Lifelong Labor: Brad Holloway reflects on 42 years at Thombert

If you’ve ever seen a combine slice through rows of corn or watched a forklift rearrange a warehouse, you probably weren’t looking at the system of wheels, tires and belts that keep the machinery chugging along tirelessly.

If you had examined the wheels and tires when the machines stopped, you probably would have noticed a serial number beginning with a “T.” The “T” stands for “Thombert, Inc.,” the 72-year-old manufacturing company in Newton that leads the market in polyurethane tires and wheels for forklift equipment and rubber-tracked agricultural mid rollers.

The products begin with the heavy metal castings around which machine operators pour a brightly colored or shiny black polyurethane elastomer called Dyalon to create the wheels and tires. Burly men and a few intrepid women in T-shirts, work pants and thick-treaded boots push the product through the process. They measure and correct for concentricity with robots that look like Disney-Pixar creations. They hang castings coated with Smurf-blue adhesive to dry on racks Millennials use for displaying doughnuts at parties. A few zip from task to task aboard Segways on steroids. Rock music from the genre’s golden age thumps from retro box speakers. Lathes trim excess polyurethane from wheels, and synthetic curlicue ribbons fly through the air.

The heat from curing ovens tuned to precise temperatures and overwhelming noise that reverberates from the worn concrete floor to the cacophonous ceiling might render this a young man’s job, but a handful of employees on Thombert’s production floor have watched the company grow for over four decades.

Brad Holloway’s gnarled knuckles tell the story of someone who has seen the evolution of ergonomic mechanization within the facility: Someone who packed thousands of boxes and loaded and unloaded hundreds of semi-trucks manually before increased mechanization lifted some of the manual burden. He’s Thombert’s longest-tenured production worker.

Forty-two years ago, Holloway stepped through Thombert’s doors for an initial interview. A few days later, Bob Smith, a partner in the company, called him back.

“I had been working in the restaurant business for six years, and he asked me why I was getting out of the restaurant business,” Holloway says. “I told him that I wanted to make more money.”

The answer must have satisfied Smith because a supervisor called Holloway in for a third interview. At 19 years old, Holloway began working at Thombert as a janitor.

“I was the youngest one here. Everybody else was around 40, so that was very intimidating but once I got to know the guys and stuff, I fit right in.”

He still spends weekends fishing with friends he has made throughout his time with the company.

Over the decades, Holloway moved through jobs in almost every aspect of Thombert’s production process. He’s poured Dyalon around castings. He’s shaved ribbons of polyurethane off rubber tires to even their sides. For 35 years, he filled orders to ship across the country.

Holloway can remember a Thombert before the trappings of technology breathed life into what had been only futuristic ideas: Wall-E-esque robotics and Star Trek like computers. In his early years, Holloway hopped into Bob Smith’s El Camino and drove the truck, stuck in adolescence ten blocks to the Newton Foundry tucked in behind the Maytag Company to pick up the castings.

“They came in barrels,” Holloway says. “They’d grab all the barrels with the forks and pick them up, and they’d throw them in the back of the El Camino. Of course, I’m going back, and the front end is like this,” he indicates the upward tilt of the vehicle’s nose with his hand and laughs.

After the forklift unloaded the barrels from the back of the El Camino, Holloway would stack the castings, one by one, by hand.

When he started working in shipping, he remembers that gaping holes were worn through some floors of freight boxes that semi-trucks crated up to the dock. Holloway would either cover the spots with sheets of a metal plate or navigate the forklift around the cavities.

“I was young. It didn’t bother me. It was just bizarre the way we did things,” laughs Holloway. “Nowadays, you wouldn’t be allowed to drive a semi like that.”

By the end of Holloway’s 35 years in the shipping department, he tapped away at a keyboard coordinating Thombert’s software with customers’ programs to create custom labels and order lists.

“The different software is constantly changing,” Holloway says. “These younger kids, you know, they were born with computers in their hands. That would be the biggest challenge, the computer work.”

Holloway has watched the plant meet the challenges that changing technology, stricter regulations and increased demand for the product created. Today, workers no longer mix and pour Dyalon by hand; A shot system injects the polyurethane blend housed in a whomping 40,000-pound tank. Five freight trucks— complete and with sturdy floors— now leave from the plant dock carrying neatly packed boxes of wheels and tires to Crown Equipment Corporation. Computers have revolutionized the shipping process.

At its core, however, Thombert remains the same company where Holloway immediately felt at home and formed fast friendships. It still provides steady jobs with benefits for individuals hoping to improve their work schedules and wages so that they can spend more time with their families.

“I think it’s a good example of how a company can stay in business as long as what it has and grow but still remain a good place to work,” Holloway says.

Thombert’s production line not only forges wheels and tires that outlast the others on the market, it molds dedicated, diligent workers committed to the company and to preserving the functionality of the “made in the U.S.A.” stamp. These individuals help keep the wheels turning at farms, warehouses and shipping companies across the nation.

Contact Phoebe Marie Brannock at 641-791-3121 or pbrannock@newtondailynews.com