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Pioneer Paper Co. Production

Reflecting in striking fashion the speeding-up tendency of California industry, a roofing trade report issued recently revealed the unusual fact that one Los Angel€s plant alone, engaged in the manufacture of asphalt-saturated shingles, produced, during 1977, enough roofs to shelter nearly twice the annual average increase in the city's population.

The firm referred to, the Pioneer Paper Company, which is the oldest of its kind in Los Angeles, having been established by Willis G. Hunt and H. M. Eichelberger in 1888, had a production capacity of a roof every 10 minutes during the fiscal year, which closed June 30, last. This was at the rate of 144 roofs f.or a 24-hour day, or 43,2@ for a 300-day working year.

Reckoning the average of four persons to a family, this number of roofs would have provided shelter for t72,BO0 peopl,e. The average annual population increase of the city, it was pointed out, is a little more than 100,000.

Roofs are sold by the square, according to the Pioneer company. Each square contains 100 square feet and the average home requires about 20 squares to cover it. On the basis of 2000 ',square feet per home, the Pioneer company during the last fiscal year turned out roofing, all of which had to go through a highly technical process of asphalt-saturation and Yosemite rock-surfacing, at the rate of 86,400,000 square feet, or 3.27648 square miles a year, a figure which, authorities have asserted, stamps the Pioneer plant as the finest of its kind in the world.