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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
October 2022 #14279 Page #142
The Last Word on The First Trade Show
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fter this year’s BCMC, it’s worth considering how far our industry has progressed since we first went to a trade show. The year was 1958, and the National Association of Home Builders Show (NAHB now IBS) was the only way to reach a national audience. Fortunately, we had one tenacious man, Cal Jureit, to show the world the marvel of his technology. And this first trade show made all the difference.
Joe Kannapell, P.E.
Jureit had to go on a tear just to get to the Show, optimizing his Gang-Nail design and putting together a complete business in the two preceding years. That included building machine tools, buying stamping presses, and developing truss engineering. At that point, he really hadn’t come up with an economical way to ship his truss plates, or to fabricate trusses. But he had the foresight and confidence in his invention to make the trip, even though when he left for the Show he had only sold $25,000 worth of truss plates. Jureit had no hesitation about leaving the warmth of Miami for a frost-bitten Chicago in January – he had previously worked two years in Toledo, Ohio. Yet he had to take a full day to get there, flying in a propeller plane (Pan Am flew the first commercial jet flight later that year) and pay about $150, or $1500 in today’s money, for the flight. And likely he took the train to get downtown to the Conrad Hilton Hotel and register at the Show headquarters. From there, he had to take a cab or mount the elevated “L” train platform to get to one of several Show hotels, such as the Summit House shown here.
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