uh welcome to a scrap life a podcast solely focus on the hustlers grinders operators and business owners who live and breathe the scrap metal industry every day we are the original recyclers no suits required just guts and hard work here is your host brett eckhart cheers cheers here we are okay special edition podcast today we’re having our 50th anniversary this year and uh i was trying to think who i would interview for our 50th anniversary so i figured it wouldn’t be it wouldn’t be a good 50 anniversary podcast without the two of you guys so ken bull my dad rod eckhart and uh some cooper’s lights cooper’s live so yeah thanks for coming saturday afternoon yeah yeah saturday yeah two guys are retired so every day is uh saturday you can’t remember what the rest of the week is so i wanted to get i wanted to get you guys in here because you know there’s so much history so much uh so many stories and we won’t fit them all in today but i just couldn’t i couldn’t think of two better people that to have the conversation with going into this

weekend for everybody that doesn’t know we’re having a truck show on saturday you know kind of a hall of fame unveiling while unveiling on friday party and it’s mostly for our people mostly for our people who have worked for the company are working for the company trucks that want to come in from out of town and show off their trucks so but it’s mostly just a big party celebration for us so we’re throwing our own birthday party and it just so happens to be on your actual birthday yeah july 2nd so yeah sometimes i wonder if this stuff doesn’t happen on purpose yeah sometimes you know it works out the way it’s supposed to work out you know um so i want to like i kind of want to take it all the way back you know we started in technically in united metal side ken what was the what year did you start i believe it was i think i worked a little bit the summer of 72 then i think for maybe a month or something like that and then i went to the tasseling corn where my mother worked at crookems

and then later on that fall i started working back at united metals and pretty much been there ever since i think at one point in time i took off uh what maybe a two or three month hiatus and he’s collided with mine which worked for the mine uh no no i actually went to work for uh mccluskies oh okay delivering delivering food so why working 20 hour days of figuring out why am i doing this so why’d you take off the did you get fired or did you just no no no i went more money you know okay and what year was that that was probably yeah maybe around 74 or five okay so you were there for a couple years and then it feels like that kind of happens a lot even today like people will leave and go chase more money thinking that it’s gonna be a lot better and sometimes it is sometimes i’m like go ahead go do what you got to do but often times you know we get the phone call of hey do you mind if we come back and do what we’re doing you know the

whole thing back back in in the day when uh rod and me and the rest of family and some of our other friends kind of hung around each other then we got acquainted and of course without hellraising all the time and then pretty quick your dad bought the company and we all went to work for it yeah that long time ago so some of my like fondest memories which is why i’ve wanted to get cooper’s lights today is even when i was like a teenager and even like pre-teen like 12 13 is even in the summer obviously during school i would i wouldn’t be down there during the week very often but let’s get a day off but in the summer come down i’d you know work in the recycling center or do whatever whatever at the time get a few hours into work and a lot of around time and uh at five o’clock somebody would make a beer run or 4 30 or whatever whatever time that was dale remembers it as him making the beer run a lot he did a lot yeah and so we laugh about that all

the time but i could i was like dude you know what if we do this podcast i’m gonna have some canned coors light and that’s how it’s gonna go because sitting around as a as a young teenager in the office and listening to you know grown men that have actually put in a full days of hard work and then some actually sweating actually like getting after it is kind of what shaped a lot of my like i don’t know my respect or a lot of my like just my childhood of watching people you know get out there and get after it every day so that’s the reason why and i know you guys both still like cooper’s light oh yeah and you got to witness a lot of yeah i did i got to see a lot of people come and go through the yard right i got to see a lot of guys that were good guys i got to see some guys that were maybe not such good guys and which is kind of the nature of our beast that we live in every day you know in the industry we’re in

it’s because it’s a fairly labor intense in some positions and you got truck drivers and you got guys out there busting their ass all day you got equipment operators and so you get to see the kind of the full gamut of people so give me a tell me a guy that you kind of makes that you think about when you think back in the history of the early years of united metals united hauling a guy that kind of that like some good give me a good story or a good a good memory of one of the old school guys the fruit of the first guys that pops up into your head well i’m going to talk about maybe pete antony’s that’s the one i thought about you and maybe even jake yep those two were they were they were actually there before we were oh yeah they worked for the judge berlin before we even got to work on summer days cleaning transformers so in like the 70s early 70s yeah early 70s okay yeah you know we were in junior high high school working summers for judge birnbaum united model and scrap united

