(written by LaurieHaig)

The past several years have seen many changes occur at Lethbridge Iron Works. Unprecedented growth, about 35% a year for the last six years, has resulted in many changes to the infrastructure of the Company. However, through it all, the Lethbridge Iron Works has strived to maintain the high level of quality and service that has allowed the Company to reach its Centennial Anniversary. The Davies family, and indeed all of the management and staff at Lethbridge Iron Works, take tremendous pride in the longevity and reputation of the Company and will continue to do whatever is required to see to it that the Company has reason to celebrate again 100 years hence.

The growth and success of the Company can be attributed to four things. First and foremost is the customers of Lethbridge Iron Works. We are fortunate to have a very loyal customer base that are for the most part leaders in their respective industries. The growth of our customers has meant that we had to grow with them, or risk losing their business to another foundry. We have chosen to expand our capacity and capabilities to ensure that we can continue to provide our customers with the very highest quality ferrous castings at a competitive price and in a timely fashion.

The second contributor to the success of the Lethbridge Iron Works is the Company's staff. Throughout the years the Company has employed many capable and colorful people, as the contents of this book amply demonstrate. Today we have a very loyal, capable and dedicated staff that ensure we provide top quality castings each and every time an order is processed through our plant. We are proud of our staff, our low turnover rate and the longevity of many of our employees; to them we owe a special Thanks!

Lethbridge Iron Works has always had an excellent supplier base, which is the third factor contributing to our success. Suppliers of services, raw materials, and capital equipment play a big role in the day to day operation of our foundry. Several of our suppliers have been dealing with us for many decades, which allows for a continuity of operation through years of growth and changes in the industry and the Company. We expect no more and no less of our suppliers than our customers do of us, and we appreciate our suppliers' assistance in maintaining our leadership position in the ferrous foundry industry.

The fourth factor that has played a role in the success of the Company is the sound management practices of three successive generations of the Davies family, beginning in the early '20s and continuing today. The Davies family has always looked to the future of the Company. Decisions are not made based on a three year payback or some other short term measure. Rather, decisions are made based on whether they will help the Company grow and prosper, provide better working conditions for employees, improve the Company's quality and deliveries, satisfy customer needs, and increase competitiveness and productivity over the long term.

We look forward to continuing the tradition of quality and service established by George B. Davies Sr. and carried on today by us, his son and grandsons. The "blood, sweat and tears" required to celebrate a Centennial Anniversary in a family business makes us all a little more appreciative and respectful of the importance of this event. We hope you enjoy reading about the history and people that make up the "Lethbridge Iron Works Company Limited 100 Years of Quality and Service."

The establishment of a pioneer community in western Canada in the latter part of the 19th century required the presence of many trades and skilled labour. In the early economic development of what has become the City of Lethbridge, the development of the various ferrous metal trades played a key role in the emergence of Lethbridge as a centre for the repair and fabrication of ferrous metal products.

The artisans who practice these trades were blacksmiths, farriers, wheel-rights, and foundrymen. These feisty, independent business people ran their own business, found ways of putting their labour on the shelf during the long winters and complemented one another in the repair, fabrication and construction of iron and steel products for the coal industry, agriculture and railroads. One firm which emerged from this varied collection of metal workers and prospered for 100 years is the Lethbridge Iron Works. This company emerged from relatively humble beginnings as a small foundry and fabricator, to reinvent itself several times as it kept track of evolving technologies, economies of scale and markets. This story of this company is delightfully illustrated by this volume that paints a picture of the individuals and Davies family who are the driving personalities in the success and longevity of this firm.

The Davies family have been remarkable in that over successive generations they have been able to maintain the spirit of the first metal foundry and take the critical risks associated with growth and success. Each generation of Davies asked the subsequent generation, upon each expansion initiative, a major question: "can you pay for it"? On each occasion, son(s) advised father that it was possible and the venture proceeded.

In the view of the writer, Lethbridge is an unlikely spot for a major foundry operation. The product is heavy, the markets are far away and there is a high cost for electric power. The Davies family has been remarkable in their leadership style in that they were able to identify markets well beyond Alberta for the majority of their products. The reputation they have maintained for high quality in all of their efforts had led to a competitive firm that successfully competes in niche North American markets.

The events chronicled in this volume make for a good read. The human side of the enterprise is celebrated by the stories of both the Davies family and those who have had the privilege of working for the Lethbridge Iron Works.

David Crichton, his wife Jessie and son David Olgivie were some of Lethbridge's earliest residents. David worked as a machinist for the Alberta Railway and Coal Company. His son was following in his footsteps. But times were changing, and the Crichtons could hear opportunity knocking.

In the late 1890s, the Lethbridge economy was largely dependent on the coal industry. Irrigation and the expansion of the railway promised to transform the landscape. Soon Lethbridge was being touted as "The Coal City in Wheat Country."

The mines, farms and railway could not flourish without support industries. The Crichtons recognized this, and in 1898 they founded D. Crichton & Son, which would be incorporated as Lethbridge Iron Works Co. Ltd. six years later. The company supplied repair parts to the mines, mills and railways. It operated as a machine shop, blacksmith, fabricating shop and small grey iron foundry.

The Crichtons located their company on the southwest corner of First Avenue and First Street. It would remain at this site for another 77 years. The original building was 32 x 40 feet. It had a coke-powered melting furnace with a capacity of three tons, a 14 horsepower boiler and engine, and a brass furnace. Staff was composed of "three skilled mechanics from the east," and one labourer.

Iron foundries use basically the same process today as they did in 1898. A pattern is used to make a sand mould. Molten iron is then poured into the mould. Once this iron solidifies into the desired shape it is called a casting.

One of the biggest problems the Crichtons faced was finding a source of sand suitable for making the moulds. Fortunately, they didn't have to look too far- a good supply of sand was found in the coulees, literally at the foundry's doorstep. The sand was mined continuously until the 1960s.

Before D. Crichton & Son was established, people had to order their castings from Great Falls or Winnipeg. This was both slow and expensive. It's therefore not surprising that the October 4, 1900 edition of the Lethbridge News heralded the company's arrival with great enthusiasm:

"That the foundry will be a boon to all users of machinery in Southern Alberta and Eastern Kootenay there is not the least doubt, and there is every reason to expect, as it becomes known, that the work hitherto sent hundreds of miles further east will find its way to Lethbridge, and what is now an infantile industry become a concern of some magnitude, as the settlement of the country progresses."

Less than a year later disaster struck! A fire on May 8, 1901 nearly burned the business to the ground. The machinery, according to reports in the Lethbridge News, was "more or less injured".

The Crichtons didn't have any insurance, and damages were thought to be in the $2000 range. At that point, it seemed unlikely that the company would last three years, let alone 100. Clearly, the Lethbridge News reporter didn't expect the business to survive. The following was part of the coverage of the fire in the May 9, 1901 edition of the paper:

"Very general regret is expressed around town at the misfortune which has overtaken Messrs. Crichton's enterprise which it was hoped was but the beginning of a large industry."

The business managed to rise from the ashes though. A report in the June 13, 1901 edition of the Lethbridge News said:

"Although somewhat disheartened at the time of the disaster to their newly started enterprise, the proprietors ­ D. Crichton & Son ­ were far from being permanently downed, as a visit to the scene of the late fire will at once make manifest. The new building which is rapidly nearing completion is larger than the one destroyed, being 50x32 feet with a 10 ft. addition on the east side for an engine house, and the machine shop being partitioned off from the foundry. New pulleys, shafting and inside works of fan are expected to arrive here very shortly, and as soon as placed in position the furnace will again be started up, and work rushed ahead."

In 1902, foundry workers had plenty to celebrate-Lethbridge Iron Works was back in business, and the Lethbridge Brewing and Malting Company began production directly to the south. Some say, jokingly, that the brewery was established as a direct result of the foundry. Iron workers have a fondness for beer! Fritz Sick, the brewery's founder would become a Lethbridge Iron Works shareholder in 1927.

Lethbridge Iron Works was incorporated on March 19, 1904 in Regina under the Northwest Territories Act. (Alberta and Saskatchewan would not become provinces until 1905.) The Crichtons were the majority shareholders. Shares were also held by Charles A. Magrath, a land commissioner and Lethbridge's first mayor; shopkeeper Edward Allan Cunningham; and Thomas Morgan Evans who helped to establish the first irrigation canal system in Southern Alberta.

The Crichtons sold their shares to Charles A. Magrath in July, 1905, making him the majority shareholder. Shares were also purchased for Magrath's wife Mabel. David Crichton Sr. stayed on to manage the business for another four years.

In 1906, Lethbridge Iron Works was in the news again. The foundry produced the first steel car wheels ever made west of Lake Superior. The wheels were said to be lighter, more durable and stronger than cast iron wheels. According to the Lethbridge Herald, "the wheels were made as an experiment but the test was so successful that this line is likely to be continued."

Cunningham and Evans both sold their shares to Magrath in 1907. Shares were also purchased by John Askie Silver who would manage the plant from 1909 to 1912, and Berton Beecher Hoyt, who had worked at the foundry for many years. Hoyt would sell his shares to Magrath three years later.

Even before becoming a shareholder, Silver may have been responsible for bringing a fair bit of business to the foundry. He owned some farmland near Lethbridge. In 1906 he planted every acre with a type of hard spring wheat that had never been grown here before. He got almost triple the normal yield and was able to sell his crop for a good price. As word of Silver's success spread, settlers rushed in hoping to secure some cheap but fertile land.

It appears Silver's luck held while he was at Lethbridge Iron Works. By 1909 the company employed 35-40 men and had room and equipment for three times that many. The payroll was about $2500 per month.

The men worked as moulders, blacksmiths, machinists, fitters, boilermakers, etc. They mainly did repair work for the mines and the railway, and structural steel and iron work for buildings. They also did some automobile repair work. Most of the manufacturing at the foundry was for the mining and building industries. Much of their customer base was outside of Lethbridge. They were even doing some repair work for a construction firm in Utah.

In 1911, John Silver announced that the foundry could match "outside prices" if they received a two-year contract from the city to supply hydrants, manhole covers and other iron work for local improvements. He said such a move would double the payroll to 75 men and require an investment of about $50,000 in new buildings and equipment.

Today, George B. Davies Jr. is president and general manager of Lethbridge Iron Works. He is doubtful that the plant got the contract in 1911, because the foundry has never made anything but manhole frames and covers for the city. He says, "Lethbridge Iron Works bloody-well should've gotten the contract. Lethbridge Iron Works was the only foundry in Lethbridge, and the city should have been buying as much as they could from them."

Contract or no contract, things could hardly have looked better for Lethbridge Iron Works and the Magrath family than they did in 1912. John Silver sold all of his shares to Charles A. Magrath. Business was booming, and (except for one share) the Magrath family had complete control of the business.

Charles Boulton Magrath (C.A. Magrath's son), became plant manager when Silver sold his shares. At that time, Lethbridge Iron Works had a monthly payroll of $3500 and employed 50 men for 7 months of the year. Most of them were laid off for the winter.

C.B. Magrath hoped to increase capacity, buy new machinery and get enough business so the plant could remain open all year round. It seemed he had a knack for manipulating the press to get what he wanted.

The August 1, 1912 edition of the Lethbridge Daily Herald stated:

"That the Lethbridge Iron Works Co. Ltd. will next spring remove their whole plant now situated on First Ave. S. to the industrial sites purchased by the city in 1910 from the A.R. & I. was the information received by the Herald today from C.B. Magrath managing director of the company."

The article went on to say that a "fine lot of new buildings" would be erected, and Lethbridge would be able to "boast one of the finest facilities west of Winnipeg."

In actual fact, however, Lethbridge Iron Works had not yet even applied for a site in the new industrial centre. The article seemed to get the ball rolling though. By October 30, 1912, City Council had agreed to let the electorate decide whether Lethbridge Iron Works should get a free site in the Industrial Centre, a 10 year tax exemption and water, light and power at cost.

An editorial in the December 6, 1912 edition of the Lethbridge Daily Herald urged people to vote in favour of the deal for Lethbridge Iron Works. Although the paper was traditionally opposed to "bonusing" (providing free land, reduced rates and tax exemptions) to industries, they rationalized that because other cities were doing it, Lethbridge had no choice but to follow suit. The editorial said, "Maybe it will be the start of a race that will place Lethbridge on the manufacturing map."

The Lethbridge electorate voted overwhelmingly to provide Lethbridge Iron Works with a new site and all the concessions that went with it. C.B. Magrath immediately applied for a permit to build an addition at the existing site. He didn't want to move until 1914 when he would know where the railway would locate and could choose a site accordingly.

Magrath told the Lethbridge Daily Herald, "...anything we may do on our old site will be of a temporary character to tide us over until we can get our new buildings ready." Hopefully, the 'temporary' buildings were well constructed, because it would be another 64 years before the foundry would relocate.

Municipal debt, war and disease would take its toll on Lethbridge Iron Works and the city as a whole.

The economy began to flounder in 1913, which was about the same time that City Council found itself with an enormous debt brought about by a huge public works program and a system of granting lenient tax exemptions like the ones given to Lethbridge Iron Works. It would take the city until 1928 to get itself out of the financial mess which was so bad that at one point the banks were refusing to grant credit to the school board.

The First World War caused a 20 per cent drop in Lethbridge's population as more than 2000 residents left to serve in the armed forces. Plant manager C.B. Magrath was among these men. He enlisted in 1915 and settled in Chicago when the fighting was over.

Some were not so lucky. Postmaster Alvin Ripley was the only non-Magrath to hold shares in the Lethbridge Iron Works between 1912 and 1914, when he sold his shares to C.B. Magrath. Ripley was killed in action in 1917. In total, World War I would claim 261 Lethbridge citizens.

The Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 hit Lethbridge with a vengeance. More than 2500 of its approximately 10,000 citizens became ill and 129 died.

Lethbridge Iron Works did not prosper during these times. A labour shortage, coupled with wartime restrictions on materials meant that the business was stagnant at best. It was hard to believe that less than a decade had passed since the foundry had grandiose plans of expansion. By 1919, the business had an overdraft of more than $15,000 at the Union Bank (which would become the Royal Bank of Canada). The balance sheet was showing a loss of more than $2000.

Lethbridge Iron Works had three plant managers during these difficult times. After C.B. Magrath left in 1915, G. Kischel took over. He stayed until 1918 when W. Barnacal joined the company. Barnacal was manager until 1921.

In July 1920, John E. Davies was running the Alberta Foundry and Machine Co. in Medicine Hat. The Magraths asked Davies to manage Lethbridge Iron Works and try to nurse it back to financial heath. Davies agreed to buy shares and split financial control with the Magraths, but he remained in Medicine Hat.

John recruited his brother George B. Davies to manage the company. George had been orphaned while very young, and had very limited schooling. His first two months as manager were spent in Regina where he attended a crash business course. Over the next 10 years he would purchase shares from his brother John until their holdings were nearly equal. C.B. Magrath of Chicago was still the majority shareholder during this period.

Davies liked the dramatic arts. In 1923, he was a founding member of the Lethbridge Playgoers. Two years earlier he'd run into Ernest Sterndale Bennett at a theatre production in London, England and convinced him to join Lethbridge Iron Works as secretary treasurer. Sterndale Bennett became a shareholder in 1925. He was extremely active in the arts community. A local theatre would eventually be named after him.

Other people buying shares in the 1920's included V.W. Parrish; W.H. Leland, owner of Leland Coal Company; A.G. Baalim owner of an auto dealership and head of an oil refinery; C.H. Sutton; Michael M. Mueller; Arthur H. Frankish; Hugo J. Miller; A.N. Kessler; F. S. Leffingwell; C.F. Tollestrup; brewery owner Fritz Sick; W. Boyden; and Ortus Henry.

