He was an engineer, a master craftsman, a police commissioner, a fire commissioner, a mayor in his home town and a bright, shining light for educating young people on the technical aspects of plastics.

            Albert Spaak was born to immigrant parents in Patterson, New Jerseyin 1921 the yearafter his parents arrived from Holland.  They were looking for a new beginning now that World War I was over and the Treaty of Versailles had been signed months earlier.  In America, the Spaaks found a country prepared to celebrate the Roaring Twenties.  The auto industry was leading an industrial boom and amenities like electricity and a telephone in the home were becoming popular. 

            In America the Spaaks’ found a comfortable life, Albert’s father becoming a tailor and his mother a dressmaker, both of them successfully involved in trades that were in great demand at the time, especially in the New York metropolitan area.  Albert attended a private religious school and he was raised in the strict religious tenets of his parents.  In fact, Albert often notes that as a young boy, his father constantly encouraged him to get a trade when he grew up.  Albert understood that to mean, his father wanted him to grow up and become a minister of the church and thus was the basis for his religious schooling.

            Albert instead decided on technical endeavors and was fortunate enough to befriend someone that would offer encouragement and help in obtaining the background he needed to succeed.  His mentor was Edmund Shore, a technical high school teacher, who had been chief engineer at American Bridge Company, a firm known for designing and building bridges, for sure, but skyscrapers as well.  The company built the Chrysler Building in New York, which at the time, was the tallest building in the world.

            American Bridge was leading a change on the American landscape at the time and through his mentor, Albert became very interested in the modern American city and the new challenges it presented to designers, architects and engineers.  As a young man he watched the construction of the Holland Tunnel and as a teenager he witnessed construction of the Lincoln Tunnel and the Empire State Building, all key factors that would change the architecture and character of New York City and which had a profound impact on Albert’s views of a modern world.  These events would provide valuable insight for him much later in his career.

            Upon graduating from high school in 1938, Albert went looking for a job as a draftsman.  He recalls walking the streets over a period of three months, visiting many companies whose engineering departments had been furloughed or moved.  “Nobody was building any buildings,” he recalls.  The one vocation that Albert had worked so hard to attain, even dreamed of becoming a part, was nowhere to be found.

            After several months, Albert met a man who was working for Bright Star Battery Co., one of the early injection molders in New Jersey.  He tipped Albert that a company called DeMattia, a family owned machine shop and mold maker, was looking for a draftsman.  Albert applied for the job and got it, and within a short period of time found himself involved in developing some of the early U.S.-built injection molding machines.  Albert was subsequently named chief engineer of the company.

            “When I got over there in 1938, the injection molding machine that we knew about was the Isoma,” recalls Albert.  “Columbia Protective Sight molded eyeglass frames on several of the German-built presses.  But they were breaking down and the company asked DeMattia to help fix them.

            “The basic design of the Isoma resembles today’s all-electric injection presses.  The injection unit consisted of a nut-and-bolt mechanism.  An electric motor turned the nut, which spun the wormgear, or the bolt, and pushed the injection ram forward.  DeMattia saw a business opportunity making plastic machines for Bright Star Battery, who was already a customer.

            “I was asked to redesign the machines and Bright Star bought several of them.  The DeMattia presses used a toggle clamp.  On the injection side, a series of large springs were used to finish the injection.  Although this was an improvement, they still had problems.  The nut and wormgear would wear out.”

            The basic problem, as Albert recalls, “We never felt that machine would run 24-hours a day, seven days a week.  We figured five hours during the day sometimes.  But then the customers would say, ‘Gee, business is picking up tremendously, let’s run em ‘round the clock!’  The machines couldn’t take that.”

            DeMattia also developed another pre-World War II machine, a vertical press that brought the mold halves together via a series of levers.  The customer that bought this machine made a string of rosary beads, insert molding each one, then moving on to the next bead.

