By Lloyd Graff The Honey Crisp apple season will begin with the Labor Day weekend. Honey Crisp is the apple that has overwhelmed the Golden Delicious, Macintosh, Pippin and Gala varieties in the hearts and palate of the applistas who frequent farmers’ markets in search of the perfect pomme. Count me as an apple knocker with credentials. I have traveled to the orchards of Wenatchee, Washington; Logan, Utah; Laporte, Indiana; and Honeoye Falls, New York, searching for apple succulence, but in the mountains of North Carolina I found my best Apple anecdote if not the tastiest fruit. I stopped at…
Author: Lloyd Graff
By Lloyd Graff August 29, is the second anniversary of the day I almost died. I hesitate to revisit it in this blog because I’ve already written about it extensively in the magazine. But I am of the philosophy that you should never let a good crisis (or the memory of one) go to waste, so I’m going to bring it up once more. IMTS 2008 was coming up, but I was feeling so crappy I didn’t care. I had spent two weeks pretending to vacation with my family in Michigan. I drove home with my daughter Sarah and remember…
By Lloyd Graff The lead story in the Sunday New York Times discussed the “striking” drop in the investment in common stocks. The article went on to talk about the widespread disillusionment with equities since the dot-com crash and the subprime demolition. The Dow Jones average is actually down over 1000 points since 2001. Personally, I think the widespread disgust with the stock market performance by individual investors derives from the “gaming” of the market by professional computer jockeys for whom long-term investing is holding a stock or an index for a week. The Quants, for whom the stock market…
By Lloyd Graff When you enter a machining firm which cuts millions of pounds of brass bar each year, you expect to find a line of New Britain screw machines or Davenports – bunches of almost identical automatics methodically turning out fittings. But at Marshall-Excelsior Corporation in Marshall, Michigan, the machinery assortment reflects the eclectic taste of its owner, Jeff Begg. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Warner-Swaseys, New Britains, Davenports, Wickmans, National Acmes; 5-spindle; 6-spindle; 8-spindle; a menagerie of screw machines bite at the brass rod, turning out Jeff’s variegated mixture of niche market non-ferrous…
By Lloyd Graff Thanks to reader Roger Meyers for sending me an informative article from Forward ONLINE about manufacturing coming back to the United States. One of the companies prominently mentioned in the piece is Wham-O Corporation, maker of Frisbees and Hula Hoops. Wham-O’s products are not exotic, but they take up a lot of container space per dollar value. With container costs from China up to $4500 from as low as $3000 at the bottom of the recession, Wham-O has rejected offshoring. Their products are not labor-intensive to produce, primarily using injection molding presses. They are cheap, light and…
By Lloyd Graff On Thursday, I had the opportunity to spend several hours with Mitch Liss of Edsal Manufacturing, a major producer of steel shelving and office furniture with sales of $200 million, based in Chicago. Mitch gave Noah and I an insider’s view of purchasing politics by big box retailers and huge catalog sellers. He said that within massive organizations like Wal-Mart or Grainger you find two distinct parties influencing purchasing decisions, the buyers and the global (strategic) sourcing groups. The shelving buyers who work closely with the sourcing people have the responsibility of making the final call about…
(From the Archives) The Chicago Bulls are playing the Cleveland Cavaliers in round one of the NBA playoffs, and I just cannot resist comparing Michael Jordan and Lebron James. Let’s break this down. 1. Defense: As a defender Jordan was a consistent all pro, but he was not a shot blocker. Lebron defends well and is a superb shot blocker when he wants to be. Advantage Lebron. 2. Rebounding: As a rebounder Jordan was instinctive in his positioning, thus ending up with numerous triple doubles. Lebron is taller but seemingly is out of rebounding position more than Jordan. Advantage Jordan.…
By Lloyd Graff I remember virtually nothing from my early childhood. I sometimes think I was born when I was five years old. My parents told me that I did not talk until I was three. They actually thought I was retarded. But I do remember one thing quite vividly from my early years—my mother performing dramatic readings in dialect for my sister and I in the park. She would pack a picnic lunch, we would go outside, and she would read stories, doing several voices like it was a radio performance. Her favorite was about an immigrant mother taking children to an amusement park. I had…
By Lloyd Graff When my arterial plumbing got perilously close to fatal failure 16 months ago, God granted me the opportunity to reassess my life while on a breathing tube for 12 days. The highlight of those days was turning over in my bed (actually, being turned). My conclusion after the ordeal ended was that I really did not want to make any big changes in my life except one—I wanted to feel my days more intensely. Whatever I got to do in the days I was allotted I was going to do with an awareness and gratitude that was…
By Lloyd Graff Salt is the ultimate commodity. Buy a canister of Morton’s off the very bottom shelf at the supermarket for a buck and a quarter and use it for six months, then buy another. But for a seasoned cook, salt has a flavor that varies with the coarseness of the granule and where it comes from. Sea salt tastes different than mined salt, and rough kosher salt makes better brine than the fine stuff. When I think of salt I envision Tony Maglica, the man behind Mag Instrument, the greatest machining success story of the last 30 years.…