It would be more than three decades before Ortus Henry received his shareholder's certificate. Henry applied for 10 Lethbridge Iron Works shares in 1927. Each share sold for $100. Henry made a $370 down payment on his shares and didn't increase this amount for four years when he upped his payment to $400. At this point he decided to purchase four shares rather than 10. Henry's application for 10 shares was cancelled in 1931 and the secretary was instructed to get a new application and issue Henry a certificate for four shares. It seems this never happened.

As of 1961, no one could locate Henry's application for his four shares. As a result, the share certificate was never issued. On December 22, 1961, the directors finally issued Ortus Henry a certificate. It was antedated to Nov. 2, 1931 .

It's hard to say what would've happened to Henry's shares had Lethbridge Iron Works been sold in 1927 to John E. Taylor and Sons of Calgary. According to the minute books, the Calgary company was given an option to purchase Lethbridge Iron Works, but nothing ever came of this.

1927 was also the year Lethbridge Iron Works made its first venture into farm implement manufacturing and sales. George Davies and a local farmer patented the Buffalo Plow Disc. It didn't sell as well as they'd hoped. Perhaps it had something to do with its size. George Davies Jr. says, "As I understand, it turned the soil in such big mounds that the wind picked the soil up in no time." Farmers had sort of a preview to the dust storms of the 1930s.

Although sales of the Buffalo Plow Disc were slow, by the late 1920s business was picking up for Lethbridge Iron Works. The directors were looking for new sources of income, including setting up a small shop at Coutts. There was oil well activity at the Red Coulee Field near the town, but all the casting and repair work was going across the border. The company never did start a Coutts branch. The dirty thirties wiped out any plans for expansion.

In 1931, four shareholders lost their shares because their accounts were not paid up. One person took his downpayment back in trade. Times were tough for the shareholders that remained.

C.B. Magrath was elected president of the company in May 1932. He replaced John E. Davies who had held the position since 1920. One month later, Magrath resigned and E. G. Sterndale Bennett was appointed to the position. The following year A.N. Kessler was elected president and A. G. Baalim became vice-president. Both men held these positions for many years.

Business was so bad during the depression, that manager George Davies was unable to take any time off. A motion during the December 7, 1934 Director's Meeting stated:

"Moved by A.G. Baalim, seconded by A.N. Kessler that G.B. Davies be granted a credit in lieu of vacations in the amount of one hundred dollars ($100) per year for the period 1928 to 1934 inclusive, total seven hundred dollars ($700) Carried"

In the early 1930s, Lethbridge Iron Works gained a valued customer. Charles Noble, a local farmer who became known for his Noble Blade Cultivator, hired the Iron Works to create pilot models for his company. When Davies arrived at work, he'd often find Noble waiting for him, eager to discuss his latest ideas. In the years to come, the two companies would co-operate in the manufacture of land packers and other equipment. Today, New Noble Services Ltd. continues to buy castings from Lethbridge Iron Works.

Although he would be a shareholder until the 1950s, C.B. Magrath resigned as a director of the company in 1935. At that time he called in a demand note for $7,698.65. It took until 1940, to settle the note. Lethbridge Iron Works agreed to pay $6000 in payments of $50 per month over a period of ten years.

The minutes of the meetings which took place during the 1930s contain very little about business dealings and a lot about how the shareholders hoped to keep the company afloat. During the decade, George Davies was forced to renegotiate tax and lease agreements with the city, try to sell a parcel of foundry land to a coal company (the deal never went through), and to convince the Royal Bank to charge lower interest rates on company loans.

Although times were tough, Al Firth still managed to land a job at Lethbridge Iron Works in 1936. Perhaps it was due to his volunteer experience. Firth's cousins Les and Herb Hacker were employed by the Iron Works. One of Herb's duties was looking after the melting fires on the weekends. Firth would often accompany his cousin, stoking up the fires and helping to haul the ashes away to a piece of company property located across the railway tracks. The ashes were hauled in a heavy wheelbarrow with steel wheels. One cousin would hook a long handle to the front of the wheelbarrow and pull it along. The other would push the handgrips on the back of the wheelbarrow. It was hard and dirty work.

Firth says there were a couple of weekends when George Davies came to the plant and saw him helping out his cousin. "Mr. Davies was afraid I was going to get hurt," recalls Firth, smiling, "so he figured he'd better have me on compensation."

George Davies could be very kind to both his employees and his potential employees. Firth says when he first found out that there might be a job available at Lethbridge Iron Works, he was so excited that he got up bright and early, drove into Lethbridge from the family farm and arrived on the Davies doorstep at about 7:00 am. He knocked on the door and told George that he was interested in getting a job. "Mr. Davies was very polite," says Firth, "but he suggested that maybe I should come down to the plant and make an application."

Firth says his first paycheque was $11.55 for a two week period. He took it home and presented it to his mother. She handed it back and told him to get himself a new overcoat. He purchased one on 5th Street and got $1.50 back in change.

Firth remembers that in 1936, the Lethbridge Iron Works foundry was "a dismal place." Coal fires provided the only source of heat. There was one tap with cold running water. The bathroom facilities, such that they were, consisted of cast iron toilets in the coal shed.

Firth still bears the marks from the time he was recruited to brighten the place up. Business was slow, so he was told to hose down the walls and give them a whitewash. Firth says he had to use carbide that was drained off from the acetylene welders. The substance worked like whitewash on the walls, but burned the skin on contact. More than 60 years later, scars are still visible on Firth's wrists, where the "whitewash" dripped down as he was painting.

There were 10 employees when Firth started at Lethbridge Iron Works. George B. Davies, Dick Kimber and Jean Wilcox were in the office. Foreman George Lynge, Herb Hacker and Al Firth were in the foundry. The machine shop consisted of foreman Rube Hunt and Alex Merchuk. Bill Hodge was the blacksmith and Les Hacker was his assistant.

"It was a real community effort between all of the departments," says Firth. For example, "We would make moulds in the foundry for maybe a week or so, and then on the day we were going to pour metal into them Les Hacker or Bill Hodge or Alex Merchuk or whoever was available would come over to help," says Firth. "If the foundry had work, we worked there. Sometimes George Lynge would mould, and I would go to the machine shop or the blacksmith shop," he adds.

Sometimes, work was so scarce that Firth would be sent to help out at the Davies home. One time he and a young apprentice named Mead were supposed to paint the family garage. Firth was called away, but before he left he reminded Mead that there was an undercoat and a finish coat. Firth told Mead that the undercoat was to go on first. Mead assured Firth that he understood.

When Firth went to check Mead's progress the following day, he found that the finish coat was gone. Mead had used it for a first coat. They simply poured the undercoat into the finish coat can, painted the undercoat over top of the finish coat and kept their mouths shut.

Firth says it was a treat to help out at the Davies residence because they always got goodies, and George would bring them a bottle of beer at noon. On one occasion, though, helping out the Davies turned out to be a very traumatic experience. Firth says one time his cousins Les and Herb Hacker went to wash the Davies' windows. Les held the bottom of the ladder, and Herb climbed up, approaching the window just as Mrs. Davies was getting out of the bathtub. "Herb just about fell off the ladder," laughs Firth. "He dropped the pail and almost drowned Les. Les told me Herb was red as a beet. I guess he didn't see much except a bare outline of her. I don't think anyone ever told the Davies."

Firth says when there was foundry work in the late 1930s, it tended to be manhole covers for the City of Lethbridge, castings for the coal mines or parts for the coke ovens in Fernie and Coleman.

Foundry work in the wintertime presented its own set of challenges. The only heat came from two big coal fired stoves (made by Lethbridge Iron Works) that were in a partitioned off area of the moulding floor. Foreman George Lynge benefitted most from this arrangement because he worked alongside the stoves.

Everyone else had to work in the main part of the building, where it could be bone chillingly cold. These people depended on "salamanders" for warmth. These "salamanders" were also manufactured at Lethbridge Iron Works. Firth explains, "They were like grids ­ there was one for the bottom and four for each side and they were wired together. In the mornings we would build a wood fire and just about choke everybody. We'd put coking coal in it and of course once the coke got going it would throw a lot of heat out."

"Salamanders" were also used in the winter to get the sand ready for moulding. The men would mix the sand outside, then windrow it in piles. On the mornings when they would be moulding, they would pick the "salamanders" up with the crane, take them over to the piles of sand and thaw it enough so they could work with it.

In those days, the sand still came from the "Old Laundry Hill" in the coulees. "There was a drayman by the name of Mumby, says Firth, "who used to go down there and haul it up in a wagon with horses." Firth says the coulee sand was "excellent for making smooth light castings but there wasn't enough permeability in it for plate work or anything like that. It would scab and buckle."

Foundry foreman George Lynge wasn't the easiest fellow to work with. He was either Welsh, Scots or English, depending on who's telling the story. He spoke very quickly and sharply and was not at all patient or open to new ideas. Firth says he was extremely unpopular, but it turned out that he had a brain tumor which may have accounted for some of his unreasonable behaviour in his later years.

Lynge's temper could be terrible. Firth describes a time when they were making moulds for fire grates. These moulds didn't have a top; they were simply bedded in the sand. Lethbridge Iron Works kept a cat in those days, in order to keep the mouse population down. During the night, the cat walked across the moulds and left some footprints. When George Lynge saw what had happened, he yelled, "Go get a sack! Go get a sack!" Firth and Brent, a machine shop apprentice who was helping out, just stood there. Finally Lynge got a sack himself, put the cat in and drowned it in the water barrel. Firth says he was afraid to speak up because he was a new employee and Lynge was his boss. But because Brent was from the machine shop, he had no such qualms. "Gee did he ever tear into George," says Firth. "It didn't make any difference. It was the type of guy he was."

Firth was laid off briefly in 1939, due to a fire at the foundry. Firth and Lynge had shaken out some moulds and watered them down, but there still must have been some hot spots. The wall ignited during the night and damaged some electrical boxes. Firth was sent home until the electricity was fixed.

The following year Firth left for Ontario because he felt he had learned all he could at Lethbridge Iron Works. Meanwhile the company, the city and the country as a whole were feeling the effects of another war.

With the onset of World War II, Lethbridge Iron Works attempted to secure munitions contracts with the federal government. Foundry owners from Edmonton, Calgary, Medicine Hat and Lethbridge came together to establish a strategy for securing war orders. They agreed to send John E. Davies to Ottawa. He was a director of the Lethbridge Iron Works in addition to owning a foundry and machine shop in Medicine Hat.

While in Ottawa, Davies met with a representative of the Department of Munitions and Supply purchasing board. Davies convinced him to come to Alberta in September 1940 for a tour of the province's "larger" plants. On returning to Ottawa, the government official recommended that firms in Calgary and Medicine Hat be granted shell contracts "in the very near future." He added that "consideration be given to granting shell contracts in Edmonton and Lethbridge at a later date."

Lethbridge Iron Works never did secure a munitions contract, but business, nevertheless, improved considerably from the previous decade. The City of Lethbridge was undergoing a growth spurt due largely to the war. A flight training facility was set up at Kenyon Field; a militia regiment was headquartered here; and a prisoner of war camp was established on the city's outskirts.

Camp 133 was the largest prisoner of war internment camp in Canada. It housed more than 12,500 German soldiers and was guarded by 800 men. It also had some significance for Lethbridge Iron Works. The present foundry is located on the site of the internment camp.

Plant superintendent Richard C. (Dick) Kimber became a shareholder and was elected secretary-treasurer in 1942. He would serve in this capacity for more than 20 years. Kimber was a very intelligent and well-respected man. He was a talented draftsman and designer, but sometimes he was a bit skimpy with his materials. Retired steel shop foreman Bill Dunn says, "Some of the paper he used was pretty awful. It didn't last very long because it was cheaper than newsprint. It came off a big roll of kind of whitish wrapping paper. Some of the drawings became so ragged that we'd try to read them and they'd all be covered with scotch tape."

Al Firth returned to Lethbridge Iron Works in 1942 after a brief stint at a St. Thomas, Ontario bronze shop, and a rewarding term at Waterloo Manufacturing where he picked up lots of up-to-date knowledge. Although he'd been asked to return to the Lethbridge plant, he didn't stay long. He says foundry foreman George Lynge "was almost impossible to get along with." Lynge wasn't open to learning new things. Says Firth, "I had picked up a lot of different moulding tips, gating techniques and what not, but he wouldn't accept any of it you know." Firth left the Iron Works and went to work as a brakeman for Canadian Pacific Railways.

Fourteen year old George B. Davies Jr. spent the summer of 1942 working at Lethbridge Iron Works. He started out in the core department. When holes or internal cavities are required in a casting, cores are used to form them. They are made up of a mixture of sand and resin that is shaped and then baked until it hardens. The cores are then placed in the sand moulds before the molten metal is poured.

Today, all sand is mixed by machine. When George B. Davies Jr. started at the Iron Works though, sand was mixed by hand. Quality wasn't always consistent. Davies Jr. recalls that he didn't always enjoy his work in those days. "Alan Kimber and I used to work in the core department," he remembers. "At that time the equipment was not modern like it is today, and we were trying to crank out cores. They'd get to be about six or seven inches and they'd break. I was very frustrated. We thought maybe it was the sand we were mixing, but we managed to tough it out."

Davies Jr. was proud to be earning a paycheque though. "We were getting about 20 cents an hour," he says. "We got a raise to two bits ­ another nickel an hour. It was one of the biggest things that ever happened to me."

Alan Kimber was also 14 in 1942. He recalls that foundry foreman George Lynge used to scream a lot. Davies Jr. agrees, "He used to scare the hell out of us."

They weren't too scared to stick around though. In the years to come, Alan Kimber became a journeyman machinist. He was eventually put in charge of machine shop operations and purchasing, as well as being appointed plant superintendent. As was mentioned previously, George Davies Jr. became president and general manager of Lethbridge Iron Works.

By 1943, World War II was taking its toll on the labour force. During the 1944 Annual General Meeting, George B. Davies said, "(In the past year) a shortage of skilled labour resulted in turning away of business daily. The bulk of our labour today is inferior to that employed in past years and (they) demand the highest wage rates." Despite concerns about labour quality, Lethbridge Iron Works had a notable increase in business in 1943. The financial situation was positive enough that directors began to collect a $50 annual fee provided that they attended at least one meeting per year.

The following year, the directors agreed that "management should adopt a policy of maintaining the plant buildings and equipment in as good a state of repair as finances will permit." The balance sheet for 1944 "showed a favourable picture particularly with regard to liabilities." Business would continue to improve throughout the 1940s.

At the end of World War II, the company directors met with C.B. Magrath to discuss post-war policy. Magrath said he expected western Canada to "experience considerable expansion in manufacturing during the next 10 years."

At the same meeting, the directors agreed that since the "Dominion Government planned to open up extensive tracts of land to irrigation in the near future,... such a line of products would be profitable." Thus was born the "Lethiron" line of water control gates that would be sold to irrigation districts throughout the prairies. Eventually, four types would be manufactured - large radial gates, cast iron slide gates, head gates and farm turnout gates.

Foundry foreman George Lynge passed away in 1945. At that time, George Davies asked Al Firth if he'd like to return to Lethbridge Iron Works and take over the position. The pay was lower than what he'd been earning with the CPR, but Firth came back to the Iron Works anyway. He explains, "I enjoyed the company. They were good people." Firth would stay on at the plant another 45 years.

Lethbridge Iron Works began to import sand and coke from the United States in 1945. Firth says these better quality products were the first of many improvements for the foundry. (Today, the company gets its sand from Manitoba and Wyoming.)

The City of Lethbridge experienced a construction boom after the war. In 1946, Lethbridge Iron Works hoped to take advantage of this by selling structural steel. Unfortunately, they did not have a suitable building to house a structural steel shop. They attempted to secure a loan from the Industrial Bank of Canada, but the bank felt that the company's earning power was insufficient and their prices were too low. The directors then tried to buy some steel trusses from C.B. Magrath so they could rebuild the existing forge shop over a period of years, but Magrath wouldn't sell the trusses because he wanted to use them himself.

