Part IThe Story
Sometime during the First World War (the record does not give the day, and the missing day will turn out to be characteristic) a young toolmaker from Michigan walked into an Army recruiting office to enlist in the Air Service, and Henry Ford walked in with him. Ford had not come to see him off. According to an account by the refrigeration engineer Andy Pearson, the most famous manufacturer in the world had come to persuade the United States Army that Ray Herrick was more use to the country if he stayed at Highland Park. Ford won the argument, and Herrick stayed until the war ended.
The scene is small and it carries most of what follows. One man wanted to go up, toward the visible, glamorous edge of the century, where the machines were new and the pilots became famous. Another man had decided that his value lay underneath, in the plant, on the line, inside a system that worked because nobody looking at the finished product ever had to think about him. Highland Park was where Ford was testing the assembly lines that would remake industrial civilization, and Herrick was, in Pearson's phrase, "the troubleshooter" on those lines. A troubleshooter is the person who shows up when something is wrong, fixes it, and leaves before the credit arrives. Ford knew exactly what he had. He walked to a recruiting office to keep it.
Herrick never flew. He spent the rest of his working life building things that were sealed inside other things. The business he founded made hermetic compressors, the welded steel canisters at the bottom of refrigerators and the backs of window air conditioners, which are designed so that no one ever needs to open them. The foundation he endowed gave away more than half a billion dollars, by its own count, mostly without signing its name. The laboratory he paid for at Purdue became so famous in the world of heating and cooling that a Purdue professor once said, of the refrigeration industries of Japan and China, that "Herrick Laboratories is Purdue." Almost none of the engineers who say "Herrick Labs" could tell you who Herrick was.
Fifty-odd years after the recruiting office, his grandson Todd came home from Vietnam, where he had flown Chinook helicopters, and joined the family company. Thirty-seven years after that, the company's board removed Todd as chairman by resolution on a Wednesday in February. The Herricks sued. The company sued them back. The man who had been kept on the ground had built something airtight, and the question the family spent 2007 fighting over was what happens to a sealed system when the world outside it changes temperature.
By the Numbers
The Herrick Inheritance
10Companies Herrick worked for between 1911 and 1931 before founding his own
$284,000Hillsdale Machine & Tool sales by 1933, up from $26,000 in its first year
10MCompressors a year from Tecumseh plants in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Canada by 1960
$300,000Grant Herrick promised Purdue for a laboratory, after hearing the pitch in 1953
$500M+Donated by the Herrick Foundation since 1949, mostly anonymously
83,000 sq ftCurrent footprint of the Ray W. Herrick Laboratories at Purdue
$220MTecumseh Products' loss in 2005, the year before the family lost control
Ten Employers in Twenty Years
The facts of the early life are spare. Ray Wesley Herrick was born in 1890 in Muskegon, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, a sawmill town by origin. The foundation that bears his name says only that he was "raised in rural Michigan." A Toledo press operator who worked for his company in the 1950s remembered him explaining a habit of his by saying "when he was growing up they were poor." He trained as a toolmaker, which in the second decade of the twentieth century was something close to an aristocracy of the hands. Toolmakers built the dies, jigs, and fixtures that every other machine depended on. They worked to thousandths of an inch, and a good one could walk into any shop in Detroit and find work by the afternoon.
Herrick did that, and he kept doing it. A local historian in Holland, Michigan, writing in 2023, described him as "a restless employee": between 1911 and 1931, Herrick worked for ten different companies. The list as it survives includes Packard and then Ford, where he became, in Pearson's telling, "a key member of Henry Ford's production supervisors." Accounts of the 1920s describe a reputation that moved faster than he did. Business histories of Tecumseh Products agree that he was "a friend and adviser" to Ford, Harvey Firestone, and Thomas Edison. That is a striking set of friends for a toolmaker who would not run his own company until his forties, and the sources say nothing about what the friendships consisted of. Were there dinners? Shop-floor consultations? The man who would later prefer his gifts unsigned left very little evidence about whom he was close to.
The restlessness deserves a second look, because it ended so completely. Ten employers in twenty years is roughly one every two years, and then, starting around 1930, one enterprise for the remaining four decades of his life. Two readings are available. In the first, the restless period was a search: a man testing shops the way he would test a die, looking for the place where his particular competence could not be wasted. In the second, the restlessness never left him and was redirected into constant tinkering inside his own walls: new product lines, new acquisitions, a stamping plant in Toledo, a cooler company in Ohio, small engines, chainsaws, a laboratory in a horse barn in Indiana. I lean toward the second reading. Men who leave ten jobs in twenty years rarely become contented people. They become people who own the shop.
In 1928, by the account preserved in the corporate histories, Herrick was asked to help rescue the struggling Alamo Engine Company in Hillsdale, a small town in the southern tier of Michigan counties near the Indiana and Ohio lines. He served there as factory manager and later as director of sales and production, and he stayed until 1933. That date matters. The company that would become Tecumseh Products was incorporated in 1930, which means that for roughly three years Ray Herrick ran a failing company by day while building a competitor on the side. At least one well-informed source says the competitor was "also handling orders that Alamo could not fill."
A Livery Stable on Railroad Street
The sources cannot agree on when the business began, and the disagreement tells you something.
