Monica Bartley, production planner and the granddaughter of Bartley Machine founders Mary and Louis, stands next to Bartley's monitor housing. Photo is courtesy of Bartley Machine.

Family business looks for next

niche post-telecom

01/12/2004 07:53 AM

By Elizabeth Dinan

It was 1936, during the Great Depression, when Louis Bartley was struggling to find work and his wife, Mary, mentioned a project she’d just completed at Burdett Business College. Mary had modeled a fictitious company she named “Bartley Machine” and since Louis knew how to spin on a lathe, she suggested they open a machine shop and call it Bartley Machine.

Sixty-six years later, the company remains family-run at the same Amesbury location and 93-year-old Mary stills signs the payroll. Louis, also an Amesbury fire chief, died while fighting a 1966 fire, leaving Mary with seven children and a business to run. A business which remains a survivor of Henry Ford’s automated auto manufacturing, the telecom coma and some sticking points in between.

Now run by Bartley grandchildren, cousins, uncles, nephews and nieces, the company solves high tech problems in a mixture of markets. It began manufacturing automobile headlamps, as one neighboring business produced Dodge-’Em amusement rides and another made pontoon boats. All of the businesses were crushed when mass production replaced handcrafted parts, but Bartley bounced back, aiding the war effort by manufacturing parts for Western Electric.

Western Electric led to AT&T and eventually Bartley’s manufacture of splitter-combiners for telecom. The little family-run company undercut the cost of Motorola’s splitter-combiner ($1,800 each) by two-thirds after reverse engineering the technology, then secured Lucent as a loyal customer, saving it $35 million in the first five years of partnership.

Bartley became America’s largest manufacturer of splitter-combiners with 60,000 of them in the field, Lucent as a primary customer and 250 employees on the payroll until three years ago, when Lucent took a dive.

Today the company is owned by the founders’ son Richard, while his brother Paul serves as CEO. Their company continues to manufacture cellular equipment, in many cases for former Lucent associates who’ve moved on. The company has a formidable history, money in the bank and new deals, but with the death of telecom, is looking for the next big partner.

“We feel like the nice-looking chick, all dressed up for the prom and looking for a date,” Richard says.

Bartley has many impressive new partners, though not considered big in Lucent’s wake. It has manufacturing plastic surface finished parts for a partner that sells them to Boeing, and humidifier and dehumidifier housings for a supplier to the military. And it’s working with a “major railway system” and a “major telecom company” to devise a yet-to-be-announced solution for improved wireless service on trains.

What’s also being announced is Bartley’s recent installation of train schedule monitor housings at the newly re-opened NYC World Trade Center PATH stations, closed since Sept. 11, 2001. As part of the rebuilding of the area that’s come to be known as Ground Zero, Bartley was contacted by Diversified Security Solutions to design the schedule monitor housings to solve several problems.

The first was temperature. Erected underground, the electronics were overheating and cutting product life span drastically. Second, as trains passed the electronic schedules, electromagnetic fields were emitted, causing threes to look like eights, fives to become threes, and so on, all making the scheduling information erroneous and thus useless.

Bartley designed and manufactured a shield to ward off the electromagnetic fields and solved the overheating problem with a passive radiant heat design. The company went on to improve mounting design and “as a frosting,” says Bartley engineer Don Cloutier, covered them all in graffiti resistant paint.

“They were positively thrilled,” says the founders’ granddaughter, Monica Bartley, who left a job as a Boston paralegal four years ago to come aboard, first in purchasing and now as the company’s production planner.

It’s a sweet deal, but again, not in Lucent’s league.

“It’ll never be 1,000 or 2,000 pieces. There just aren’t that many,” Richard Bartley says. “But we have secured a good relationship with the supplier. The point is, we’re still here and we’re going to stay here.”