Contributed by Benny Walker, Mirror Company

I had heard about this email and wanted to throw out a few items for consideration. 

First of all Mickey Binswanger was a joy to work with, and I looked up to him as a keen businessman and true gentleman.  Mickey and I were talking out in the Grenada plant one day and he related a story of the building of “the plant”.  He was driving down several days a week to check on construction of the new plant, they had machinery in storage around Grenada and were going to start moving equipment into the plant the next day.   He was getting ready for the trip back to Memphis that afternoon and had a thought “ we don’t have insurance on this building”.  He also related that every dollar the Binswanger family could scrape together was sunk into this new operation.    

As he left that afternoon for the drive back to Memphis he went by a local insurance agent purchased insurance on the building.  It burned to the ground that night February 5, 1947.    Mr. Binswanger said very simply and not to brag, “if I hadn’t stopped and purchased that insurance and the building burned down, there would not have been a “Binswanger” because it would have broken the company.  The plant today is about 8” higher than the original building because the concrete slab was so badly burned they poured the existing slab over the origina.  Again the man himself related this story to me personally. If any of you want a photo copy of the newspaper article I would be happy to send it to you.  The “huge glass plant” in the newspaper article reporting the fire was 30,000 sq. ft. the plant today is 220,000 sq. ft.

On a personal note I started July 22^nd  a little over 40 years ago at the unload end of the silverline making $1.89 per hour and a nickel of that was only because I was on the second shift.