The following year, George Davies visited the Industrial Development Bank in Vancouver where he secured a loan for $12,000. The Oland Construction Company started work immediately, and the addition to the forge shop was completed in 1948. It was about $2500 over budget.

Lethbridge Iron Works was 50 years old in 1948. Employees and their families marked the occasion with a picnic. They also had another reason to celebrate - the board of directors adopted a Retirement Pension Plan for Iron Works employees.

When the pension plan was introduced, only those who had worked at the Iron Works for at least 10 years were eligible. By 1953, the waiting period would be reduced to two years.

As the 1940s progressed, Lethbridge Iron Works became increasingly involved in the manufacture of agricultural equipment. Some manufacturing was done under contract for other companies, for example, the Bradshaw Bale Booster. This machine looked something like an upright conveyor belt which enabled the farmer to stack hay bales into tall piles. George B. Davies Jr. says the Bale Booster was a good item, but not a big money maker for Lethbridge Iron Works. He says, "The bale booster didn't use many castings. It was mostly made in the steel shop and the machine shop. It was the type of thing that any farmer that was good as a welder could probably duplicate himself."

Lethbridge Iron Works also developed its own line of implements called Chinook Land Packers. These were extremely casting intensive. They were used for farm seeding operations and were available in nine different models in various widths, sizes and weights. Sales of the land packers began to take off in 1948, leading to the creation of the Chinook Sales Company. It was set up to distribute Lethbridge Iron Works products through established companies. At one time there were 300 authorized Chinook outlets.

As Chinook Land Packer sales increased, so did the need to make the foundry run more efficiently. In the late 1940s, mould makers were still required to pack sand over a pattern using a hand rammer. Al Firth, and boilermaker Fred Quick decided to remedy this situation by installing pipes from the big air compressor in the machine shop to the foundry and setting up a small air compressor. The foundrymen were then able to use the much faster and more efficient air rammers.

Another time consuming exercise was banking up sand between the moulds to prevent the metal from breaking through the moulds when they were poured. Firth had Joe Miller build some wooden frames which they slipped over the moulds, eliminating the need to bank up the sand. Later, the company would purchase steel slip jackets.

Joe Miller had quite a reputation at Lethbridge Iron Works. He was a Scotsman who acted as a sort of handyman/jack-of-all-trades at the plant. He was a real character. Alan Kimber remembers that he would roll his own cigarettes. "He'd smoke them down till they were butts. Save the butts. Put them in a tin can. Take them home and roll them over for the next day."

Miller is best known for his trips to the brewery. Al Firth explains: "Joe Miller built the fence around the back. He would always disappear about 10 o'clock or so. We couldn't find him. He used to go over to the brewery. The kegging department was just across from us. He'd get these quart sealers filled. He'd drink one and come back with one full. I knew he was going because he would disappear, but I couldn't figure out how he'd get back in. If he went around the other way he'd have to go by the window and we'd see him. I was out in amongst some boxes one day and I saw him coming back. All of a sudden one of these fence boards opened. He didn't hurt anybody but it was against the rules of course. George didn't like it, but I don't think anybody else cared very much. He never got drunk."

Bad timing was Miller's downfall when it came to quenching his thirst. Kimber says, "Mr. Davies Sr. was just walking through the yard looking around. All of a sudden he heard this 'squeak, squeak' and a board swung open. Out staggered Joe from the brewery. They nailed the board up right after that."

In 1950, packer sales were so strong that Lethbridge Iron Works borrowed money so they could make them during the winter months. Al Firth says there was a very high employee turnover during packer wheel season. "We'd have 20 or 25 guys, but I think there were only a few of them, like Eddie Ruff and Joe Pankotay that stayed. The rest of them worked two or three months and they were gone."

In 1951, George B. Davies Jr. graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in Agricultural Engineering. He was immediately appointed sales manager at Lethbridge Iron Works. Business was booming. The long standing company deficit had been completely wiped out as of Nov. 30, 1950 and there was even a surplus of almost $5000. By Nov. 30, 1951, the surplus had increased to more than $15,000.

Davies Jr. was given a company car- a red Studebaker with a propeller nose. His brother Donald M. Davies got a matching grey Studebaker. Don had been a salesman at the Iron Works since 1938, save for the time he spent serving overseas during World War II.

In the years to come, George Davies Jr. would put many miles on his Studebaker. He was sent out to sell land packers and got to know southern Saskatchewan very well. "I travelled to every whistle stop in Saskatchewan and all over the place and stayed at some of the most crummy places you ever heard of in your life," he says. "Some of the restaurants were awful. I used to go for breakfast in one restaurant and I never ordered anything but a boiled egg."

Davies Jr. says, "I did sell a few land packers. Roy Sales and Service, a big Massey Harris dealer in Radville, gave me my first big order for 'Noble Casting' land packers. I was very proud of it."

In 1952, Bob Gardner was hired as a salesman-engineer. He was straight out of university with a degree in mechanical engineering. He too remembers accommodations weren't always first class. "The hotel rooms had 40 watt bulbs. We would always carry 100 watt bulbs and extension cords so we were at least able to read."

One winter, Gardner and Davies Jr. were making sales calls in Regina. They left their motel room one bitterly cold morning and headed to an underground garage to pick up the Studebaker. George Jr. asked Bob to drive, but the car wouldn't start. The battery seemed to be dead. When they looked under the hood to investigate, the battery case was empty. Someone had stolen it. The two men had to wait in the cold for a replacement to arrive. Says Davies Jr., "It was horrible at the time, but laughable now."

Sometimes sales trips could yield unexpected results. In 1952, George Davies Jr. was visiting Estevan, Saskatchewan. He stepped into a tavern to have a few beers, and met a representative of the Sund Manufacturing Company which makes combine attachments for picking up swath. The business sounded so interesting that Davies Jr. made a side trip down to the Sund plant in Newburg, North Dakota and met the owners.

Davies Jr. and the Sund people worked out an arrangement whereby Sund would send a truckload of pick-ups to Lethbridge for Lethbridge Iron Works to distribute, and Lethbridge Iron Works would make parts for Sund and ship them back on the trucks returning to North Dakota.

With the increasing popularity of Chinook Land Packers, the foundry was running out of space. George Davies Jr. found the solution when he visited a foundry in Vancouver. He reported that he'd seen a mould escalator that took up 200 square feet of space, was 21 feet high and could hold 120 packer wheel moulds.

The board of directors agreed that construction of a mould escalator should begin immediately. This wasn't to happen right away though. The foundry was so busy, it couldn't keep up with its customers. The company had to turn down $2000 worth of packer orders, and $8000 more was lost due to the inability to deliver the packers on time.

Packer sales showed no signs of slowing down in 1953. The push to increase production was on. More than 20,000 packer wheels were produced in one packer season alone.

As good fortune shone on Lethbridge Iron Works, the employees were not forgotten. The company signed on to a Sickness and Accident Insurance plan, hourly wage earners were paid for eight statutory holidays, a staff dinner was held to celebrate the end of packer season, and a Christmas banquet was held at which the staff received bonuses "in appreciation of their efforts to increase production during the past few months."

Efforts were made to modernize the plant. A REDA gas reverbatory furnace and a British Moulding Machine were purchased. A sand bin and elevator, monorail, scrap breaker and the long-awaited mould escalator were constructed.

The REDA gas furnace turned out to be a disappointment. George Davies Jr. says, "The maintenance and all that drove us out of our cotton picking minds. We had to re-line it about every week." By 1960, the company decided to sell it. It sold two years later for $2,600.

The British Moulding Machine on the other hand was a "damn fine machine." It was used right up until 1997. Gardner says part of the machine appeared to be a six-foot high casting "that was just as flat and smooth as can be." It made a big impression on the boss. "Mr. Davies Sr. came out of his office and said, 'I want you guys to have a look at this casting from this machine,'" says Gardner. He touted it up as an example of superior British workmanship. "About a month later," Gardner recalls, "the foreman came running up to Mr. Davies saying, 'I want to show you something sir.' A big piece of body putty had fallen out of this casting." The staff got quite a kick out of it. They said, "That's the way they build them in England eh?"

The decision to build a scrap breaker was an excellent one. Without it, someone could have been killed. In the 1950s, Lethbridge Iron Works depended on scrap cast iron for all their melting needs. Farmers would bring in old engine blocks, farm machinery wheels and anything else they had that was made of cast iron.

Gardner remembers that when he started at the plant, there used to be an old crane out in the yard with a huge drop ball attached. He says, "They'd hoist this great big iron ball up and put all the scrap iron underneath it. Someone would go over and trip the clutch and the ball would break the scrap. As you walked across from the back of the machine shop, pieces were flying all over."

Dick Kimber designed the new scrap breaker. Gardner describes it as "a big tower all enclosed with a drop ball inside and a big iron handle." Says Gardner, "You'd shovel the scrap iron into this thing and you'd close this big rubber belted door and then you drop the ball and blam! It was slow, but it worked."

Salesmen George Davies Jr., Bob Gardner and Bob Onufrechuck travelled 5500 miles in November 1953. They called on established dealers and visited some new territory. According to the minutes:

"The calls produced few immediate sales, but interest was high particularly with the non-plug type of packer. Most dealers expect to do at least as well as last year. This with new territory should sell 2200 packer sections."

Maybe not! The packer boom went bust in 1954. Sales dropped by more than 50 per cent. Fourteen people were laid off in January, including Bob Gardner who would be hired back as plant engineer two years later. In February, the foundry adopted a four day work week. The company was also forced to take out another mortgage due to the previous year's overexpenditures on equipment and renovations.

A mountain of packer wheels had been produced in the expectation that sales would be brisk. Davies Jr. says there were over 75,000 in stock. Ten tons of the partially assembled packers were sent to the Sund Manufacturing Plant in North Dakota. Sund planned to buy packer castings from Lethbridge in the future, but manufacture the steel parts themselves.

Even with the Sund purchase, many unsold packer wheels remained. "We took truckload after truckload out to the storage yard across the railway tracks," recalls Gardner, "There were mountains of them. We actually used them all up eventually - years later."

The storage yard was known as "the farm." It sometimes led to some confusion. Bill Dunn came to Lethbridge Iron Works in 1955 to work at the steel shop. He had been raised on a farm, and remembered reading newspaper accounts about the company's forays into agricultural equipment. He assumed that the farm was where they tested this equipment. It was a rude awakening to find out that "the farm" was a couple of junk-covered acres west of Grey's Trailer Sales.

Davies Jr. says land packer sales dropped so dramatically for three reasons:

1. There was a downturn in the sale of farm implements in general. "It not only happened to us, it happened to Massey Ferguson, the John Deere Company and everybody else too."

2. "We were beginning to saturate the market a little bit."

3. Flexi-Coil of Saskatoon.

Flexi-Coil makes a coil packer out of steel. Gardner says, "We used to pooh-pooh it in front of our potential customers as not being worth a damn." Gardner and the other salesmen from Lethbridge Iron Works were wrong. The Flexi-Coil system continues to be successful today. Meanwhile, says Gardner, Chinook Land Packer sales were "decimated" by the coil packer.

Chinook Land Packer sales never really took off again after 1953, but Lethbridge Iron Works continued to manufacture them into the 1970s. Davies says the company was still producing packer parts at the new plant. He recalls that there were some angry farmers when the Iron Works stopped producing packer parts.

The land packer story has a happy ending. Although Flexi-Coil contributed to the demise of the Chinook Land Packer, today they are one of Lethbridge Iron Works' biggest customers!

Although land packer sales contributed greatly to the revenue of Lethbridge Iron Works during the early 1950s, the company had other irons in the fire. Donald M. Davies, company vice-president and George Jr.'s brother, secured the license to manufacture Truliradiant Gas Burners at the plant. Natural gas lines were springing up across western Canada, and Don Davies, who began at the Iron Works in 1938, saw this as a great opportunity for the family business.

The Truliradiant Burner was a commercial sized unit that went into boilers.

Bob Gardner says, "We went to every boiler room in every hotel and old building in southern Alberta and Southern BC and into Saskatchewan. We followed the gas lines and we'd call on all these funny old buildings and replace their coal burners with gas burners."

Although Lethbridge Iron Works promoted these products for years, they were never really profitable. They were unsuitable for use in Saskatchewan, because that province required oil-standby installation which these burners didn't provide. High gas prices in British Columbia prevented a large scale conversion to natural gas for commercial buildings. Nevertheless, Lethbridge Iron Works continued to try and sell the burners from Winnipeg to Vancouver. Eventually they stopped sending salespeople out and sold them through Crane Ltd. and other wholesalers.

Lethbridge Iron Works ceased production of Truliradiant Burners many years ago. But John Davies, the company's current vice president engineering and operations, says they made one last set of the burners in the early 1990s. The local Catelli pasta company had Truliradiant Burners in their boilers. Five or six years ago during plant shut down, the boiler inspector told them the burners would have to be replaced before the boiler could be fired up again. "They came to us," says Davies, "and we didn't even have a pattern. I don't even think we made it from a part, they didn't have a good enough one for us to use. I think we made a pattern. We whipped off some castings for them so they could get back in business."

Lethbridge Iron Works had a side business in refractory bricks and other fire-proof materials. These were products that they used for their own furnaces, so they purchased them at a discount and sold them to the public. By the early 1960s, sales had dropped off substantially. "It got to a point of who's going to buy this stuff?" says George Davies Jr.

Lethbridge Iron Works tried selling wrought iron furniture in 1954. They even distributed flyers door to door. Although the furniture was quite attractive, it was fairly expensive to make and the line was never profitable.

Bob Gardner sums up the diversity of Lethbridge Iron Works products this way: "We'd try anything for a buck."

In 1955, the company was licensed by the International Nickel Company of Canada Ltd. to produce two corrosion and abrasion-resistant alloyed irons - Ni-resist and Ni-hard. Although no one was aware of it at the time, this was a significant new direction for Lethbridge Iron Works. One which would eventually lead it out of its economic slump into opportunities which were unimaginable in the 1950s.

The introduction of Ni-hard and Ni-resist meant for the first time, Lethbridge Iron Works was looking for foundry customers beyond the immediate area. This would ultimately change the course of the company. But first they had to get used to working with the new alloys.

The problem with Ni-hard was it had to be heated to an extremely high temperature. The foundry used a cupola furnace which was unable to maintain the heat that was necessary. A cupola furnace is powered by coke heated with blasts of hot air. When layers of iron, coke, and limestone are added, and more hot air is mixed with them, the high temperatures cause chemical reactions to take place. The limestone soaks up unwanted materials and floats on top of the molten iron in the form of slag.

Retired foundry foreman Al Firth says the cupola was unpredictable. "The thing was it was almost impossible to get the pouring ladles hot enough. Once we got the first metal out it would freeze up again. Everything would go fine one day, metal would come out really hot and other days you just couldn't get it going."

Ni-hard castings were typically very small, which, coupled with the difficulty they had keeping the metal hot enough, meant that the scrap rate was horrendous. Elmer Degenstein, a supervisor at Lethbridge Iron Works, says sometimes only about 30 per cent of the castings were actually usable with 70 per cent of them going to scrap.

Degenstein began working in the foundry in the 1960s. Ni-hard was hard to work with even then, because the company was still using a cupola to melt it. Once Lethbridge Iron Works purchased the electric furnaces, it was possible to maintain the higher temperatures.

Foundry foreman Ed Ruff joined the staff in 1955. He remembers working with Ni-hard. Moulders would make the moulds, and then they would be responsible for pouring them. Ruff says by the time they got the metal to the floor to pour the moulds it would often be too cold.

George Davies Jr. says the whole staff would be recruited to lend a hand. "We brought the office staff down to help. The steel shop went down to help. Everybody helped," he says.

