Our Own Hall of Fame

CHARLES R. HOOK Sr.

FIRST JOB $2 A WEEK

Hook Made Armco No. 6 Among U. S. Steel Giants

THE DAYTON DAILY NEWS,  MARCH 9, 1961

BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH

Daily News Staff Writer

     When Charles R. Hook Sr. joined Middle town’s American Rolling Mills Co. in 1902,  it was two and he was 22.

     This year, at 80, Hook retired.  He left the infant company he helped bring up (the name was changed to the Armco Steel Corp. in 1948) firmly entrenched as the nation’s sixth largest steel producer.

     The son of a Cincinnati buggy maker who went broke in a panic before the turn of the center, young Charley Hook couldn’t afford to go to college.  (He later received 11 honorary degrees.)

     INSTEAD HE got his first job as a $2-a-week office boy in a tinplate plant, used his earnings to take a correspondence course in engineering.  Steel making fascinated him, so Hook took a laborer’s job in a mill in Gas City, Ind., rose to hot mill foreman and  then assistant superintendent.

     When George M. Verity, Armco’s founder, offered the promising youth $100 a week to become his night superintendent, the Middletown plant was having a hard time keeping up with its bills and payroll.  (Armco employed 325 when Hook went there, more than 40,000 when he left.

     As Hook rose through the ranks, Armco steadily expanded and streamlined its operations by developing products not common in the steel industry.  Armco developed a pure iron, created the continuous method of rolling steel, helped develop a better electric train.

     Early in his career, Hook persuaded union officials to allow a management representative to attend their meetings.  In turn management information was made available to the employes.  He wanted both sides to know what the other was thinking.

     “Take the mystery out of business,” Hook declared.  “Mystery breeds suspicion.”  He said this so often he became known as “Mystery” Hook.  But Armco has a long history of happy labor-management relations.

     In 1917 he brought the first group insurance plan to the steel industry.

     THE SIGNS on Hook’s office doors changed.  General superintendent…vice president…general manager.  In 1930 he was elected president.

     Hook married the boss’ daughter, Leah, and they had three children.  Active in the community, he gave a big camp site to the Boy Scouts, raised funds for the Republican party, was national chairman of Junior Achievement.

     In 1938 he was president of the National Association of Manufacturers and six years ago—lauding him as “an industrial statesman”—the NAM made him Industry’s Man of The Year.

     CHARLES R. HOOK was a good citizen of Middletown and of the United States.  Starting in 1938 he had an almost continuous record of government service.  He went abroad for President Roosevelt to study labor conditions.

     He went to England in World War II to help solve steel production problems. He headed a commission that studied servicemen’s pay and got them more.  He served with the Hoover commission on government reorganization.

     Hook was Armco president until 1948, then chairman of the board until Oct. 1959, when he stepped down two weeks after suffering a heart attack.

     Hook recovered and remained a director, but a month ago he retired from the board after 58 years of service to Armco because: “When a fellow reaches 80, he ought to have more time to devote to his own affairs.”

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