The corporate histories say Hillsdale Machine & Tool Company was incorporated in 1930. The Ann Arbor Observer, in a long 2009 piece called "Family Feud," also says 1930. Wikipedia says 1931, places the enterprise in "a livery stable on Railroad Street in Hillsdale," and lists five founders: Charles Floyd Sage, Ray W. Herrick, Olin Freed, Marshall Davis, and a man the entry calls Wilbut Groauman, a spelling that looks like a transcription error preserved by a century of copying. An exhibit at the University of Toledo gives the founding year as 1932 in one paragraph and 1931 in the next. A company that would eventually report $1.91 billion in sales and employ 22,000 people does not have a settled birthday. No one wrote it down carefully, because in a livery stable during the Depression no one expected anyone to ask.
The livery stable is the right image to start with. Railroad Street in Hillsdale, a building put up for horses and converted to machine tools. Twenty-five years later Herrick's money would turn another horse barn, this one in West Lafayette, Indiana, into a world-class laboratory. He seems to have been drawn to buildings that were made for one era and could be put to work in the next.
Charles Floyd Sage went by Bill. He was a Hillsdale tool and die maker who owned a business called General Machine Shop and Garage. That name tells you nearly everything about him: a small-town man with a lathe, a grease pit, and an appetite for problems that came in through the front door. In the beginning he owned more of the new company than Herrick did. The corporate histories say that two-thirds of the stock belonged to Sage and his wife, with Herrick holding the remaining third. Sage was named president. The Toledo exhibit credits him with "an idea for better compressors." Wikipedia credits a different man, Frank Smith, who it says joined Hillsdale "with an idea for a refrigerated compressor," after which "the company began to grow quickly." The invention at the center of the business has two possible fathers and no patent on record in these sources. Herrick's name is attached to neither.
What Herrick contributed, as far as the sources show, was the business. Hillsdale Machine & Tool made "high-quality automobile and electric refrigerator parts, as well as small tools and mechanical novelties." Some of the work came from Ford. Some came from Alamo's unfilled orders. Sales were $26,000 in the first year and $284,000 by 1933, an elevenfold increase in the worst years of the Depression, achieved by a shop founded, in the words of one corporate history, "during the height" of the collapse.
By 1933 the ownership had reversed. "Herrick bought out most of their interest and gained control of the company," the history records, in a sentence flat enough to hide what must have been a delicate negotiation. The minority partner who was still drawing a manager's salary from the incumbent had become the majority owner of the challenger. Sage's later fate does not appear in these sources. He is one of the first people in this story to disappear into a building that carries someone else's name.
That same year, Alamo went into receivership. Herrick leased its plant for a year, intending to buy it at the end of the term. It nearly ruined him. The rent paid to Alamo's receivers ate into the Hillsdale company's thin margins, competition in manufactured parts was, in the historian's word, "fierce," and by 1934, according to the Observer, Hillsdale Machine & Tool "was on the brink of bankruptcy."
The Town That Gave Away a Factory
Tecumseh, Michigan, sits about one county east of Hillsdale, in Lenawee County, close enough that a man could drive it in an afternoon. In 1934 it had an empty factory and a population of people looking for work. Here the sources diverge again, more sharply this time, and each version shows a different side of the same deal.
In the Observer's version, the town of Tecumseh, "full of people looking for work at the height of the Depression, agreed to give it an abandoned 30,000-square-foot factory." Give it. A municipality, broke and desperate, handing a building to a nearly bankrupt parts maker because the alternative was a building with no one in it. "With a boost from investors and a line of credit from a Detroit bank secured by Ford himself," the Observer continues, "Herrick moved the firm one county east and renamed it Tecumseh Products."
In the Toledo exhibit's version, the company "purchased a 50,000 square foot plant." Different verb, different square footage.
In Pearson's version, which comes from inside the refrigeration trade, "Henry persuaded Ray to take over H. Brewer & Co. in Tecumseh, Michigan, to manufacture compressors."
These can probably be reconciled: an existing manufacturer, a vacant facility, a town eager to fill it, a bank willing to lend because the most powerful industrialist in America had put his name behind the loan. What can't be reconciled is the emphasis. In one version Herrick is a supplicant rescued by a hungry town. In another he is a buyer. In the third he is following orders from Ford. Taken together they describe the method that defined his career, and it is worth stating plainly: Herrick was very good at getting other parties (towns, banks, magnates, later universities) to put their resources behind his judgment. Ford had already shown this at the recruiting office. Here it happened again with a line of credit. Twenty years later it happened with a Purdue vice president parking his car on State Street.
The name of the company deserves a sentence. Tecumseh was the Shawnee leader who tried to build a confederation of nations against American expansion and died at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. Michigan named a town after him, and the town gave its name to a compressor company, which made the town "the Refrigeration Capital of the World." Herrick did not put his own name on the company. He put the town's name on it, and the company eventually became indistinguishable from the town.
The Sealed Unit
The product needs explaining, because its whole design premise is that you will never see it.
A refrigerator works by compressing a refrigerant gas, letting it shed heat, expanding it so that it absorbs heat, and repeating the cycle. Early refrigeration machinery was open: a motor drove a compressor through a shaft, the shaft passed through a seal, and seals leaked. A hermetic compressor puts the motor and the compressor together inside one welded steel shell, so there is no shaft to seal and no seal to fail. The refrigerant stays in and the moisture stays out. The unit is meant to run for years without being opened, and when it fails it is generally replaced rather than repaired.
In 1938, according to the Toledo exhibit, Tecumseh "brought out the first hermetically sealed refrigeration unit." That "first" is the exhibit's claim, and other manufacturers might dispute it. Pearson, an engineer writing for engineers, makes a narrower and probably more important claim: Tecumseh's "revolutionary design was cheaper to manufacture than any other hermetic compressor on the market." Lowering the cost of an existing technology is less romantic than inventing it, and it is what a toolmaker does. A toolmaker does not design the car. He designs the die that makes the fender cost forty cents less.
