Holly Grell-Lawe, granddaughter of Sam and Gladys Jennings, talks about Jennings Manufacturing for the Brookfield Historical Society.
A look at the history of Jennings Manufacturing in Masury is a snapshot of the development of and changes in heavy industry and industrial communities in the 20th century.
“I think it’s an excellent 20th-century example of the free enterprise system and how it was used by a person who really came from nothing and became a self-made man and became a success in his business and in this community,” said Holly Grell-Lawe, granddaughter of Sam and Gladys Jennings, founders of Jennings Manufacturing.
“It’s also a great example of a successful Depression-era startup,” Grell-Lawe said. “Many people tried many things during the Depression to make a living and not all succeeded, but this one did. It’s also an example of how innovation can distinguish a business from its competition.”
Grell-Lawe has collected nearly 300 photos of the company and its products and other archival material. She said she and her mother, Pamela Jennings Grell, will donate the photos to the Youngstown Museum of Labor and Industry, but the donation has been held up because of the complicated donation process and lack of funding. Until the donation occurs, much of the material has been posted on the web at jenningsmfgco.com
At an April 9 presentation for the Brookfield Historical Society, Grell-Lawe said she collected some items during an aborted research project in the 1990s, and hit up her cousins for what they had.
Sam and Gladys Jennings are shown in their shared work space at Jennings Manufacturing Co. in Masury.
Samuel Jennings was born in 1903 in Washington, Pa., and moved with his family to Masury when he was 1, Grell-Lawe said. His father was shop foreman for Petroleum Iron Works in Masury. Sam also worked for the company off and on starting at a young age, sorting rivets, cutting scrap and doing odd jobs for 8 cents an hour. His schooling in Masury went through the eighth grade and he received additional education from YMCA night school, correspondence courses by mail and a year at Youngstown Institute for Technology, an early incarnation of Youngstown State University. He eventually was appointed full-time night superintendent at PIW.
At the age of 23, Jennings went to work for W.B. Pollock of Youngstown as a welding engineer.
“Within Pollock, he was known as the stainless steel fanatic,” Grell-Lawe said. “He did develop some new things. He did develop a stainless steel annealing cover for tin mills, (and) a welded ladle car. Apparently, he had ideas that were new in terms of what you could do with stainless.”
Welding technology “took off” in the 1930s “and was replacing riveting or at least supplementing riveting in industry,” she said.
When the Depression hit, Jennings found himself without a job but with a wife and three kids to support.
“He decides that he is going to sink or swim on his own,” Grell-Lawe said. “He started his business in the empty two-car garage behind his house. That was really his first factory.”
This was 1932.
His first product was stainless steel newspaper tubes for rural routes. There were no takers for a while, until the Youngstown Vindicator ordered 300 tubes, which were sold at 38 cents a piece.
“I think he walked away with $114, which, back then, wasn’t bad money,” Grell-Lawe said.
He also made newspaper stands for the Vindicator.
Looking for more work, he approached Isaly’s Dairy Co. and finagled an order for stainless steel serving trays.
“He’s got a nice order, a big order, but he’s got no money to produce the product,” Grell-Lawe said. “This is a well-known family story. He went to Republic Steel, he went to the sales manager and in the ’30s that sales manager for Republic Steel, he was anxious to sell steel to anybody. He took my grandfather to the credit manager and they had a conversation that went like this: The credit manager said, ‘OK, where’s your money?’ And Sam Jennings replied, ‘Hells bells, mister, I haven’t got any money!’ And the credit manager laughed and apparently said, ‘Give him the material he needs. I think he’s the only guy who ever told us the truth about whether he had money or not.’”
“This was the beginning of what was a very profitable relationship between Jennings Manufacturing and the Isaly’s Dairy Co.,” she said. “He made spoons, spoons, spoons.”
Jennings’ daughters Shirley and June told stories of polishing stainless steel teaspoons in the garage when they were little girls, Grell-Lawe said. Jennings also made stirring spoons and packing spoons for Isaly’s.
“The spoon for which Isaly’s was well known was the skyscraper spoon,” she said. “My grandfather actually invented the skyscraper spoon.”