iron yep united iron metals and nail polito but anyway what i really appreciate about pete i mean we were running old pieces of uh uh well good equipment at the time i guess you know 1957 phantom crane and the guy was smooth as glass smooth as butter i mean he just he knew how to run that swing that bag and get a lot of stuff done every day and not cause a lot of people a lot of extra work yep and that’s that’s who we set our goals i mean i know that that was your mentor to make you such a good equipment operator and it’s just trying to keep up with him yep yep and how long much longer did he work work there while you guys were there was he well he worked into the 80s did he yeah that sounds about right i bet it was in like two quid because of back back problems yeah then jake hung around until he retired he was that’s probably 86 87 and i think jake was right around 70 at the time when he retired so you guys have cut a lot of

iron into a lot a lot of big into small stuff i still got burn marks on my hands we’d wear gloves that had kind of a cuff on it of course you’re out there cutting them with cutting torch and sparks are flying everywhere and they’re going down in your gloves and slow it’s flinging off and you know kind of learn to puff your belly out when one went down the front of your head so it would go clear into your pants it’s going to take the bird on your belly so what about ray like what about um old man ray raymond carrie yeah his dad was there yeah he’s ray retired you know from united metals and i mean ray’s i mean ray’s as far back as i can remember he was there so i mean i’m sure he was there before i was before i even was honest he worked for burn bomb as well and then his dad worked for burbaugh and caldwell yard when my dad worked for burn bomb in nampa and that was when it was united iron yep and so and grandpa partnered up with burn bomb in

72 was the year or he bought it or he bought partnered up with burn bomb in 72. i’m gonna say in 72 he started bid salvage okay right and that was actually across the tracks right next to the ice plant that’s not there anymore scottsdale where burn yards at right now yeah on what we call a mainstream yeah yeah and but but at that point you still still there’s the napa yard still and the caldwell yard correct yeah yeah and then the judge wanted to retire and he could see that you know my dad which was the manager of both yards was leaving and doing his own thing so then he decided to go ahead and sell out to you not my dad so i going back to so ray and when did gene eugene gino come along oh well that that had been 87 89 somewhere yeah pretty quite a bit later okay so gino’s one of the guys that we’re putting on the hall of fame well um gino’s a guy that you know never ever ever became a manager never became you know moved up the food chain too far other

than he just shows up every day and hard work puts in an honest day’s work right so we kind of i i always appreciated that about gene he breaks a lot of it still has always has still does on occasion but uh he’s slowing down for sure but i always kind of had a fond liking for gino just because he’s willing to show up every day and that’s getting harder and harder to find was it always the case i mean even when you guys were younger it was getting people to show up as hard as it is today everybody showed up because we needed money yeah gene started he went from uh he was uh sorting worms at a worm factory yeah and uh cleaning battles that he could come get from from myself ken when we were kind of managing the non-ferrous side of the things and so gina would come every night take stuff home clean it up for us bring it back and then go sort worms and then realized he could make more money yeah you know just actually for us yeah okay and then we still let him

take stuff home and clean it because you know just improve the product you know so we could sell it for more he’s still doing that not that long ago just a few years ago until finally i was like gene i’ll let you but at the end of the day you probably just need to go home and relax and get ready for the next day because if you’re at home cleaning scrap all day all right all night and you know he’s getting older older to the point where it’s like i’m more concerned like just it’s it’s hot outside it’s you know it’s or it’s cold outside like you just need to probably just take a few it’s just about my age your age he’s debbie’s age yeah he’s everything okay he’s one one year on paper officially from being able to retire is what what it amounts to so and then we’ve got like we’ve got bob smith um that we’re gonna put on the the hall of fame wall so give me a little history about bob smith yeah bob smith was working for uh fleetwood homes and moving trailer houses they actually started