            Other early customers for these machines were Lionel Manufacturing Co., which was beginning to replace die-cast components on its electric toy trains and Earl Tupper, founder of Tupperware, also purchased a the big vertical machine.  “At the time,” recalls Albert, “DeMattia was competing against some early injection molding machine manufacturers like Watson Stillman, Reed-Prentice and HPM. 

            As the U.S. became involved in World War II, so did DeMattia and the company switched to fulltime war production.  And while all of this was going on, Albert met his wife Irene and they married, settling down in Little Falls, New Jersey.  Initially, Albert was able to avoid being drafted because of his position at DeMattia but when President Roosevelt expanded the draft, Albert received orders to report to the Navy Shakedown Task Force.  “It sounds exotic,” chuckles Albert, “but we spent our days painting the decks of ships in Bermuda.  I complained that I should be using my engineering skills in a Navy machine shop.  They threw me off the ship and gave me a new assignment on the island, placing me in charge of the barracks.  I was later given the same job at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” 

            Albert’s efforts in obtaining a more responsible and appropriate assignment finally paid off and he eventually got into the military’s V-12 officer candidate program and after the war was over he was discharged as a lieutenant. 

            “I promptly returned to my job at DeMattia and as we switched back to commercial activities from war time manufacturing, we began making hydraulic clamp presses.  I also designed an early scrap grinder, which we dubbed the ‘nibbler,’ and which was used to chop up lumps of injection drool and grind sprues.  To handle film scrap, DeMattia built one of the first grinders with knives set at an angle.”

            Following the war, Albert also returned to Newark College of Engineering (NJIT) where he enrolled in night courses prior to the war.  Now, after EIGHT years of taking night courses, he had a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering (BSME).

            At about this time, Albert began working, with DeMattia’s permission, as a consultant at Mastro Industries, a DeMattia customer.  He typically worked at Mastro on Saturday’s and quickly gained enormous respect for owner Mario Maccaferri, who was trained in his native Italy as a classical guitarist.  His New York-based company made toy musical instruments, saxophones, guitars and even the ukulele playing by television star Arthur Godfrey.  “I left DeMattia for a job as chief engineer at Mastro in 1948 and worked there for two years full time.  Maccaferri was a genius,” Albert recalls.

            “We developed new heating cylinders for injection presses and came up with ways to boost the speed of injection presses.  If a new machine came out and it produced a product 10 percent faster, we’d get rid of the old machine and put the new machine in, no questions asked.

            “Another big market for us was plastic wall tile.  I remember operators working quickly to remove the tile, molded eight at a time, from the injection press and using a punch press to remove the gates.  We’d grind up the scrap and molded new tiles, and instruments, in a marbleized rosewood color.

            “I liked working for Maccaferri.  Things would get done there.”

            Mastro also made cane reeds for instruments and while working for the company Albert had a chance to meet several great musicians, including Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey.

            By 1950 it was time to move on to new challenges and when offered a job with the new Polymer Chemicals Division on W.R. Grace & Co., Albert took the job.  Polymer Chemicals was selling high density polyethylene (HDPE) and Albert’s background in injection molding was perfect for a new company attempting to sell new products into the market.  “My machinery and processing expertise helped in working with customers and that helped get me promoted to the position of Director of Technical Service and Application Development in charge of a staff of 75 engineers and technicians.

            “We would often modify existing equipment at a customer plant and because I could speak the ‘molder’s’ language, they trusted me and my team in that we could help them improve their production and quality.

            One example of was "valve gating," which enabled the molding of thin-wall parts and large, deep draw parts with fast cycle times.  I used my own designs, combined with a patent purchased from injection molder Columbus Plastic Products Inc., to mold parts that were unheard of at the time, including large waste bins, which had not been injection molded previously.”

            Albert was also mindful of the need to promote plastics to consumers. His team at Grace led a promotional program that placed an injection molding machine in the basement of Macy’s Department Store in New York City.  “We placed a fully automatic DeMattia press in the basement of the store and molded valve-gated mixing bowls in several colors, selling them literally off the press at 39 cents each.  It was such a hit that we had lines of women who wanted to buy this hot item,” Albert recalls.

