Coronation! [CSL]
It’s early 1917. Charles S. Moomy, the vice president of his father’s business, Keystone Rubber Manufacturing Company in Erie, Pennsylvania, decides he wants to go out on his own. He has been saving up and he has connections. But he’s going to stick with what he knows – and that’s rubber. And because synthetic rubber is still in its experimental stages, we’re talking natural rubber, the stuff that has to be harvested from mature trees that grow thousands of miles away. He meets with James T. Johnstone, a New York City rubber broker, who secures for him a large batch of crude rubber (most likely from southeast Asia) and invests $30,000 of his own money as well. Charles purchases $4,000 worth of rubber making machinery and gets an agreement from Montgomery Ward & Company to buy the bicycle inner tubes he plans to make.
This new company of perhaps 65 employees begins operations in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on September 12, 1917. A decade later, the company has over 300 employees and is making 10,000 inner tubes per day. But the next decade, the one that includes the era we refer to as The Great Depression, nearly bankrupts the business. It was touch and go. There were loans. There were sacrifices. And it survived.
Fast forward nearly 100 years, we have ourselves a massively successful, publicly traded company, or rather collection of companies, that can proudly say they are one of fewer than 60 companies with 50+ years of consecutive dividend increases. The headquarters are now in Scottsdale, Arizona, but they haven’t forgotten where it all began…
All hail Carlisle Companies Incorporated!
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