hauling lumber into the plants and then they uh ended up needing the homes that they built move so he started doing that and then they decided they’re not going to do that anymore and so bob smith became available and then bert hired him and that the rest of that guy’s history i mean he just what year what about what year was that that he came to work for united hauling well i had to be 80 probably 84.85 okay because he got into an 82 kenworth that’s how i remember those trucks and actually he took the truck that i was driving when he came to work for us so and then what year did we switch him over to at some point we moved him off we moved him from hauling to local we moved him to medals and that was while i was still that was when i was there full time what year do you remember that was when he moved him roughly that was in the 90s oh did you move into the metal side yeah well he could do like 2 000. he drove one or two he drove that

peterbilt that that i had that 2000 38 yeah 38. so he drove that thing for probably three or four years at least yeah remember we had to go pick him up and uh baker that one time which was crazy is um truck 38 still in the fleet 38 still it’s still going to this day which is the good thing about those older trucks like that that you know they’re you can still work on them and you can still you know keep them going plus we have barry and the truck shop and those guys do a good job of well they’re all like children we don’t like to get rid of them i’m we’re good buyers bad sellers we’ll buy more we just have a hard time getting rid of it um what we’ve got uh um another guy that we’re gonna put on the hall of fame wall of fame and uh greg brown the rattler yeah man if i wish i could get a hold of that guy i hope somebody out there listen to this podcast or something greg brown if you’re out there please figure out a way to get a

hold of us he came and visited us about a year or two ago and i’ll be damned if i can’t figure out how to get his phone number or how to get a hold of them so i mean i need to hire one of those like private investigator people to like just see if they can find him but greg was super influential in in my career um but he was there i want to say like 2000 is when he came 99 like my senior year of high school maybe he could be i’d lose track of it but in that race closer to five yeah i think it was like right around there because i remember it was because he bought the you know dave and theresa’s house so i want to say it was like right in that range because they were there up until high school graduation dave and teresa were there so like i know it had to be somewhere in that range after in that range or after that because it wasn’t that long after remember when he started was the price of scrap was so shitty that he you know

his claim to fame for a long time was just he could go figure out how to get scrapping the door and he couldn’t pay any money for it so he’d always talk like even in like 0.50607 when the price of scrap was good his way of kind of like poking poking in front of us like i could buy scrap when you couldn’t give anybody money for scrap the funny thing about greg was at that time it was trying to find a niche for him because he all he wanted to talk about is when he was in the glazier union with the glass and talked about when he was in naam and and he rattled about that stuff all the time i mean he was just to the point where he’s almost annoying and no he was yeah and and i’d one year when you hired him and i said i said where’d you get this guy um and they i think he came from probably snitches probably jim goodrich wanted us to have him right which i’m glad yeah and that the way it turned out because rod put me out there to

go beat on doors of course i’m not good at beating on doors that’s not your specialty so i took greg out with me one day and he stood in there for 15 minutes talking to these people of course they wanted to get the hell out of the way and talk them into putting a ban on their property and i went back to the office and i told told rod i said i found him a job and the reason why i got probably 90 of the customers he got is because he they got tired of listening to it yeah because he just talked her leg off that’s kind of part of being a salesman a little bit right i mean just being willing to talk people into submission i think there’s a lot of that to it and uh you know so i have some great memories of greg you know i spent a lot of time with them driving around visiting customers greg’s really the one that taught me how to uh sell non-ferrous like that’s my first that’s how i first started selling on ferris was greg he had all his price

sheets and who he’d sell stuff too at that time we were selling a lot of stuff to uh simon and sons norm and uh but greg had like you know charlie neal metro which i know you guys had dealt with metro and then uh you know norm simon joseph simons and and there was and then obviously we were exporting stuff to leah at that time but there was only certain items that we were sending to her but greg like really honed in on selling you know most of our material at that time went to simon when i when i was there yeah right yeah we sold a lot to sims too yeah but i think but that was before i started folds because i remember going sitting down with them and it was either metro or it was simon and sons like that was kind of the two or leah and i don’t know how it transitioned from you know him out there beating on doors because he still was doing both at the time right i mean he was out there trying to find customers but then also kind of organizing the loading