Once the moulds were poured, they'd be taken around to the side of the building. It got pretty hot - about 120 degrees Fahrenheit. As soon as the moulds were cool, they'd be shaken out by hand. The sand would be put through a riddler. This was a big screen attached to a motor that was placed off-centre so the whole thing would shake. The screen had three or four cast iron balls on it that would break up the sand as it flowed through the screen. The smooth sand that came out of the riddler would be used as finishing sand and placed right up against the pattern in a mould.

Firth says the cupola furnace had a sort of stopper called a "bot." The bot was a long steel rod with a clay end. The furnaceman would pour the metal until the ladle was full and then push the bot in the hole to stop the flow. Firth remembers furnaceman Tom Orr as "easy going and unconcerned." He says, "Tom would maybe have a thousand pounds of metal in this big ladle. George Davies Sr. would be down and he'd be shouting, 'Get that bot! Get that bot!' Tom would just take his time. George would get pretty excited. He'd say, 'Can't that guy move any faster?'"

Bill Dunn joined the steel shop in 1955. He would eventually be promoted to steel shop foreman. Dunn says sometimes the steel shop workers would have to work on Ni-hard castings before they were shipped to the customer. "Ni-hard," says Dunn, "has no ductility whatsoever. Any stresses and it would just split." They used to make "cyclones" which were like funnels for the mines. The mould had a big core inside to shape it. Says Dunn, "The core had to be strong enough to stand the pressure of pouring, but weak enough so it would collapse and not split the iron when it cooled. When (the casting) came out split, we would make three or four rings, weld pieces in-between them to hold the rings in place then fill the crack up with cast iron rod. It held them together, and they didn't turn them down, but it wasn't great. We tried all kinds of things."

Dunn says his first day of work was a real eye opener. "When I first came to the Iron Works and went through the whole plant, I thought how does anyone work in here without getting themselves hurt? There was stuff sticking out everywhere. Holy mackerel! But you'd get used to stepping over things and going around things."

Dunn was hired to help out Gus Gast on the forge and Nick Visosky on the hammer. "It was a real thrill to work with those fellows," he says.

The steel shop foreman was Bill McKay. Bob Gardner, who was asked to come back from Winnipeg and re-join the Lethbridge Iron Works staff in 1956, remembers McKay as "a great guy." Says Gardner, "I really enjoyed him. When he'd get enthusiastic he'd carry the crew and get things done. But hazardous, Jesus! He'd throw something and say, 'Watch out!' as the steel hit the floor."

Dunn says he helped make "hundreds and hundreds" of irrigation water control gates when he started working at Lethbridge Iron Works. One time he was working on a radial gate with Bill McKay when he found out just how accident prone his boss could be. Radial gates are made of steel channels and angles with curved corrugated metal skin on the front. They're put together with rivets. Bill McKay was riveting the skin on the front, and Dunn was working behind it. The corrugated metal skin didn't fit just right, so it had been clamped at the top with a big bar. Somehow the clamp let go and the bar hit McKay on the head. Dunn was unaware that anything had happened until he saw his unconscious boss go rolling by.

Gardner says, "One time I walked into the steel shop and I heard this little voice saying, 'Help! Help! Help!' (getting progressively louder). I looked over and there was this big shear which is still at Lethbridge Iron Works, and Bill's got his hand stuck inside this shear plate. He couldn't reach the switch. I thought, 'I'll fish him out, but what's it going to look like?' I turned the machine off. Undid it all. It was his glove. His hand was still there. It was hot, but it was all there."

Gardner continues, "This guy, I tell you, great guy, but looking for an accident to happen." Recalls Dunn, "The steel shop used to have a set of rolls for rolling pipe. In order to gear down, forward and back they had an old truck transmission rigged up. The coupling had a great big set screw sticking up at the end and it was wide open no cover on it or anything. One day, Bill had on a pair of khaki trousers with cuffs at the bottom. He stepped over the screw and the cuff got hung up and it wound it down right to the hip. It was a pretty dangerous machine."

Remarkably, Bill McKay was never seriously injured at Lethbridge Iron Works. He did lose a finger at his farm, however.

In the 1950s, the equipment in the machine shop consisted of a horizontal wheel press, a milling machine, a radial drill and three different lathes. Gardner describes the machine shop as, "an old, dark wooden building with years of accumulated dust on all the exposed timbers and walls." The machinists in the shop handled a wide variety of custom work for the mining and agricultural industries, machined finished castings produced in the foundry, and did repair and maintenance work. During the packer boom, machining bearing spools for land packers was the order of the day. As the decade went on, work in the shop shifted to making seats, slides and stems for the increasing number of irrigation gates being produced by Lethbridge Iron Works.

Lethiron irrigation gates sold well throughout the late 1950s. The market was good - parts of Southern Alberta and Saskatchewan were getting irrigation for the first time; other established irrigation districts were undergoing repairs and renovations. The downside was that the sale of irrigation gates was almost entirely dependent on government spending. Even when they were selling well, the irrigation gates weren't big money makers for Lethbridge Iron Works because their profit margin was very small.

George Davies Sr. retired as general manager in 1957. He wanted to give his sons a chance to run the business. He appointed his elder son Donald as manager. That same year, Bob Gardner became a shareholder.

Donald Davies would only remain at the plant for another five years. He would resign and move to Toronto in 1962, at which point George Davies Jr. would take over as manager.

1957 was not a good year for Lethbridge Iron Works. In fact, the company was in trouble. Some employees were on reduced hours, others took a salary cut. George Davies Jr. says, "The Iron Works got so slow that Bob Gardner and I were out working in the foundry. I used to help them mould. I didn't know my right arm from a hole in the ground, but I used to do it anyways. I did it because I wanted to do it, not because I was forced to do it."

On Saturday mornings Gardner and Davies Jr. used to help grind castings down on the grindstone. They'd take off the gates (the part where the molten metal enters the mould) and make sure the castings were smooth.

Foundry foreman Ed Ruff says the men in the foundry appreciated the gesture. "You'd work right beside the guys. It helped, because you gained a lot of respect that way."

Retired foundry foreman Al Firth says "Chip (George Jr.) was ambitious and a go-getter." It may have been George Davies Jr.'s actions in response to the work slowdown that ultimately saved the Iron Works.

Ever since the Iron Works began producing Ni-hard and Ni-resist alloyed irons in 1955, they'd managed to pick up the odd casting job, particularly in the ceramics industry. Traditionally, they never sought foundry work outside of the Lethbridge market. They tried to sell other products from Winnipeg to Vancouver, but they never promoted the foundry as a place for other companies to have their castings made. The philosophy was, says Davies Jr., "They develop a product and then try and sell it."

By 1959, the business was still floundering. George Jr. decided to take action. He says, "I told my father, 'Dad, I'm going to go up to Calgary. I'll spend a couple of days there and sell some castings to someone. There's gotta be a way to do it up there.' He said, 'You can go but Dominion Bridge and Riverside Iron Works will eat you alive.'"

Davies Jr. and Al Firth went up to Calgary together. Firth recalls George Jr. saying, "The only way we're going to get anywhere is by expanding, showing these people we can do a good job too." Firth and Davies Jr. visited Robin Nodwell, "one of those big outfits that were into the agricultural business." Firth remembers that "they had a small valve with very intricate coring inside that was a bitch to make." The Crane foundry had been doing their castings and were getting "50 to 60 per cent rejects," says Firth. "George talked the manager of Robin Nodwell into giving us a chance at it. We made an initial order of 100 castings and had one reject. The secret was in the mixing of the core sand," says Firth.

After the success in Calgary, Davies Jr. took a trip out to Vancouver and visited West Coast Automation. Says Davies Jr. "They build cylinder heads. They go from the big ones which are 14 inches down to the smaller ones that are about the size of my fist, which they call a two inch. They were having a hell of a lot of trouble with their castings. They'd buy 1000 castings and have 350 rejects. I said, 'Oh, we can do better than that.' I knew who they'd been dealing with and these people didn't know (how to make castings). And then they said to me, 'Well you'll never get all our castings.' In a year's time we had all their small castings up to their big castings. It was the smaller castings we were interested in, we weren't going into big castings, but we took 'em and we made them and we made them right."

Davies Jr. says that's when they finally realized they could sell their castings anywhere in North America. He shakes his head as he asks, "Can you imagine that we sat on our asses for about 60-70 years and never went out and tried selling castings?"

From June 30, 1959 to June 30, 1960, Lethbridge Iron Works sold $50,000 worth of castings - about four times more than the previous year. As foundry work increased, the board of directors realized that it would be necessary to buy more and better equipment in the coming years. They set up a Capital Reserve Fund for such expenditures.

Bob Gardner remembers they bought their first rail car full of coke in 1960. "It was a whole hopper car full.," he says, "We didn't know what we were going to do with it when we got it. We built a snow fence and unloaded it across the street. Whenever we needed coke we had to take a truck over and hand load it."

Most of the sand used at the plant in 1960 was trucked in from Calgary.

Sand from the coulees was still used for a few specialty castings. Getting it was quite an adventure. Firth says, "There was a fellow who worked in the blacksmith shop named Harry Harvey. He had mine experience so he used to go down (to the sand quarry in the coulees). He had it all propped up and everything, although it wasn't like a coal mine where there was slate or something above it. It was just sand and gravel. Sometimes you'd be digging even in the open pits, you'd dig underneath and all of a sudden the whole wall would come rolling down."

They'd bring the sand up in an old pick up truck. Says Firth, "It was a half ton truck and we used to haul about 3000 pounds of sand."

Sicks Brewery tried to buy the Lethbridge Iron Works property in 1960. The two companies were unable to negotiate a price that they both could agree on, so a deal was never reached.

As the company's customer base increased, so did some of the hazards of doing business. They lost more than $2000 to a bad account and decided to subscribe to Dunn and Bradstreet's Credit Report Service.

Speaking of hazards, there were many to be found at Lethbridge Iron Works. Incredibly, there were very few serious injuries. The men working near the molten metal would occasionally suffer burns. These usually happened when the metal spattered on their foot and burned through their shoelaces. They used to keep a bucket of cold water nearby. If someone got molten metal in their shoe, they stuck their foot in the bucket.

Foundry foreman Ed Ruff says men were tougher back then. "We didn't bother with things like that in those days. You'd get a little piece of metal in your boot, you'd shake it off and keep on going. Today they'd be off for three/four weeks. We didn't even bother to take any time off in most cases."

Gardner says they used to use a first aid treatment for burns called FOIL. "It didn't matter if it was third degree or what, you just put FOIL on it."

Some burns were more serious than others. Retired foundry foreman Al Firth says sometimes accidents were the result of pure carelessness. "The slipjackets were supposed to remain on the moulds until the metal was solid. Some of these guys would just forget and pull it off too early."

Firth says they had to be careful not to pour moulds too fast "When you pour a mould, you have to watch to see when it's coming up the risers then slow down. Otherwise it might burst. One day, I was standing a ways back from this riser, when all of a sudden 'woooof' it just hit my hard hat and went down in between the band. By the time I got my helmet off it was smoking."

Any moisture coming in contact with molten metal can cause an explosion. This could be a real problem in the winter, when the sand could have ice crystals in it. On winter mornings, the sand used to be piled up against the wall, and someone would have to hold a blower to it until it had thawed enough to work with.

"We'd still get the odd kaboom," recalls sales representative Mel Collier.

The cupola furnaces were between 3 and 5 feet off the ground, depending on the size. They were supported on legs. Each furnace had two cast iron doors at the bottom. There was a steel pole rammed underneath to keep them closed. Before starting up the furnaces, someone would dump in moulding sand from the top and tamp it down. They would charge the cupola by hand, loading buckets of iron and taking them up on an elevator. It was like a push buggy. There'd be a layer of coke, some iron, a layer of coke, some iron, a layer of lime, etc.

The pole holding the doors closed had a chain link in it. Once all the metal was poured for the day, someone would have to open the doors. Machine shop foreman John Hetesi says, "There would be two guys standing with the cold water. They would stand off to the side, hook the pole with a rod, pull it out and the doors would open."

Firth says once the doors opened, "the sand bottom would collapse and slag and metal and whatever was left in there would come rushing out." "Sometimes there would be a pocket (of molten metal) and there would be quite a splash from that. It started a couple of fires in previous years."

Sometimes the doors would open and the sand wouldn't collapse. "The slag would be held up and there would be all this unmelted metal and stuff," If this happened, they dropped a big cast iron ball in from the top. Firth says, "Sometimes it came thundering through, and sometimes we had to get underneath and poke it up."

Furnace operator Wayne McEntee remembers a couple of times when the drop ball didn't work. "We had to pound with sledge hammers on the outside and hope that it didn't open until we got the hell out of the way."

Bart Davies is vice president sales and production, and George Davies Jr.'s son. He's been a full time Iron Works employee since 1975. Bart says the grindstone probably caused the most injuries. "Even though we'd tell the guys to wear their safety goggles, some of them would think they were immortal and end up with little pieces of metal in their eyes." Today Lethbridge Iron Works has a formal safety program with a full time staff member who administers it. "Some people think it's too rigid, says Davies, "but our new employees embrace it. I think they like it and appreciate it."

Some injuries during the 1960s were not caused in the line of duty. Elmer Degenstein says, "Guys who were bored before quitting time used to grind broomsticks, grinding nice little designs and get their thumbs caught or something."

There were other situations where no accidents took place, a fact that seems nothing short of miraculous! Al Liptak, director of personnel, remembers they used to load drums full of castings with the "old mule." The "mule" had been used to pull planes during the war. The Iron Works fitted it with a hydraulic front end loader. Says Liptak, "That's how you'd load the drums, eh. You'd punch two holes in it and then you'd just swing the son of a bitch. A thousand pounds of castings and you're swinging it into the truck hoping it doesn't fall on you."

In 1963, Lethbridge Iron Works was granted a license to produce Ductile iron from the International Nickel Company of Canada. Normal cast iron is quite brittle and it can't be stretched without breaking. Ductile iron is much stronger and can be stretched up to 25 per cent before it breaks.

Lethbridge Iron Works was one of the first foundries in Western Canada to get a Ductile license. They had to pay the International Nickel Company a royalty of either $6 a ton or $1000 a year, whichever amount was larger.

Bob Gardner says International Nickel was very particular about who they'd grant licenses to. "If you said it was Ductile, it had to be up to certain standards because every man and his dog was trying to make Ductile at that time. Fly by night outfits would put in junk and the stuff would break and give Ductile a bad name."

Pete Probius, an engineer with International Nickel, used to go to all the foundries with Ductile licenses and check their product. "He'd come two or three times a year," says Gardner, "look under a microscope with us and show us what we were doing wrong."

George Davies Jr. says "Ductile is what made this company." Production of Ductile grew rapidly over the next decade, securing Lethbridge Iron Works' role as a jobbing foundry. In other words, the company's main customers are manufacturers who use Lethbridge Iron Works castings in their products. Today, about 80 per cent of the castings made at Lethbridge Iron Works are Ductile iron.

Many changes were necessary before Lethbridge Iron Works could produce Ductile iron. The cupola furnaces couldn't consistently maintain the high temperatures necessary for Ductile production. The company had to purchase a Detroit Electric Rocking Arc furnace. Although the Detroit furnace was new to Lethbridge Iron Works; the technology had been around for a long time. In fact, the company's first Detroit furnace was a used one dating back to the 1920s. In addition, a special transformer was purchased along with two used Milwaukee Moulding Machines, and a section of roller conveyer. Ladles, craneways and ladle jacks were manufactured and housed along with the new equipment in an addition to the foundry building.

Bob Gardner remembers that at first, only three men, Al Firth, Ed Ruff and himself, could operate the electric furnace. The Detroit furnace had two electrodes that carried electrical current - one fixed and one that moved. As the current travelled, it emitted sparks just like a welding arc. "Except," says Gardner, "in a welding arc the electrodes are about 1/8 of an inch in diameter. These things were 5 inches in diameter so there was huge power behind them. You'd bring these things together and you'd draw them apart. You'd get a huge welding arc and it roared and it melted the iron."