            Albert also purchased a Krauss-Maffei press with 1,500 tons of clamping force for the Grace laboratory.  This was an exceptionally large machine in its day and at the 1958 National Plastics Exposition (NPE), we shuttled visitors from the show to the lab all week to demonstrate this machine and what we could do with our plastic products.”

            According to Albert, Grace played a key role in the first on-sight bottle blow molding at Melville Dairy in Burlington, N.C.  “At Grace, we built our own extrusion blow molding machine.  In the lab, our engineers developed special heads to obtain a uniform parison for half-gallon bottles.  We put a test machine in at Melville Dairy where an operator stamped out flash and then sent the bottles on to the milk filling area.  We were making bottles like crazy.  We had an accumulator, because the guy stamping out the flash was slower than the machine.  And they were coming out of the accumulator all over the floor.

            “The dairy loaded the extra bottles in a truck and began selling them to Farmer’s Dairy in Winston-Salem, N.C.  I paid a visit to Farmer’s Dairy and tried to sell them a special blow molding machine.  While the owner seemed interested, nothing happened until about one month later when federal liquor control agents visited my office in New Jersey.

            “This guy says to me, ‘Those bottles weren’t going up to Winston-Salem.  They were going to High Point, N.C. where they were being filled with moonshine!’  I laughed at the whole idea of it, but it seems that the opaque HDPE bottles concealed the contents of the booze better than glass containers, an underground innovation not reported in the trade press at the time.”

            Albert enjoyed his years with W.R. Grace and has fond memories, particularly of his personal accomplishments.  But that changed in 1966 when Grace sold its plastics resins business to Allied Chemical Corp., later Allied-Signal.  The mentality was much different at Allied-Signal, which prior to the acquisition was selling basic chemicals like sulfuric acid.  Plastics was a new business for the company and Albert found himself bogged down into company politics that wore thin with him over time.  In 1970 he elected to take early retirement, but he knew he wasn’t ready to retire per se, he was only 49 years old, but he just needed to get out of the Allied situation.

            Timing is everything and just as Albert retired from Allied he learned about a position as Executive Director at the Plastics Institute of America (PIA), then located at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.  He knew the Stevens Institute and he liked it there.  “This thing with PIA came along, and I wasn’t feeling too well.  I was shook up.  At age 49 I was a wreck, “Albert recalls. 

            “I took the job as Executive Director in 1970 and I figured I would be there a year or so.  I ended up staying for 20 years.  I stayed because I enjoyed it so much,” Albert said.

            Working with a small staff, Albert began to encourage and expand PIA technical seminars focusing on education of plastics.  When he retired from the PIA in 1990, he donated his retirement bonus back to the PIA with the contribution going toward the Plastics Pioneers Education Fund.

            There were other things going on in Albert’s life at this time as well.  He was now energized and became active in the International Executive Service Corps, a non-profit organization that uses private sector volunteers to assist in the economic growth of countries around the world.  Albert and his wife Irene went to Mauritius as part of a IESC program and where they turned an old sugar mill into a recycling plant capable of handling plastic waste that was littering the island nation.  Al and Irene visited many other developing countries as well. 

            At home, Albert became mayor of Little Falls, NJ from 1993 to 1994.  He had been active in local politics for forty years on the local planning board and served as police commissioner, fire commissioner and deputy mayor.

            Albert continues to think of young people and their careers in the plastics industry.  “Young people have to learn to be persistent,” he advises.  “It’s so hard to get things started.  In life, you come up with an idea, especially in plastics, and often nothing happens until ten years later.  It takes 10 years! 

            For Albert Spaak, it took a lifetime, but he donated a lifetime of gifts to the plastics industry.  From his subtle beginnings as a draftsman, to his support and enthusiasm in creating the Education Fund of the Plastics Pioneers Association, Albert gave generously and will be remembered often, not just by his colleagues, but by young men and women who share the scholarship benefits he created while they attend college in plastics related careers.