process plus he was paying customers too yeah and he knew exactly what was out there in the yard at all times which was really good because he he made an inventory of it yeah knowing what he had and you know for the most part we’d go out there and look and see what we got you know pretty much guess that he knew what he had out there yeah he was pretty organized yeah you know probably that from the glass company we always talk about it you know the guys now here that you know tom buxton we always talk about greg and the glass company you know because that was where you know he spent a lot of time was he a math teacher at one point too i mean so he was excellent with math you know yeah he was very good i went to went to college to become a math teacher and i i think he he might even top for a year or two and then he went to work for the glass company and became the he became the general manager of i think the northwest for that company and

then finally something happened with it and yeah enough great time so do you so tell me a little bit about i mean i got like i said i got fond memories of greg um but i was some of the some of the best stories i heard were even before greg’s time so tell me i love hearing about like that ge job you guys did downtown boise in the 80s right grandpa was still here and um it was off of gallon road actually but yeah which is in boise yeah not downtown oh not downtown but it’s in boise okay all right i missed by a couple miles so tell me about the ge job because there’s always there’s a couple old relics around here somewhere every once in a while i’ll see yep the big ass copper bolt i saw one before greg at uh rule still retired i saw one of the old school torch tips and he said he remembers because i think at that time the norco was you know providing the oxygen and the and the cutting tips and everything else for that job right so all the equipment yeah so

tell me about the tell me about the ge job how to come about like what was the deal what was going on general electric just contacted the local scrap yards and then they uh you know my dad and they made a deal together and then they introduced did they have to bid it out or was it did they did it did they just figure out who they who to go with did they like make you put a bill yeah i think my dad was pretty nervous about getting that job i mean he wanted it with something i mean it was what was it like 4 000 tons of scrap inside a building everything brand new and there might have been more than that because that that armature that was in there weighed i think was 250 000 pounds that they rolled on that rail car that was specially built yeah and there was some of those uh what what we call those dome looking things back in the day yeah whatever you know but those things were like six forty six times six inches thick and just weighed up a whole bunch of ways

did you have to cut them inside the building could you get it outside to cut it like when you took everything outside to cut that general electric had their manager come up and they hired a crane company out of portland to come down and move everything out they just blew a hole in the side of the building and rented the property next door and and uh the property they had rail track behind it right and so was able to load some rail cars and that’s how they got that armature on the rail car yeah that’s right i remember that so it was a lot of non-ferrous in there right what was the plant was it was a lot of non-ferrous no no no no this mostly iron yep okay just everything it took to build a steam plant it was a steam generation plant all stored in one building oh they were paying like ten thousand dollars a month you know back in 1987 to generate just to house that thing just a store and they stored it for 10 years before they cut it up for scrap and it was already

done generating elections brand-new just going to whoops oregon they actually had they actually had a wax coating on a lot of the stuff to keep it from rusting oh so they just they just use the voice facility to build it no they just store it because they would put it someplace and put it into production but it never happened okay from what i remember i think there was there was like 25 to 50 of them scattered all the united states that they never used what about uh remember the iron that we got years later we brought it into the scrapyard you know all that plate and all the i-beams and all that was from the nuclear plant up there exactly see that’s that material was waiting for that right that was the and that three mile an island three mile island happened at that particular time too and that pretty much shut down all the nuclear plants that they was building along the columbia i just watched a documentary on that on netflix about that was like one of the first big nuclear you know plants and that three mile island you

know there was built purposely where it was at because the water was around there to cool the reactor and they’re actually that was like only the phase one they were actually working on building the second phase and the third phase of that to make it even bigger before i mean it wasn’t that old when it happened i was i was kind of surprised i figured that plant had been running for a long time but it was pretty new when when it when all that all went down so yeah they they said that kind of killed the the whole nuclear um power generation for a long time because people were nervous about what could happen and there’s still a lot of plants they’re still going yeah exactly that the government don’t want you to know no no well and because it’s they’re in all reality they’re pretty damn efficient like for generating electricity which is a whole another topic but yeah yeah i remember i remember reading or watching that show just here not that long ago so i’m always thinking about some of the cool cool older jobs um you know one of the