The war interrupted. The compressor line was "sidelined for War production," in the exhibit's phrasing, and the sources do not say what Tecumseh built for the war. By 1947 the company was "a leader in the refrigerator compressor industry." By 1950 it was, by several independent accounts, "the largest independent manufacturer of refrigerated compressors in the world."
The key word is independent. Tecumseh did not make refrigerators. It made the part that made refrigerators work and sold it to the companies whose names appeared on the doors. Decades later the company described itself in a sentence that could have been Herrick's epitaph:
— Tecumseh Products Company, corporate statementNot many people ever look inside their refrigerators or air conditioners to see the compressors that drive the critical cooling systems of these appliances... we are the silent partner inside the products of many of the world's best known brands.
The silent partner. The phrase fits the man as well as the product. In November 1950 Tecumseh bought the Universal Cooler company of Marion, Ohio, and moved into air conditioning. The Observer credits the following boom to Ray's son Kenneth, who "came back from World War II and took charge," after which "the company flourished making compressors for window air conditioners." The Purdue sources call Ray "then CEO" in the 1950s, and William Fontaine of Purdue addressed him as "the president of Tecumseh Products" in 1953. Corporate titles in a family company are a matter of interpretation. It seems clear that by the late 1940s the father held the title and the authority and the son ran operations, and that the arrangement held for decades.
By 1960 the plants in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Canada were producing ten million compressors a year. In 1956 the company bought Lauson and entered the small-engine business. In 1957 it bought the Power Products Company, maker of the two-cycle engines found in many old chainsaws. The engines were, as the Observer put it, "a more visible product," the Tecumseh name stamped on the shroud of the motor you yanked to start your lawnmower. Tecumseh engines were eventually sold in more than 120 countries. Its Snow King line, according to one industry account, "had powered more snowthrowers than all other brands combined."
For most of the century, then, every American suburb ran on Ray Herrick's machinery twice: once in the kitchen, where nobody saw it, and once in the garage, where the name was printed on the engine.
Turkeys
In July 1952 Tecumseh Products bought the Acklin Stamping Plant in Toledo, Ohio. Acklin was older than Tecumseh by twenty-one years and had its own history: founded in 1911, it had come through the Depression and the war, and it had its own managers and its own sense of itself. The original plan, according to the Toledo exhibit, was to build a new plant in Michigan and move Acklin's employees and equipment there.
Acklin refused. Its people did not want to "break a good organization." The plant stayed in Toledo.
Most acquirers would not have accepted that answer. Herrick did. The exhibit records that "initially at least, there were no changes to the company's management structure." Acklin executives took seats on Tecumseh's board, and Tecumseh's president and secretary took seats on Acklin's. The plant became Tecumseh's in-house stamping operation. It produced compressor casings, the steel shells of the hermetic units, and kept taking outside work, including parts for major automakers, which "helped to stabilize the cyclical production schedule." The schedule followed the weather. Air conditioner production began in winter and peaked in February, March, and April, so that casings could be shipped to assembly plants and the finished units could reach stores before summer. August was the slow month. The plant shut down for two weeks every August, which meant that in the hottest part of the year the people who made the machinery of cool were sent home.
Cordia Ross was a press operator at Acklin. Decades later, interviewed for an oral history project by a student named Ben Grillot, she remembered one thing about the founder:
— Cordia Ross, Acklin Stamping press operator, on Ray HerrickHe said he gave us turkeys for Christmas... because when he was growing up they were poor and they couldn't afford turkeys.
The quotation has several layers. A press operator remembering, years later, not a speech or a policy but a turkey and the reason given for it. A rich man explaining his generosity by referring to his own childhood. The explanation passed down secondhand, "he said," which is how almost every piece of Herrick's interior life reaches us. In Tecumseh, the Observer reports, the company gave away turkeys at Thanksgiving. In Toledo, according to Ross, it was Christmas. The sources disagree on the holiday and agree on the bird.
Harvey Schmidt, later mayor of Tecumseh, described the town in the Observer with an affection so complete it read almost like a confession:
— Harvey Schmidt, mayor of Tecumseh, Michigan, to the Ann Arbor Observer, 2009It was a total company town back then. Almost everybody you knew had a dad who worked there. My dad worked there. My friends' dads all worked there. But it was good—great, really.
The "But" carries the weight. Schmidt knows how "company town" sounds to a modern reader, with its echoes of scrip, Pullman, and coal camps, and he answers the objection before it is raised. But it was good. Then he revises upward, great, really, as if "good" had been too cautious for what he remembered. Turkeys, summer picnics, a whole town's fathers going to the same gates every morning. This is industrial paternalism in its sincere Midwestern form, practiced by a man who had been poor, and its effect on loyalty is hard to overstate. It is also a form of control. A company that feeds your family at the holidays is not one you organize against. It is one you defend at city council meetings fifty years later.
I don't think Herrick meant it cynically. I don't think he meant it purely either. Turkeys were cheap, and loyalty was worth a great deal, and he had been a man who left ten employers in twenty years. He knew exactly what makes a skilled worker leave.
Money in a Horse Barn
At the end of the summer of 1953, a Purdue mechanical engineering professor named William Fontaine drove to Tecumseh to look for research relationships and pitched the company's president an idea.
