Alumni Feature
The Accidental Chemist
By Gabriel Welsch Photography: David Baio
I’m riding with Glenn Burket ’56 in his white Chevy Suburban, at a leisurely pace on winding roads in a surprisingly hilly part of central Ohio when without warning a wild turkey, neck elongated in effort, runs in front of the vehicle. Without time to brake, stop, or react in any way, the truck rumbles ahead and the turkey rolls up over the hood, tumbles against the windshield and disappears.
Juniata
In the rearview, besides an asterisk of black feathers in the road, the turkey is gone. After taking a few iffy turns, Glenn turns to me and says, “Sometimes life just happens.” Our day has been focused on how his life happened. He’s had better luck than the turkey. But elements of chance have played a role. An accidental chemist at Juniata, he jockeyed his way into a dynamic industry, and grew as it grew. Need proof? Just about everyone reading this has seen Glenn’s work. If you’ve seen the translucent blue plastic strips in a curtain on a grocery store loading dock, or outside a car wash bay, that’s Glenn. If you’ve noticed the color of a chain link outfield fence—the polyvinyl material to prevent corrosion—that’s probably Glenn. (In fact, if you’ve gone to games at four different fields, three of those fields would have had fence coatings using plastics from Glenn’s plant in Ohio.) If you’ve used a garden hose, stood on shock absorbing mats in commercial kitchens or factory floors, swung on a playground swing and held the chains where plastic sheathing kept your hair from getting snagged, that’s Glenn. Glenn Burket is plastic ubiquity, and in four decades of business, he has shipped products around the world. Amid financial downturns and wars and other cataclysms, his companies have only experienced a single quarter where he did not turn a profit.
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Burket is direct, gregarious, and focused. Pushing 80 years of age, he still works full weeks, visits grandchildren, helps with his wife’s kenneling business, participates in civic and political life (as a staunch conservative), and is always thinking about the next thing. As we toured his Ohio facilities, he is quick to point out new equipment, describe a new product, discuss the finer points of the good sense of locating his plants along rail lines. Several trains a day move through Ohio, headed east and west with cars full of his plastics. Flex Technologies—the company he started in 1975—occupies six facilities in four locations. Three are in central Ohio, and one is in Tennessee. Flex’s main product is thermoplastics and PVC, and the company’s ability to blend to extremely precise manufacturing specs for a range of clients and products has given it staying power not only in industry but in the global marketplace. Flex’s vinyl and PVC compounds are used in everything from toys and automotive parts, medical supplies to weather stripping, shoes to a range of hoses, to just about anything you can extrude or inject into molds.
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