So, I was fooling around and trying to figure out what I wanted to do and decided – my father kept coming back.   He was still working at the tannery.   He was still a tanner at the tannery.   He kept coming home once in a while and said that the superintendent of the tannery wants you to come down and be an apprentice for my job.

I said, “No, I know the superintendent too well.”

When we were kids we worked there at Christmas holidays and all the big holidays when you had some time off and summer.   I said, “I know him too well he won’t let me there with your very long.   He’ll put me out in the plant.   I’m not going to do that.   I am not interested.”

So, anyway, he kept coming back and saying, “The superintendent wants you to come back and do this.”

I said, “No, I am not going to do that.”

So one day I was kind of running out of money and he came along and he said, “He wants you to come down and be an apprentice and learn his job and the assistant superintendent making compounding leather finishes, basically.”

I said, “I don’t trust that guy!”  I liked him.  He was a great man, but I said, “I know how he operates.”

So I said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll try it but you tell him.  The first time he starts putting me on that plant I am going to quit.”   I knew he wouldn’t tell him but that’s the way I felt anyway and I would have quit.

But, this guy was a real sharp civilian and he knew just how to work me to keep me in there compounding and matching colors and stuff like that.

In those days we made all our own leather finish right from the beginning, right from the graining, the pigments, to compounding and putting resin and shellacs and different things in.  That was after the hides were tanned and ready for finishing.   Just like you were finishing this piece of wood here.

So anyway, he would work me pretty well.  He knew exactly how far he could push me I guess.  So, I did that and little by little I wound up after many years later I wound up being plant manager and vice president of production.   That’s what I was when I retired.

I think I worked at the tannery somewhere around 40 years or close to that.  I did all the jobs in the plant just enough to know what I was doing.  Like I say, he was a sharp superintendent and he wanted me to know every part of it.  If I did them all from one time to another from shaking hides to right on to where they are going out the door as finished product.

Well I’ll tell you what, going there and being very reluctant about going to work there I never regretted one day of it.  It was a very interesting place to work.  I met a lot of people.  As I came along and started becoming part of the management team I did some traveling.  I looked at equipment in Europe and shoes.  I met a lot of people who became my good friends in Europe.

It was something like a worldwide fraternity.  We would visit their plants, and they would come here and visit our plant.  We checked out each other’s equipment and looked for equipment that would be beneficial to them as well as beneficial to us.  It was a very open business.

It wasn’t always this way.  When I first started working at the tannery, everything was a secret.  It was a complete turn-around.  A lot of that turn-on round was due to the philosophy of our CEO, Norman Lezin.  We had no secrets and we hoped they had no secrets from us.  As it turned out, the whole country went that way.  Everything was very open.

At the tannery I had the freedom to develop anything I wanted to develop.  We were never held back.  Whatever he wanted to try, you had a free hand to try it.

Sometimes a customer would come along with a piece of leather and challenge us: “I want you to match that!”

So we would have to match the leather for color and quality.

We’ve also had the challenge of developing our own ideas and taking those to market.  We did a lot of that.  In fact we probably did more of that than we did color matching.  We developed our own lines of leather.

Coach handbags was a big customer of ours.  We developed a leather for Coach, but we didn’t do it according to their standards.  We did it according to our standards.

Red Wing Shoes Was also a big customer of ours.  We had big names and retail who were buying our products.  When cowboy boots were big, that was a big part of our business also.  We had Acme boots, Georgia boots…  You can name all the big boat makers and we did business with all of them.

Every year the tannery used to have big picnics and parties.  It was pretty remarkable how they put that together.  They were all well-attended.

You had to be careful working at the tannery.  You could get hurt on some of the equipment.  Some people did get hurt.  They got careless.  They lost a hand or something once in awhile.

When I first went to work at Salz we used all vegetable products for the tanning process.  All of the tanning was done using oak bark.  I think we did that until the mid-nineteen sixties, I would say. Perhaps 1965 or 1966.

Then that kind of weather was being replaced by plastics and other products.

You know, the vegetable-tanned leather was beautiful leather. Plastics were coming in big. These were low-upkeep products for women.  They kept making plastics better and better all the time and almost impossible to tell the difference from weather.  We weren’t in the shoe business at that time.  He was mostly handbags, luggage, and bill folds.   And that business started going down, down, down.

Then Norman Lezin, the CEO, decided that we better get into some different types of products.  He decided that we better get into the shoe leather business.

That was a big switch for us; it took a lot of doing.  It was a whole different way of tanning and a whole different way of finishing the leather.

I don’t know if you have heard the name of Paul Flagg or not.  He was associated with a tannery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  He’d done a very good job there.  I think he was the nephew of the owner of Flagg Tannery.  I don’t know exactly what happened out there but he was looking for somewhere else to go; a new position.  He got hired at Salz tannery and he was the swing-man between the days of vegetable-dye tanning, and what we call chrome tanning.

So Paul Flagg was with Salz for seven or perhaps ten years; I’m not really sure how long.  When he left is when I was moved up one more notch.  When he left, they put the whole plant under my supervision.  But Paul represented a big step forward during our transition.  He was a key guy.  And he also brought some customers along with him.

After his uncle passed away, Paul went back to Flagg Tannery and bought it.