Fontaine was called "Wild Bill." Bob Bernhard, who directed the lab Fontaine founded from 1994 to 2005, remembered him as a man "in his element raising funds and recruiting faculty," someone who "today would probably be referred to as an entrepreneurial personality," with "excellent relationships with industry in the Midwest." Government research funding had dropped sharply after the war, and Fontaine had an unusual answer: a laboratory paid for by industry, where graduate students would write theses on industry's actual problems. It was also interdisciplinary before the word was fashionable. Mechanical engineering and animal sciences would jointly study how climate affected livestock.
Fontaine's own account, in a memoir he published in 1990 called Comets Amongst the Stars, describes the meeting in the third person:
— William E. Fontaine, Comets Amongst the Stars (1990)Mr. Herrick became quite interested in our ideas and decided they were so novel, that he promised to make a grant of $300,000 for the construction of the necessary laboratory facility.
So novel. What persuaded Herrick was not familiarity or a sure return. It was novelty, a professor proposing something nobody had tried. The man who had cut the cost of an existing technology in a livery stable wrote a six-figure check for an untested arrangement between a university and industry, after one summer conversation. Purdue's later accounts say he "liked the idea and donated enough money to start the labs." That shorter version is probably closer to how such decisions were actually made.
The money needed a building, and the building took a while. Sometime between 1954 and 1955, R. B. Steward, Purdue's vice president and treasurer, called Fontaine and asked him to ride around campus and look at sites. Steward stopped his car on State Street, in front of a horse barn, and said, "You can start from here, and we can build from that."
Steward is the kind of figure who shows up repeatedly in Herrick's story: an institutional man with a budget and a vacant structure, willing to back someone else's ambition with an old building. The town of Tecumseh in 1934 had done the same thing with a factory. The barn dated from 1919 or from the 1920s, depending on which Purdue page you read. In 1958, or 1957 according to Purdue's own masthead, the Ray W. Herrick Laboratories officially opened inside it, with Fontaine as director. The east and west wings went up between 1957 and 1960. Purdue's archivists have pointed out that even the opening date was a negotiation: during planning for the fortieth anniversary, two former directors "put 1958 as their best guess." Even the founding date of this monument was an estimate.
The livestock research did not last. The engineers' sensitive HVAC test equipment did not mix well with the animal scientists' chicken coops, and Purdue lore holds that "Fontaine's engineers stole eggs from the coops, convincing the animal scientists to leave." Herrick Labs took over the whole barn, and the research turned to "human comfort and high-performance equipment," which meant air conditioners, which meant compressors, which meant, in effect, Tecumseh's own products.
Raymond Cohen arrived as an assistant professor in 1955. He was born November 30, 1923, and was a Purdue freshman when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He served with the 89th Infantry Division, the first American division to liberate a concentration camp, and then came back to West Lafayette and earned three degrees there. He was a man who had seen the worst of the century and came home to work on valves. Not long after becoming a full professor in 1960, he and his graduate students solved a problem that was costing the refrigeration industry heavily: "costly, catastrophic compressor valve failures caused by vibrations." The published results drew international attention and, as Purdue's account puts it, "put Herrick Laboratories on the map."
So the money a compressor maker gave a university came back as a fix for the compressor industry's most expensive failure. The cycle closed. Cohen became director in 1971 or 1972 (the sources disagree on this too) and served until 1993. By his retirement in 1999, he said, "about 60 percent of our funding came from industry sources." Asked late in life what he was proudest of, he did not mention the war or the governor's award. He said: "Worldwide, everyone knows Herrick Laboratories. In Japan and China's refrigeration and air conditioning industries, for instance, Herrick Laboratories is Purdue."
Research on compressor vibration led to acoustics, acoustics led to anechoic chambers, rooms built so that sound does not reflect, and soon the old horse barn contained some of the quietest spaces in Indiana. From there the work moved to noise in cars, airplanes, and pavement. By the lab's fiftieth anniversary in 2008, about 600 Herrick students had completed graduate degrees, and the lab counted more than 120 past and present sponsors in Canada, Japan, Germany, Brazil, Korea, and Denmark. In 2013 Purdue opened a $30 million, 68,000-square-foot addition, LEED Gold certified, with more than a thousand sensors monitoring the building's own heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. It is a living laboratory that studies itself. The original barn still stands in front of it. Purdue calls it "the legacy building."
The Giving That Does Not Sign Its Name
In 1949, two years after Tecumseh became an industry leader and one year before it became the world's largest independent compressor maker, Herrick did two things that would govern the rest of the century for his family.
He used his Tecumseh stock to create the Herrick Foundation, a Michigan nonprofit with a mission, as its current website puts it, "to provide financial contributions to worthy publicly supported charitable organizations." On February 26, 1949, he and his wife, Hazel M. Herrick, also established trusts. A second set followed on February 24, 1956. These were the Ray W. Herrick and Hazel M. Herrick Trusts, held for the benefit of Todd W. Herrick and his descendants and for Toni Herrick and her descendants.
Those dates come from an unexpected place: a settlement agreement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2007, at the end of a fight the trusts helped make possible. Herrick in 1949 was building a sealed system for his own wealth. The foundation and the trusts would hold his stock. Through dual-class shares that survived Tecumseh's early-1990s public offering, the stock would keep the company in the family's hands.
The foundation's giving philosophy is unusual and revealing. It describes "a preference for challenge grants, and, in most cases, anonymity for the Herrick Foundation so that the community clearly owns the initiative." Both choices are a toolmaker's choices. A challenge grant is a jig: it holds the work in place and makes other people's money line up behind it. Anonymity is the compressor inside the refrigerator: it does its job without appearing on the door. In more than seventy-five years the foundation says it has given away more than $500 million, most of it unsigned.
