Golden Triangle project, retirement of company owner celebrated in Howland

Staff report

HOWLAND

Friday was a day to celebrate the completion of road and waterline improvements to Mill and Superior streets as part of the Golden Triangle Improvement Project.

But it also was a day to recognize Flex-Strut, one of the fastest-growing businesses in the Golden Triangle, and its soon-to-retire president and general manager, Dale Gebhardt Sr.

Gebhardt thanked the Howland Township trustees, Trumbull County commissioners, county engineer and city of Warren for completing the $200,000 upgrades to the streets near Flex-Strut so quickly.

“These projects have moved at light speed,” Gebhardt said. An earlier project widened and paved Commonwealth Avenue.

Gary Shaffer, deputy county engineer, said the project provided much-needed paving and widening of Mill and Superior, as well as a larger waterline to better serve Flex-Strut, Thompson Mechanical and a new Fastenal plant.

Gebhardt also spoke earlier Friday at the Good Morning Trumbull County event at Kent State Trumbull, explaining that Flex-Strut manufactures metal framing.

The company is “not a high-tech, advanced manufacturing plant of the future, but what we are is probably what would be referred to as an old fashioned, tried and true manufacturer of the past and present,” he said.

“We employ 90 people and zero robots,” he said.

Gebhardt said he returned to the Warren area in 1973 after serving eight years in the Coast Guard. It took him one day to get hired as a structural-design engineer for Van Huffel Tube Corp., which employed 1,200 people in the Golden Triangle. Those jobs moved to Chicago in 1985.

He started Flex-Strut and hired some of the people who lost their jobs at Van Huffel.

“We’ve expanded five times, and our building is now over 115,000 square feet,” he said.

Gebhardt and his sales manager, Mark Marini, retire Jan. 1. “My two sons have become co-presidents of Flex-Strut Jan. 1, along with four of their co-workers and co-owners, who will provide the leadership for Flex-Strut for decades to come,” he said.