The employees were back at work Monday, cleaning up the mess, and Jack
began making arrangements for other places to operate.
"We operated in five different locations" while the
machines were being rebuilt.
Mr. Rutledge had a hangar next door.
Jack rented two lathes from him along with some space in the
building. He paid Mr. Rutledge
a salary to work for him. Jack
moved his burned machines over there, " and my people started working."
"One of my customers came down, Mr. Doskicil, and he ran the tumbler
and tumbled the burned parts so they cleaned up and looked all right.
He drove in from Zabcickville, out past Rosebud.
We sold our first job the following Wednesday." Many
of Jack's customers and friends chipped in to give Mercury a hand in
the rebuilding effort. "Southern
Toy loaned us a forklift, Bird Kultgen loaned us a truck, Leo Zeig of
Zeig Sheet Metal in Hearne had a new welder on order, and we took the
welder from DuPuy Oxygen," Jack said.
"And we had a whole bunch of things like that from our customers
and friends. It pays to
be nice to people."
The Waco Industrial Foundation built Mercury
a building on land leased from the city, and Jack's father, Ernest Richards,
an electrician, retired early and came down to Waco to wire the new
building. The City loaned
Mercury an engineer to oversee the construction, and by the end of April,
Mercury was in its new building.
"It was a lot of hard work," Jack said.
In 1967, Mr. Rusch, who was 10 years older
than Jack and who was not in good health, decided to sell his half of
the business to K&S Manufacturing, which was Mercury's biggest customer
at the time. "My new
partner was not adverse to borrowing money, and he paid very quickly,
in 10 days." Jack
said. "And Wallace Rusch stayed and worked for 10 years.
We gave him a project to take with him when he retired, and he
set up a little shop for himself, and he and his son built this project.
The project was Seam Busters, a product Mercury
had started building in 1949 for Mr. Thompson of Hawk and Buck.
It was used in the garment industry. After Mercury was
rebuilt, business got even better.
"We were growing all the time, "Jack said.
"We were doing a lot of work for General Tire, and we were
making sidewalk skateboards. We
were making 50,000 sets of hardware a day." The company also
did work for Phillips Petroleum and American Desk in Temple and many
companies in the Metroplex.
In 1970, Jack hired a sales rep, Alan Craft
of Craft & Associates. "Prior
to that, I did most of the sales," Jack said.
"He was very effective and is still very effective for us."
In 1972, the owner of K&S Manufacturing
died, and his son-in-law, Bill Steele III, bought K&S.
In 1977, Mr. Steele sold K&S to the Kidde Company, a $2 billion
conglomeration of companies that manufactured fire extinguishers and
furniture, among other products.
In 1982, Kidde sold off K&S to Aircap, a lawnmower and edger
manufacturing company, and kept Mercury Tool.
Then in 1984, Jack bought the other half of Mercury Tool back,
for 20 times what Mr. Rusch originally sold it for.
Over the years, Jack has learned to be patient
with business cycles. "We've tried to diversify," he
said. "Steel cycles
every three years. Oil
cycles about every seven. We
had a downturn in '91, a bad one in 1982-'84, one in '73-74."
One of the products that have cycled in and
out of Mercury's history is the Bangalore torpedo, which is sold by
the U.S. Armed Forces to other nations.
In 1968, Mercury built 35,000 torpedo kits; in 1970, it built
70,000 kits; in 1986, 8,000 kits; and in 1988, 6,000 kits. The last time Mercury built the torpedo kits was in 1995.
"That's stuff that's carried through since 1968 - almost
30 years," Jack said.
