March/April 2013
Ralph Simon built a 43-year career in the paper industry on a foundation of business expertise, integrity, faith, and family, which continue to sustain him in his retirement.
Ralph Simon will tell you he is a purpose-driven person. “Throughout my life, I’ve made numerous choices on purpose because of what I wanted to do,” he says. “I’m not a person who says, ‘I just ended up there.’” One choice was to pursue a career in the pulp and paper industry, which became his life’s work. Beginning in 1967, Simon spent 43 years working for four companies engaged in all aspects of the business: paper manufacturing, converting, distribution, and recycling. Along the way, he also chose to serve as a volunteer leader in industry organizations and trade associations, including ISRI’s national Paper Stock Industries Chapter. By the time he retired in 2010, his peers considered Simon an esteemed senior statesman and mentor in the paper trade.
Finding a Calling
Robert Ralph Simon was born in Cleveland in 1944 to a father who was an aeronautical engineer and a mother who was a fashion model and reservation agent for American Airlines. His parents divorced when he was five, and his mother remarried when he was eight, relocating the family to Gloversville in upstate New York—a “wonderful place to grow up,” he recalls. “My parents and extended family provided a safe and trusting environment, and my parents taught me to respect others, regardless of their status in life,” he says. His stepfather, a sales executive for a company that made leather fashion accessories, traveled extensively, and the young Simon frequently accompanied his parents on
business trips.
In high school, Simon lettered in four sports—football, basketball, baseball, and golf—and participated in numerous activities, including theater and student government. Though several New England colleges accepted him, his parents encouraged him to visit the University of Miami (Coral Gables, Fla.). He fell in love with the campus and decided to enroll there. Beyond his studies, he was a walk-on player on UM’s red-shirt scholarship basketball team, a Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity member (in which he held several leadership positions, including president), and the “voice” of the Miami Hurricane football cheerleaders, leading the cheers at games in his senior year.
As a junior, Simon and a fraternity brother formed a business group in the fraternity for advertising studies and arranged a tour of a local printing plant for its members. During the tour, he asked the hosts to provide summer jobs that would introduce the group's members to the advertising and printing businesses. Simon landed a summer internship at the Miami Herald selling display advertising space, which gave him his first taste of the newspaper business. While there, Simon and a special advertising projects team leader sold enough ad space to create a 32-page Sunday supplement—the paper’s largest supplement to that point, he says—on the aviation industry of Dade County (Fla.).
Simon graduated from UM’s School of Business in 1966, earning a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a double major in marketing and management. When nearing graduation, he recalls considering his options. Would he return to Gloversville and work in his stepfather’s industry? No. For one, his stepfather was the only nonfamily member of a small, private business. “He wasn’t appreciated as much as he could or should have been,” Simon says. Also, he didn’t want to work for a small company, and he didn’t want to compete against his stepfather’s sterling reputation. In addition, Simon observed the buyer-seller relationships his father had with the major retail chains and what he had to do to get an order. “I just wasn’t happy with that,” he says. Would he take the management training position General Foods Corp. offered him in Jacksonville, Fla.? No. “I knew I hadn’t finished my education, as I wanted to specialize in international business,” he says. With that in mind, he chose to attend the Thunderbird School of Global Management (Glendale, Ariz.). While there, though professors encouraged him to prepare for work in Asia, he instead chose to learn Spanish to prepare for working and living in the Americas.
Even before graduating in 1967, with a bachelor of foreign trade in international management, Simon had received a half-dozen job offers and had another decision to make. He seriously considered working for American Express Financial Group in New York, until he learned the company planned to hire 20 people for its management training program. He felt that was a crowded field and instead decided to keep his options open. Studying in the library one day, he noticed a representative from Crown Zellerbach Corp.—a San Francisco-based paper company—conducting interviews. Simon started talking with the rep and ended up being his last interview of the day. The company’s international group recruited only from Thunderbird and recruited only one graduate a year, he learned. When the company offered that one slot to him, he accepted and began his career in the paper business.
