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Kalamazoo
Gazette
Sunday,
May 10, 1987
Bob
Cunningham
 Gazette
Correspondent
Transcribed
for the Internet
by
Emma Sefcik
12/2001
Memories
linger of an entrepreneur
panning
for gold in the Depression
Hartford – Some
businesses, not unlike some people, thrive on
adversity but can’t stand prosperity.
That
seems to be what happened with the Burnette Castings Co. of Keeler.
It grew by leaps and bounds during the
Great Depression, but
folded in early 1949, when most businesses were enjoying the big
post-World War II boom.
William A. Burnette
proved throughout his life that he could see the sunny side of even the
worst situations. Following the stock market crash of 1929, when many
entrepreneurs were throwing themselves out of windows, he decided it was a
good time to grow.
In a 1932 bid to beat the Depression, Burnette
built a factory and office on his Keeler-Hartford Farms to produce cast
aluminum cookware.
His next move was to set about building a nationwide sales
organization,
Cookware
Co. of America, to sell his products
door-to-door and to use the party technique that later became popular for
selling cosmetics, clothing, jewelry and household goods.
 Rodney
Lynch of Hartford, although he was never employed at Burnette's, had
friends and relatives who did work there.
Burnette converted an old farm house to a dormitory near the
factory and a lot of the single employees lived there. It
was a good place to have a job, Lynch
said. During the depression our sales
increased until the company was making a profit and paying me an
executive salary up to $40,000 a year, Burnette
said in the People
to People Scrapbook, a
book he had published in later years. Much of his money was plowed back
into expanding the business and building up the farms.
By
the end of 1936, Burnette had more than 1000 cookware salesmen in the
field, and planned to add another 1000 sales people during 1937.
Burnette claimed that many of his sales people were earning more than
$1000 a month, an almost unbelievable amount, at a period when most
people were lucky to even have a job earning $15 to $25 per week.
Burnette,
an ordained Methodist minister from Chicago, got into the direct sales
field around 1920, and quickly rose to the top of his chosen profession.
Always
observant and on the lookout for opportunities, he had been waiting for
the right time to manufacture and sell his own high quality heavy
aluminum cast cookware.
Dora
Kaucher of Hartford, who as a young bride, bought some of the aluminum
utensils during 1941, speaks highly of Burnette’s cookware.
She said, It
was everything they claimed it to be and more.
She
bought four utensils that to the best of her memory cost about $7 or $8
each, at a time when most people were earning about $15 to $25, if they
were lucky enough to have a job. But she’s never regretted her purchase.
I
remember the cookware came with a written guarantee to last ten or fifteen
years. Now, even though the paper the guarantee was written on
disintegrated years ago, still after 46 years of heavy use the cookware’s
almost like new,
she said.
Kaucher
said even the raised spiral bottoms, engineered by Burnette, seemed to
speed the time necessary to bring the utensils to cooking temperature,
and distribute heat more evenly, as claimed by the company.
But
even more important to her than the engineering specifics,
it
was easy to use and clean, she said.
A lot of women
around here bought Burnette’s cookware, I’ve never heard a complaint,
and everyone I know with Burnette cookware is still using it the same as
myself,
Kaucher
said.
With
the start of WWII, aluminum was in short supply and was no longer
available for civilian use. Burnette,
with his foundry in place, immediately went into production of aircraft
parts for the war effort.
But the post war period
proved to be an even greater obstacle for Burnette than the depression
years. Aluminum prices soared
and with a wide open job market, Burnette never did get an effective sales
force together again. In 1949 he was forced to liquidate the foundry.
At the time the foundry
closed, Burnette recalled how as many as 25 youths lived in a dormitory in
the early 1930s. They lived together under their own
discipline without even so much as a scandal. There were many romances and
marriages which came about as a result of living in the same dormitory and
many of those couples remained in the community and continued working with
us.
Any
man who understands my feeling toward these men and women and their
families will understand why I stayed in there fighting for the business
during 1947-48 even though we lost more than $100,000.
Burnette didn’t consider the
foundry closing a personal failure.
I’ll
turn my efforts to the canning business and the farms,
he said. Burnette,
who with his son-in-law, Carl “Hal” Carlson continued running Burnette Farms
and Canning Co. until his death in 1977, believed that
just
as important as what business you are in, is when you get in and when you
get out.
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