Roger Bourke White
Encyclopedia
Roger Bourke White a Cleveland businessman, co-founded Glastic Corporation with Richard C. "Dick" Newpher. Glastic, located in South Euclid, Ohio, was one of the first makers of fiberglass
Fiberglass
Glass fiber is a material consisting of numerous extremely fine fibers of glass.Glassmakers throughout history have experimented with glass fibers, but mass manufacture of glass fiber was only made possible with the invention of finer machine tooling...
insulators for the electrical industry, and now makes fiber optic cable.
Roger's work was part of Cleveland's post-war boom that swelled the city to 7th largest in the nation in the 1950s -- just behind Detroit. It also diversified the manufacturing base of the Northeast Ohio area, so that when Ohio's Steel Belt turned into the Rust Belt
Rust Belt
The Rust Belt is a term that gained currency in the 1980s as the informal description of an area straddling the Midwestern and Northeastern United States, in which local economies traditionally garnered an increased manufacturing sector to add jobs and corporate profits...
in the late 70s and early 80s, companies that Roger had founded and worked with cushioned the crunch and contributed to the area's reinvention as a diversified manufacturing area.
Roger was born in 1911 in Boundbrook, NJ to Joseph and Minnie White. He had two older sisters, Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White was an American photographer and documentary photographer. She is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet Industry, the first female war correspondent and the first female photographer for Henry Luce's Life magazine, where her...
and Ruth. Margaret Bourke-White is generally considered one of the great photojournalists of the 20th century.
Roger graduated from MIT in 1934.
After graduation he worked first for Union Carbide
Union Carbide
Union Carbide Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company. It currently employs more than 2,400 people. Union Carbide primarily produces chemicals and polymers that undergo one or more further conversions by customers before reaching consumers. Some are high-volume...
in New York City. Union Carbide asked him to move to Cleveland Ohio to sell welding and cutting products to the steel industry there. It was in Cleveland that he met and became a business partner with James T. Lewis at Lewis Welding.
During his early years in Cleveland he became part of the Gold Coasters, a small men's group. While there, he and his friend Dick Newpher built a sailing kayak
Kayak
A kayak is a small, relatively narrow, human-powered boat primarily designed to be manually propelled by means of a double blade paddle.The traditional kayak has a covered deck and one or more cockpits, each seating one paddler...
from a kit. They didn't like it. It was flimsy, so they worked it over, redesigned it. They took their new design to the Mentor Harbor Yachting Club, Mentor, Ohio and there sailed rings around the regular sailboats.
Roger also loved camping and flying airplanes. He would take days-long trips into the wild woodlands around the Great Lakes. He flew planes as small as Piper Cubs and as large as twin-engined Piper Apaches.
In 1944 he worked on the Manhattan Project
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada, that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army...
which produced the first atomic bomb, and in 1945 he married Anne "Mike" White, and they had two sons, Roger Bourke White Jr. and Jonathan Bourke "Toby" White, and six grandchildren.
In 1946, as part of America's transition from a wartime to a post-war economy, Roger moved from the steel industry to start a brand new industry: the high-tech fiberglass
Fiberglass
Glass fiber is a material consisting of numerous extremely fine fibers of glass.Glassmakers throughout history have experimented with glass fibers, but mass manufacture of glass fiber was only made possible with the invention of finer machine tooling...
electrical insulator industry. He started Glastic Corporation with Dick Newpher. He became a leader in this field, producing numerous technical conference papers, trade journal articles and a text book on reinforced plastic
Reinforced plastic
Reinforced plastics are a recent class of materials in which the low modulus and temperature limitations of plastics are overcome by reinforcing it with fibres of high modulus....
s. Roger's work produced smaller insulators, which reduced the size of electric motors, leading to the proliferation of small motors that now help us every day.
Roger was a member of the Cleveland Skating Club. He was a tenacious tennis player and clever curler. He skied and snorkeled, so vacation time took the family north and south. In the Bahamas he found a new sport in addition to snorkeling
Snorkeling
Snorkeling is the practice of swimming on or through a body of water while equipped with a diving mask, a shaped tube called a snorkel, and usually swimfins. In cooler waters, a wetsuit may also be worn...
: he would perch on the front of a small outboard board boat and chase sharks across sandy shallows. If they let him get close, he would shoot them with a bow and arrow.
Like his sister Margaret, Roger enjoyed photography. He also loved making home movies.
He sold out of Glastic in 1968. After that he became Chairman of Lauren Manufacturing Company, New Philadelphia, Ohio
New Philadelphia, Ohio
New Philadelphia is a city in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, United States, 71 miles south of Cleveland on the Tuscarawas River. It was first incorporated in 1808. Coal and clay are found in the vicinity...
, which made extruded rubber products for the auto industry, window sealers for skyscrapers, and other sealers for the Alaskan Pipeline. He founded another major manufacturing business, Pultrusions Corp., Aurora, Ohio which made pultruded fiberglass products. Their products were used for overhead racks on buses, sewage treatment paddles, tent poles and flag poles for bicycles.
He married Bonnie Crislip in 1976.
He retired from business in 1980, but stayed active helping people in other ways. He linked up with the American Go Association
American Go Association
The American Go Association was founded in 1935 to promote the board game of Go in the United States. Founded by chess master Edward Lasker and some friends at Chumley's restaurant in New York City, the AGA is one of the oldest Western Go associations...
of New York City, NY, and promoted the playing of Go in the United States. Go
Go (board game)
Go , is an ancient board game for two players that originated in China more than 2,000 years ago...
(in Korean Paduk
Paduk
Paduk may refer to:*Paduk or Baduk, Korean names for Go *Paduk, an alternate name for Padauk, the wood from several species of Pterocarpus...
or Baduk
Baduk
Baduk may refer to:* Baduk , a 1992 film by director Majid Majidi.* Baduk , the Korean name for the board game Go....
) is a chess-like game which is widely played in the Far East.