Some of it was signed, and the exceptions tend to be the ones people remember. In Holland, Michigan, the public library is the Herrick District Library. A 2023 column in the Holland Sentinel began, "Holland owes an awful lot to Hazel Hayes, Ray Herrick and Henry Ford," and credited Herrick's donation with making the library possible. Ford appears again here, as he does throughout the story, in a library that bears Herrick's name. Purdue's laboratory bears his name. Inside Philanthropy, which tracks foundations, reports that the Herrick Foundation has given Purdue more than $11 million toward the laboratory's expansion and about $4 million over several years to the University of Michigan for a new medical facility.
The foundation's present form would probably have seemed familiar to its founder and odd to him at once. It is, Inside Philanthropy notes, "not an open one." It "does not accept unsolicited inquiries or proposals; it chooses its own partners." Its giving now focuses on housing, lifelong learning, and community wellbeing in five southeast Michigan counties (Washtenaw, Lenawee, Livingston, Jackson, Monroe) plus Emmet and Charlevoix up north, and in counties in Arizona and Montana "where family and board members live." Lenawee, where the town of Tecumseh sits, is still on the list.
It also calls itself "time-limited." It is pursuing a wind-down strategy and has not announced a closing date. The seal Ray Herrick placed around his fortune in 1949 is being opened deliberately and slowly, from the inside.
The Seal Breaks
Ray Herrick died in 1973. His company outlived him by forty-two years as an independent firm, for most of them comfortably.
Kenneth ran it. Kenneth's son Todd joined in 1970 after Vietnam and the Chinooks, the grandson of the man kept out of the Air Service having flown twin-rotor helicopters over a jungle. The 1970s brought domestic expansion and the 1980s brought joint ventures in Brazil and France. An early-1990s public offering raised capital while, in one corporate history's carefully neutral phrasing, "allowing the founding Herrick family to retain control." The shares traded on NASDAQ as TECUA and TECUB, two classes, one of which kept the family's grip on the company secure. By the mid-1990s sales were approaching $2 billion and the company earned more than $100 million a year. In 2004 it reported $1.91 billion in sales and 22,000 employees.
The trouble began, according to the Observer, in 2002, when the Brazilian real strengthened against the dollar and cut the company's revenues from its large Brazilian operation "almost in half." In 2003 Kenneth retired and Todd became chairman. The third generation took over just as raw-material prices soared and Chinese manufacturers took the window air conditioner market away from the American companies Tecumseh supplied. The company lost $220 million in 2005 and $80 million in 2006. Rumors of bankruptcy circulated.
"Things were pretty grim by the end of 2006," Teresa Hess, a company spokeswoman, told the Observer. The writer, James Leonard, noted pointedly that "both Tecumseh and the Herrick family prefer to wage their battles for public opinion through proxies." Neither side would speak on the record. The Herricks, as always, did not put themselves forward. Hess, speaking for the company that now opposed the family, said:
— Teresa Hess, Tecumseh Products spokeswoman, to the Ann Arbor Observer, 2009Herrick family management, though they had built a very successful company, were without the background and/or expertise to fix things. In the era of globalization, they lacked the skills to handle a global operation and to turn around a global company.
The board, still under family control at five members, looked for money and found little interest in a company losing this much. Late in 2006 it reached a deal with Tricap, a New York fund that some people called a "vulture investor." "Tricap would loan $100 million," Hess said, "but they told us the company needed to seek professional, non-family management. We agreed. Todd Herrick agreed." The Amended and Restated Second Lien Credit Agreement was dated November 13, 2006, with Tricap Partners as lender and Citicorp USA as collateral agent, and it made hiring a chief executive a condition of the financing. AlixPartners was brought in to plan a turnaround. A man named James Bonsall became interim president and chief operating officer.
On February 28, 2007, the board expanded itself to seven members, amended the bylaws, and removed Todd Herrick as chairman, "but having him remain as a Board member," as the legal papers put it. He could keep his seat but not the chairmanship.
On March 6 the Herrick Foundation and Todd Herrick sued the company and three directors, Albert A. Koch, Peter Banks, and David M. Risley, in the Circuit Court for the County of Lenawee, Case No. 07-2525-CZ, seeking to have the February resolutions declared "void and of no force or effect." Lenawee County is the county the town of Tecumseh had given a factory in 1934, the county where the foundation still sends grants. The family sued in its home court.
On March 15 the company sued every Herrick entity in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Case No. 2:07-cv-11144. That meant the foundation, the trusts, Todd, Toni, Kent B. Herrick, and a foundation trustee named Michael Indenbaum. The foundation Ray created to give away his fortune and the trusts he and Hazel set up for their descendants were now defendants, sued by the company whose stock he had placed in them.
By April 2, 2007, the parties had signed a Settlement and Release Agreement, which runs to many pages and was filed with the SEC. The fight was over almost as soon as it started. In the "Family Feud" piece two years later, the Observer could still feel its heat.
The rest is a list of sales and moves. In 2007 the gasoline engine and powertrain lines, "what the company had been most known for," went to Platinum Equity. In December 2008 the engine manufacturing division closed. On February 10, 2009, the remaining engine assets, including inventory, tooling, and intellectual property, went to Certified Parts Corporation in Janesville, Wisconsin. That same year Tecumseh Products moved its headquarters out of the town of Tecumseh to Pittsfield Charter Township, outside Ann Arbor, and a local columnist summed up the year with a headline about how awful 2009 had been. In 2013 the company agreed to pay about $7 million as its share of a $41 million settlement over price-fixing allegations stemming from a secret 2004 meeting at a hotel of executives from Tecumseh, Whirlpool units, Danfoss, Panasonic, and an Italian components firm. In 2015 Mueller Industries and Atlas Holdings bought the refrigeration business.