ones that comes to my mind too is when you guys loaded up all those uh rail cars all those flat deck rail cars um and where who what was that who was that what was that job for for which rail company when you guys cut up all those those rail cars and we hauled them off of the flatbeds well that that came out of boise cascade all those flat bed rail cars that they had to hold logs we worked doing the demo job for sim plots okay brad and i think you were involved in plus tvm and basically loading all these old yeah log flatbeds on flatbeds to haul to portland so you know when i think about you can i i mean one of the things that always comes from my mind is you you’ve been around long enough which means you’ve operated a ton of a different equipment i’ve always said you’re the best equipment operator i’ve ever been around like bar none you could put you on anything and if you ask my dad he said you’ll break a lot of that’s the nature of the but that’s the nature of

the beast of what we do right and so i have a little empathy in me sometimes when stuff rolls into the shop because as long as the guy running it wasn’t you know brand new or as long as the guy run it just just happened because he was trying to get stuff done i’m like oh i feel like i’ve been down this road but of all the equipment you’ve ran you know in your lifetime like what brings back some of the like the fondest memories or what or or makes you just chuckle anything that you got any good equipment stories for us and it comes with one of the things was when i first started running the cable crane and we didn’t have outriggers on it i mean it’s basically a rubber mounted crane that was cable operated and you had to use both hands in both feet to run the whole thing and you’re constantly moving yeah and by the end of the day you pretty much had a workout oh yeah there’s no uh there’s no hydraulic assist there was no it was just uh it was all manpower yeah it’s like

manual steering no air conditioning and like well we broke all the glass out of it so we could see yeah exactly and what glass was in it got broke out anyway so uh yeah but to me that was probably the most interesting machine is because you’re picking up pretty heavy weight and you had to know where the tip point was on that crane to keep from tipping over yeah and that’s the one thing that pete kind of taught me back in the day do you think that made you a better like equipment operator once the excavators came around and the other stuff that kind of oh probably because that’s when i learned how to work on everything too so do you remember when you forgot to put the boom lock in and you got into the power lines and flattened all the tires that wasn’t my fault and pretty quick i hear like 50 000 volts just going off of course i grabbed the boom and got it out of there fast enough to where it didn’t didn’t quite blow the tires out oh no they were all flat they were they were after

that happened but if i if all the tires if the tires would have blown out it would have hit the ground and i wouldn’t be here talking to you today because it might have been hanging on to the side of the crane i hadn’t done there either yeah yeah yeah and so we sat there in about and we got off the crane after i pissed my pants and i sat there and watched the tires just go flat and i think they were fairly new tires at the time too melted all the inner tubes yep didn’t lose the tires it’s all the inner tubes yeah which is good i mean those are easier at least less expensive to replace than the tires the funny thing about that was here comes people out of the plant so what happened we don’t know we didn’t know we played doms so how long how long have you guys been friends like how long how long have you known each other i did you know you meet at work you meet before that 69.70 yeah see when you guys first moved up on the hill i was good

friends with dave robellier which was your neighbor and also dean which is debbie’s brother that lived across the street so there was three houses there okay and all of us kids at that time were all the same age and that’s how we all got to meet each other then we started hanging around and then the cousins ricky and and ron jordan and then their cousin then we all became pretty much a kind of like the little rascals you know yeah yeah before there’s video games before you could stay inside all day and the houses were smaller and parents said go outside and do oh no we without doing other things at that time yeah i think it was all probably around 13 14 somewhere in there maybe 12. okay man somewhere in there but we figured out how to steal our first beer drink it yep where’d you steal it from go to the grocery store beans and then you buy a pop and dump the pop out and open a beer and put it in the pop can then pay for the pop on the way out where do you dump the pop

at the fountain have somebody else steal a pack of cigarettes so he’d have beard cigarettes have a space up in their garage that we’d go up there and smoke and we never ever got caught i don’t know how we didn’t well we got caught stealing though well yeah yeah yeah got caught still i wasn’t involved in that one though not the beer the cigarettes sweet to park a lot a couple of times yeah so then uh lessons learned you know some of the other like some of the other memories i have of the two of you is the years that you guys had the softball teams oh yeah like those are some really fun memories as a kid going to the softball games you know watching you guys play softball i don’t remember the co-ed really as much i know i know you’ve talked about it but i only really remember the fall i don’t really only remember the met like the summer men’s league games and going to like gabiola park and watching you know because a lot of a lot of not everybody on the softball team but a fair amount

