Memories of Days on Roller Skates
I enjoyed your article (Sept. 16) about warehouse employees speeding around on roller skates, thus filling orders three times faster than their shoe-bound counterparts. Without saying so specifically, the article almost indicates the system is brand new.
Recently we did read about a brand new development in, I believe, France, where order fillers propelled themselves on roller skates.
Both assumptions are incorrect by about at least 50 years.
In the mid-1930s a Western pioneer by the name of C.D. Smith, who opened a wholesale drug firm in Grand Junction, Colo., in 1900, dreamed up that precise roller-skate idea with results precisely the same as you described. Naturally he became famous, but only locally. Now we find his unique system re-invented.
The C.D. Smith Co. (now companies) is still alive and well. So is C.D.’s youngest son, Sterling True Smith, graduate of our own USC and now president of the venerable and fast-growing pioneer firm.
All of which proves that history does repeat itself.
GEORGE V. CALDWELL
Santa Monica
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