What a memory!

Oops! I did it again. I got my memories out of order. The last post should go sometime after this one...

Just before I left Pacific States Plastering to partner with Roger, I was asked by my boss, Slim Martindale, to go and check out a possible job down at Marina Del Rey. There was a high rise condominium project coming out to bid and it was an odd one. The development company had gone bankrupt before the project could be completed and so each of the 18 floors was in different stages of completion. I had to walk each floor and estimate what it would take to complete them.

It was an eerie sight. Not a soul was in the building and there was no one to operate the man lift elevator on the outside. I had an idea as to how it worked so I got in, closed the doors, examined the controls, pushed the lever and made my way to the top floor. On the 18^th floor, no framing work had been done, though all of the material was present. Stacks of drywall and bundles of studs for the walls. Also present were the tools and debris from the day that the project was shut down. A year or more had passed since the gates had been closed and the workers sent home. The floors without windows had become home to thousands of pigeons and the occasional sea gull. Creepy!

I made my way down, floor after floor, counting what would be necessary to complete the project. By the time I reached the 2^nd and 3^rd floors, I was looking at almost complete units, painted and with carpet and tile installed. Now all I had to do was to come up with a good estimate. I bid it really high as I was afraid that I might have missed something and I wasn’t sure how much of the existing material could be used. After all, it had been sitting in the damp air of the marina for over a year.

With my estimate in hand, my boss called the bankruptcy receivers with our bid. When he was connected, he was asked if he could hold for a minute or two? Sure. And then, an odd thing…he could hear the conversation on the other line; very faintly, but clear. And it was our competition, bidding the job. He heard their price. When he was reconnected, Slim asked if he could call them back in just a minute. Sure. We did a quick re-evaluation of our estimate and then called in with a number just about $5,000 lower than our competition. Surprise! We got the job. And at a price about $100,000 higher than we had estimated. Our competitor had been the original drywall contractor on that same job and was hoping to recoup all of their losses and that explained their very high bid.

Once we began the job we were contacted by almost every subcontractor that had been stiffed by the original developer. All wanted a chance to recover some of their losses. And one of those subcontractors was Regent Mfg. They were the acoustical and texture spray contractors and had done the first 7 floors of the project and wanted to complete the job.

I went over to their office which was nearby and met the owner, an interesting guy! And also present was Larry Adamy. He was renting some office space for his company, Marina Drywall, in Regent’s warehouse. Now I already knew Larry from a time when he worked as a taper for the same company I had begun with. So we had some common ties, including the fact that we both knew Rick Thompson…he had worked along with Larry. (We'll come back to these names later)

OK, back to Regent; as a manufacturer of spray rigs, he had no equal and his machines were the fastest around. At this time, spraying was a very lucrative business to be in and Regent had hired some fast nozzle men to cash in on the boom. A nozzle man, one hose puller and a man on the ground, mixing, could spray 84,000 square feet in just under 4 hours. Not bad

More later…

Career Move

During the middle of the 70’s, I decided to take a risk and go into business with a friend, Roger Evans. I had been doing some work for him, estimating some new jobs and finishing small jobs that he had picked up for himself. My own work had been slow and I was ready for a change when he asked me to partner with him. And, he had a general contractor’s license which allowed us to do almost any kind of work.

He already had one good client, Blue Ribbon Builders, a home remodeling contractor and so we jumped right into that market. I became the estimator and the taper, while Roger was the hanger and the collections department. We bought a spray rig so we could do texture and acoustic ceiling work. We leased Ames tools and finally had enough work to hire someone to help us. More work came along and now we bought a second spray rig; a larger one. We were doing 4 or 5 remodels a week and working long hours. But at the end of the month, we were barely making normal wages, and often times not.

Then I got a call from a taper that I had known a long time ago. He was now an “entrepreneur”, working from a small office in Marina Del Rey. He wanted to know if we were interested in doing some work for him. He had an eager client, Mann Theatres, but he didn’t have a license at the time and he said he would make it worth our while to help him out. We would give him a 10% finder’s fee for the work he passed onto us. All I had to do was to bump the estimate by 10% and if that was agreeable to Mann Theatres, we had a good deal! So off we went…we were in ‘show business’!

Mann Theatres was expanding from their traditional Midwest home and buying up old theatres (Fox Theatres) and converting them to multiplex theaters. Our job was to build the walls that divided one large theatre into 3, 4 or even 6 small ones. And we had to do it in a hurry. Most times the walls were at least 40’ high and required 3 layers of board on each side. The walls would extend through the old and existing ceiling so we had to spend a lot of time, high above the floor, crawling carefully above an old and dirty ceiling while we were hanging the board. Scary!