded beyond its San Jose headquarters to include branches in Stockton, Richmond, and other California cities.
   In 1973, though, Bob decided to leave the hands-on work of the family business to try to freelance as a marketing and management consultant for the scrap industry. “I wanted to try something else,” he says. “With young children, I wanted to work out of my home—to be with my kids. I didn’t make a lot of money, but it was a nice lifestyle.”
Another 10 years later—in 1983—an opportunity arose to return to LMC Metals and, since his children were older, he decided to reenter the scrap business, working from its relocated headquarters in Richmond. He then managed the scrap company as executive vice president, assisting with the sale of the firm in 1988 to Simsmetal USA Corp. and staying on as president through 1993.
   Summing up his scrap career, Bob notes that “working was always a means to an end for me. I didn’t love the scrap business. I don’t miss going in every day.” Still, he keeps a hand in the business through consulting work, which has taken up 20 to 25 percent of his time. This work—which includes helping “buyers buy and sellers sell”—has its enjoyable moments, he says, noting that he especially had fun consulting on the bankruptcy proceedings for Hiuka America Corp. “I enjoyed matching wits with the young attorneys,” he states. “They kept me on my toes.”
   Speaking as someone who has been both in and out of the scrap fray, Bob asserts that “members of the scrap industry are their own worst enemies. Many of the problems they have they’ve made for themselves. The industry is fairly simple. It’s how you manage the margin-vs.-volume fight that counts. You hear the same thing wherever you go—once your operating costs are in line, it’s the balance of volume vs. margin that determines success.”
   At this point in his life, Bob says he wouldn’t return to the business full-time—unless he was broke. “The industry has been good to me and I enjoyed it,” he says, then confesses, “but I don’t like work. It’s as good an industry or better than most, but it can be a hard and messy business.”
   At the end of 2003, Bob’s current 10-year cycle will be over, raising the question as to what his next 10-year phase will bring. Probably spending even more time with his children and grandchildren, and tackling unusual projects such as his remote cabin in California’s Trinity Alps.

Dramatic Changes and Evaporating Margins
Fred D’Agostino sang his way into the scrap business. It happened this way: In the early 1970s, Fred was between jobs, but he spent some of his time singing with the New York Choral Society. One time, the fellow singing next to Fred told him about an opening where he worked, which happened to be Brandeis Goldschmidt & Co. Ltd. Fred followed up on the lead and got the job.
   For the first three months, Fred worked as a clerk, reporting what happened on the trading floor of the old Commodity Exchange on Water Street. The company then brought him uptown to meet company executives, including Harold Sacks, who told him, “I think you might have a future in trading metals.” Before becoming a metal trader, however, Fred had to spend six months in the back office, learning about shipping, trucking, bills of lading, letters of credit, and the like.
   After that education, he began buying scrap. “I loved it for a lot of reasons,” he says. “The more you learned, the better you got. It was never boring. You never knew what the market was going to do. It was exciting. It was great.”
   Prior to his scrap career, Fred had served as an officer in the Navy. He followed that with various jobs, including working as a drug detail man for Merck, driving a cab, and being a stockbroker, all of which helped him in the scrap business, he says. 
   After an internal squabble at Brandeis a few years later, Harold Sacks started his own firm, shortly thereafter hiring Fred as his number-two man. A couple of years later, there was a falling out, and Fred left the firm to join Gerald Metals, followed by stints at Metal Traders and its successor company, Warrenton Refining Co. Then, in 1989, he opened a metal-brokerage firm named Metal Resources Inc. with the backing of Southern Foundry Supply Inc. He closed the business after two years, noting with pride that “no one got stiffed” in the process.
   At that point, Fred left the metals business. “Changes in the way scrap and refined metals were traded were so dramatic,” he explains. “The margins just kept evaporating. Even the effort to keep costs down by working by myself just wouldn’t work. I couldn’t find a place for me. I still miss it every day.”
   Fred spent the next six years working with his brother-in-law in an importing business in Cleveland. But the metals business came calling one final time in 1998, when Philip Services Corp. hired him to join its Conversion Resources division, which had bought Warrenton Refining. “It was like old home week,” Fred recounts. Yet this return to scrap only lasted a year when Fred concluded that Philip Services—which declared bankruptcy in 1999—was “a house of cards.”
   Once again, Fred pursued a career outside the metals industry. His next career move led him to a software marketing firm in Cleveland that “was a great business until 9/11,” he says, “then it evaporated.” Currently, Fred is in the insurance business in Cleveland, a position that, “while not the greatest, beats driving a cab,” he says.
   Even now, Fred says he’d consider returning to the metals business, though he’d certainly ask a lot of questions before making such a move. He misses the people, the daily buzz, the fact that the business is different every day, the challenge of calling around to find out where the market is likely to go.
   Getting reflective, Fred notes that “memories are very selective. I definitely miss the people I got to meet throughout the industry, but I don’t miss working with some of the maniacs. But I loved the business. I have a lot to be grateful for.”