The town named Tecumseh is still there. The company named after the town is now headquartered elsewhere and owned by others, and the family named Herrick no longer runs either.
The Name Without the Man
Look up "Herrick" on Wikipedia and you get a disambiguation page. It lists a locality in Tasmania, townships in Nebraska and Pennsylvania, an English cricketer named Herrick Bowley, a Presbyterian clergyman, a toy inventor, the codename for British military operations in Afghanistan, and a fictional character in a comic book. It lists the Herrick Corporation, a steel fabricator in Stockton, California, founded in 1921, whose beams hold up the Salesforce Tower, the Disney Concert Hall, and the Bradley West terminal at LAX, and which has no connection to Ray Herrick at all. It does not list Ray Herrick.
Harvard Business School includes him in its database of Great American Business Leaders of the 20th Century. Its profile does not record the year he was born or the year he died.
Pearson, writing about the lab in 2025, began with a premise: "Few institutions in the world become so famous that they are better known than the person whose name they bear." He mentioned Carnegie Hall, the Guggenheim, and the Royal Albert Hall. Then he asked the question that seems to have occurred to almost no one in sixty-seven years of Purdue graduate students: "So who was Herrick?" The only book-length answer is a 1984 volume by John Harper Dawson, A Biography of Ray W. Herrick, published by the Lenawee County Historical Society in Adrian, Michigan. Libraries that hold it report that all copies are in use.
The laboratory has outgrown every building it has occupied. It now supports more than $16 million in research a year, with more than 170 graduate students and 34 faculty, and has the largest academic HVAC lab in the world. Its psychrometric chambers can hold conditions from fifty-five degrees Celsius down to minus twenty. Its geothermal bores go three hundred feet into the Indiana ground. In May 2025 it held a homecoming, with tours of the legacy building and the new lab, sessions on plans for a third facility, a cookout, a golf outing at $85 a player, and a dinner for four retiring professors at a venue called the Stables Event Center. The reception was sponsored by Carrier. Cummins sponsored the dinner. Even the event hall had once been a stable.
Inside the old barn on State Street, the one Steward pointed to from his car and told Fontaine he could start from, are the anechoic chambers that grew out of the compressor-vibration work Herrick's money paid for. They are rooms lined so that a sound made inside them hits the walls and does not come back. Engineers stand in them to listen to machines. A person speaking in one hears only their own voice, once, with nothing returned.
Part IIThe Playbook
The principles that follow come from a life that left little in the way of direct testimony. Herrick wrote no memoir that survives in these sources, gave no interviews that are quoted, and preferred his gifts unsigned. What he left instead was a set of structures: a company, a foundation, a set of trusts, and a laboratory. Each reflects decisions that can be reconstructed and judged. Some of those decisions compounded for seventy years. One of them, the decision to seal control inside the family, worked for two generations and failed in the third. The playbook below treats both outcomes as instruction.
The principles
- 1.Be restless until the problem is worth staying for.
- 2.Become the person the powerful refuse to lose.
- 3.Grow on the incumbent's overflow.
- 4.Take control from the minority seat.
- 5.Let the town bid for you.
- 6.Own the part, not the brand.
- 7.Don't break a good organization.
- 8.Pay in memory, not just in wages.
- 9.Fund novelty, then get out of the barn.
- 10.Give so the community owns it.
- 11.A hermetic seal also keeps the system from breathing.
Principle 1
Be restless until the problem is worth staying for
Herrick worked for ten companies between 1911 and 1931 and then spent four decades building one. The usual advice about loyalty and tenure misses what that early period was for. A toolmaker moving through Packard, Ford, and Alamo was collecting a sample of how different shops failed and recovered: how the Highland Park lines were debugged, how a struggling Hillsdale engine company came apart from the inside. By the time he incorporated Hillsdale Machine & Tool, he had something no employee at a single firm could have had, which was a comparative sense of where industrial operations broke.
The restlessness was not undisciplined. It stopped as soon as he had a structure he controlled. The lesson is not "change jobs often." It is that early mobility is worth something only if it builds a pattern library you will eventually commit to using in one place.
Tactic: Treat every early job change as a deliberate sample, write down how each shop fails, and stop moving when you find a problem big enough to absorb the next forty years.
Principle 2
Become the person the powerful refuse to lose
Henry Ford walked into a recruiting office to keep Herrick out of the Air Service. Two decades later Ford personally secured a Detroit bank line of credit so Herrick could move his company to Tecumseh. Both are the same asset paying off: Herrick had become, as the troubleshooter on the Highland Park lines, operationally irreplaceable to the most powerful manufacturer of the age.
This kind of leverage is quieter than a network and more durable. Herrick does not seem to have been a celebrity or a promoter. His "friendships" with Ford, Firestone, and Edison are recorded as those of a "friend and adviser," which in industrial terms means the man you call when something on the floor isn't working. Becoming that person to someone with capital turns your competence into their credit risk, and they will protect it.
Tactic: Pick the single most consequential operator you can reach and become the person they call when the line goes down. The loan, the reference, and the intervention will follow from that role, not from networking.
Principle 3
Grow on the incumbent's overflow
From 1930 to 1933 Herrick managed Alamo Engine while his new company handled "orders that Alamo could not fill." That arrangement would raise governance questions today, and it is still a precise growth model. The incumbent's customers were already qualified, the demand was proven, and the gap was operational, not commercial. Hillsdale went from $26,000 to $284,000 in three Depression years largely by taking demand that already existed and that the incumbent could not serve.