The movement of the electrode was controlled by a crank. It was all done by hand. Firth explains "You needed to get the right distance between electrodes to get an arc. If you got too close it would just make black smoke."

"You wanted a loud noise, then you knew they were working. Once they were smoking or it was quiet, you just had them jammed too tight," says Ruff.

Gardner remembers Lethbridge Iron Works made a big impression on the city, the first time they used the Detroit furnace. "That first afternoon we were running it, there was this wild arc. We'd go from this to a dead short and this meter would go up to 10,000 amps. Then there'd be a big roar and a spark and then it would short again.

"I got back to the office and the phone was ringing. It was Frank Hutton at the power house. He said, 'Bob, What are you doing up there?' I said, 'Just trying to melt a little iron Frank. Why? What's your problem?' I knew damn well what the problem was. He said, 'The meters are going crazy in here.'"

The aggravation caused by the new furnace turned out to be worth it. Ductile iron sales skyrocketed. Unfortunately, Secretary-Treasurer Dick Kimber wouldn't live to see the dramatic effects this would have on the company. He passed away in 1964. That same year company auditor S.G. Martin retired due to ill health. He'd been working for the Iron Works since 1930. Plant superintendent Alan Kimber (Dick's brother), and pricer/salesman Bob Onufrechuk became shareholders in 1965.

Al Firth believes part of the company's success was due to the loyalty of its employees. "Lethbridge Iron Works treated me well, and I wanted it to be successful," he says. "I can remember when we started with the Ductile, sometimes I'd be there early in the morning, go back at night, sometimes 18 or 20 hours a day just to get things going."

In the early days, the composition of the metal wasn't always perfect. "We had no lab," Firth explains, "so the only thing we could do was to do a chill test." They'd take a wedge shaped piece of metal, cool it in water and then break it. "If it was crystallized we knew we were on the right track," says Firth. He adds, "When we tapped the metal we would pour another sample, sort of a round plug, that would be broken off. If it was hard to break you knew it would be pretty good Ductile."

As Ductile sales increased, so did the need to expand and modernize. Over the next ten years, the company would spend $350,000 on new buildings and equipment including 2 new electric arc furnaces built by the Iron Works.

Furnace operator Al Plausteiner remembers going in at 5:00 on cold winter mornings to start up the three electric furnaces. They drew so much power, that "sometimes the lights of Lethbridge just dimmed," he says.

In order to reline or replace electrodes in the two larger electric furnaces, someone had to actually climb inside them. Sometimes they were still warm. Elmer Degenstein says, "You sort of had to climb around like a squirrel, and if you weren't careful you'd get a jolt if you got your gloves wet."

Aside from the operation of the new electric furnaces (the cupola was still in use for everything but Ductile) little changed for the foundrymen in the 1960s. There were some moulding machines, but the men continued to mix their own sand, make their own moulds, pour their own metal and shake out their own castings. Most of the work was done at ground level.

"Foundry work was as much an art as a science," says Bart Davies. The quality of a casting would depend largely on the skill level of the person making it. Also, pattern making was not as accurate as it is today.

Patterns are made by journeyman craftsmen in the pattern shop. Today patterns can be made of wood, plastic and metal. These craftsmen, aided by state of the art technology, make the patterns which produce castings having tolerances of + or - 1/32 of an inch or better. In the 1960s, the tolerances were + or - 1/8 of an inch. Of course in those days, pattern makers didn't have the benefit of technology. All patterns were made of wood. Like the patterns of today, they had to be made a little bit larger than the desired casting, because iron contracts as it cools. The pattern makers tool was a "24 inch ruler," containing units which made allowances for the shrinkage of cooled iron.

Despite the large margin for error, the foundrymen of the 1960s still managed to produce castings of the highest quality. This was a credit to their skills and their experience. Then, as now, many of the company's customers were from out of town. The products and services offered by Lethbridge Iron Works kept them coming back. In fact, many continue to be loyal Iron Works customers to this day. Says Al Firth, "I don't think there's any foundry in Canada that does a better job than what they're doing."

Bob Gardner remembers one night in the 1960s when he didn't think there would be a Lethbridge Iron Works to come back to. "I got a call about 2:00 in the morning. It was the fire department. They said, 'You've got a fire at the plant.' I went tearing down Scenic Drive and turned around the corner and all I could see was smoke and red. I thought, 'There it goes. Goodbye job. It's gone.'," says Gardner. The smoke was coming from the stack at the brewery, and the red colour was being reflected off the brewery's neon sign. As for the fire at the Iron Works: Gardner explains, "It was just a piddly little fire in a corner somewhere. It was out in five minutes."

Gardner is amazed that the old plant survived so many years. "It was a fire trap," he says, "and it never burned. I guess everything that was gonna burn burned 50 years ago."

Ed Ruff remembers that they used to pile castings up against the old wooden wall and it would sometimes start smoking. "But," says Al Firth, "most of the time people would spot the fire and put it out."

Lethbridge Iron Works had about 50 employees in the 1960s and early 70s. Many of them miss the camaraderie that existed between them before the company got so big. "We knew everyone. Everyone got along. We knew all the wives," says Elmer Degenstein. George Davies Jr. agrees, "We used to know everybody and their wives and kids. We have 150 employees now. I wouldn't even know if they were married, let alone if they were fathers."

Rapport between management and staff was very good, to the point where the board of directors would even underwrite employees' bank loans.

Retired steel shop foreman Bill Dunn remembers Lethbridge Iron Works as "quite a close company." He continues, "I don't know if cozy's the right word, but congenial anyway. At one time, if anyone had a birthday, then they'd have to buy beer for the whole crew. At that time beer was 10 cents a glass and you got your licks in when someone else had a birthday."

Elmer Degenstein recalls fondly the days of the 10 cent beer. He and some others from Lethbridge Iron Works would head down to the Plainsman Hotel on their lunch hours. "Five guys would throw a buck on the table. That's 50 draft." Al Liptak also remembers those days, "You guys would get in (heck) everyday when you came back. Me and Eddy (Ruff) would be standing at the door."

Company controller Shirley Setoguchi says on pay days, manager George Davies Jr. would find his employees cheque stubs downtown. Sales representative Mel Collier explains, "We never had a bank. We had the old Lethbridge Hotel. Former assistant foundry foreman Joe Pankotay knew the owner of the Lethbridge Hotel. We'd cash our cheques in there and then say "Oh, we might as well have one while we're here." Adds Al Liptak, "He'd just roll in the Loomis truck with cash when the Iron Works crew arrived, and they'd leave three quarters of their cheques in his bar."

Some Iron Works employees used to live at a local boardinghouse. The landlady there, Julia Fisher, knew some of her tenants cashed their cheques at the Garden Hotel. She made sure she never missed a pay day. Recalls Collier, "She'd be in their garnisheeing their cheques. She'd say, 'Make this cheque out to me, it's rent.'"

Because the old plant was next door to the brewery, the workers were never too far from their next bottle. A cold beer store was attached to the brewery. Collier says they used to sneak through the window, buy a case and then pass it back into the plant. Sometimes they'd swipe a couple of cases of pop off the Coca Cola truck. "It was borrowed coke," he chuckles.

Because the old plant was next door to the brewery, the workers were never too far from their next bottle. A cold beer store was attached to the brewery. Collier says they used to sneak through the window, buy a case and then pass it back into the plant. Sometimes they'd swipe a couple of cases of pop off the Coca Cola truck. "It was borrowed coke," he chuckles. "They always got their empties back." Collier jokes that it may not have been a coincidence that the brewery closed down after Lethbridge Iron Works moved to the industrial park.

The company used to buy a keg of beer on Christmas Eve. Al Liptak remembers his first Christmas at the plant. "I'm single, what's Christmas Eve to me? We get a keg of beer and everyone's all whistled. Get another keg of beer and everybody's more whistled. What the hell, go get another." Liptak says some of the wives wouldn't talk to him for about five years. Their children had been waiting for their fathers to come home.

The wives couldn't have been too happy after one of the staff picnics either. The weather was bad, so the picnic was moved to the foundry. While everyone was socializing, some of the kids got into the moulding sand. Moulding sand contains coal dust. Liptak recalls, "They were just black. All you could see was the whites of their eyes." Bart Davies jokes, "Sixteen people came in on Monday and their wives had forced them to retire because of the way their kids ended up."

Sure the wives would get frustrated once in a while about something that occurred at work, but Lethbridge Iron Works could also start romances blossoming. Controller Shirley Setoguchi has been working at the plant for 25 years. She was hired to replace a secretary named Linda. It seems that Linda was doing more than just typing. She was also getting to know personnel manager Al Liptak. The couple would eventually marry. Furnace operator Wayne McEntee quips, "No wonder the books were never done. Al had to work late at night to do them."

Before Linda and Al, there was Gloria and Bob. When Gloria worked as a secretary, she met and fell in love with pricer/salesman Bob Onufrechuk. They also got married. Setoguchi chuckles, "The company decided all that hanky panky was no good, so they hired me."

Both the machine and the steel shops played important roles in the manufacture of Lethbridge Iron Works products such as Chinook Land Packers and Lethiron Irrigation gates. But with the company changing its emphasis from manufacturing and selling its own products to providing castings for other manufacturers; the roles of both departments were changing.

Machine shop foreman John Hetesi remembers a time when his department would make 300 irrigation gates a year. They had to machine every surface. As time went on, the machine shop continued to produce a reduced number of gates, serve customers and machine finish castings. Increasingly, however, the concentration was shifting to foundry maintenance.

The steel shop's role was jobbing and repair work, light structural fabricating and manufacturing equipment. Retired steel shop foreman Bill Dunn says, "The writing was on the wall for machinists and steel workers" because so many people were getting their own shops. He says, "When I came to Lethbridge Iron Works in 1955, the men that were in the steel department were pretty defensive about their position there. They didn't have much use for the foundry. They thought it was just an add-on. At one time there was only one other shop in town that would do welding. But suddenly there were welding shops all over the place and farmers got their own equipment so there wasn't a call for custom work. Also, the prices that they had to charge to make anything were so high that they just didn't like to face the customer and hand him a bill."

Repair work was the same story. Says Dunn, "They couldn't take the abuse when they handed the customer a bill. They got to a point where they'd tell them if it cost $40 or less, go buy a new one. At $40 an hour for labour it adds up in a hurry."

Dunn says the steel shop did a wide variety of jobs over the years including the scallops on the Hoyt's Hardware building, fire escapes, gates, structural steel work, mining equipment and wrought iron railings. But that sort of work gradually decreased. The work that gradually increased was building, installing and maintaining equipment for the foundry.

In 1970, business was steady, so the directors decided to construct a new foundry building at the original downtown site. It would have three moulding stations complete with a muller and overhead sand. This was quite revolutionary for two reasons - The muller made it unnecessary to mix the sand with shovels and rototillers; and the moulding stations enabled the foundry workers to make their moulds while standing up.

As it turned out, the backs of the foundrymen didn't get the break they were expecting in 1970. Sales dropped dramatically that summer, and although the new building was constructed, plans to purchase the new equipment were cancelled. Business was so slow, that hourly staff had to be placed on half time. Business improved substantially by April 1971, and the new molding stations were purchased that summer.

Throughout its existence, Lethbridge Iron Works has experienced a high rate of employee turnover. The work is tough and dirty. Attracting hard, capable workers has never been easy. In 1972, the company introduced profit sharing. The goal was to attract good workers, make sure that they stayed and boost production. The first year, workers received between $50 and $300 in bonuses. By the following year, bonuses had increased to between $210 and $470. The practice of distributing bonuses continues at Lethbridge Iron Works. The amounts have increased substantially from the 1970s though - in 1997, Iron Works employees shared $400,000 worth of bonuses.

In 1973, Lethbridge Iron Works celebrated its 75th Anniversary. The company had more work than it could handle. Ductile work was backlogged by almost a year, so the board of directors decided to accept only "lighter, higher-profit castings." The foundry went on double shift, but the Iron Works was having a hard time attracting enough employees to continue this for long. The foundry needed to expand and modernize to become more efficient, but there was little room to grow at its downtown location.

George Davies Jr. was interviewed in the February, 1973 issue of Trade and Commerce magazine. He said: "Expansion is a bit limited right now as I feel we have enough capacity potential to carry us for the next few years. If I were to locate the foundry today, I would of course move it into the city's industrial district, but to make such a move today would cost us a quarter million dollars just to move, plus the cost of building an entire new foundry."

One year later, in February 1974, Lethbridge Iron Works placed a deposit on a piece of land in the industrial park. By August, they'd sold their downtown site to Sicks Lethbridge Brewery, secured a loan from the Alberta Opportunity Company for $1,539,000 and been offered a grant from the federal Department of Regional Economic Expansion (DREE) in the amount of $417,640. Twenty per cent of the DREE money could be used while the plant was under construction, and the remaining 80 per cent would be released one month after the plant was in operation.

A condition of the DREE grant was that the shareholders had to invest $200,000 in new capital into the company and keep that money invested for at least 2 years after the new plant opened. Barbara Davies, George Jr.'s wife, lent Lethbridge Iron Works the money.

Once financing for the new plant was secured, plant engineer Bob Gardner was charged with making it happen. "They divorced me from my regular work," he says. "I'd have never gotten the plant designed and built if I had to do the day to day running around. I was holed up in the attic of the old office building. I had a room up there. I did all the drawing and organizing and ordering of the new machinery."

Central Electric was the electrical supplier for the new plant. They continue to serve Lethbridge Iron Works to this day. Goldie Oliver owned Central Electric. Gardner remembers spending many Sunday afternoons in Goldie's office discussing electrical design. Oliver says chuckling, "Bob would tell me what he thought was going on. He'd make a list. Monday morning he'd change the idea and start all over again."

The steel shop was kept busy preparing for the move. Retired steel shop foreman Bill Dunn says, "We built the tallest trusses and a lot of other equipment, belts and hoppers and things."

Retired machine shop foreman Alan Kimber says they continued their daily customer work, such as repairing and replacing worn-out parts, as construction on the new plant took place. They also had the enormous task of preparing their equipment for its new home. Most of the equipment in the machine shop was on a line shaft - there was one big motor driving everything. The operator controlled the equipment by moving belts around with a big wooden stick. Each piece of equipment at the new plant would have its own power supply. Motors, gear boxes and mounting equipment had to be purchased and installed. The new machine shop had to be mapped out to determine where the equipment should go.

Meanwhile, the foundry continued to thrive. Sales for the year ending June 30, 1974, were up almost 50 per cent from the previous year. They topped $1,000,000 for the first time in history. By June 30, 1975, they were approaching $2,000,000.

The new concrete and steel plant was built by Kenwood Engineering. The 50,000 square foot building was completed in August 1975. George Davies Sr. celebrated his 80th birthday with a tour of the new plant. George Jr. drove his father around the facility in a golf cart. "What do you think, Dad?" he asked. "It's really nice son, but I hope you're going to be able to pay for it," his father replied. He needn't have worried. The Alberta Opportunity Company Loan was completely paid off by 1989.

Kimber remembers that he and Bob Gardner were the first people to work at the new plant. Kimber would spend mornings there connecting equipment and afternoons back at the old plant. Gardner's desk was an apple box, as he toiled away in the room that would become his office.

Bill Dunn was seriously injured the summer before the plant opened. He had his hand "at the wrong place at the wrong time," and hit it with a pneumatic hammer. He was told by his doctor to take five months off work, but went back early to help out with the plant. "They'd asked me to come supervise a bit," he says, "but I couldn't just stand around watching." He worked alongside the men.

At first, Dunn was worried he'd get the cast on his hand dirty, but he managed to keep it fairly clean. At least it was clean enough to fool the doctor. Says Dunn, "When the doctor finally turned me loose he said I'd been pretty good at cooperating and not doing stuff. I couldn't even look at him. I didn't say a word."