of guys on the softball team actually worked with you guys too right like a couple of them yeah there’s two of you well library was our pitcher and then i don’t think there was anybody else on the team that worked worked down there i remember that tom harrison guy remember um who else dennis mitchell yeah and then who else did we have kevin shane kevin shane was then there was oh savage oh dave gary gibbons was a grandpa was grandpa a big saw was he like a big remember you talking about but grandpa was big into like sponsoring softball women’s softball right then they need to sponsor the men’s team later that’s when your dad and i was playing on it yeah he played third base i played second base yeah always remember one night we’re playing for the the city championship okay the other team had nine guys on the team they’re kicking our butt okay do we have anybody on the bench i fire a ball from second base over to third and as he’s running this guy’s running towards third your dad’s playing third catches the ball slaps the guy in

the back of the head knocks him out we had to call an ambulance get that guy hauled off did you win by default pretty much yeah because they only had eight but but here’s the other thing so we had to play them again uh-huh and we we throttled them second time okay but they have actually had nine players or they had to play with eight again well they had to they had to finish with nine they didn’t have anybody else on the bench so you started with nine years finish yeah okay how many years did you guys play softball no a lot five six seven years it seems like there was a fair like my knee out playing softball yeah kind of one of those sliding into second base and then changing your mind at the last second kind of stamped your knees sideways or your cleats bite on you oh yeah yeah that was pretty much the end remember we were playing for another championship and the guy comes sliding us playing catcher the guy comes sliding in home to take me out he ended up in a hospital going too ambulance

right to the hospital okay we worked in the scrap yard all the time i mean we’re nothing but muscles you know and we well we would play these iron all day long you know we were in our probably mid to late 30s and we’re playing against these kids just getting out of high school and and you know in college like 25 year olds and we’re just kicking their ass yeah yeah no those are some of my uh some of my best my best memories give me one of your give me one of your favorite memories about you know growing up working at united metals give me one two whatever anything it doesn’t have to be like just something off the top of your head that makes you that makes you smile makes me smile well i’ll start with my memories you know there’s a lot of people that we’ve talked about here you know but you know there was a lot of family this scrap yard began and it was just nothing but family it was family and it was difficult i mean thursdays and weeks you’d get along and then there was days

and and months you just you dreaded to even go to work and yeah and then it made christmases and stuff like that even a little tense yeah a little more because i was kind of the step step child of the bunch i was about the only one that wasn’t family related somewhere or another yeah but he was always in there he was always involved he’s always with us camping trips everywhere yeah everything so and you know you know i’ve talked about this i just want to make sure that we talk no no i want to i do i want to let’s let’s go there because it’s something you and i have talked about and and i’ve said you know by the time i came along i was it was pretty much grandma and grandpa you know there’s a little some memories of of uncle ron a little bit before he left to go to work this for the cement uh company i don’t remember that much about you know uncle robert being there because by that time it wasn’t that in the 80s the grandpa had bought the muffler shop and i think that

that move was made with with uncle robert um and you guys you have a lot more memories of like the extended family being there than i than i do but i do think it’s important to have the conversation and say okay because i’ve wrote about a few times like you know but it and a lot of scrap companies are this way right that’s how they this is how they start you know and it’s like whoever you know you feel like can give you some contribution whether it’s a brothers sisters you aunts your mom dad it’s just a family affair and i think that’s the way that our industry has been and still to this day a lot of places are very you know um even the dairies did that okay i mean everybody the farmers the dairies they yeah so i don’t wanna i’m like you i don’t wanna gloss over it because i know that the only reason that we exist today is because there’s a lot of family to get over like early humps right a lot of people doing a lot right and that was that was the thing that was

