Greetings from South Kent School
First and foremost, we hope you and your family are safe and healthy during this uncertainty we are all facing. Family is the heartbeat of South Kent, and we want you to know we are thinking about all of our South Kent family members.
We would like to share with you how a few members are stepping up to help during COVID19.
Calvin Frost ’59
Most folks don’t realize that 50% of our business is manufacturing silicone coated release liners. This is high tech and very tricky selling into food, medical and transportation industries in a variety of applications. Because of this, we are defined as an “essential” business. While our salespeople are all working remotely, our plants continue to operate and are very busy. Our release liner business is especially busy.
Last week a customer called and had a rush order. Their other supplier couldn’t meet their needs and they wondered if we could help. We said we would try! We received the order last Thursday evening (Maundy Thursday) and started running at 3:00am Friday morning. We shipped part of the order Friday afternoon (Good Friday) for delivery on Monday. The balance was shipped Monday for delivery on Tuesday. This allowed our customer to make a pressure sensitive tape with our liner for another manufacturer. The application was for a tape that would be used on a “face shield” for protection in hospitals to protect nurses and doctors from infection from the Coronavirus. Our team was delighted and proud to make a contribution to prevent more infection!
What is interesting to me, is how complicated downstream manufacturing really is. We buy paper and chemistries to make release products. That’s our expertise. We sell to another company that makes the tape. That company sells to the face shield manufacturer who puts the pieces together. Not only is this high tech but imagine the “chain of custody” that everyone must follow!!!!!
I remember like it was yesterday when Tom Dingman asked me after 3 days in his “baby” chemistry class if I had understood anything. I admitted that I didn’t and he excused me from the class for the rest of the year. Excused is another word for “F”, failure! But eventually I figured it out and we now have a pretty neat business that utilizes chemistry in so many different ways. South Kent taught me resilience. It taught me that life isn’t always grades, A’s and B’s! It taught me more than anything that life isn’t a straight road and that the real lesson is how to deal with those curves and way bridges! It taught me that failure is a constant and that success, however you define it, only comes after years of hard work and focus!
Geoffrey Moore ’59
Geoffrey (Jeff) Moore (SKS ’59) reports that the Covid-19 crisis has brought him back from semi-retirement to work full-time on the Milken Institute’s response to the national emergency. All nine centers of the Institute around the world, plus the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, have redirected their efforts to mitigate the spread of Covid-19; expedite research into effective treatments; and help companies and their employees weather the current conditions. The Institute website, www.milkeninstitute.org, includes a Covid-19 Treatment and Vaccine Tracker, updated daily, that identifies more than 100 treatments and vaccine candidates in the clinical trials pipeline.
Weekly conference calls on the website feature reports from leading industry, government and public health officials; and Institute Chairman Mike Milken conducts a daily podcast conversation with top scientists and medical researchers. The podcasts are also available at www.mikemilken.com. “We’re also talking to people worldwide and around the clock matching small biopharmaceutical companies that have a drug candidate—but don’t have the capital to scale it up and market it—to philanthropies, financial firms, government agencies, academic centers and big pharma who have investable funds and scalable resources,” says Jeff.
“When the challenge of this unprecedented threat has been overcome—and I’m confident it will be, Mike and I plan to write a book about it. But having the phone ring every five minutes hasn’t been easy on Genie, who has her own book—a psychological thriller—in the works. She’s been understanding, but having two Type-A’s locked down in the same house creates its own psychological thrills.”
What amazing work – we’re looking forward to reading your book as well as Genie’s. This doesn’t need to be highlighted but I don’t want it to blend with Jeff’s message.
Peter Seltzer ’03
Click here to see what Peter is doing to help during this pandemic. Peter, your South Kent family is very proud.