Dunn says he and the others worked so diligently to get the new plant off the ground because Lethbridge Iron Works was important to them. "One of the guys on Kenwood's (construction) crew said it was just another job for him. I said it was a little different for us because this is our plant and we want to see it work."

Less than a month before production was to begin at the new plant, tragedy struck. Company director Bob Onufrechuk was killed in an automobile accident. This is when Bart Davies moved from the moulding line to the office and began in sales.

At about the same time, the board of directors were informed that Lethbridge Iron Works didn't have enough equity to qualify for the DREE grant. The company had a written agreement from Sick's Brewery to buy the old plant for $252,000, but the federal government refused to accept this agreement as equity. That left Lethbridge Iron Works $153,000 short of the $700,000 in equity they needed to qualify for the grant. George Davies Jr. quickly arranged for a personal loan to make up the difference.

Lethbridge Iron Works still wasn't out of the woods, even with the $153,000 from Davies Jr. The company needed to be in production at the new facility by a certain date in order to get the remaining 80 per cent or $324,000 of their DREE grant. "But," says Bob Gardner, "they advanced this deadline on me a month during the final stages of construction. All of a sudden, new rules! We had to have product produced on Dec. 5, 1975 or hundreds of thousands of dollars went down the drain."

When the fateful day arrived, Gardner says his hair got a little greyer. Two government officials arrived in the late morning. They were carrying clipboards and looking expectant. Says Gardner, "Ken Firth was standing around, I was standing around and someone was trying to get metal out of this furnace. We couldn't get it going. They said, 'I guess that's it then.' I said, 'No,' and asked George to take them for lunch."

Gardner says he assured the men by the time they got back from lunch, the foundry would be producing something. When the men came back, he tapped the Detroit electric rocking arc furnace. They took pictures of metal going into the mould. "We poured some bottle openers," says Gardner. "I've still got one with the date dymo taped on it." As for the government representatives, "They went away happy," says Gardner.

Castings from an electric rocking arc furnace may have satisfied the Canadian government, but the real show piece at the new plant was a 1000 kilowatt Ajax channel induction furnace with a holding capacity of 44,000 lbs. and a melt rate of 2 tons per hour. For employees used to dealing with much smaller amounts, 22 tons of molten metal was a lot to get used to. At first it was "intimidating" and "scary."

The Ajax didn't arrive in a box, ready to plug in. Quality Assurance Manager Dave Rynenberg, Mickey Ress and Ajax representative Gene Lasky were faced with the Herculean task of putting it together. They put together two inductors, and had to pour the furnace lining. Says Rynenberg, "The first time we put the lining in the Ajax furnace we had about 25 guys. It was just crazy." Experience and new materials have made lining the furnace a lot less painful. "Now we do it with about three guys," he says.

Rynenberg describes starting up the Ajax furnace for the first time as "a day from hell." Before the Ajax could be powered up, the loop at the bottom had to be completely covered with at least 3000 lbs. of liquid metal. They had to melt the metal in two Detroit electric rocking arc furnaces. "Technically," says Rynenberg, the Detroits had a capacity of 2000 lbs., "but we used to get 2200, 2300, and even 2400 lbs. when the lining wore down - there was more room and we took it to the limit." In order to get the required 3000 lbs., the men had to take metal from both of the Detroits.

The Ajax requires at least 14,000 lbs. of liquid metal before any solid metal can be added to it. That means that once the men had it up and running with 3000 lbs. of molten metal, they still had to add at least 11,000 additional lbs. They usually added more.

Today it only takes a couple of hours to prime the Ajax furnace. But back then, melting those 14,000 lbs. of metal required the efforts of "20 people running about like crazy." It was a long and trying day, not to mention noisy. Says Rynenberg, "The Detroit furnaces used to scream at you. There was no doubt about having to wear ear protection." Adds supervisor Elmer Degenstein, "It didn't matter what part of the plant you were in, you could hear them. They were horrible."

Once it was primed, the Ajax furnace ran for a year before it was shut down, relined and started up again. Therefore, the 14,000 lb. metal melting marathon only happened once a year. The rest of the time, the Detroit furnaces were used to melt special alloy irons such as Ni-hard. Melting Ni-hard in the Detroits was much less frustrating than melting it in the old plant's cupola, because the Detroits could easily maintain the high temperatures necessary to produce good alloyed castings.

The Ajax furnace has always been used to melt Ductile iron. Sales representative Mel Collier thinks it would've been "a scary experience" for the person who "flicked off the switch on the magnet and dropped the first load of steel" into it.

Rynenberg replies, "I don't recall that being particularly scary. We had some good clean steel." He says once the Ajax was up and running, "it was kind of neat. We had a fairly easy way of melting metal and we had a good supply of it."

Temperature readings were done differently at the new location. At the old plant, foundry workers relied on their eyes to determine how hot the metal was. Generally, the whiter it was, the hotter it was. Once they moved to the new plant, precise readings could be made through the use of a temperature lance - a sort of probe enclosed in a cardboard tube that is dipped in the metal.

Bart Davies is not likely to forget the first time he had to take a reading with the temperature lance. He explains: "We'd just filled (the Ajax) up for nearly the first time. I'd been asked to come in to monitor the temperatures. Plant Engineer Bob Gardner kind of gave me instructions about what to do. Put the probe in, get the temperature. I stuck the probe in and all of a sudden nothing happened with the monitoring devices. Pulled the probe out and it's burnt right through. I had it in too deep. I had burnt off all the cardboard casing that protects the probe."

There was no spare probe, a rather unfortunate situation, because they were depending on temperature readings to determine the correct power settings for the new furnace. Davies panicked. "I thought, 'It's like a nuclear disaster.'" Davies says his father George Jr. came to the plant that night and they wondered if the furnace was "going to run away from us and have a melt down or is it going to freeze up."

It turned out that disaster was averted. They found an outfit in Calgary that had the parts to fix the probe. Bart and his father ended up driving up there in the middle of the night to pick up the necessary supplies.

Davies says one of the drawbacks of being in Lethbridge is that things are not always readily available. He says, "Sometimes the parts are 3000 miles away. It's always been a problem having the adequate resources to deal with those kind of little scenarios that always creep up."

While Bart Davies was at the new Lethbridge Iron Works plant worrying about a disabled temperature lance, the old plant was still in operation. A small group of men were over there pouring Ni-hard. In fact, there were eight months when Lethbridge Iron Works was operating two plants concurrently. Some say those left behind at the old plant were the most fortunate because they didn't have to deal with setting up the new equipment and "hauling crap back and forth."

Bart Davies recalls one instance when they did a little less hauling than expected. "The pattern loft in the old plant was full of patterns going back to the early 1900s. I remember we opened some big doors on the north side of the old building and we started throwing stuff out . But people would stop and they'd see the patterns and they'd say, 'Got to have that.' There were gears and sprockets. I've got a few on my patio wall."

Operating two plants at once was an expensive proposition for Lethbridge Iron works. In the fiscal year ending June 30, 1976, they lost almost $42,000 compared to a net profit of more than $250,000 in the previous year. Things didn't get much better in 1977. The whole North American economy was in a downturn, and this was reflected by slow sales at Lethbridge Iron Works.

Bart Davies says his father George Jr. likely spent many sleepless nights in those years reflecting on the concerns his father (George Sr.) had about whether they could pay for the new plant. For awhile, they were unable to pay off any of the principal on their Alberta Opportunity Loan, just managing to pay off the interest. In retrospect, though, some say the economic slowdown was actually a blessing. It gave everyone a chance to get used to the new equipment so everything was running smoothly when the economy picked up again in the late 70s.

There was plenty to get used to. A completely new sand system was in place with silos, a continuous muller, and pneumatic sand transfer. There was no need to shovel the sand anymore, it all came out of hoppers already re-mulled and aerated. The biggest change was in the mixing. Previously, it was mixed by feel using the "old moulder's touch." There is nothing hands-on about the new method. Today, the sand is mixed continuously at a rate of up to 70 tons per hour. The quality of the sand depends on what is added to it at the start of the process. It was frustrating at first. Says retired foundry foreman Al Firth, "The way we were trying to mix the sand, it was terrible." Mel Collier adds, "My brother (who also worked at the Iron Works) said they would go days when they were supposed to make moulds on the rollover and they would make nothing - the sand was no good or they couldn't get any sand."

These bugs were soon worked out, and the sand system gained widespread acceptance. Rynenberg, Collier and Degenstein say the sand system is one of the integral components that enable Lethbridge Iron Works to compete in today's market.

The sand system consistently produces good moulding sand. One of the reasons for this is that the new plant came equipped with proper lab facilities for testing sand mouldability, moisture content, etc. This was a vast improvement from the lab at the old plant; it consisted of a microscope and sander. In addition, Lethbridge Iron Works purchased thermal analysis equipment which determined the carbon and silicon content of the metal. Quality Assurance Manager Dave Rynenberg says, "We also used to do wet analysis where we'd take some chemicals, and acids and weigh out samples and mix-a whole bunch of alchemy."

Today, the company has a spectrometer that can analyze 16 elements in a metal sample in just a couple of minutes. Says Rynenberg, "We used to send out the sample to a lab and get the results back in a week or a couple of weeks. Now it's practically instantaneous."

The improved testing facilities make for better metal. "There's a lot more control now than there used to be particularly with the high-chrome cast iron," says Rynenberg. "We used to make up a recipe-put so much of this in and so much of that, sort of like making a cake. Before we got the spectrometer we were never really quite sure what we had in there with regards to the elements carbon and silicon and chrome. Now we can test our metal before we take it out of the furnace. If it's okay we use it. If it's not okay we can make the adjustments."

Adjustments of a different kind were needed on some of the equipment at the new plant. Lethbridge Iron Works had purchased a Wheelabrator shot blast system for cleaning castings. At first, it didn't work right - a thrust bearing had been installed completely backwards.

There were no such problems with the Hunter moulding machine. It substantially reduced the time it took to make a mould, and discharged to an automatic shakeout system to shake the castings out of the sand once they were set. Shaking out the castings by hand was a horrible job. The heat was stifling. Mel Collier was assigned to shake out castings on his first day of work. He didn't last long, "I quit actually. I went back to Manitoba." Many Iron Works employees have left at one time or another, it's the nature of the job - intense, backbreaking labour.

The working environment at the new plant was an improvement over the old one. There was better lighting, heating and ventilation. Collier says, "Everything was just better laid out and more efficient."

Controller Shirley Setoguchi says one significant difference she observed between the old plant and the new was that it was possible to work at the old plant and not be able to read. Elmer Degenstein agrees, "Experience was always the best asset, more than having to learn to read or write, as long as you could sign your name on your cheque." The equipment at the new plant made reading a necessity.

That same equipment forever changed the role of the foundry worker. It used to be that the quality of a casting was a direct reflection of the person making it. He was responsible for each step. Once he had enough knowledge and experience, he could make excellent sand by just knowing when it felt right. He had a whole arsenal of techniques for making and pouring his moulds. A good moulder could make consistently good castings. Modern machinery makes it possible to produce high quality castings that are less dependent on the skills of each individual worker.

Mel Collier says, "The art of moulding no longer exists at Lethbridge Iron Works." Adds Dave Rynenberg, "The skills are not required that used to be required for some of the more complex jobs. You can train a guy to work the Hunter moulding machine in a fairly short time."

As the role of the foundry workers changed, so did their duties. Their work became much more specialized. Collier cites this example, "When you were a moulder, then you were a moulder. Down at the old place you could be anything." Setoguchi agrees, "Right now, each person does the same thing all day. Before everyone had lots of jobs."

Of course, that specialization didn't extend to slow times like they had in 1976 and 1977. "Then," says Rynenberg, "you could be painting the fence." Or become a lawn keeper like Mel Collier did one summer. "We fertilized that spot out there three times and not one blade of grass ever came out of it," he says. "Not until Bart took over about 5 or 6 years ago." Says Elmer Degenstein, "He put fertilizer on it once and it came up green." Collier thinks he knows why. "They started putting some dirt in it." Previously they'd tried to grow the grass in dust from the foundry. "It couldn't grow nothing," says Collier.

1977 was not only a tough year for business, Lethbridge Iron Works also experienced two significant personal losses. Former manager Donald M. Davies died in March 1977, and Company president and former manager George Davies Sr. passed away in September.

Sales remained poor until the summer of 1978, when they picked up dramatically. By September 1978, there were more than five times the orders than had been on hand in September 1977. The plant was turning out more than two times the tonnage per month per foundry worker compared to the old plant.

Sales to June 30, 1979 were a whopping 88 per cent higher than the previous year. They topped the 2 million dollar mark for the first time in history. Increased business meant an increase in jobs. The company's payroll was in excess of one million dollars. There were about 65 employees. Twenty more would be hired in the next few years.

Four women were among those getting foundry jobs in the late 1970s. Two of the women were married to other foundry workers. Both couples are divorced now, but the former husbands are quick to point out that the breakups had nothing to do with Lethbridge Iron Works. Bart Davies says, "The women were good. They're not here anymore because we got slow after that and there were lay offs. They just never hired women back. I wasn't in management then but I think management's standpoint in those days was there was probably a little lack of concentration (on the part of the men) at times."

Elmer Degenstein feels the women may have got some preferential treatment. "They went out to celebrate one of the girl's birthdays at the Miner's one lunchtime and came back an hour late." Mel Collier continues, "We go out the next time, come back half an hour late and get our asses ragged."

Bart Davies says Lethbridge Iron Works doesn't attract a lot of women applicants. "But there's a few out there that would still make excellent employees. If one ever walked through the door that looked like the right person we'd certainly consider her."

Six prisoners from the Lethbridge jail also found work at the foundry in 1978. Collier says, "They were great guys for the most part, but some were bad birds. Most of them were good workers." Sometimes their lack of experience was a problem. "One guy came on the floor, went straight to the pouring floor and filled his boot up with iron," he says.

"They were our buddies," says Collier. "(The correctional centre) would deliver them in the morning and pick them up after work. They always showed up and were on time. All their money went into their account. They fed them well too. They'd make them a loaf of bread for lunch."

About a year after the Iron Works stopped hiring prisoners, there was a robbery attempt. Some suspect it was one of the former employees, because the would-be robbers seemed to know their way around. They tried to crack the safe. Says Bart Davies, "They didn't know how to run the torch. The safe was all black. They never got anything."

Sales topped $3 million in 1980. Good fortune seemed to be leaking out all over, and so, unfortunately, was the Ajax furnace. One weekend someone set the power higher than it should've been. The Ajax got really hot. When the employees arrived at work on Monday, it was almost overflowing. The temperature had risen so high, that it had melted part of the lining and filled the furnace right up. There was lots of slag, and the men set to work cleaning it off. Everything seemed to be fine. At least for a couple of weeks.

Dave Rynenberg explains. "I think two weeks later this leak finally broke through. It kind of melted. Down in the bushings there's only 3 1/2 inches of refractory between the liquid metal and these copper bushings. There's a loop of metal. It broke down in that area and just melted down through to the bushings. It didn't take any effort to cut its way through them."

Rynenberg remembers how he found out about the leak. "Mickey Ress gave me a call and said, 'Hey you better get in here. It's leaking out the bushings.' It leaked right through to the bushings and it was starting to pour out and of course there's no way you can stop it. No way at all."

The molten metal ran out into the pit in front of the furnace. The pit had been equipped with large steel barrels with sand between them. Retired steel shop foreman Bill Dunn says the thinking was that if a spill occurred, the iron would run into the barrels and be separated by the sand. "But," says Dunn, "I think they put the barrels too close together and it melted one barrel into the other. They ended up with four barrels of cast iron all in a lump."

Dunn was in charge of clean up. He and the "steel shop boys" tried to cut the iron out with an oxygen lance. Bart Davies recalls, "He worked for weeks to get that stuff out of there." Says Dunn, "We could of done it if we had enough time and enough money but it was kind of hopeless." In the end, Speedy Transport came and jacked the whole thing out. It took them three days.