The broader version applies well beyond Hillsdale. The best early customers are often the ones an established supplier has already won and then disappointed. They don't need to be persuaded that the product matters, only that someone can deliver it.
Tactic: Before you look for new demand, list the orders your largest competitor is turning away, delaying, or botching, and build to fill exactly those.
Principle 4
Take control from the minority seat
Herrick began with one-third of Hillsdale Machine & Tool. Bill Sage and his wife owned the rest, and Sage was president. By 1933 Herrick had "bought out most of their interest and gained control." The sources say nothing about how the negotiation went, which may itself be the point: there is no recorded feud, no lawsuit, no Sage memoir about betrayal. The minority partner who ran the business and controlled the customer relationships converted operating indispensability into equity.
Founders often fight over cap tables at formation. Herrick's case suggests that the opening split matters less than the question of who becomes essential to running the enterprise. Equity tends to move toward the person the business cannot do without.
Tactic: If you start as a minority partner, put your effort into owning the operations and the customer relationships, and structure the agreement so that buying more equity later is possible.
Principle 5
Let the town bid for you
In 1934 Hillsdale Machine & Tool was nearly bankrupt, crippled by its lease on the Alamo plant. Herrick's response was not to raise money at a distressed valuation. He moved to a town that needed jobs more than he needed a building. Whether Tecumseh gave him a 30,000-square-foot factory, as the Observer says, or sold him a 50,000-square-foot one, as the Toledo exhibit says, the structure was the same: the town's desperation was converted into the company's capital base.
He repeated the move. In 1953 Purdue had an idea and no money, and Herrick supplied the money. In 1954 or 1955, Purdue's vice president supplied the barn. Herrick consistently put himself where someone else's unused asset (an empty factory, an idle barn, an underused reputation) could be paired with his judgment.
Tactic: When cash is short, look for institutions holding idle assets they badly want put to use, and offer them employment, activity, or relevance in exchange.
Principle 6
Own the part, not the brand
Tecumseh's founding advantage was a hermetic compressor "cheaper to manufacture than any other," sold to the companies whose names went on the appliance doors. The company later called itself "the silent partner inside the products of many of the world's best known brands." Being the independent component maker has three structural advantages: you sell to every brand instead of competing with them, your volume is the sum of theirs, and your engineering improvements spread across the whole industry.
The cost became clear later. When Chinese manufacturers took the window air conditioner market from Tecumseh's American customers, Tecumseh lost the business along with them. A silent partner's fortunes depend on the brands it supplies. Herrick's diversification into small engines, which carried the Tecumseh name, was a hedge against exactly that dependency.
T
The Tecumseh Machine, 1930–2015
Key decisions in the life of the company Ray Herrick built, from livery stable to sale.
1930
Hillsdale Machine & Tool incorporated (sources vary: 1930–1932); Herrick holds one-third.
1933
Herrick buys out most of the Sage interest and takes control; sales reach $284,000.
1934
Move to Tecumseh, backed by a Detroit bank line secured by Henry Ford; renamed Tecumseh Products.
1938
Hermetically sealed refrigeration unit introduced.
1949
Herrick Foundation established with Tecumseh stock; first family trusts dated February 26.
1950
Largest independent compressor maker in the world; Universal Cooler acquired in November.
1952
Acklin Stamping acquired; plant stays in Toledo.
1953
Herrick promises Purdue $300,000 for a laboratory.
1956
Lauson acquired; entry into small engines.
1960
Ten million compressors a year.
1973
Ray W. Herrick dies.
2007
Board removes Todd Herrick as chairman; dueling lawsuits; settlement April 2.
2015
Refrigeration business sold to Mueller Industries and Atlas Holdings.
Tactic: Build the component every brand needs, and then build at least one product with your own name on it so your fortunes are not entirely tied to your customers'.
Principle 7
Don't break a good organization
When Tecumseh bought Acklin Stamping in 1952, the plan was to move it to Michigan. Acklin refused, not wanting to "break a good organization." Herrick accepted the refusal. The plant stayed in Toledo, its management stayed in place, and the two boards exchanged seats. Acklin became Tecumseh's casing supplier and kept taking outside automotive work, which helped smooth out the seasonal swings in air conditioner production.
Most acquirers would have consolidated the operation for efficiency. Herrick appears to have recognized that a working organization is itself a precision instrument, with its own fit and tolerances, and that moving it would destroy the alignment he was paying for. Cross-board seats gave him visibility without taking control away from people who knew how to run the plant.
Tactic: When you acquire a well-run operation, leave it in place, exchange board seats instead of managers, and change the structure only where performance actually requires it.
Principle 8
Pay in memory, not just in wages
The turkeys cost little. Decades later a Toledo press operator still remembered them, along with the reason Herrick gave: he had grown up too poor to afford one. A Tecumseh mayor remembered a "total company town" and called it "great, really." Industrial paternalism has a mixed reputation, and much of it is earned. Herrick's version worked because it was tied to a personal story, and that story made the gift a shared memory instead of a perk.
The operating lesson is not "give gifts." It is that the benefits people remember are the ones with a reason attached. A holiday turkey from a man who once couldn't afford one tells the employee that the owner remembers what their life is like. Workers forget wages and remember that kind of gesture for decades.
Tactic: Attach a true, personal reason to at least one benefit you offer, and say the reason out loud. People remember why far longer than how much.
