The One Who Held It Together
Thirty-six years of a company are easy to measure in parts shipped. Harder to measure is the person who kept it standing.
You can measure thirty-six years of a company in parts shipped, in customers kept, in the steady hum of a floor that opened every morning and closed every night. What you cannot measure is the person who made all of it hold its shape.
A husband and wife ran Alron Corporation. He was President; Jane was Vice President. But those two titles undersell what actually happened inside that building, which was that two people turned a marriage into an enterprise, and an enterprise into a living for everyone who walked through the door. He had the trade. She had the whole rest of it — and the rest of it, it turns out, is most of it.
He was President. She was the reason there was a company to be President of.
Jane was the one who could see the whole board at once: the order that had not shipped, the supplier who had not called back, the check that had to clear, the new hire who needed watching, the customer who needed reassuring. She held a hundred threads at a time and never once let the company feel how many there were. That is a particular kind of genius — the kind that leaves no monument, because its entire purpose is to make sure that nothing ever breaks.
When the doors closed in 2013, after thirty-six years, what was left behind was not only a record of certified welding and precision machining. It was the quieter proof that someone had stood at the center of the whole thing the entire time, holding everything together so that the work could simply be about the work.
This page is for her: the manager of everything — and the one who held it all together.