DETROIT – Toledo, as is well known, was claimed by both Ohio and Michigan back in the early days of the area’s settlement.
That was resolved in 1836 by the aftermath of the comic-opera “Toledo War” in which Ohio prevailed, mainly because it was already a state; Michigan was not, and it was an election year.
However, if the city is politically part of Ohio, economically it has one foot in both states, and may be more like the Detroit area than anywhere else. For a century, the city has been heavily tied to manufacturing and the auto industry.
While Jeep is the iconic Toledo car brand, the city was also the home of Champion Spark Plug, and of a glass industry deeply tied to autos. For three decades, the former Libbey-Owens-Ford Company (LOF) produced all the windshields for General Motors cars.
But that ended long ago, and Toledo, like Detroit, though at a slower pace, has been hemorrhaging jobs and population for half a century. Libbey-Owens-Ford was taken over by foreign corporations, and even the name hasn’t existed since 2006. General Motors, which produced more than half of all cars sold in America in the early 1960s, is now struggling to hang on to a 16 percent market share.
Other once-mighty corporations, including Champion Spark Plug, Questor and Sheller-Globe, have gone the way of the dodo.
Businesses have, of course, risen and fallen in good times and bad since the beginning of time. But a little over a century ago, both Toledo and Detroit were made great by swashbuckling young entrepreneurs, none of whom came out of Harvard Business School.
Virtually all the world knows the story of Henry Ford, the lanky mechanic who was born on a Dearborn farm a few weeks after the battle of Gettysburg. He invented one of the first cars in a garage in 1896, but he put the world on wheels and made Detroit a major metropolis by adapting and refining another idea: The moving assembly line, which helped produced 15 million Model Ts.
Less well-known is another man who had even more humble origins, but who also changed the world, and did as much for Toledo as Ford did for Detroit. Michael Owens, born in 1859, started his life as a child laborer, first in the coal mines of West Virginia and later in the glass industry, which was then also a labor-intensive, dirty and dangerous business.
Somehow, he worked his way up and became a skilled glass blower. Eventually, he came to Toledo to work for Edward Drummond Libbey. Thanks to Libbey’s money and his own mechanical brilliance, Owens by 1903 had invented something that would revolutionize the industry: The Owens Bottle Machine.
That invention lay at the heart of the success of the companies that later became LOF, Owens-Illinois (now O-I Glass), and Owens-Corning. It helped Toledo grow, and it also made Michael Owens, the son of Irish immigrants who fled the 1840s potato famine, rich.
I learned all this, and a lot more besides, from Barbara Floyd’s fascinating book The Glass City: Toledo and the Industry That Built It (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Newspapers and magazines tend to treat books in an unfortunate way: They may get a little attention or get reviewed when they are first published, but then are forgotten. This book deserves to be rediscovered and better known.
Floyd, who spent many years as both an archivist and director of the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections at the University of Toledo, is a fine writer who really knows her stuff.
There are stories in this book that go beyond the scope of the glass industry, including an account of the efforts of leaders like the late Ed Dodd, then chairman of Owens-Illinois, and Paul Block, Jr. to revitalize and rebuild Toledo, especially the downtown.
The one story that I found most fascinating was that Toledo, or rather, what was then the Willys-Overland Co., landed the contract to produce Jeeps during World War II because of pure cronyism.
John Biggers, the then-president of LOF, had been brought into government service to help coordinate wartime production, working under Bill Knudson, then president of General Motors.
Ward Canaday, who was head of Willys-Overland, desperately wanted the contract to build Jeeps, but the government awarded it to Ford. However, Canaday lived across the street from Biggers, and the two were good friends. As Barbara Floyd tells it, “Biggers spoke with William Knudson and convinced him that Ford was needed for other war products,” and so most Jeeps were made by Overland.
Where would Toledo be today without that connection?
Barbara Floyd’s book is also brutally honest about the decline of the glass industry, which may have come in part because companies were more involved in attempting takeovers, or warding them off, than improving their products.
“Today,” she concludes, if you want to see the impact of the glass industry, the place to do that is not in a modern plant, but “by visiting the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art.”
After I finished the book, I asked her why she thought a new generation of entrepreneurs was not transforming the city.
“I think we lack a Michael Owens because it would be hard for someone as undereducated as he was to start from the bottom,” she said. “So much of today’s manufacturing depends on advanced technology.” That’s undoubtedly true.
But you have to wonder, and hope, that there is someone of any education level out there who could prove her wrong.
