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Start Free Trial NowTitle: An Empire Lost (12)
AN EMPIRE LOST (Continued} al Bank of Toledo stood between him and his father's money. Harrison Overmyer died in I960, leaving an estate valued at more than half a million dollars. Hie estate was administered by the bank, and Cora Belle Over myer was the main beneficiary. A year after his father’s death, Mr. Overmyer sued to overturn the will, and for two years after that, there was a running battle in various courts: Lucas County Probate Court, Wood County Common Pleas Court, the Ohio Supreme Court, appeals courts, and even the United States Supreme Court The case was a nasty one. There were insinuations that his mother was incompetent to handle her affairs. And at one point in the case, Mr. Overmyer’s attorney, Kelsey Bartlett (who later was disbarred) presented Mr. Overmyer’s objections to the court’s distribution of $62,000 to his mother over a two-year period. It was obvious, according to Mr. Bartlett’s plea, that Cora Belle Overmyer was spending the estate’s money “on something other than the necessities of life.” Mr. Overmyer was unsuccessful in overturning his father’s will, but two years after he began the court contest, his mother died, in 1963. He took control of the estate, and his career as a big-time warehouseman took off. He never forgave First National Bank for resisting his maneuver, and some think that that experience led to his founding of Progress National Bank a few years later. “It was like a bad dream,” one of First National’s directors said. “It’s the kind of thing you wish you'd never seen.” I F DAN Overmyer wasn’t a genius in the warehous ing industry, he wasn’t far from it He is given credit for revolutionizing the industry. When he was growing up in the business, the typical warehouse was just like his father’s, the Merchant’s and Manufacturers Warehouse, an old multistory structure on South Ontario Street And when be opened his own warehouse in 1947 on Smead Avenue (with $2,000 borrowed from his father, according to Dun’s Review), it too, was an old, multistory, inner-city building. And a firetrap to boot The building was heavily damaged in 1964, to the extent of nearly $500,000, in a spectacular fire that jumped from an abandoned foundry next door. Sometime in the 1950s, Mr. Overmyer began to see that the typical warehouse represented a bottleneck in the transportation and distribution system, and he devised a simpler, more efficient way to store goods — long, narrow, single-story structures with high ceilings, equipped with truck docks along the front and railroad sidings along the rear. This type of structure allowed for a smooth “flow-through” of goods. He began testing his ideas in the mid-1950s by building the first modem warehouse in Tampa, Fla. By 1966, he had created enough waves in the industry that Duns Review labeled him the “Wizard of the Warehouse” in a feature article. Accompanied by a picture showing Mr. Overmyer atop a huge forklift, the article called him “the world’s biggest custodian of other people’s goods.” It went on: “Crewcut, bespectacled and built like a linebacker, Overmyer is, at 41, the undisputed king of the warehousemen with 260 booked-solid buildings in 55 cities, a client roster (including GM) that runs into (Tan To Page 14) Support Teacher, j. inonito,. j 25C | *te Irfede Ufa* j »♦*•** )MtW« 1 UlktiwH iSMiSfPlNat ^Thousands Bet Numbers at kaiser Daily Known Gamblers Walk Toledo Streets - TW ^ FOR BRIBERY Among the communications businesses once owned by Mr. Overmyer were WDHO-TV (Chan- nel 24), and the To ledo Monitor, a business weekly that adopted a sen sational approach to tbe news in its final months. 12 TOUDO Mogoiine, FB. 23-MARCH 1.19S4
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Clipped 1 month ago
- Blade
- Toledo, Ohio
- Feb, 23 1986 - Page 206