Saturday night, the Sharpe family and the R.I. Manufacturers Association will gather at the Squantum Club in East Providence to honor the man who spent nearly three decades at the helm of machine-tool colossus Brown & Sharpe.
Inspiration struck last summer as Dave Chenevert listened to a presentation about the history of Brown & Sharpe and the impact of the manufacturing company that was once one of Rhode Island's largest employers.
As executive director of the Rhode Island Manufacturers Association, Chenevert realized the organization he had recently taken over should establish an annual awards ceremony to recognize people and businesses that have shaped Rhode Island's rich manufacturing history. He wanted to honor modern contributions in a state where mill worker Samuel Slater and other entrepreneurs launched the American Industrial Revolution in the 1790s, making cotton yarn on water-powered machines.
Chenevert's choice to receive the inaugural Samuel Slater Life Time Achievement Award: Henry D. Sharpe Jr., the longtime president and third generation of the Sharpe family to run the manufacturing powerhouse. Giving "Hank" Sharpe the recognition he deserved was long overdue, Chenevert said last week.
He also recalled the response from one of Sharpe's sons when he mentioned the idea: "You'd better hurry up. He's 94."
Saturday night, the Sharpe family, Chenevert's association and Rhode Island manufacturers gathered at the Squantum Club in East Providence to honor the man who spent nearly three decades at the helm of a Rhode Island machine-tool colossus.
Chenevert praised the Sharpe family for their "extraordinary ingenuity" and generous philanthropy and said he could not think of a more fitting recipient of the first award.
Chenevert's inspiration came from Gerald M. Carbone, a former Providence Journal reporter and author of a recent book, "Brown & Sharpe and the Measure of American Industry: Making the Precision Machine Tools That Enabled Manufacturing, 1833-2001." As Carbone spoke in North Kingstown at Hexagon, the Swedish company that bought the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Co. and its trademarks in 2001, Chenevert began thinking about honoring Sharpe.
The family company dates to the 1830s. Beginning in the 1860s, it manufactured machine tools with precision, Carbone said. At its height, in 1943, the company employed 12,100 people.
But after Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 and ushered in tax cuts, an increase in military spending and other public-policy changes, Carbone said, the company had to evolve. Like so many U.S. manufacturers, it couldn't compete with machine-tool companies in Japan, Italy and Germany that began producing far cheaper goods.
In the 1980s, after Sharpe retired as president, the company pivoted.
Until just last year, Hexagon had continued making its coordinate measuring machines under the Brown & Sharpe name, Carbone said. The machines touch everything from automotive engine blocks to aluminum cans. They measure products as they're being made to be sure they're produced to standard specifications, Carbone said.
Sharpe took the helm in 1951, when he was 27, and he turned over the reins at the annual stockholders meeting in 1980. During his last full year in charge, 1979, company revenue hit an all-time high — in today's dollars, the equivalent of $800 million, Carbone said.
Although his father and grandfather before him had run the family business, Sharpe's ascension was not a foregone conclusion or a nepotism hire, Carbone said in an interview. His aunts, whose fortunes depended on the company, had already proven "they weren't going to let family ties" get in the way of running the company.
"They wouldn't have given Hank the job if they didn't have faith in the kid's abilities," Carbone said.
Sharpe remembers taking over the family business as "scary — just a big responsibility, a lot of things that I didn't know much about."
At his North Kingstown home last week, he and his wife of 64 years, Peggy Boyd Sharpe, 90, talked about the company and its impact on their lives.
Before his father chose him as successor, Sharpe thought he'd like to be a reporter. He had worked on his high school newspaper at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and had a summer job as a copy boy at The Providence Journal. (By the 1980s, he would be on the newspaper's board of directors.)
But, Carbone said, he also earned a degree in economics from Brown University, with awards in mathematics and languages. In 1944-45, he left Brown to fight in World War II, as a Navy ensign aboard a ship that would have been among those carrying an invasion force to the shores of Japan had the empire not surrendered. Instead, it was one of the first allied ships to enter Tokyo Harbor after the surrender.
Then he completed an abbreviated apprenticeship program at Brown & Sharpe. Its training programs were famously rigorous and prepared people to work at any machine-tool company in the nation, Carbone said.
As president, Sharpe inherited a warren of ramshackle buildings along Providence's Promenade Street. He risked investing in renovating those and figuring out how to reconfigure production lines so workers could produce better-quality, less-expensive automatic screw machines than their competitors, Carbone said. Then he built a 1-million-square-foot machine-tool plant in North Kingstown, Carbone said. Hexagon later bought that building, sold it and moved its Brown & Sharpe division into Quonset Business Park.
In hindsight, Carbone thinks Sharpe probably got a "bad rap" from people who thought he must have been anti-union, considering the company weathered a strike that lasted 17 years, which Carbone said is the longest in world history.
Brown & Sharpe employees went on strike in 1981, after Sharpe had retired as president but while he remained on the board of directors. The violent strike — including the bombing of a supervisor's van and the shooting of a striker — lasted four years on the picket line and then dragged on in court for 13 more.
Yet Carbone's research showed Sharpe resisted efforts by company executives to move production out of Rhode Island to save $5 million. Also, while he was still on the board, the company offered striking workers a pay raise of 33 percent over three years, which workers rejected because of other concerns.
Carbone said the Rhode Island Manufacturers Association award is well-deserved, and Sharpe's impact on Rhode Island manufacturing all grew from the faith his family placed in that young man.
"He rewarded that faith in him," Carbone said. "That faith in him paid dividends for many people in many ways — in Providence, Rhode Island and beyond. Because by running an extremely successful company for so long, he contributed to both the stockholders' dividends and to the social fabric of Rhode Island for so long — and to this day, because the Sharpe family is famous for philanthropy and it was the successful running of that business that made that philanthropy possible."
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