By 1980, both the steel shop and the machine shop had evolved almost entirely into plant maintenance. Both departments had ceased being revenue producers for the company due to the large increase in similar enterprises in the Lethbridge area.

Bill Dunn and the men from the steel shop definitely had a lot of maintenance on their hands the first and worst time the Ajax sprung a leak. Thankfully, when it happened again, clean-up was much simpler. "I remember it started leaking through the plugs in the bottom," says Dave Rynenberg. "Mickey Ress was down there with Bob Gardner trying to stick some clay up there. It just didn't work." Bart Davies adds, "There was just a little run out and we managed to freeze it off and then dump the furnace."The plugs were made of refractory cement. Rynenberg says after the leak, the foundry stopped using plugs in the Ajax. Instead, they switched to Dry Vibe - literally a dry cement. "You pour it in, it vibrates into place and then it's sintered and cured," he says.

Revenues continued to increase in 1981, so the board of directors felt it was a good time to expand. The company spent almost $300,000 on the purchase of a new air compressor and a building to house it and the two existing compressors. The addition was completed June 30, 1982. Two months earlier the bottom had fallen out of the economy. Although sales were almost $4.6 million in the year ending June 30, 1982 orders on hand were only about a quarter of what they had been the previous year. Business conditions across North America were poor.

Lethbridge Iron Works laid off 29 employees in May 1982, reducing staff numbers to 56. Those people that remained, went on a Government of Canada work-share program. With work-share, employees work reduced hours for reduced pay, but unemployment insurance benefits help to cushion the lost wages. For the previous three years, employees were getting raises of 10 per cent annually. The pay cuts must have been difficult, but less so than they would have been without the work-share program.

George Davies Jr. told the Lethbridge Herald at the time that it was the seventh slump he'd seen since he began at Lethbridge Iron Works and it "appears to be the worst."

In 1983, Lethbridge Iron Works offered to buy back its minority shareholder's shares at $3500 each. Today, all but two shares are held by members of the Davies family. The other shares are held by controller Shirley Setoguchi and personnel manager Al Liptak.

The people that sold their shares back to the company were likely feeling pretty smug. Lethbridge Iron Works appeared to be on fairly shaky ground. Sales for 1983 were almost $2 million less than they'd been the previous year. Employees went from a four day to a three day week. Staff levels dropped to about 40 people. It was an eerie feeling in such a large plant. "You could hear echoes," says Mel Collier. "It was scary coming in here." Elmer Degenstein adds, "You could yell at someone from one end of the plant to the other and you could hear him. Now they can't hear you up on the pouring floor if you stand down by a machine."

In those slow days we poured maybe 10 or 15 thousand pounds a day," says Bart Davies. That's a tenth of what they pour today. He says despite the tough times, they held on to as many staff people as they could. "I think we kind of pared it down a little bit, but the whole idea of work-share is to try to keep your valuable staff."

Davies refers to the recession in the early 80s as "that skid time." He says some people had trouble understanding why Lethbridge Iron Works stayed in business. "We had some years when the return on assets was pretty stupid. I remember sitting with our accountant and him saying, 'Why are you doing this? Why don't you get the hell out? You're making two per cent. Just bail!'" Davies chuckles, "Because it's a family business, we said, 'We need to find a new accountant!'"

It's a good thing Davies didn't heed his accountant's advice. The economy picked up in 1984, and so did business at Lethbridge Iron Works. By 1985, sales reached $4.5 million, almost as high as they'd been before the recession hit. Staff levels had climbed back up to 70. Employees remember it as an easier time. "There was less pressure in those days," says Dave Rynenberg. "As far as we know," responds Mel Collier. "Not being in the office, it was relatively simple. We just worked until 3 and went home. We had the best hours in the world-7 to 3." Says Elmer Degenstein, "There was never a real demand on how many you made and how much you got out. But everybody worked pretty hard."

Like many others at the plant, Collier, Degenstein and Rynenberg say they enjoy working for the Davies family. Says Collier, "In all honesty, they treat everybody pretty well. Everybody has their squabbles about this and that, especially now with so much change going on but basically they treat all the guys good." Says Bart Davies, "We've been very lucky with our people. We do have good people."

Perhaps it's this mutual respect that has prevented the labour disputes which have occurred at other foundries. "They've never had to worry about a union, says Collier. "At one time (Elmer) Fud and I were together out at the plant and the union tried to come in here. They took our ball team and they plied us full of beer and took us back into a room. All I wanted to know was how much more an hour we were going to get, and all they could say was 25 cents - maybe. I said, 'For how much a month?'"

"They couldn't improve on what we already had," adds Degenstein. Collier continues: "So there were never any problems. What they do now is pay a decent wage, but as soon as they go into the bonuses they more than make up for the wage. A five year guy made 9300 bucks (bonus) last year." Says Degenstein, "The guys really appreciate that."

Sometimes company management put their own flesh and blood into their work. Plant engineer Bob Gardner almost sacrificed a foot. He was walking across the cat walk, measuring something, when he stepped right into the sand aerator. "It is like a Rototiller, with turning blades," says Gardner. "As I stood on it, my foot went right down, and the thing was clawing its way up my leg." His shoe was pulled right off. It was fortunate that he wasn't wearing boots. Gardner explains, "The shoe just fell off, but a boot would've pulled the leg in."

Gardner continues his tale, "I fished my foot out and there were a couple of slashes, but my foot was all there. These guys turned white. It was funny because Elmer was down in the moulding line and he's moulding away and the sand comes out and there's this shoe. It looks like Bob's shoe. No foot in it, good! Oh, that was close!"

Sales dropped again in 1987, and the employees went back on work-share. It was a familiar cycle. Controller Shirley Setoguchi says, "Every four years you could just see the orders on hand going down. It dipped and then it would come up again. But we haven't had one for a long time."

In 1988, Calgary hosted the world at the Winter Olympic Games. Lethbridge Iron Works showed its Olympic spirit by manufacturing the anchors that hold up the Saddledome roof.

The late 1980s were a time of enhanced environmental awareness. Lethbridge Iron Works was already quite environmentally responsible. For example, gates, risers and imperfect castings are remelted. About 98 per cent of each batch of sand is re-used. Bob Gardner thought he'd found another way to help the environment. He was leafing through a "surplus round robin letter" that was published nationally. Says Gardner, "It told all the stuff that companies had for surplus that other companies may be able to use." He saw an entry that mentioned charcoal. That sparked his interest because of it's carbon content. Dave Rynenberg explains, "Carbon is one of the principle elements of iron castings. In Ductile iron we have around 3.7-3.8 per cent carbon. We use a lot of steel right now. Steel is low in carbon so we need to add carbon. You're melting the steel and then you're adding carbon to it. It's part of the recipe, like a cake."

Gardner continues, "I looked at where (the charcoal) was and it was right handy in our area. I called the phone number, and it was Palliser Distillers, right next door." Palliser uses the charcoal to filter its vodka. "I said, 'There's no alcohol left in there eh?' and they said, 'Oh no, we made sure we got all the alcohol.' I said, 'Let's try it.'" They went over to Palliser's, picked up some sacks of charcoal and proceeded to throw one into the Ajax. "Well, you should've seen it," says Gardner. "A ball of fire rolled all the way up. There was a mushroom shaped cloud. I thought, 'Well, there goes the plant! Whoosh! It was all the alcohol and fusel oils that were still in the charcoal."

The plant survived. George Davies Jr.'s youngest son John joined the company in 1988. He'd graduated from the University of Alberta with a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master's in Business Administration. Davies says he never originally intended to work for Lethbridge Iron Works and was actually employed by Alberta Government Telephones when his father persuaded him to join the family firm. He was to do the plant engineering and some sales. His father believed you had to do sales to truly understand the business. "I didn't think I was much for sales. After about six months of seeing me in a work atmosphere everyone sort of agreed."

John's forté is automation. As vice-president engineering and operations, he ensures that the plant runs as efficiently and profitably as possible. Many staff members credit John's understanding of technology and his willingness to use it with much of the company's success.

Unlike some plants, automation at Lethbridge Iron Works has not meant lost jobs. In fact, just the opposite has happened. With increased technology has come increased production. As production increases, it becomes necessary to hire more people to handle it.

Lethbridge Iron Works has always tried to bring out the best in its employees. In fact, all of the managers and office staff started out working in the foundry. Even John Davies used to work in the grinding room during high school. Says Bart Davies, "We've watched these people as they perform out in the foundry and we say this is a talent that we want to harness in here."

Mel Collier started working in the office as a sales representative in 1986. He really appreciates the opportunities he's been given at Lethbridge Iron Works. "I got a great break. I was a moulder. I was going nowhere. I think it's a great plus that if you work out in the plant you get a chance to advance."

Plant engineer Bob Gardner retired in 1989. One of his last projects was replacing the "screaming" Detroit furnaces with two 1.5-ton Inductotherm Coreless Electric furnaces. The coreless furnaces are much quieter than the Detroits. In addition, they melt faster and have a bigger capacity.

John Davies helped Gardner oversee the installation of the coreless furnaces. They ran into problems that they weren't expecting. When the plant was built, conduits full of electrical cable were placed in the walls and floor. It was a cost saving measure. "It's very inexpensive and easy to do." says Davies. "You just have to lay it out and fill it with concrete. You don't have to attach it to the wall and get it in the right place." Bart adds, "The problem was the plant was built and the location of the conduits was never properly recorded." They had to cut a hole in the wall to install the coreless furnaces. "The electrician tried to figure out about where the conduits were, says John. "We figured we were fine. We cut a hole about 3 feet high and 3 feet wide. We took the piece of concrete out. No conduits. Perfect! Then within two minutes someone came up from the sand room and said none of the equipment's working. When you cut an opening like that with a circular saw, you have to overcut a little bit because the curve of your saw blade." They got out a flashlight and saw that they'd hit a conduit with the overcut.

Things got worse when they tried to repair the damage to the electrical cables. "We started jack hammering and hit 'em all," he says. "Five conduits all in a row. There were probably 4 electricians there who worked double time for 24 hours replacing all those wires to get the place going again. That crew was great. It was one of those situations that pulls everyone together. They were running around and they were talking. By about 6 in the morning everyone was quiet. Methodical. Drumming along. Doing their job. Dragging their ass. Trying to get it done. Ever since then we've tried to be much more careful."

Power failures can be devastating to an iron foundry. It only takes about an hour without power before the metal in the Ajax cools down enough to render the furnace useless. Lethbridge Iron Works has emergency generators that kick in as soon as the power is down. Wayne McEntee remembers that the generator ran for so long when the conduits were accidentally cut, that he had to get some more diesel to refuel it.

Al Liptak recalls a power failure one winter day when Lethbridge Iron Works almost lost its back-up power supply. Liptak says the power outage was lasting longer than expected, and the Lethbridge Iron Works was on its last tank of diesel to power the generator. "We called Esso," says Liptak. "Esso said they had the diesel, but it was in the ground and there was no electricity to power the pumps to remove it. We called around and managed to find a bulk fuel truck that could deliver the fuel." Liptak says if the bulk fuel truck hadn't been available, they would have started phoning farmers in the area who usually have gravity fed tanks.

Bob Gardner remembers an ice storm during the 1980s that destroyed many transmission towers between Calgary and Lethbridge. "I received a furnace alarm late at night," says Gardner, "and immediately drove to the plant. It was an eerie experience as there was not one light showing in the entire city. In the plant, the 70 kW emergency generator had started and was providing working lights and furnace cooling, so there was no immediate danger. Foreman Al Firth and furnace operator Wayne McEntee arrived shortly and the 300 kW diesel generator was started. The crew stayed in the control room for 14 hours monitoring the furnace until power was restored the next afternoon."

The office staff at Lethbridge Iron Works joined the computer age in 1990. The system has since had many upgrades. Dave Rynenberg says, "We started out with those little 9 inch screens. Now we've all got large colour monitors -we're spoiled to death." Mel Collier says his paperwork has been substantially reduced. He used to spend hours and hours writing out job orders and purchase orders by hand. Bart Davies says computers "allowed us to get a lot more instructions back to our people." "Our record keeping has always been good," says Dave Rynenberg, "but now it's easier to get at. All the information's in the computer."

Sales in 1990 and 1991, were rather flat. Once again, employees went back on work-share. A period of what Bart Davies calls "unprecedented growth" began in the summer of 1992. Things haven't slowed down since. Sales in 1993, were more than $2.5 million higher than 1992. They surpassed the $10 million dollar mark in 1994 and continue to increase at rate of about 30 per cent annually.

Bart says most of the foundry's customers come from four main industry groups "Our biggest industry group is agricultural manufacturers," he says. Sales to this sector took off in 1994 when wheat prices increased. "Sales were slow for many years because there was no money in the grain," says Mel Collier. "Farmers preferred to fix the equipment they had, rather than purchase new stuff. When the wheat prices went up, 'Boom!' these guys were buying." Elmer Degenstein thinks the increased demand for castings is due to the evolution of farming. "In the past 4 or 5 years we've seen the small farmer disappear," he says. "Bigger operations have taken over the land which boosts agriculture and sales."

"The volumes are so dramatic, like 50,000, says Collier. We used to get orders for 5000 castings or 10,000 castings and we thought that was big. We'd get orders for 25,000 castings and I'd go home and cry. Now I don't think there's a number that could scare me."

The men sometimes wonder if the market is being saturated. "We sell a guy 30,000 tips that go into the ground. We sell 'em so many thousand shank holders and air seeder parts and think, 'Every farmer has got to have an air seeder by now. Who the hell's buying them this year?'"

Bart Davies says, "The second industry group is something called secondary automotive, which is principally Class 8 truck manufacturers and highway bus manufacturers. We don't sell to the Big 3." General Motors did approach Lethbridge Iron Works at one time and asked them to make castings. They refused. John Davies explains, "GM would be counterproductive. We're in the business to make money, we're not in business just to make castings. We want to do both. They were surprised by our lack of gratitude."

"Our third largest group is the railroad," says Bart. "One of our largest customers has its head office is in England with Canadian offices in Montreal. It's a really good account. Ten years ago they bought castings all over the world - South Africa, USA, wherever they were most economical. We managed to forge a pretty good relationship with them based on quality and service and a bunch of other things."

The fourth group is oil and gas. "That's an area that's seen a fairly significant growth in the last few years," says Bart.

Mel Collier says it's easier to be a sales representative than it used to be. "It's a lot more fun than it was 12 years ago. We were banging on doors and there wasn't a lot going on. Oil and gas wasn't anything special. It's been a good time for everybody." Collier says that sales calls today consist of checking in with the customer, finding out how they're doing and making sure there aren't any problems. "We're not actively seeking any new customers. We're just trying to keep up with what we've got now," he says.

Over the years, Lethbridge Iron Works has developed enough trust with some of its customers that they "come to us and say, 'Here's this job, make it for us and charge us fair bucks,'" says Bart. "That's a very special relationship to have in the industry."

In order to meet increased production demands, Lethbridge Iron Works launched an enormous modernization program beginning in 1992. Machinery and equipment were purchased. Existing machinery was upgraded. The entire plant was computerized. To illustrate the huge extent of this program: Lethbridge Iron Works took 90 years to acquire one third of its capital assets, it acquired another third in just eight years and the final third between 1996 and 1998.

A sand cooler was installed in 1992. At the same time, John Davies undertook the task of computerizing the sand system. He says "It was the project from hell and it always will be." He explains: "One sand room equipment supplier sent a representative to start up the new computerized equipment. His name was Dick. His nickname quickly became Mr. Head. He was a Dickhead. My wife had a better chance of starting up this new equipment than he did because at least she'd be smart enough to figure it out. This guy programmed it and didn't have a clue."

John believes the location of Lethbridge Iron Works worked against it in this case. "That's another thing about being in Lethbridge, we're considered to be nobody. The supplier's good people were at John Deere, starting up their equipment. Dick was 55 years old, had probably never seen a computer in his life. They sent him on a PLC (programmable logic controller) course and said go ahead and do this."

