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American Electric Company, St. Joseph, Mo., has weathered quite a few changes over the past 100 years. It has survived countless U.S. presidents, the Great Depression, and two World Wars, as well as several internal changes, ownership shifts and expansions into neighboring states. American founders Luther Reid and E.L. Platt took a risk when they opened the electrical supply products business in 1897, long before electricity was a household staple. The business partners took a more radical turn when they gave their employees stock ownership of the company. Platt remained a partner until he died in 1926. Reid, an Iowa native with no heirs, slowly sold the stock to the employees over the years. When the company started wholesaling, most of its business was with telephone companies, In time, however, most of these phone companies were taken over by the Bell Company. American then picked up the business of small lighting plants, but then they were bought up by large utilities. Fortunately there were contractors everywhere, and contractors became American's core business. In 1924, a young man named Russell Peck walked into the St. Joseph headquarters and asked Reid for a job. Reid told him he didn't need to hire anyone at the time, but Peck persisted, and told him he'd work for free for a week, to show Reid how much he wanted the job. Reid said he didn't feel right about doing that, so he told Peck he would start him at $7.50 a week. In 1928, American opened a location in Wichita, Kansas, and expanded to Colorado, Oklahoma, and other sections of Kansas and Missouri. In 1949, when Reid died, Peck took over as president. By this time the employees fully owned the company. Peck ran the company until 1968, and Barent Springstead was the president for the next two years. In 1971, Denton Matteson took over. Matteson served as chairman of NAED from 1983-84. In 1979, a subsidiary of Sun Oil, Philadelphia, Pa., purchased American Electric, as well as several other distributorships in other industries. American still operated as a separate business entity and Matteson remained president until 1984. Then, in 1987, a group of executives who had been in charge of the distribution arm of Sun Oil bought out the entire distribution group, which included American. The distributorship was owned by a limited partnership, which was known as SDI. The partnership continued until 1994, when Consolidated Electrical Distributors, Westlake Village, Ca., purchased American. Today, American is still based in St. Joseph, and is headed by Division Manager Louie DeLeon, who served as president from 1990 to 1994. There are 18 locations in Oklahoma, Missouri, Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska, which go under the name of American Electric Company. |
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