the thing with your mom and dad burton wilma they treated me just like they treated you every day yeah if i needed something your dad would give it to me or whatever it’s just like the the first week i started working there and i got paid my normally hourly weighed you with probably a dollar an hour at the most who knows yeah whatever it was and so and i moved out on my own i’m renting an apartment and i went in what you needed to do yeah and i did and so i went in and i told your dad i said i can’t quite survive on this could you give me a little bit more money and he did and made it made it the word i could survive yeah i mean he was you know the company at that time wasn’t making a fortune but he made it affordable for me to live and i’ll always remember that yeah and i think that’s that’s part of like how businesses grow is like sometimes you get lucky and you’re a farmer and you have eight kids or you know whether it’s you’re at a

dairy or a scrap yard and you got a lot of help back when kids were more of an asset than they than they are liability today right so more expensive well they had kids because they needed the help and and i think that that’s like a big a big piece to not just our business but a lot of a lot of businesses out there but i think i’ve wrote about this before i mean because only because of what you’ve told me you know your brother worked in the business your brother-in-law your mom your dad your sisters like and and then people that aren’t necessarily blood family but they are family i can which is kind of how i operate today i don’t necessarily have any blood family in any of the businesses but i got a lot of people that are like my family that have put in their time and paid a lot of dues so it’s they are family right because we got more people now today than you guys did then but i think that families play a big big role you know in the business and create a

lot of heartache too you know it’s not always it’s not always rosy with whatever you do in life you know you’re going to have your trials and tribulations and and with whatever you do and it you know united medals for one thing it’s it we struggled a lot of years before we became a great company and the reason why i say we is because i felt like i’m part of that and you guys tell me that all the time what do you think made the helped you make the transition to be from a company that struggled to become a great company keep working at it we worked at it a lot but you know the biggest thing that really stepped us up in the game was when we partnered with schnitzer steele true oh yeah you did you and debbie yeah hawked her underwear and everything oh yeah and you asked me what what i wanted to do in the company at that time and i said well i just want to be your right-hand man i’ll help you out with whatever and you did yeah and what if he wanted something you

and we argued about that you refinanced your house so that i could afford to buy a piece of property well to expand united hauling i mean come on that’s stepping up to the plate man yeah that’s that’s stuff we did back then and that’s what i want people to know like that’s the type of stuff that i think can get lost as things get bigger is what it took to get to the point to where you could even have a bank willing to talk to you but you know what i mean like all that stuff that had to happen to get to that point you know is and i was because obviously you know when you say you know from a struggling company to a to a good company great company was you know a lot of it’s attributed to a timing timing a ton of hard work and the third piece that i’ll say is willing to bet on yourself right like you’re most people want they want the accolades or they want the you know the check at the end of the day or they want to say they you know but

they’re afraid to bet on themselves they want to use right somebody else’s money or somebody else’s credentials because they’re afraid that if they use their own or they don’t you know that they’re now putting their their cells on the line and if they lose they’re afraid they’re more afraid of losing right versus just saying exactly i’m willing to and the one i think the one person that and rod will even vouch for this jim goodrich helped a lot back in the day with keeping us going in the right direction make making sure we were all right is that correct yeah it was his job and he was very good at his job yes he was i wrote about it i discussed it with the recycling today people and another transition from you know united mills being privately owned to being 50 owned by sensor steel and uh and because you said it and and you said it kind of helped you become a more mature company like it took you from kind of being a teenager to being like a maybe a 20 something year old like so you had a little more responsibility

you had someone you had help but you also had like someone that kind of um that you had to kind of show them what you’re doing and someone you kind of had to uh prove out that you were worth the investment i mean plus the help right guys like jim goodrich and what terry glue coughed and some of those you know old school schnitzer guys um were a big part of that puzzle as well even though they didn’t necessarily work for united metals so which property did you refinance your house to help buy well the one on london i believe his house was on london no but which which property which united metals property where the arch buildings at large building this is the old sim plot grain silos yeah yep i remember the day that that whole place burned down that whole block and then the green towers were still there and the fire department was down there and we had we had cars that we had stacked up against the warehouse and they caught on fire because that that was a hot hot fire oh i bet because were they woods they