Principle 9
Fund novelty, then get out of the barn
Herrick promised Purdue $300,000 because, in Fontaine's account, he found the ideas "so novel." He then appears to have stayed out of the operation entirely. Fontaine ran it, Steward found the building, and Cohen's students solved the valve-vibration problem that "put Herrick Laboratories on the map," which also happened to be a costly problem for Herrick's own industry. By 1999 about 60 percent of the lab's funding came from industry, and it had more than 120 sponsors around the world.
The design was unusual: a single industrial donor seeding a lab that served the whole industry, competitors included. Herrick seems to have understood that a lab tied to one company would produce one company's research, while a lab open to the industry would produce a field, and that his company, as the largest independent compressor maker, stood to benefit most from a stronger field.
H
How the Herrick Labs Model Differed
The structure Herrick and Fontaine set up in the 1950s against the norms of the period.
| Prevailing norm | Herrick Labs approach | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Government funds academic research | Industry funds thesis research on real problems | Scaled ~60% industry-funded by 1999 |
| Single-discipline departments | Engineering and animal sciences under one roof | Pivoted Chickens out, HVAC in |
| Donor directs the research | Founder funds, professors run | Scaled 120+ global sponsors |
| Purpose-built facility first | Start in a horse barn, build later | Compounded 83,000 sq ft today |
| Company-captive lab | Industry-wide lab, competitors welcome | Scaled "Herrick Laboratories is Purdue" |
Tactic: Fund the field your business depends on, not just your own R&D, give control to someone with more fundraising ability than you have, and keep your involvement to writing the check.
Principle 10
Give so the community owns it
The Herrick Foundation states its method directly: challenge grants and, "in most cases, anonymity... so that the community clearly owns the initiative." This is philanthropy built the way the compressor was built. The challenge grant lines up other donors' money behind the project. Anonymity keeps the donor's name off the result, so the project survives the donor's absence because nobody thinks of it as his.
The exceptions show what the rule protects. Where Herrick's name went on the work, at a library in Holland and a lab at Purdue, it eventually separated from the man so completely that a 2025 trade columnist had to explain who Herrick was. The name lasted and the identity faded. Anonymity is more honest about how this tends to go: the work lasts and the donor doesn't.
Tactic: Structure major gifts as matching challenges and leave your name off, so the community that raises the match regards the result as its own.
Principle 11
A hermetic seal also keeps the system from breathing
In 1949 and 1956 Herrick and his wife created trusts. In 1949 he put his Tecumseh stock in a foundation. In the early 1990s the company went public with two share classes that kept "the founding Herrick family" in control. The structure worked for two generations. It kept out raiders, short-term pressure, and the scrutiny of outside capital. In the third generation, facing a strong real, Chinese competitors, and $300 million in losses over two years, it also kept out the "background and/or expertise" that the company's own spokeswoman said the family lacked.
A hermetic compressor is built never to be opened. That is its strength, and it is also why a failed unit gets replaced instead of repaired. When Tricap made non-family management a condition of its $100 million loan, the seal was broken from outside, under duress, and on a lender's schedule. A seal designed with a planned opening, a mechanism for bringing in outside leadership while the company was still healthy, might have avoided the February 28 resolutions, the Lenawee County lawsuit, and the federal countersuit.
S
The Seal, Assessed
Herrick's control architecture and how each element performed across three generations.
| Mechanism | Generations 1–2 | Generation 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Family trusts (1949, 1956) | Strength Continuity, patient capital | Risk Named in federal suit, 2007 |
| Foundation holding company stock | Strength Philanthropy plus control | Risk Foundation sues the company |
| Dual-class public listing | Strength Capital without dilution of control | Risk Control without capability |
| Family succession | Strength Kenneth builds the boom | Risk Lender forces non-family CEO |
Tactic: When you build a control structure meant to outlast you, include a defined, non-punitive way for professional management to take over, triggered by performance rather than by a creditor.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— R. B. Steward, Purdue vice president and treasurer, stopping in front of the horse barn on State Street, c. 1954–55You can start from here, and we can build from that.
— Raymond Cohen, director of the Ray W. Herrick Laboratories, 1971–1993Worldwide, everyone knows Herrick Laboratories. In Japan and China's refrigeration and air conditioning industries, for instance, Herrick Laboratories is Purdue.
— Herrick Foundation, statement of philosophyA philosophy to promote community participation drives a preference for challenge grants, and, in most cases, anonymity for the Herrick Foundation so that the community clearly owns the initiative.
— Raymond Cohen, Herrick Professor Emeritus of Mechanical EngineeringI like to say that serendipity is very important. Being at the right place at the right time. Seeing the opportunity and then taking it.
Maxims
- Sample, then commit. Ten employers in twenty years is preparation only if it ends in one enterprise you will run for forty.
- Be the troubleshooter. The person who fixes the line when it breaks is the person the powerful will walk into a recruiting office to keep.
- Feed on overflow. The incumbent's unfilled orders are pre-qualified demand waiting for someone who can deliver.
- Equity follows indispensability. Start with a third, run the business, and the rest tends to come to you.
- Pair idle assets with judgment. An empty factory, a vacant barn, a nervous banker: each is capital looking for someone to use it.
- Sell the part inside everyone's product. Being the silent partner makes your volume the sum of every brand you supply.
- Leave good organizations where they are. A working team is aligned the way a precision tool is; moving it can ruin the fit.
- Give the reason with the gift. A turkey from a man who was once poor is remembered for fifty years.
- Fund the field, not the favor. A lab open to the whole industry builds the market a dominant supplier needs.
- Build the seal with a valve. Any structure designed to keep control forever needs a way to bring in outside leadership before a lender forces it.
