Radio Script #1087

Little Talks on Common Things
May 16, 1976

As many of our listeners know, this program during all of its 27 years on the air has been sponsored as a public service, not as advertising, by the Keyes Fibre Company. It has always been and continues to be one of the few sponsored programs on the air that is never interrupted by advertising. No one is asked to buy any Keyes product. Before the actual broadcast starts, listeners are simply and unobtrusively told that the program comes to them as a public service offered by Keyes. It is, therefore, appropriate that occasionally a part of one broadcast should be devoted to the accomplishments of that manufacturing company which means so much to the Waterville area.

When Little Talks first went on the air in 1948. Keyes had besides its home plant on the Waterville – Fairfield town line and its mill at Shawmut, only one other factory in the United States, located at Hammond, Indiana, and a major interest in a Canadian mill at Hantsport, Nova Scotia, Which operated under the name of Canadian Keyes Fibre.

During the quarter century since this program began, the Keyes Fibre Company has enjoyed extensive and impressive growth. Within the United States there are now Keyes plants in Sacramento, California; Wenatchee, Washington; and New Iberia, Louisiana. Its overseas manufacturing subsidiaries and affiliates include plants at Viul, Norway; Catania, Sicily; Lille d’Elle, France; Birr, Ireland; Frosinone, Italy; Muno, Belgium; Cuernavaca, Mexico; Valencia, Venezuela and Melbourne, Australia. The company has sales and administration units located at London and Surrey in England; Dusseldorf, Germany; Bilboa, Spain; Milan, Italy; Oslo, Norway; and Stockholm, Sweden. Its licensees are found in Argentina, Northern Ireland’s Ulster, New Zealand and South Africa. In its manufacturing and licensing, Keyes now covers 17 countries on five continents.

Today, the business started by Martin Keyes only a little more than half a century ago, in a rented building at Shawmut, Maine, is now a great international corporation. Its pie plates made by Martin Keyes have expanded into more than a hundred different products, and the total annual production now exceeds 100 million pieces. But the essential material, though greatly improved in the process of manufacture, remains basically the same: groundwood pulp fashioned into some sort of three-dimensional article by means of a mold.

Now highly sophisticated machines turn out the articles in one continuous, automated operation. Today about 96% of Keyes production is used for packaging, distribution and service of food. For serving meals there is a broad line of disposable tableware. Not only in the home, but in places of professional food service as well, a favorite is Keyes’ CHINET disposable ware. The newest product in this line is called Meadowflowers. Instead of being a simple, white, though very durable, unadorned dish, it is rim-printed with a floral pattern in delicate shades of green. Customers now may have the new plate or the plain white for the same price.

Wood pulp so easily absorbs heat and moisture that it makes highly desirable packaging for the sale of perishable foods. Through the years Keyes has developed such packages in shapes and sizes designed to make the best preserving and the best display of such foods as eggs, fruit, vegetables, and meats. Keyes molded pulp trays for apples. peaches, pears, and citrus fruits are now used in every major fruit growing area of the world. This line has been expanded into bulk trays and baskets for shipping berries and small, delicate fruits.

Perhaps many listeners to this program do not know that Keyes has entered the area of horticulture. The company has adapted its conventional pulp-molding process to form peat moss and other fibers, enriched with plant nutrients, into a variety of products for flower and vegetable gardeners. These items, called KYS-KUBE. KYS POT, and KYS STRIP are being used by both home and commercial growers. Keyes Tree-Start growing blocks went on the market in 1974. It is an elongated peat moss block designed for what is called “plug culture” in planting trees. The Tree-Start offers the advantage of giving added protection to seedlings.

Industrial packaging, as distinct from food packaging, has not been neglected by Keyes. It now makes such packages for glassware, fluorescent light tubes, phonograph records, trays for manufacturers of glass punch cups, and a tray for single servings of table syrup. Because of its overseas expansion and the worldwide spread of the metric system, Keyes now makes many articles by metric specifications.

In 1975 the total of Keyes’ domestic net sales reached a new total of $78,617,000. In this country, Keyes was then employing 1,768 persons. In addition, was the income and the employment in Keyes’ foreign plants and affiliates. An interesting statistic is that Keyes’ sales per employee amounted to $44,667. The financial soundness of the company is also shown by the fact that its return on shareholder’s equity was 18.5%.

Keyes’ central offices are now in Montvale, New Jersey, but one has only to visit the huge plant and the spacious offices of the company in Waterville and Fairfield to realize that Keyes is still a Maine-based firm. The original small, brick building that housed the operation in 1914, now extends for almost a full mile on the street near the Waterville-Fairfield line. While the president and a number of other officers live out of the state, the Chairman of the Board, Robert Fairburn, is a resident of Waterville. He and Mrs. Fairburn purchased the estate on Upper Main Street, near the Fairfield line, historically known as the Mountain Farm, where the original buildings date from the early 19th century. The Fairburns have made extensive improvements to the property, making it one of Waterville’s most distinctive homes.