No Return on Investment
Though Joel Schiavone’s family owned a scrap company—Michael Schiavone & Sons Inc. in North Haven, Conn.—his first career out of college was far afield from scrap.
   After graduating from Yale University and Harvard Business School, he ran a chain of nightclubs named Your Father’s Mustache, which prospered from 1962 to 1971. As music tastes changed and nightclub crowds dwindled, however, he decided to ask his father if he could join the family scrap business. For the next 15 years, Joel dedicated himself to scrap. Then, at 50, he decided to go into other endeavors, including transportation, real estate, cable TV, and politics.
   Joel left his family’s scrap company, in part, because he found that his business strengths weren’t a good match with the industry. “I’m a dreamer and a planner,” he says, “and I don’t run things very well. The scrap business needs day-to-day management, and I don’t do that well.”
   He also left the business, he says, because it operates on such low margins that “there’s no good reason to stay, from an intellectual point of view.” As he explains, “When you’re plodding away to make two or three percent off of capitalization, you have to realize there’s simply no connection between investment and return. The business is very competitive, very small, and owners don’t control costs because they’re more concerned with market share. There’s a certain mindset in the scrap business. When you’ve been in the business 100 years, you just don’t seem to think about return on investment.”
   In his life after scrap, Joel has launched two campaigns in the Connecticut political arena. One time, he was a candidate for governor. During that campaign, his opponent asked him to join his team as comptroller. Joel agreed, but their camp lost the general election by 8,000 votes. Twelve years later, in 2002, he ran for mayor of New Haven but again lost in the general election. Despite these losses, Joel still hopes to someday resume his quest for political office, though he admits that he “can’t focus on the nonsense.” At the moment, he doesn’t have the energy or the time for politics.
   Instead, he continues to work in real estate, including a neighborhood revitalization project in the Fair Haven area of New Haven. In this project, Joel and his partners are buying and refurbishing grand old houses on the water that were built in 1812. They are about a year and a half into this 4-to-5-year project, he notes.
   At 66, Joel doesn’t seem to have a big interest in retiring in the traditional sense of the word. On that topic, he recounts a recent experience he had at a Harvard Business School reunion: At that gathering, he found that those who had worked for someone else had retired, while those who worked for themselves were still working. “I’ve worked for myself for so many years, why quit?” he asks.
   Even now, he thinks fondly of his scrap career. “I liked the business,” he says at first, then adds, “I loved the business. I loved the people. I loved the conventions. The group of guys I grew up with in ISIS were great people, and we had a great time.” He even misses “the smell of a scrap yard,” he says. “You walk out in the yard with your hard hat on and you feel the energy—there are trucks, trains, big equipment, cranes. Sure I miss it.”  •

Jim Fowler is retired publisher and editorial director of Scrap. He enjoys his life after scrap.