were it was a wood structure that was right yeah which is why it burned so well that was like an 80 79 maybe yeah somewhere in there the other one that comes to mind too is when we had the train wreck come down through there he said well we made the comment well you know i could have come on this side of the tracks and they would have just cut the train out but instead they hired us and we had candy bars yeah all night long yeah sometimes just if somebody’s willing to hire you and they’re willing to pay you at some point you just say okay i’ll do whatever somebody so much foot traffic through the scrap yard we couldn’t get anything done everybody wants to see a train right yeah for days for days so they just hired us to go unload the it was the mars bars bars snickers uh three musketeers i think that was a lot of candy bars we didn’t get to eat the other thing i was i remember too uh was when you guys crushed those brand new was it like an insurance deal you crush

those brand new 84 chevy pixels step side pickups yeah i got the horn button off i saw that i remember because i actually ended up with that truck right yeah i mean so i remember you saying like this is 88 yeah 88 so and i remember that that horn button i remember you saying this came off this is how we got this insurance guy did you wreck that pickup i hit two deer with that truck yeah you gave me a deer magnet yeah two deer with that truck yeah man one and one in eastern oregon and one on my way to court in uh washington colfax county i got i got a little uh fist fight up there and i had to go to court so many so many memories and so much fun and like ultimately i don’t want to you know make this thing go any longer than it needs to be but i just felt it to be super super important a to get you guys together um because i know that there’s you guys spent so many years together and you guys are i look up to both of you

i mean you’re like an uncle to me as much as any uncle i ever had or probably more i probably spent more time around you yeah around me exactly and that’s why you know i wanted you i mean i appreciate you taking some time out of your guys busy days but you earned your busy days so i’m i’m i’m i appreciate you sitting down um i want people to know that when you see united metals today the only reason it even exists today is because of all the that happened and all the hard work that got put in and all the betting on yourself they got done way before i ever even showed up right and this is like accumulation of a lot of people betting on themselves a lot of people betting on um our ability to sustain the company a lot of people multiple people’s contributions so we could have a hall of fame wall that’s 50 people deep i mean i really believe that right but our first iteration we kind of had to say okay this is this is how we’re going to start just kind of like the same

way the nfl hall of fame or whatever every year you kind of come back and you say okay who deserves to be here and who deserves to be a part of it and i think we’ll probably keep continue doing it but there’s so many people that contributed to to what it is today this what you see today is only exists because of all those people’s contributions family included grandma grandpa you know the aunts and uncles the i mean all those people played tremendous roles not you know no not taking anything away from any of them but more just saying we appreciate all everybody’s contributions up to this point and i don’t want that to get lost on people this wasn’t built overnight it wasn’t built from 2004 to 2022. it was built from like 1972 to 2022 a little bit by a little bit everybody trying to do the next best thing and keep hiring hiring excellent people along the way 100 yep yep i mean from the guys you know from the start in the 70s to the guys that we hire next week right or we hired last week or eight years

ago like everybody’s became you know has played their role in it some of them have you taught you who you know you don’t want to hire ever again and some of them have said man if i could clone that guy i’d do it 50 times over you know but it is what it is i just i appreciate you guys coming in if there’s anything you want to leave with like now’s the time say it now or forever hold your peace at least until next year i’m calling kanye into doing this again i just kind of wish your grandpa my dad could hear because i’d say hey hey dad remember when you told me i couldn’t be successful because i love trucks too much come to the truck show love to tomorrow you there how about you kid all the one thing that i that you know what it was what was i thinking well way back in the day one night i was a young naive dumb kid probably stealing him that’s a good thing i remember talking to your dad and i said bert i said what are we going to do when

we run out of scrap and he looked at me and he says as long as there’s a human being on this planet there will always be scrap yep anything well that makes sense you know of course that it’s true yeah we’ve ran out of farm scrap pretty much i mean there’s some farm scrap out there but nothing like that’s all that was our bread and butter and yeah and now that’s gone it’s all this commercial scrap right so and uh household scrap right yep which is still good scrap you know still makes the the world go around yeah but i appreciate you guys thanks for coming in and i love you guys and i wouldn’t be we wouldn’t be here today we wouldn’t be having the party tomorrow or friday and saturday if it wasn’t for the two of you so cheers cheers thanks guys