Building a Career
A few other aspects of the job with Crown appealed to him, Simon says. “I felt I really needed to understand the business, so I wanted to go where there would be a formal corporate training plan.” Crown’s two-year training program fit the bill. He also liked the idea of living in San Francisco, where “everything was happening” at the time. He soon became a new product development manager, where one accomplishment was introducing plastic bags to grocery produce departments, which previously offered only paper bags.
It was in San Francisco, playing in a softball league, that Simon met his future wife, Susan Allen, a flight attendant with Trans World Airlines. They married in Susan’s hometown of Springfield, Mo., in 1969. Eight weeks after they returned from their honeymoon in Hawaii, Crown relocated him to San Juan, Puerto Rico. “That was a wonderful experience,” he says, “living on the beach and working in countries in the Caribbean as well as northern South America.” During an extended leave in the United States, however, Simon decided to give up beach life and return to San Francisco. In 1972, after five years with Crown, Simon left to join Wilson Paper Co. (Whittier, Calif.), a wholesale paper and packaging distributor. John Gilmore, a previous mentor of his at Crown Zellerbach, hired him to work in the group’s Hayward, Calif., office. Two years later, after the company promoted Gilmore and relocated him to Los Angeles, it named Simon general manager of the Northern California branch.
In his time with Wilson Paper, Simon expanded the company’s sales south to Fresno, Calif., and east to the Reno/Lake Tahoe area of Nevada. One memorable event in this stage of his career was dealing with an industry shortage of bleached and colored bag kraft. With no bleached paper available, Simon remembers convincing Wilson’s largest retail account, Macy’s, to change its trade dress merchandise bags from white to natural kraft brown bags with earth-tone inks. This new color trade dress design became the standard for Macy’s nationwide for several decades.
In 1975, conditions at Wilson Paper changed dramatically. The company’s president and Simon’s mentor Gilmore both left the company, which was then reorganized and its business assets sold to a local competitor, prompting Simon to consider a change as well.
In 1976, William Gleason, Simon’s supervisor and mentor when he worked in Crown’s international division in San Juan, recruited him to work for Consolidated Fibres Inc. (San Francisco) as general manager of its recycling division in Nashville, Tenn. William Ledbetter, the company’s area manager, became another mentor. “Bill taught me the ramifications of mills dictating buying prices based on supply and demand and the importance of knowing a mill’s grade and quality requirements,” he says.
Building on his operational experience with Wilson Paper, Simon reduced the Nashville facility’s volume by eliminating high-cost, low- or no-profit suppliers, cutting the workforce, and maximizing revenues by upgrading materials. He did such a good job streamlining the operation in just 12 months that CFI sold the division. Though the new owner asked Simon to stay on as general manager, he decided to relocate his family to Atlanta to assume the newly created position of regional operations manager for CFI’s Southeast recycling facilities.
Over time Simon accepted additional responsibilities at CFI, eventually marketing recovered materials full time. As a product specialist, he handled regional sales of used aluminum beverage cans and glass cullet as well as various paper stock marketing assignments. From CFI’s Bill Fowlkes and the late Bill Taylor, Simon learned the importance of contract negotiations and building long-term, mutually beneficial business relationships. “Everything I was taught in my career I tried to carry forward, modifying it for the business at hand,” he says.
Later in his career with CFI, Simon returned to international business activities, relocating the firm’s international eastern sales office from Newark, N.J., to Atlanta. His responsibilities included secondary fiber sales to Europe and prime linerboard and medium sales to Central America. During this period, Simon served on Consolidated’s team tasked with drafting a contract to supply ONP to Ontario Paper Co. (Thorold, Ontario). OPC accepted the proposal with the caveat that Simon would participate in the start-up work and procurement development efforts. He and other CFI staff members spent the next year developing an ONP recovery and logistical program for OPC’s mill. Simon credits the program’s success to the support of CFI’s principals, Haskel and James Stovroff, as well as Paul Clarfield, who led the Toronto office. The program’s “joint effort further reinforced the value of the team concept and [the idea] that no one person has the ability, knowledge, and time to do it all,” he says.