The skyscraper spoon had a long bowl, like a gardening shovel, for heaping ice cream onto a cone.
“The patent was finally issued in 1935 and he is listed as the inventor,” Grell-Lawe said. “Of course, the patent was assigned to Isaly’s Dairy.”
Isaly’s established a store in Masury in 1940, according to local history writer Lois Werner.
“From those beginnings of trays and spoons, he really started making a lot of different dairy-industry equipment,” Grell-Lawe said. “It included milk tanks, pans, spoon washers, cold milk strainers, bottle-washing machines, jugs that would be used in soda fountains that would hold the soda behind the nice front with the spigot.”
Jennings made other items for Isaly’s and other dairy-industry companies, but the 1940s brought on “a big shift in the company,” she said. “He shifted from stainless steel to steel-plate construction and heavy machine work, primarily for the steel and rubber industries. I think that this was primarily motivated by the needs of the steel and rubber industries during war time.”
There are no known photos of products the company made for the war effort during World War II. “However, there is oral history,” Grell-Lawe said. “I remember these stories from my grandmother. The anecdotal oral history says that among the products that the company did make were landing craft doors and some kind of equipment for PT boats.”
Sam Jennings’ willingness to invest in new technology and equipment gave his company a competitive advantage over older shops, she said.
“Most plate shops were unable to do machine work and so what Jennings did was he equipped his shops so that he was able to do both welding and machine work; whereas, other plate shops, particularly older ones, would send out material for machining,” Grell-Lawe said. “Being able to fabricate, weld and machine in one shop enabled him to cut his costs, expedite delivery and take responsibility for the entire job, the entire product that was to be produced. All the products he made once he made this transition, they were all custom. There was never any production line, per se.”
Sam Jennings never wanted to have a big company – he is known to have had 125 employees in the ’40s – but he loved making big things. As the photos show, some of his products, particularly for the steel industry’s blast furnaces, were huge. The garage shop lasted all of one year before he built a larger shop that he added onto six times, and then a second plant, which had rail service.
In the 1940s, Jennings started building homes that his workers could rent for $45 a month. Many still stand.
The 1950s was “a very strong business decade for Jennings Manufacturing,” Grell-Lawe said. “I would guess, if you want to say the company had a heyday, it probably was the 1950s into the 1960s.”
Customers included Republic Steel, Jones and Laughlin Steel and U.S. Steel.
The 1960s also was a strong business time, but the kinds of jobs Jennings was getting were changing.
“Beginning in 1960, he’s getting jobs that are repairs – stress relieving, reconditioning, re-hard surfacing – of blast furnace equipment,” Grell-Lawe said.
Although she doesn’t know for sure, this type of work seems to follow the historical theory that American heavy industry dominated the world stage and had “very little incentive to innovate or to work to improve productivity,” Grell-Lawe said. “I don’t know that this is evidence that these heavy industries were not pursuing new technologies, were not investing in new equipment. I just know that in 1959 and 1960 we have photographs that are showing repair work, reconditioning work, resurfacing work.”
Whatever the case, “What was going on with them (steel industry) is going to trickle down into different kinds of jobs for Jennings Manufacturing,” she said.
The latest photo Grell-Lawe has found dates from June 1969. Sam Jennings died in 1974 and Gladys sold the company to Koppers, a former customer, in 1975.
Gladys is an unsung hero of the Jennings Manufacturing story.
“Even though Gladys Jennings was Sam’s wife, she was a corporate officer and, regardless of her role initially doing bookkeeping and in personnel work, it was unusual for a company incorporated in 1932 to have a high-level corporate officer who was a woman,” Grell-Lawe said.
Descendants of Sam and Gladys Jennings are, from left, Scott Gibson, Tom Peters, Holly Grell-Lawe and Tim Taylor.
All of Sam and Gladys’ four children – all daughters – worked for the company at one time or another, and many of their husbands and kids also worked there.
“I actually worked two summers on the switchboard, the summer before my senior year of high school and the summer before I went to college,” Grell-Lawe said, noting that although she did not grow up in the area, she spent many summers living with her grandmother in Masury.
Jennings Manufacturing’s two plants are now owned by Eddie Kane Steel.
