Issue link: http://psai.uberflip.com/i/1402657
PSAI Association Insight, July 7, 2021 I 15 Larry Cashwell of Readi-Lite Barricade in Raleigh, NC, now retired, relates the most common progression of unit choice during the period from the 1960s into the 2000s. He began in the business in 1965 initially as traffic control and service. "When I started in the restroom business, we had fiberglass units that we purchased from a variety of manufacturers. We used Virginia Fiberglass and Phil Carter units primarily." As his business grew over the years, he continued to purchase fiberglass until the early 1980s when plastic units became the new standard in the industry. As his fiberglass units aged, he replaced them with plastic restrooms. Larry's experiences in unit selection and purchase are shared by many other operators in our industry. Fiberglass manufacturers and their impact on the PSAI. Virginia Fiberglass Products and The Phil Carter System were two of the most popular fiberglass manufacturers of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and they were also companies that strongly supported the new Portable Sanitation Association (PSA) at its inception in 1971. Both firms have interesting stories that also reflect the nature of the portable restroom industry at that time. Virginia Fiberglass Products – Roanoke, Virginia Frank Van Balen incorporated his company on March 14, 1966, with an $8,000 initial capital investment. His initial goal was to manufacture fiberglass boats. (Un?)fortunately the fiberglass boat market did not work out as Frank had envisioned. He needed a new product line. How he found the portable restroom market is reflected in a fascinating account published in the Danville, Virginia newspaper The Bee on August 25, 1976: "Ten years ago, a former salesman from Buffalo, NY, by the name of Frank Van Balen was operating a molding shop in Roanoke, Virginia when a man from Richmond stopped by and asked whether Van Balen could make some outhouses. "I thought he was nutty and threw him out," Van Balen remembers. But the potential customer persisted, Van Balen made 100 units for him and stored the molds in the front of his shop." "Then a man from Hagerstown spied the molds … "It suddenly dawned on me there was a market there. I loaded an outhouse on a pickup truck and started calling on dealers." At the time the article was written in 1976, Virginia Fiberglass estimated that they had sold 25,000 to 30,000 fiberglass units since its inception 10 years earlier. In a previous article in The Bee from March 14, 1973, Van Balen shared several reasons the portable restroom industry had expanded. • Contractors saved time in keeping em- ployees on the jobsite and not having to drive or to walk to local restroom facility. • Federal regulations favored portable sanitation with new laws such as forbidding trains to dispose of waste on the tracks. At the time of the article, Virginia Fiberglass had just signed a contract with Seaboard Coastline Railroad to provide units to be secured on their train cars for general use. • International demand was also high for these first "mass produced portable restrooms." Van Balen reported that shipments to Germany had already been made and inquiries had been received from operators in Italy, Israel, Spain, and Belgium. • Special event promoters were rapidly discovering the convenience and the cleanliness of having portable restrooms on site. Van Balen reported that his company had, "…provided units at the 1972 political convention in Miami Beach. And 256 were shipped to Florida for the crowds at the most recent Apollo liftoff." As a point of reference regarding the growth of the portable restroom industry from the 1960s to the time this article written in 1973: "From sales of $125,000 in 1968, business has (continued on page 17) Fiberglass Units – The Bridge Between Wood and Plastic (continued from page 13) Frank Van Balen