That Keyes is still Maine-based is shown by its stockholders. Three thousand Maine residents own more than 40% of the company’s stock. Of its more than 1,700 employees, a thousand are in its Maine mills, and in Waterville is the company’s major machine shop where its numerous dies are turned out.

Keyes Fibre Company means much to Waterville. Not only does it give employment to many men and women in this city and its surrounding towns, it is also Waterville’s largest taxpayer.

I have personally known four heads of the Keyes Fibre Company: Dr. George Averill, Wallace (Deke) Parsons, Ralph Cutting, and Robert Fairburn. Everyone of them has been devoted to public service and has spent much time in voluntary, unpaid work for non-profit organizations. That example set by the company heads has inspired many of its executives and employed staff to similar service. That could not have happened if public service were not a company policy. Right now in 1976, the list of Keyes persons in such service is very impressive.

Mr. Fairburn himself is Vice-Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Thomas College. Richard Hawkes is Vice-Chairman of the Mid-Maine Medical Center, a member of the Colby Institute for Management Committee, and of the Colby Baker Scholarship Committee. Richard Cyr is Chairman of the Waterville Area Community Chest and a member of the Waterville Planning Board. Oz Ellis is Chairman of the Kennebec Sanitary Treatment District and Engineering Technical Advisor of Mid-Maine Medical Center. Fred Johnson is President of the Maine Children’s Home. Robert Nickless is Vice-Chairman of the governing board of the Waterville Boys’ Club and Chairman of its Building Committee. Burleigh Barker is also on the Children’s Home board. Wayne McMullin is on the board of the Mansfield Clinic and on the Advisory Board of the Alcoholism Treatment Program. Donald Leach is on the Waterville Planning Board; Gordon Lyford on those of the YMCA and the Salvation Army; and Jerome DeLisle on the board of the Osteopathic Hospital. John Sutton is Chairman of the Belgrade Planning Board and is on the executive board of the North Kennebec Planning Commission.

It is risky for any commentator to give a list of names like that for fear of leaving some one out. So here and now I want to make my apologies to any Keyes employee engaged as an official in public service, whose name I may have inadvertently omitted. The Waterville area has indeed many reasons to be proud of its now world renowned manufacturer, the Keyes Fibre Company.

Once in a while on this program I like to remember that it is called Little Talks on Common Things. That is why I occasionally bring up such subjects as words, expressions, proverbs, and peculiarly local speech. Now I want to present a similar subject hitherto not discussed on this program – the entirely wrong impression we have of some common ideas and beliefs. To give the subject a name we might call it Misinformation.

We often talk about moth-eaten clothes. Moths don’t eat clothes. What does the damage are the larvae before they turn into moths. After the insects themselves develop, it is too late to spare the garment.

Did you know that royal purple originally was not purple but crimson? In ancient times, the best of it came from Tyre in Phoenicia, the land that gave us the beginnings of our alphabet. That crimson dye, called purple, was made from a tiny
Mediterranean shellfish.

Catgut has nothing to do with cats. It is made from the intestines of sheep.

Dandelion has no reference to dandies. It comes from the French dent de lion, lion’s tooth. Whale bone is not bone at all, but a horny substance along the whale’s upper jaw. India ink originated in China. German silver has no silver in it; it is made from copper, zinc and nickel. A camel’s-hair brush is made of squirrels’ tails. The Irish potato did not originate in Ireland, but on the slopes of the Andes in Peru. Sap does not rise in the spring. Sap flows horizontally, in and out from center to surface of the tree trunk, not up and down.

I am sorry to explode the myth about Cinderella’s glass slipper, but here goes. The oldest version of the story in the Germanic countries refers to a slipper of much more comfortable material, fur. When the story first appeared in French it referred to the slippers as vair, a French word for ermine. But vair, in speech, sounds much like verre, the word for glass. Soon French printers were designating the slippers verre, not vair.

There are interesting items of Biblical misinterpretation. Delilah did not cut Samson’s hair. The Bible story definitely says she called in a man to cut it. Three Wise Men are not mentioned in the gospels. The narrator says merely, “Wise men came from the east.” No mention of their number. Neither did they follow the star all the way. The story says, “They saw a star in the east.” But they traveled west to get to Jerusalem. From there to Bethlehem they did follow the star. How did the tradition develop that there were three of them? Because of their three named gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh. Statues put up in the early cathedrals depicted three Magi, each carrying one of the substances. It thereafter became easy to think of their number as three.

Now let us close this program with a bit of misinformation about way down upon the Swanee River.” There is no such river, and the one whose name Stephen Foster twisted into Swanee he never saw and would be ashamed of it if he had seen it. Foster composed the song “Old Folks at Home” in Baltimore. For it he needed a musically sounding name to designate the lyric’s river. He tried Tee-Dee, then Yazoo, and several others equally unsatisfactory. Then he examined an atlas and discovered running across the Georgia-Florida border a stream called the Suwanee. But it had three syllables and Foster’s rhythm demanded only two. So he changed the name to Swanee. As for the river itself, its water is the color of black coffee, and for most of its length it flows through dark, dismal swamp. Fortunately, Stephen Foster never saw it.

Year: 1976