Dick's ineptitude was costing Lethbridge Iron Works a lot of money. "We had other people waiting to start up their equipment at $1000 a day," says John. "They couldn't do their work until this guy got his act straight." Finally John had had enough. "I called the general manager and chewed him out for 10 minutes. They sent up a new fellow to program it. He was a wet-behind-the-ears 18 year old who got in there and within a few minutes he had things working."

The sand room was John's first and most painful experience with computerized controls. Since that time, a good portion of the production machinery has been computerized. "Some of that modernization has been a lot of what's helped us maintain our quality edge and our competitive edge," says John. "We embrace modern technology which many foundries don't do."

At first, some Lethbridge Iron Works employees didn't exactly embrace the technology either. John says, "That kind of technological change creates a lot of fear and apprehension. It's like playing with china dolls. They don't want to touch it because they might break it. They wouldn't want to even try something for fear of the repercussions of it, but people got to be a lot more comfortable."

John's wife Karen remembers many sleep interruptions. "We used to get a lot of phone calls in the middle of the night. Now John's redone all the programming on a lot of the PLCs so its a lot easier now if the machinery breaks down for whoever's there to troubleshoot it themselves." John agrees, "There was a period in our lives when the phone calls were frequent. I'd get up, get in the car, and drive slightly over the speed limit to work to handle them, but that has become very infrequent now."

Contamination was as big a concern as computerization in late 1992, when a cable broke and the magnet fell into the Ajax furnace. Dave Rynenberg explains, "At that time the wires inside the magnet were aluminum. Aluminum is deadly - it's one of the worse things you can put into Ductile iron. It contaminated everything. We took it down as low as we could, then filled it up. This diluted the aluminum out. We were making cast iron for the next little while."

In 1993, Lethbridge Iron Works purchased a Truflo Automated Mould Handling system for their Hunter-20 moulding machine. No new equipment was purchased the following year, but they were having plenty of trouble with some existing machinery - the Ajax furnace.

Lethbridge Iron Works buys 30 to 40 tons of scrap steel a day. A container of either water or flammables was inadvertently put into the furnace with a load of scrap. The results were disastrous! John Davies explains: "Basically what happens is it gets sucked into the metal and it expands and expands. If it's water it turns into high pressure steam at 2800 degrees Fahrenheit which is infinitely higher pressure steam than they run in a high pressure steam systems. The steam wants to occupy a far larger volume than it is able to in the furnace. The only place that it can go when it blows is up because it's contained in all other directions."

Dave Rynenberg says, "The lid on the furnace weighs 10 thousand pounds or so, plus it's bolted down with twelve 3/4 inch bolts." John adds, "There is a 2 inch rod on the hydraulic ram that lifts the lid." The steam "snapped the end off of that 2 inch steel and snapped the twelve 3/4 inch bolts, and tipped the lid over." "Unfortunately, Wayne McEntee was ascending the steps to the melt floor when he heard the "boom", and immediately jumped from the deck to the lower level shattering his ankle and foot. Snapped his leg like it was a piece of wood." says Rynenberg.

"It was a very bad experience that taught us all a lesson," says Bart Davies. "Since then we've had a lot closer inspection of incoming scrap materials. The furnacemen pay a lot closer attention to what they're putting in."

The next mishap with the Ajax furnace put it out of commission for more than two weeks. The furnace used old electro-mechanical controls. They had been turning it up higher, then down lower, then up higher, etc. to keep it circulating. Somehow, it went up high, and wouldn't come down.

The furnace is alarmed. If something fails that can be monitored, a list of people is contacted. "I was about 7th on the list and I shouldn't get a call," says Bart. "I got a call Sunday morning about 8 or 9 o'clock. I go in and as I walk around the corner I see the furnace. It's glowing a lot more than it normally does." Molten metal gets whiter as it gets hotter. He continues, "I kind of get up there and then all of a sudden half of the lid isn't there. I look a little closer and I notice there's no refractory in the lid and the refractory's on top of the furnace. We've got something weird happening. I recognize that the temperature's way, way, too high. I go up and check and the furnace has kicked off. I turn it to melt power. Melt power is usually 1000 kilowatts, and I get scared when it hits 1550 kW."

Bart called John, who was in Montana for the weekend. John said, "Shut it down." The refractory on top cooled, creating a sealed container with 22 tons of molten metal underneath. The men had to use jackhammers to make a hole so they could drain it. It took a long time. "You and I were in there," John tells Bart, "and we both put on the silver coats and we both ran the jackhammer in there with our guys. We did the hot, hard physical labour. We didn't sleep. We weren't done until early the next morning."

"I actually poured metal for the first time in maybe 20 years, says Bart. The guys all filed around and said, "Look at that guy he doesn't know what he's doing." And I didn't, so what the heck."

Electricians came in and completely gutted the control systems "They replaced it with modern technology which now monitors dozens and dozens of things that can go wrong," says John.

A new sand muller, twice the size of the previous one was purchased in 1995. In 1996, a 6400 square foot addition was built and the cleaning room was reworked. Purchases that year included a new dust collector, Didion drum, two shot blast machines and six oscillating conveyors.

The breaking floor, where the gates and risers are separated from the castings, was made much more efficient. Previously, there would be great mountains of castings. Mel Collier says as recently as 1995, castings could be stuck on the breaking floor for as many as three days if they "got on the wrong end of the pile." Now, castings no longer pile up. They are done on a continuous basis and placed in labelled bins when they're finished. "Before," says Collier, "you kind of had to wait a week from the time you poured the thing until the time you got it to the grinding stone. Now if you need something you can jump around a little bit and you can get it done the next day."

The price of pig iron rose dramatically in 1996, forcing Lethbridge Iron Works to use more scrap steel and returned castings in its melting process. Dave Rynenberg says, "It's easier to control chemistry with just pig iron and less steel. We have to replace the carbon that isn't in the steel. Carbon is very light, it floats on the top and it's difficult to dissolve into the metal. Added to that, the slag from the steel coats the lumps of carbon and further impairs the dissolution. It's a vicious cycle really. You come to the point where you've got too much carbon floating on it and all of a sudden the slag disappears and this carbon will shoot up in your melt so you put more steel in to counteract that and then it drops down again. It's like a see-saw. It's not easy to control."

Lethbridge Iron Works became a fourth-generation family business when Bart's son Dylan joined the firm in 1997. Dylan is a graduate of the Engineering Technology Program at SAIT. He's now kept busy with, among other things, "doing lots of design work for installing new equipment." He says, "My main goal is to make it so John can work 40 hours a week at some point instead of 60."

Lately, there's been no sign of slowdown for either John or Dylan. An International Moulding Machine (IMM) line for large castings was installed in 1997. In early 1998, Lethbridge Iron Works doubled the power of the coreless furnaces with the addition of a second power supply. A new bridge crane and a Laempe LL-10 automatic core machine were also installed.

A 13,000 square foot building dubbed Plant #2 was also completed in the first half of 1998. The foundry now has 80,000 square feet of space. George Davies Jr. marvels, "We bought seven acres in the industrial park and we thought we'd never use it. We're almost using all of it now."

In February 1998, Lethbridge Iron Works made history when they became the first foundry in the world to install a new Hunter model 20H moulding machine and model HLH-III handling system. It can produce 200 moulds per hour. This is a far cry from the days when moulds were made by hand. In those days, it would take 5 to 30 minutes to produce a mould. Retired plant engineer Bob Gardner says, "They can pour as much in a day as we could in a good month."

"We could probably pour more than 200,000 lbs. in a day now," says Dylan Davies. The production increase has created jobs. During the first three weeks of 1998, 18 new people were hired, bringing the total number of employees to 150.

Everyone starts out in the grinding room. Bart Davies describes it as "dirty, fairly hard, boring and repetitious work." He says, "In the old days you were there for 5 to 10 years before you had a chance to move on."

Promotions come much more quickly now. "There's more positions to fill so there's constantly people moving around," says Dylan. "Now you'd be lucky to be in the grinding room for 2 months. Some guys are only in there for a couple of weeks. That's going to start to slow down again probably, but it'll never be at 10 years again."

Dylan says most people find out about jobs at the Iron Works through word of mouth. He says someone mentions it at a bar and the next thing they know, the whole bar's applying for work. In many cases, new employees end up being friends or relatives of those already working in the foundry. Quality Assurance Coordinator Mark Mundell warns, "They all play the lottery together so that may pose a problem when the 6-49 pays out large one day."

Lethbridge Iron Works currently runs two production shifts. Elmer Degenstein says, "Even that isn't enough." Says Mel Collier, "Unless this Hunter makes a big kick, we're still 12 weeks out. That's the way it is right now. A lot of foundries who haven't expanded are worse." Dave Rynenberg admits, "I never thought we'd ever be this busy."

Mel Collier, like many other long-standing employees, enjoys the financial rewards that a good business year can bring. But he points out that success also comes with a price. "Everyone works a lot more now. There are no 8 hour days. I don't think there's a guy in the office or management team that can work 8 hours and still say they are on top of the job. No way you could do it. Guys are in here from 7 am. to 5 or 6 pm., and four, five or six hours on Saturday."

Dave Rynenberg says Ductile iron accounts for about 86 per cent of the company's casting production. Recently they have been looking into producing Austempered Ductile Iron (ADI) which is regular Ductile that has undergone a special heat treatment. "You need to be able to run these heat treat furnaces 7 days a week 24 hours a day," says Collier, "and right now we can't handle it." Dave Rynenberg adds, "It's very specialized equipment. We'd need a whole new plant. We'll have to see if the market demands it." At the moment Lethbridge Iron Works sends its ADI orders to Oshkosh, Wisconsin for heat treatment. Rynenberg hopes that one day the plant will be able to produce ADI right here at home. "We could be the leaders in Canada," he says.

One thing about Lethbridge Iron Works, they're not afraid to try new things. "There's always been a vast amount of change in the company," says John Davies, "but it was through the 90s when the real leaps and bounds changes in production, the employment level and everything have really occurred. It's something that's difficult to manage but it's certainly getting us where we are. You have the people who talk about the good old days, but for the young guys who have a job right now instead of being unemployed, I think these are the good new days." Bart adds, "I think most of the guys who talk about the good old days like what they see for the most part. Sometimes you have to prove it to them six times, but once you do they get on line."

It has taken a lot of time and effort for some veteran employees to accept the new health and safety program at Lethbridge Iron Works. Jeff Marshall administers the program on a full time basis. He says, "I think the Iron Works has always had a good understanding of what health and safety is about and what it's for. We just never really had a set program." Marshall understands why the program isn't popular with some workers. "It doesn't make any difference where you go," he says. "People tend to resist change." Elmer Degenstein agrees, "Lots of guys don't want to change because they don't realize it's for their own protection. They're just stubborn that's all."

Marshall says he doesn't see the same kind of resistance with new employees. "The new workers that we hire, especially with some of the programs we've got implemented now, realize the benefits provided by the program.. Health and safety is (part of their job) from the day they step in the door. It's the long term employees that have been around for 30 years that are having a hard time accepting the new ideas."

"It's got to be a mindset change toward safety," says Marshall. "We've come a long ways that way. It was tough for everyone to get used to the new system. We still have our troubles, and it's gonna be a while yet, but we do have a lot more people on side."

The health and safety initiative is officially known as the Partnerships Program. It is done in conjunction with the Workers' Compensation Board and Alberta Labour Occupational Health and Safety. Lethbridge Iron Works receives financial incentives for participating in the program. WCB and OHS provide Marshall with general guidelines, and he tailors a program specific to the Iron Works facility. The program must be certified at the end of three years.

"We've really increased health and safety awareness and control at the plant," says Marshall. There are basically three types of control - administrative, engineering and control utilizing personal protective equipment. Marshall says an administrative control is "something that can help prevent injury or illness due to an administrative change in policy. An example would be developing a policy for the rotation of workers in an area that produces a lot of heat where there may be heat related stress involved."

He says an example of an engineering control would be "changing the pouring ladles from hand wheels that are rotated manually to electronically controlled motors that actually turn the ladle."

"Personal protective equipment is really the last line of defense for the worker," says Marshall. "We try to implement administrative and engineering controls first."

Dylan Davies says there's now a procedure in place to deal with workers who commit a safety infraction. "It starts with a verbal warning, then you could have a written warning, a 2 day suspension, then actions that could lead to termination. That's our policy. That could be whether it's my dad, or John or whoever it is."

Marshall credits the commitment John and Bart have towards the safety program with the increasing acceptance it is gaining at the plant. He says, "Once we realized it was going to be a full time position and was going to encompass a lot of work, Bart took the helm and basically had a staff meeting and said, 'Look guys, this is the direction we're heading in.' He's done that every few months since the inception- met with the guys and explained how important this program is."

Quality Assurance Coordinator Mark Mundell agrees that the support of the Davies brothers has been important both for the health and safety program and for his attempts to implement a quality program. Mundell is working towards getting the company ISO (International Standards Organization) 9000 certified. "Basically," he says, "it's just documenting what we do here to establish control in our system. It works on the idea of continuous improvement, thus reduced defects. It's quite a status thing."

ISO is an international standard made up of 20 elements. Each element has a set of criteria that has to be met. "So for each element you have to address all the criteria and ensure that you're meeting that criteria or else we won't pass the audit," says Mundell. Audits take place on an annual basis.

Mundell says the men in the foundry have been cooperative. "It's a little bit of a change for the guys out there, but they're accepting it quite well unlike some of the safety things. They have to be more accountable now and I like to think they are always looking for continuous improvement. The idea is to be able to consistently produce the same thing over and over again. Now there's a procedure and basically a control in place so there shouldn't be any reason for fluctuation in the way they do things. There's always reference there for them if they're not sure what to do."

All new employees attend a day-long orientation which focuses on health and safety issues as well as ISO. Marshall and Mundell have also implemented an area trainer program where workers from the foundry floor are recruited to train their co-workers in matters of quality and safety. An area trainer is "out there to answer questions," says Mundell. "He's meant to be a resource. It's a perfect liaison between us putting new things together and actually seeing it implemented on the floor."

Because Lethbridge Iron Works is growing so rapidly and undergoing so many changes, Marshall and Mundell understand that it can be tough keeping up. "Everybody's still got their everyday job to do," says Mundell, "yet there's all these new things that are piled on top that you need to look at as well. You don't ever get a chance to take a break that's for sure."

As a result of the hard work of all Iron Works employees, the Lethbridge Iron Works Company was extremely pleased to receive its ISO 9002 Quality Certification in June, 1998.

Lethbridge Iron Works celebrating its 100th year as a busy, productive, family-owned foundry is not something that George Davies Jr. predicted 25 years ago. He told Trade and Commerce magazine in February 1973:

"I would like to keep it as a family company, but I'm afraid this will be difficult."

"A company of this nature, particularly with today's tax laws, is difficult to maintain as a family enterprise. The only way it can go from person to person is to get very large and then go public. I honestly can't see a company of this size and nature remaining viable and competitive in the market that we're going to be looking at in 15 to 30 years. I'm sorry to say that, but I really think that's the future we face."

John Davies says his parents and grandparents should be given much of the credit for the fact that Lethbridge Iron Works is still a family firm. "You can find many articles about generations of business. Companies making it past the second generation is not very common."

John believes the company made it to the fourth generation because of the strong values instilled through the families. "We take tremendous pride in not only the success of our business, but the longevity of our business and the quality of our business," he says. "I joked with the guys when we handed out $400,000 in bonuses, 'It's either this or buy a Ferrari."

"You won't see that," says John. "In our family history with the company, you invest in the company and the people. You have the capital assets and you have the people assets. Without the people you can have all the capital assets in the world but it isn't going to do you any good."

One hundred years of quality and service. A testament to the men and women of the Lethbridge Iron Works Company Limited, past and present. Thanks, each and every one of you for your part in the Company's success. To the next one hundred years Cheers!