Posted 11:51 PM by Gene

While searching for information as to why the chemical operations of Atlantic Richfield Company left our city -- well, this will take some explaining, so let's start from the beginning: Atlantic Richfield was a big refining company created by the merger of our local Atlantic Refining and LA's Richfield Petroleum, and several other firms along the way. It had a big chemical operation. When the companies merged they moved corporate HQ out west but the chemical unit remained here. For years it was run by somebody named Sorgenti, who probably more than any other local businesshack of the time boasted about what a wonderful city this was and how proud he was to be here and all the social organizations he was involved in and...and then all of a sudden he announced with great "sorrow" he was moving the chemical unit to Newtown Square, no doubt to be nearer his golf game, and in one stroke his rep went out the window. That ARCO later left the biz altogether (indeed its successor Lyondell, an ARCO spinoff, is being acquired by a Dutch firm -- and Lyondell now employs only 180 in what is now a research facility there; its former numbers were far greater) , and that the parent exists solely as a brand name, long ago swallowed up by the cute flowery mismanagement of BP, does not make the recollection any sweeter.

Anyway, while searching for the information we never found (and in the process rummaging through sites specializing in the CSR fraud, PC in a three-piece suit, not to mention MICKEY D's CSR "blog") we happened upon this 1971 piece from Time about all the companies that ran screaming out of the cities, which only a hard-core conservative or GEKKO KUDLOW could read without grimacing. One graf struck us promptly:

Executives of companies that have taken the suburban leap insist that it was worthwhile. Management morale and office productivity rise, they say, and frequently costs are cut or checked. Donald M. Kendall, president of PepsiCo Inc., points to an annual saving of $1,500,000 on space alone at the company's new headquarters in suburban Purchase, N.Y. At American Can Co., which moved a year ago to a 180-acre office campus in Greenwich, Conn., Vice President Melvin M. Nield says: "On every count it has worked better than we expected." "This is an easier way to operate a business," says Kendrick R. Wilson, chairman of Avco, which moved to Greenwich in 1969. "I'm putting in at least an hour a day more at work, and two hours' less commuting. What I like best is that when the end of the day comes, I can look out the window and think — and not have to worry about that damned train schedule or traffic on the throughway."

It offers no succor that two of the three companies now exist in the great office park in the sky (not to mention "Borden, Eastern Air Lines, Grolier...Uniroyal...General Telephone & Electronics Corp....Stauffer Chemical...Pan American," etc., etc., etc.), nor that Messrs. Kendall, Nield and Wilson may be perpetually blasting out of sand traps somewhere in purgatory; their actions remain an open wound, indeed they were at the heart of the deindustrialization of America, and no amount of PR about being greener than AL GORE will change that.

The location of expanding office activities may well be a key determinant of the nation's urban condition — municipal solvency, racial harmony, environmental amenity and economic efficiency — for the rest of the century.

One seldom accuses a newsrag of perspicacity, but 36 years later the cities remain unwell, and while a lot of the credit goes to JE$$ES we can never underrate all these folks who broke the golden rule and declared they were no longer their brother's keeper.

P. S. That ARCO history mentions Thornton Bradshaw. Anyone remember him? He ran ARCO and appeared on lots of TV image ads. He later ran RCA and sold the company to LEGENDARY WELCH. He seems to have been a responsible, forthright CEO. Now, like the 95 handicappers of the past, forgotten.

P. P. S.

Stauffer Chemical exhibits a particularly convoluted story, indicative of the pace of mergers and acquisitions during the 1980’s. Cheseborough-Ponds purchased Stauffer in 1984, and was in turn acquired by Unilever in 1987. Unilever did not want to retain Stauffer and sold it to ICI in 1987. ICI kept the Agricultural Group, sold the Inorganic Chemicals Group to Rhone-Poulenc and sold the Specialty Chemical Group to Akzo-Nobel, who now operates the Dobbs Ferry facility. By 1988, the Stauffer Corporate Engineering staff had been reduced from 300 to 25 and the Research Process Development staff had been reduced from 60 to 25.

What did all this needless merging and merging and merging give us except pink slips and Henry Kravises and a strong China? (For what it's worth we note the Poulenc in Rhone-Poulenc, a French drug and chemical giant long gone, was Francis Poulenc's family, another factoid impossible to locate on the superefficient Web.)