November/December 2005
By Si Wakesberg
What would Simon Strauss have to say about his old company if he were alive today?
In August, Asarco L.L.C.—once a giant in the copper industry—announced it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It was an inglorious end to a firm that had been a driving force in the global primary copper market.
I first met Simon Strauss when I was a cub reporter for the Daily Metal Reporter. He was then an important metal executive, known and respected internationally. Even more, he was a spokesman for the entire copper industry, testifying before congressional committees on matters of vital interest to primary producers.
He began his career as an editor of the prestigious Engineering & Mining Journal. During World War II, he worked on procurement policies for the U.S. government. In 1946, he joined Asarco and ascended to become vice chairman in 1977. During his Asarco years, Strauss acted as president of the Lead Industries Association and head of the Zinc Institute as well as chairman of the American Bureau of Metal Statistics. He also wrote Trouble in the Third Kingdom, which addressed the developing problems in the mining industry. Commenting on recycling in that book, Strauss wrote that “estimates have been made that 90 percent of all copper consumed is potentially available for recycling.”
Strauss was a kind and patient teacher, and though I pelted him with questions when I first met him, he never got ruffled. Once, when the government called a meeting of copper producers in New York to discuss the question of price-fixing in the industry, I happened to be sitting next to him. He looked around at the group of producers, who were all crowded into a small room, raised his hand and said somewhat innocently to the government official in charge: “I’d like to go to the men’s room. Will you please assign someone to go with me and make sure I don’t fix any prices on the way.”
It was a facetious, yet ironic comment because, on the one hand, the government insisted that copper producers not talk to each other for fear of price fixing while, on the other, it brought all the producers together into one room. At that time, the government had been investigating the copper industry for months.
In fact, even I was called before a grand jury to give testimony, and one of the questions asked of me was: “Do you know Simon Strauss?” In the end, the government’s quest to prove price fixing fizzled out.
I was also fortunate to get to know Strauss outside the parameters of the copper industry. As a music lover, I traveled every summer to Tanglewood, the famous music festival in Lenox, Mass. Imagine my surprise to run into Strauss at one of the concerts. He had a cottage nearby and was a steady patron of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which made Tanglewood its summer home.
Strauss had a challenging domestic life because his first wife had polio, yet he was the most caring of husbands. Though he traveled a great deal for both Asarco and the industry, he always brought his wife on business trips, no matter how difficult the travel. His wife, a remarkable woman, later wrote a book about her illness and how her husband meticulously took personal care of all arrangements for her travels with him.
Strauss traveled so much because he was always in demand to speak about the copper market. His fame was universal. “He’s the international authority on copper,” a British analyst told me. “When he talks, we listen.”
Strauss’s importance was also reflected in Asarco, which was a major player in both the primary and secondary metal markets. Asarco, in fact, operated a secondary smelting company, called its Federated Metals Division, which was a big buyer of both copper and lead scrap. In those days, much of the domestic copper scrap shipments went to copper smelters or brass ingot manufacturers. Some of those companies, like Federated, were tied to primary copper producers.
If you traveled from Newark to Philadelphia, you would pass smelting and ingotmaking plants like American Metal Climax Inc., Asarco, and Barth Smelting Corp. along the way. Years ago, Philadelphia was a copper scrap hub, and the Philadelphia Metals Association dinners attracted large crowds of processors and consumers.
I recall particularly my first visit to the gargantuan American Metal Climax plant in New Jersey, which took an entire morning to survey. It is long gone, as are the other smelters and ingotmakers in the region.
When I look back, I can honestly say that Asarco’s Federated Metals Division had the most knowledgeable staff in the entire industry. To name all of the distinguished alumni would be an arduous task. I must, however, mention Paul Fine because he was the man I always called first whenever I had a question about copper scrap. There was no shilly-shallying—he came right back with the answer.
Lucky for me, a young reporter in the 1950s to 1970s, many copper scrap consumers had expert buyers at the helm. If Paul Fine wasn’t available, I could call Mel Kriegel of American Metal Climax, Ted Gruen at International Minerals & Metals Corp., or Hugo Simon at Barth Smelting. If the question involved copper scrap exports or international copper movements, my good friend Kurt Leburg of Schiavone-Bonomo Corp. was there to help. They were real market authorities, always kind enough to share their vast knowledge with a youngster like me.
What would they say about Asarco’s downfall? The copper market has gone through periods of consolidation and rationalization during which even giant companies were not immune. In the process, copper producers and their satellite smelters were either swallowed up or perished on their own.
By 2005, Asarco, which had been acquired by Grupo Mexico S.A. de C.V. in 1999, was struggling with many problems, including financial difficulties, environmental challenges, and strikes, all of which backed the company into a corner. The company was, as Metal Bulletin put it, “beset by unpaid bills, environmental suits, poor-quality assets and a seemingly ambivalent parent company.” High copper prices kept the machinery going until mid-2005, but the once-great copper firm finally succumbed in August and filed for Chapter 11.
The last time I saw Simon Strauss was, surprisingly, at a family affair. I was at the wedding of my grandniece. Sauntering to the bar for a scotch, I literally bumped into Strauss. Startled to see him at the family event, I blurted out, “What are you doing here?” He smiled and said, “I’m here at my grandnephew’s wedding!”
By that time, he had retired from Asarco but was still acting as a metals and minerals consultant. He had achieved remarkable heights in his career and earned many distinctions. In 1963, for instance, he received the Copper Club’s Ankh Award—also known as the Copper Man of the Year Award—for his outstanding contributions to the copper industry. In 1997, the Mineral Economics & Management Society gave him its W.A. Vogely-MEMS Award, recognizing his work in advancing mineral economics. Then, in 2000, Strauss was inducted into the National Mining Hall of Fame.
Not long after we met at my grandniece’s wedding, I heard that Strauss had died. I realized then that it was the end of an era, an era of powerful metal executives who dominated the market scene in a way that no longer exists.
There is an epilogue to this story, something that only happens in the world of paradoxes. Recently, I was invited to visit an old friend who had moved into an “independent living facility” near Philadelphia. While there, I was surprised to run into Simon Strauss’s second wife, and we exchanged memories of that fabled copper man.
To this day, whenever there’s something happening in the copper market, I think of Simon Strauss and wonder what he would say, how he would address the problem. Will we ever again have such remarkable industry executives as Paul Fine, Mel Kriegel, Hugo Simon, and Kurt Leburg? History fades fast. I hope someone will one day write the full story of all of those outstanding individuals who contributed so much to the development of the copper and scrap industries in the United States.
—Si Wakesberg, New York bureau chief for Scrap