Simon chose not to remain on the procurement team in Canada, instead returning to Atlanta to explore another product-development opportunity: Consolidated asked him to develop a new shredded-paper bedding product for the poultry industry. Drawing inspiration from an existing program in England, he acquired a prototype machine and began producing a product line under the trade name Agri-Bed. Because the system operated best with over-issue news, Simon re-established his connections with publishers and printers. He also began marketing excess ONP to the developing cellulose-insulation business.
Working in Atlanta, Simon knew about Southeast Paper Manufacturing Co., which operated a mill in East Dublin, Ga. “We were an ONP supplier to this mill and also a competitor for ONP supply in the Southeast market,” he says. As he learned more about Southeast’s management philosophy, he began to think about working with its recycling group, Southeast Recycling Corp. “The company highly regarded its employees,” he says. “The company wanted the business to be fun to run; it wanted to take ordinary people and teach them to be extraordinary managers.”
Simon took over CFI’s sales of ONP to SRC so he could get to know the managers and develop personal relationships with them while following their progress and staff developments. “The SRC people were so dedicated and had so much joy working for their company—they were so proud,” he says. “I could see they were treated with respect. I had a sense that things were changing and thought, ‘someday, I’m going to move to SRC.’”
Making the Move
In mid-1987, when SP was installing a second newsprint machine at its Dublin mill and ramping up its ONP supply accordingly, it approached Simon to interview for positions related to the new recycling operations. To supply the growing mill, SRC planned to expand its recycling division from eight to 26 locations, which Simon says appealed to him. “I liked the stability of regional operations management—that type of business was my core DNA,” he says. “So when I heard there were expansions involved, it made sense to me that this was the place I should go to work.” His relationship with Jim Fletcher, SRC’s vice president and general manager, grew into a lifelong partnership focused on growth and credibility for the company.
SRC named Simon operational manager for its non-Florida region, which included existing operations in Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana and plans to expand to Maryland, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia. After joining SRC, Simon—who had always benefited from mentors in his career—decided it was time he became a mentor for others. “I made a decision that I was where God told me to be,” he says, “and I was going to stop being the guy who was always doing and start leading by example.” In his new position, he used what he calls a “consultative, team-management style” of project leadership. In particular, Simon worked closely with Rob Barnwell and Tony Prosperi to expand SRC’s regional operations in Georgia and Louisiana and establish recycling operations in Maryland and Virginia by acquiring the Mason-Dixon Recycling group of Garden State Paper Co. (Paterson, N.J.).
With the acquisition of a paper mill site in Newberg, Ore., in late 1999, Southeast Paper evolved into SP Newsprint Co. The company reassigned Simon to a small group of SP managers that would go west and assist in integrating the new Newberg mill into the SP corporate culture. He re-established his previous business relationships in California and developed new ones with contract suppliers such as publishers, printers, and private processors.
Over two years, Simon worked with Newberg’s John Lucini to develop an updated ONP supply network throughout the region and open the company’s first materials recovery facility in Portland, Ore.; a procurement office in Los Angeles; and, later, a materials recovery facility in Tacoma, Wash. After that project, Simon returned to Atlanta to lead a procurement team that was buying ONP for the Dublin mill from suppliers in 18 states. “Since SP needed clean ONP, I led the fight for quality material,” he says. His team developed SP’s Star Quality program and assisted in setting up the mill’s inspection protocol, which gave suppliers feedback on their ONP quality. As commingled curbside collection programs expanded, paper stock quality improvement became an ongoing issue, he notes. In times of oversupply, Simon returned to his international background by leading the company’s efforts to export ONP throughout the world.
