Old Rope Works Uncoils to Renew Ties With History

For more than a century, Tubbs Cordage Co. was as durable as the product it manufactured--rope with the strength to secure crab pots in the swift-flowing Bering Sea and moor the biggest barges in the worst storms.

The company, which was founded in San Francisco and later moved to Orange, withstood wars, earthquake, the Depression and the drastic changes brought about by industrialization and the invention of synthetics.

Not even Tubbs, though, could weather the slow creep in liability insurance costs or the 1980s onslaught of cheaply made imports from the Far East. In April, 1986, 135 years of history went out of business.

But not for long. Five months later, the company’s one-time marketing vice president reached deep into his bank account, hired 25 laid-off Tubbs employees, moved back into his former office and salvaged the firm. Today, Tubbs is back, turning out rope and making money again.

“Tubbs was very much a part of this community,” said Robert R. Dunne, 56, the affable Irishman who is now company president. “I just felt I wanted to keep it alive.

“I know this sounds a little like Ollie North, but I didn’t want to be beat up by imports and have people out of work.”

Dunne’s zealis evident and extends beyond the “couple hundred thousand dollars” he spent to resurrect the rope works. Every spool of its cordage bears a flag-motif sticker that says, “Made With Pride in America.” And, Dunne said, “We sincerely mean it.”

Got Same Employees

Company officials went out of their way to put the same employees laid off months earlier back on the payroll again. “When we reopened, they all came back,” he said. “They were all on unemployment a year ago. Now they’re back to work and paying taxes.”

Still, when Tubbs went out of business in 1986, it was by a unanimous vote of its board of directors. So why does Dunne think he can succeed where others failed?

“My wife asks me that a lot,” is Dunne’s first answer. His second is more to the point and involves his reasons for leaving semiretirement and the way he plans to run Tubbs, which has been resurrected under the name Tubbs Rope Works Inc.

For starters, Dunne said:”You can only play so much golf and read so many books.”

The new Tubbs is a much smaller incarnation of its old self. At its height, Tubbs Cordage Co. had 500 employees working at warehouses and manufacturing plants across the country and posted $33 million in annual sales.

Oddity in County

Today, its only facility is in Orange, housed in a building circa 1920. With its clattering, 70-year-old machines and workers who actually sweat for a living, Tubbs Rope Works is an oddity in Orange County’s high-tech business landscape.

“We’re scaled down,” he said. “We probably have more emphasis on marketing. They (Tubbs Cordage)were heavily oriented to a manufacturing philosophy. We’re very customer oriented.”

The product has changed radically since Alfred and Hiram Tubbs founded their first firm in Gold Rush-era San Francisco and manufactured what the company said was the first rope west of New England in 1856.

Tubbs ropes--then made of imported Manila hemp--helped build the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams and were used in the safety net that saved lives and countless dropped tools during construction of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Today, though, the rope is made of synthetics such as polypropylene. Instead of combing natural fibers to be twisted into yarn, Tubbs machines now melt tons of polypropylene pellets, then form them into yarn that is twisted into rope strands.

Department of Commerce officials said using synthetics cut out much of the early foreign competition, which flourished in the cordage industry because all hemp used in the making of rope had to be imported.

It was during the 1960s and 1970s that the company reached its peak, Dunne said, adding a mill that spun synthetic carpet yarn and achieving its top sales.

But foreign competition struck again, aided, Dunne said, by a loophole in tariff law that allows the duty-free import of inexpensive Korean rope.

Tubbs Cordage “had some rather substantial losses the last couple of years,” Dunne said.

“They decided to liquidate because of the competition from Korea.”

Dunne Took Over

And that is when Dunne, a former mayor and city councilman from Villa Park, stepped in. Dunne had spent 30 years with Corning Glass Works before joining the original Tubbs in 1981 as vice president of marketing. He was in semiretirement when the firm went out of business.

Today, the company makes about 30 types of rope. There is cheap, multicolored “junk” rope used to moor barges on the Mississippi. There is “California truck” rope, which is used by flatbed truck operators and has an orange stripe woven through it so Highway Patrol officers can verify that it meets state regulations.

But as important as the variety of rope is its market. Tubbs will make an estimated $2 million to $3 million in sales in its first fiscal year and will show a “small” profit, Dunne said.

“This is not a growth industry,” Dunne said. “There aren’t any revolutionary new uses for rope. But it’s a stable commodity.”