All in the Family

The largest U.S. producer of wallboard and similar wood products last week took over one of its biggest customers. In return for 81,250 shares of its own stock (current value: around $4,550,000) Masonite Corp. bought control of Marsh Wall Products, Inc. of Dover, Ohio, No. 1 finisher of Masonite wallboard. For 23-year-old Masonite, the deal will enable it to turn out finished products (doors, panels, etc.) for sale to the building trade. For Marsh Wall, it marked a new chapter in a happy saga of family enterprise.

Around the Table. The heroine is a chipper, bright-blue-eyed great-grandmother (five times over) named Mrs. Catherine Marsh, born 88 years ago this Christmas Day. When her husband, a traveling electrical engineer, was killed by a Coney Island subway train in 1905, Mrs. Marsh was left with seven sons and two daughters (the oldest son at home was 16), no insurance and a $4,500 mortgage on the Ohio farm where they lived.

Forced to move, they settled in nearby New Philadelphia. There Mrs. Marsh kept the family together by iron determination and a switch that was put to stinging use whenever any of the boys broke her cardinal rule: "Don't fight among yourselves. You must depend on each other." By mowing lawns, selling papers, and other odd jobs, and paying heed to "Mother," the Marshes made ends meet. In six years Mother Marsh bought a white frame house.

Two years later, Alvin, her third son, had a chance to buy a back-alley lumberyard in the neighboring town of Dover, but he could find no one to lend him the money. At the first of many similar family councils around the dining room table, Mother Marsh talked things over with the whole brood, finally decided to mortgage the house to back Alvin. Starting with $1,700, Alvin soon made enough to move out of the alley, set up two branches in other cities.

Within a few years he had added two brick companies to the properties. Remembering the lesson of the switch, Alvin took his brothers in as partners, made Mother a sort of chairman of the board. She ran things anyway. When serious disagreements cropped up, Mother Marsh, said one son, would "give us hell and make it hurt as much as one of the lickings we used to get."

Around the Tree. Marsh Wall Products, Inc., the fourth and largest of the family's companies, was started in 1930, almost ended when a fire razed its plant and equipment in 1935. Starting up again from scratch, the brothers now have a business that employs more than 300, grossed $6,000,000 this year. They sold their 80% interest in it (Marsh friends and dealers and Masonite officials own the rest) in line with the trend among family enterprises to consolidate with bigger corporations, thus make assets more liquid to pay such things as inheritance taxes.

Otherwise, the sale will not change things much for the Marshes; they will still run the company. For Mother Marsh things will change even less. She still lives in the same white frame house in New Philadelphia. On Christmas Eve this year, she will do what she has always done for her grown-up brood: make them a batch of fudge, serve it around the tree, then lead a chorus of Silent Night before sending them off to bed.

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