Having just watched the business his father started celebrate 90 years in the finishing industry, Ralph Capalbo Jr. is more than happy to enjoy his retirement.
“I’ve tried to run a successful business for the last 57 years, so now I am glad that the boys are in there now,” says Capalbo, who turned the business over to his sons, Nick and Chris.
“It’s making life a lot easier,” he says. “Obviously, I’m not involved in the day-to-day or what have you anymore, but I’ll stop and help when they have a special project for me.”
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Capalbo, the latest to be featured in FinishingAndCoating.com’s Legends series, joined his father’s business in 1965 fresh out of college, although he says he had been working there much sooner.
“Probably when I was 12 or 13 or so, coming in on weekends and doing things when I shouldn’t have probably,” he says.
Based in Worcester, Massachusetts, New Method was founded by Ralph Sr. in 1931 in the basement of his parent’s home. Capalbo says his father was very progressive when it came to automating the facility, and Ralph Sr. purchased New Method’s first fully-automated, return-type rack cadmium plating line just in the mid-1940s. That was the beginning of what is now four operating automated plating lines.
When Ralph Jr. left college, he says he knew he wanted to work in the family business.
“I always enjoyed working with my hands and enjoyed the machinery, the mechanics, the chemistry,” he says. “I definitely was a hands-on person. When I was young, I could never see myself at a desk at a financial bank or something. It wasn’t going to work.”
New Method offers many plating processes, including cadmium, which not many shops offer these days. Capalbo admits it is harder to run a plating operation these days because of the more stringent government regulations.
“We’ve upgraded to Microfiltration Industrial Wastewater Treatment because the limits have gotten lower and lower and lower in cadmium as far as discharge,” he says. “You’re under the microscope all the time, it seems. You get done fighting one battle, and another one shows up.”
But Capalbo is enjoying his time in retirement, without the worries that come with owning a plating facility.
“I’ve always enjoyed the challenges of running the shop,” he says. “Yes, I would come home grumbling to my poor wife, but I enjoyed my whole career. I enjoyed it very much.”
