After this year’s BCMC, it’s worth considering how far our industry has progressed since we first went to a trade show. The year was 1958, and the National Association of Home Builders Show (NAHB now IBS) was the only way to reach a national audience. Fortunately, we had one tenacious man, Cal Jureit, to show the world the marvel of his technology. And this first trade show made all the difference.
Jureit had to go on a tear just to get to the Show, optimizing his Gang-Nail design and putting together a complete business in the two preceding years. That included building machine tools, buying stamping presses, and developing truss engineering. At that point, he really hadn’t come up with an economical way to ship his truss plates, or to fabricate trusses. But he had the foresight and confidence in his invention to make the trip, even though when he left for the Show he had only sold $25,000 worth of truss plates.
Jureit had no hesitation about leaving the warmth of Miami for a frost-bitten Chicago in January – he had previously worked two years in Toledo, Ohio. Yet he had to take a full day to get there, flying in a propeller plane (Pan Am flew the first commercial jet flight later that year) and pay about $150, or $1500 in today’s money, for the flight. And likely he took the train to get downtown to the Conrad Hilton Hotel and register at the Show headquarters. From there, he had to take a cab or mount the elevated “L” train platform to get to one of several Show hotels, such as the Summit House shown here. [For all images, See PDF or View in Full Issue.]
From there, Jureit would have to find one of the Show annexes, which were each one mile down the L train from the main exhibit floor at the Hilton. He’d then set up his small booth at one of two vintage 1920’s venues: the ballroom of the Summit House Hotel or on the floor of the Black Hawk’s hockey area. Jureit gambled that a few of the 20,000 attendees would find him. After all, it would be easy to miss his small booth in this, the largest trade show in the country, where he’d be dwarfed by the huge displays of U.S. Steel, GE, Kitchen Aid, International Harvester, and the like.
Fortunately, in the years leading up to the Show, builders across the country had begun experimenting with 2x4 trusses in place of rafter framing, spurred on by research at Purdue, U. of Illinois, Michigan State, Virginia Tech, and others. Even entire hip systems resembling today’s had been proven effective when subjected to long-term full scale load tests. Of course, all of these used glued and nailed plywood gussets. One of these builders in South Bend, Indiana, cited in American Builder magazine, used this method. Not specified was whether this approach was practical in the winter months on a muddy jobsite. Thus, the building industry was primed for a much improved, more practical truss technology.
And Cal Jureit delivered it on January 19–23, 1958, in Chicago, even attracting builders from overseas. Jureit described the experience as taking “a tiger by the tail” and this inspired him to spread his technology far and wide, and inadvertently create a raft of competitors. His timing was perhaps perfect, but since then, so has been the timing of the many innovators who come to BCMC, a show aimed specifically to our industry. And consider how easy it is to get to see their innovations today, traveling on jet airplanes or on an Interstate Highway system, both of which didn’t exist in 1958. And walking leisurely to the Show over a bridge from your hotel and seeing everything in a single space in a modern convention center — we’ve certainly come a long way.