Me, My Brother, The Governor of Missouri and A French Big Shot

 Big bro and lil bro

Readers in North America may know of CertainTeed, a very large manufacturer of building products. They just opened an enormous factory and distribution center for roofing shingles in Jonesburg, Missouri, about an hour west of St. Louis. My brother, John Crowe, is the CEO and he invited us out for the grand opening.

CertainTeed is owned by the 350 year old French company Saint-Gobain. Their first claim to fame was doing the mirrors in the Great Hall of Versailles. John is their director of North American operations. The CEO of Saint-Gobain itself, Pierre-André de Chalendar, came over from Paris for the occasion. Governor Jay Nixon of Missouri was in attendance. (Love those jobs!)

The tour was fascinating. The plant and distribution center cover 225,000 square feet / 20,900 square meters. It is so highly automated that when running two shifts it requires only 89 employees. The plant engineer said that a third shift would require only 12 more. Now, at two-thirds capacity, it produces 800 loading pallets of shingles a day, and those pallets are about 6 feet, or a bit less than 2 meters, on a side and way taller than me (and my brother and I are pretty tall). It was a very interesting and different day.

   

Brother John at the podium.

Pierre-André de Chalendar, CEO of Saint-Gobain

Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri

And who makes the giant ceremonial scissors for ribbon cuttings?

Family History In New York

This is 120 Wall Street in New York's financial district. It is the last building on the iconic thoroughfare, standing by the FDR Drive and East River. (They say that Wall Street begins in a graveyard and ends in a river. It's literally true.) The photo was taken from the Brooklyn Bridge.

My father, John Crowe, spent most of his career working in this building. He was not in securities or banking, but rather commodities. Sugar, specifically. The company was a brokerage, middlemen between refiners and food products companies. He was the sales manager. Pepsi-Cola, for example, bought all its sugar from him. He wrote the weekly sugar column for the Journal of Commerce, a business newspaper that once rivaled the Wall Street Journal.

His office was on the side of the building seen here, facing the East River. When I was a child I loved to go with him on Saturdays. While he caught up on paperwork, I would play with the office equipment, including an old-fashioned switchboard, and watch the boats chug up and down the river.