11/22/2010
HEADLINES
OBITUARY: Remembering When Imports Were Delivered At Night

Eric Marbe Cohn, 88, who started importing fasteners in 1953, died November 8, 2010.
 

Born with his twin Jay Cohn on 2-2-22, he started in the importing business with his father. After five years importing straw goods for men’s hats, he began importing fasteners.
 

He retired from his fulltime role as president of Allied International in 1986 when he sold his shares to Kay Corporation. In retirement he operated a telephone business and traded in fasteners.
 

Allied International, American Eagle International, Allied Stainless, Allied Surplus and Allied Specials were successor companies to Northern Screw Corporation and Northern Trading Company, which were founded in 1955.
 

Allied eventually was headquartered in Rye, NY, and grew to have facilities in Stamford, CT; Los Angeles; Tulsa; Denver; Charlotte and Port Newark.
 

In a 1995 presentation to the Western Association of Fastener Distributors, Cohn recalled that in 1955 Reynolds was importing fasteners from Holland; GKN and H.J. Kennedy from England; Norman Sackheim from Germany and Allied from Belgium.
 

“In the late ‘50s the – the domestic manufacturers who had been buying abroad to supplement their capacity – told the foreigners, ‘We don’t need you anymore’,” Cohn recalled. “That was a gross mistake because the foreigners liked our business. Importers got into it to fill this void.”
 

Because of pressure against foreign competition, “a lot of distributors wanted me to deliver at night so that domestic manufacturers wouldn’t see what they were doing.”
 

In the early days importing was mostly low-end fasteners “that the domestic manufacturers did not even want to make,” Cohn once said. He cited 1/4-20 x 1/2 license plate bolts with washer head and “any cheap nut” as an example.
 

Cohn blamed cutbacks under the Reagan Administration for imported fastener quality problems. “The crooks quickly saw that the government did not have the manpower to enforce its own regulations. In the 1950’s every tenth case of bolts was checked by a U.S. examiner,” Cohn recalled. “By the 1990s they checked some shipments at the pier when they could.”
 

He testified at a U.S. House of Representatives Ways & Means Committee hearing on tariffs in 1955 and 1975.
 

“A lot of interesting things came out of the hearings. For example, there was an Australian wood screw manufacturer who decided that if he came to the United States he could sell wood screws,” Cohn remembered. “So he announced that he was coming and the domestic industry met him on the dock, bought his plant an he went home.”
 

The National Fastener Distributors Association and the Western Association of Fastener Distributors honored him with life memberships.
 

Survivors include his wife of 45 years, Barbara Cohn; two sons, fastener distributor Andy Cohn of Duncan Bolt and Lee (Chip) Cameron; three stepdaughters, FIN co-publisher Ann Bisgyer Wolz, Marcia Bisgyer Avallone and Susan Bisgyer; and six grandchildren.
 

Messages to the family may be sent c/o Ann Bisgyer Wolz, GlobalFastenerNews.com, 2207 NE Broadway #300, Portland, OR 97232 USA. E-mail: ann@expoexperts.com or Andy Cohn, Duncan Bolt, 8535 Dice Rd., Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670. E-mail: acohn@DuncanBolt.com  ©2010 GlobalFastenerNews.com