Cold Comfort

ICE

The U.S. ice industry is having the biggest boom in its history. Ice makers have thrown away their advertising projects; they cannot even keep up with demand. The mechanical refrigerator, which once threatened to put the iceman out of business, has been temporarily put out of business itself by war; more & more old-fashioned iceboxes have been going into homes. An even bigger demand for "natural" ice has come from U.S. refrigerator cars and cold-storage plants, which are caring for more perishable food than ever before. To meet the demand, the $596 million industry must produce close to 50 million tons of ice this year (1941: 34 million tons).

The world's biggest ice manufacturer, City Ice & Fuel Co. of Chicago, last week reported that its share in this record business has brought it a record gross--$24 million (including income from two breweries, fuel and refrigerator sales) for the first half of 1944. (In all of 1940 City Ice grossed $25.7 million.) On Sept. 1 City Ice will retire all its preferred stock: $12 million worth, paying accrued dividends of $1.62 1/2 a share. But record business also has brought fantastic demands. Frantic calls from iceless areas have required it to ship from California to Texas, from Florida to Texas, from Chicago to Mexico.

City Ice has been able to meet emergencies because it is a consolidation of small companies in 26 states, Canada and Mexico. The parent company is headed by William J. Sinek, 67, a chunky, jittery businessman who plays polo for exercise. Sinek is the son of an Attica, Ohio slaughterhouse operator. When he was 13, Bill Sinek went into the construction business with $1,000 he had saved while cherry picking and newspaper peddling. At 19 he was making $6,000 a year and 30 years later had built such huge projects as Chicago's Soldier Field, Lincoln Fields Race Track, the Cubs baseball park.

Sinek got interested in ice when his company built some cold-storage plants in 1926. He became director of City Ice when he sold the company some of his railroad icing plants. By 1942 he became the world's top iceman as president of City Ice.

High-strung Bill Sinek relaxes not only by playing polo ("golf is an old man's Came"). He also throws massive parties for his friends. At a dinner he gave for some railroad men in 1938, Sinek had two circus elephants brought into the grand ballroom of Chicago's Hotel Sherman to entertain the guests.

Sinek is confident that the demand for block ice will not plummet in the face of a postwar spurt in mechanical refrigerator competition. He believes there is room for both. He points to the fact that 43% of his business is helping to supply ice to the 140,000 U.S. refrigerator cars (now carrying more than 1,000,000 carloads of foodstuffs a year) in which, he says, mechanical refrigeration is unsatisfactory. Another 40% of his business comes from commercial users of block ice (hotels, restaurants, stores); from maintenance of cold storage, air-conditioning systems, railroad passenger-car cooling, water cooling, etc.

Biggest competition from mechanical refrigerators comes in domestic use (18% of Sinek's business). But he has an optimistic answer: "We're going to look after the low-income group, the masses, and let Astor St. take care of itself. Our ambition is to be the Henry Ford of the refrigerator business." He has set up an "educational department" to train icemen to make friends with women. They should help them with their housework, should show them where to put things in the icebox to get full benefit from the ice. He wants all his icemen to be like one he knows in St. Louis, who in wintertime puts on several sweaters instead of an overcoat so his customers will not decide it is getting too cold to buy ice.

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