Jane, Mark and Art Bell.
Art and Jane Bell and Their ‘Top Gun’ Son Fabricate a Dream No job is too big or too small.
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By Mark Kandborg
hen abel contracting corp. co-founder and president Art Bell picked up his first pair of tin snips at the age of 16 and put them to work, he had no idea what that simple act would one day mean for him, or for his future family. It didn’t take him long to realize he was onto a good thing. “My brother-in-law got me into it,” he says, “and pretty soon I was making $1.25 an hour. That’s $50 a week, less taxes.” Doesn’t seem like so much now, but that was darn good money in the early ‘70s. Good enough to allow a hard-working young man to buy his dream car, a 1972 Cougar convertible. He loved that car so much that he only recently upgraded to a 1973 Cougar XR-7 convertible. The man clearly knows what he likes.
He drove that car to business administration classes at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), and then to work as a field coordinator for a big company where he was responsible for the work of 75 employees. “They were making three mistakes a day, each,” he says, shaking his head. “It got to the point where the phone would ring and he would shake,” Art’s ex-wife, business partner and best friend, Jane, explains. They both knew that the stress-tobenefit ratio of coordinating someone else’s employees just wasn’t working for them. It was time to start working for themselves. So, on a warm August night 20 years ago, abel contracting corp. Corp. was born.
abel contracting corp. | 20th Anniversary | 1