Extracurricular Excellence
Around 1988, Simon started to participate in industry-related organizations and trade associations—service that continued for more than two decades. SRC’s George Elder had helped establish the Southeast Recycling Conference as a forum for exchanging regional recycling information, and Simon assisted with the group’s 1988 conference in Montgomery, Ala. He participated in almost every SERC annual conference from then until his retirement in 2010, he says. “Networking and contributing to this organization became a cornerstone of my ongoing management and leadership responsibilities.”
Simon also followed Elder’s lead in getting involved in ISRI’s national Paper Stock Industries Chapter. In addition to serving on the chapter’s board and committees on membership development and plant operations, Simon found his calling as chair of the chapter’s standards and practices committee. In that role, he recruited a 13-member committee that represented each part of the industry—processors, brokers and mill groups—and came from across the United States. This group sought to standardize and update the paper specs in ISRI’s Scrap Specifications Circular to “make it a relevant, valuable, and respected education tool for the entire industry,” he says. In his last year with SP, he also led PSI’s effort to update the quality specifications for news grades, which continue to be used today. Looking back, Simon describes his 12 years as head of PSI’s standards and practices committee as a “rewarding experience,” asserting that the group “accomplished a great deal and created lasting relationships between committee members and participants as well as the PSI membership.”
Simon’s extracurricular activities also included speaking at numerous state, regional, and national conventions, including representing SP and the American Forest & Paper Association (Washington, D.C.) in discussions of paper stock quality at the Pan-China Symposium in Beijing in the late 1990s.
Doing It Right
It was during the 2010 Paper Recycling Conference & Trade Show in Chicago that Simon made one more choice in his life’s direction. Walking through the hotel lobby one evening, he glanced at the elevators, then at the bar where people were making deals. He asked himself which direction he should go, up to his room or to conduct business at the bar? “Then I heard a voice say it’s time to go home and retire from the industry,” he says. “I’d been seeking God’s direction in my life. I hadn’t been thinking about retiring, just wondering what I was supposed to do next.”
Simon took an earlier flight home the next day and told his wife Susan he was going to retire. “Two days later, I’m sitting in an SP committee meeting, and they’re telling me I have to go to New York to handle a problem account,” he remembers. Instead, he told them about his plan to retire and asked if he could have the remaining five months of the year to “wrap up my personal business while transitioning responsibility to others.” He wondered “whether they were going to send me home, or whether I’d be allowed to do it right.” The company—to its credit, Simon says—let him do it right by visiting all of his major suppliers and facilitating an orderly transition, allowing him to end his career with the same sense of purpose with which he began it.
Ralph’s Résumé
Born: April 19, 1944, in Cleveland.
Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1966 from the University of Miami School of Business (Coral Gables, Fla.), with a double major in marketing and management, and a bachelor of foreign trade in international management in 1967 from the Thunderbird School of Global Management (Glendale, Ariz.).
Family: Married Susan Allen on March 15, 1969. Two children: Christopher and Chad.
Career: Started his paper industry career at Crown Zellerbach Corp. in 1967, moving to Wilson Paper Co. in 1972 and Consolidated Fibres in 1976. Made his final career move to Southeast Paper Manufacturing Co. (later SP Newsprint Co. and SP Recycling Corp.) in 1987. Retired in 2010 as vice president of SP’s material management group. In retirement he operates Simon Consulting, which serves clients in all facets of the paper industry.
Community and Philanthropic Service: In honor of his late half-brother, he volunteers with Canine Assistants (Milton, Ga.), which provides trained service dogs for people with special needs. He also is involved in his church, Mount Paran North (Marietta, Ga.).
Honors: Received the Phil Alpert Memorial Award from the Paper Stock Industries Chapter in 2007 for his leadership, dedication, commitment, and contributions to the chapter and industry. The Southeast Recycling Conference honored him in 2011 for his contributions to the success of the organization.
Hobbies: Traveling, reading, and golf—he recently scored his first hole-in-one.
Ralph Simon built a 43-year career in the paper industry on a foundation of business expertise, integrity, faith, and family, which continue to sustain him in his retirement.