No Room for Lazy People - Martin Seppala

New Ipswich Historical Society

FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region

Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.

Martin Seppala

It’s an absolute characteristic of construction that when you teach people the trade, real ambitious go-getters are going to go out on their own. Inevitably. And that’s fine. I wouldn’t even guess how many companies in the New Ipswich area spun off from Seppala & Aho. It was my nature to keep expanding; I still do. We bought the most modern equipment. We went into steel fabricating, then scaffold manufacturing and sold those businesses off. We had our own architectural and engineering. Then we went into all the trades: ready-mixed concrete, roofing, electrical. I think Walter Aho worked for us with the electrical division and we sold out to him: Grace Electric.

The same thing has happened in South Carolina. We started out as Seppala & Aho—we kept that name even if my brother-in-law Hjalmar Aho and I split up in 1971—and by the way, it was a very friendly split. Hjalmar’s the most upright man I’ve ever met. We had a pleasurable business together. Eventually we changed the name here to Seppala Homes: we build 200 homes a year. We have people in the area who worked for us in the beginning and now a lot of them are running their own construction companies.

Seppala & Aho got started in 1952, when Hjalmar and I were both out of work. And by about 1956 we got a job building an addition on a church in Townsend, Massachusetts, and this really gave us our start. I’m not a real educated man, but I’ve got a lot of common sense and watched how people did things. I learned how to engineer steel by watching others do it and just the simple things that you needed to know. When we bid on the church job, right away we knew the roof design would collapse under a snow load. So what Hjalmar and I did was re-design it so it would hold snow. We’d learned that much about engineering already. And we went to the architect, who was from Ayer, Massachusetts. We were real diplomatic. We felt that the roof design was a little weak, so we re-designed it and put in two-by-10s or two- by-12s instead of two-by-sixes and figured that in our price. Well, this impressed that architect. He wasn’t offended. Needless to say, we got that job. And so it was through that architect that we got all the jobs in Ayer.

We went into building a big commercial laundry. Then after that, we built Donahue Chevrolet. And from then on, we went into commercial construction. We built a motel: all in Ayer. And by that time, we started bidding on other work, so we really got into commercial construction and got into it big. From there, we just continued and reached a maximum, I think, of $130 million in one year: this was at the peak time in the early 70s. We were building in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, some in Vermont, and some in Maine. Then we came down to Georgia and got into building a lot of big shopping centers. We built some in Ohio and New York. We did a lot of government- subsidized housing, the type where they’d put up 400 or 500 apartments. We built a good part of the city of Nashua, New Hampshire, as far as commercial-industrial goes: we did a lot of work for Sam Tamposi and Gerry Nash. The Tamposis were real estate developers: buy the land and lease the buildings. We did all their work; negotiated every job. We’d do it over the phone, make a number, build a building, and they’d pay it. One job after another: beautiful years. We did about $100 million or even more of work for them and never signed a contract. You can ask Mike DeMoulas: we never signed a contract with him, either. Fifty million to 100 million. The contracts were verbal. We had an excellent reputation. They trusted us and we trusted them. We never had a difficult time building with just a handshake. Even the extras were always resolved without any real fight. It was way better than signing something. The other thing we had a reputation for; I’d smile when they said it: ‘If anybody swore on our jobs, we’d fire them.’ It wasn’t true, but we’ve been complimented 100s of times by clients about how clean-talking our men were. It’s very infectious to have people who talk without swearing. We had lots of people who worked for us who would come up and say how proud they were that their language had changed once they had worked in our company. It wouldn’t be so much from me. It would be the men who were working on the jobs who would take aside the ones who were swearing. And that stems directly from the church. And customers will comment on it. It wasn’t an absolute rule, but it was just done by all the missionaries out there who would tell their work partners, “We just don’t do that.” The other thing that we did every year for 30 years or so; a company barbecue. But the bigthing at the barbecue was that every man would get a gift list. And if the man worked for the company one year, maybe he could choose a $130 gift. But it wasn’t money. It was just the psychology. It all began by my looking for a good reclining rocker because I’ve got a long back. On the rockers I’ve tried, my head would hang over. And I found a La-Z-boy rocker and it was perfect. So I thought, ‘Imagine if we gave a La-Z-boy to everybody that works for us, every night they’d come home and remember that, ‘This is a good company ‘cause here I’m sitting in this La-Z-boy.’ So we decided to give every man who worked for us a reclining rocker; he could pick his color. We bought them factory-direct. We actually got railroad cars full of rockers. It got so that after awhile, employees could choose more than recliners. Bigger furniture. Somebody who worked for us for 20 years. A good part of their home furnishings came as gifts from our company. It really built a loyalty that would be unbeatable. That was the greatest joy for me. The barbecue was something to behold. All the men and their wives and families. So we’d cook as many as a thousand chicken halves. I think it was the best barbecue around. Hjalmar and I and everybody in management had to be out there doing the cooking. We held it at the parking lot in October. We’d cook corn on the cob, but the main thing was chicken. We got to be experts at it. Yes, we had a secret sauce No, I don’t remember how we concocted it. If there were leftovers, we’d try to give it to the bigger families: piles of chicken to take home. The barbecue became such a big thing that we had a man working for months on organizing everything for it, buying the gifts.

In the beginning, Seppala & Aho was all Finns, but that started to change when we grew in the early 60s and needed more help. In the 50s, we could sign a work visa for Finnish immigrants. They could come into the country and get their green card and work for us. We had lots of them: every timea Finn from Finland asked for a job, we hired them because they were exceptional workers. We had the finest people from Finland. And they’d bring their relations and all come and get a job with us.

Every time it was a success story. They were faithful and diligent, on time: you can’t say enough good about them. They came over as skilled construction workers and we’d teach them fast. America is geared for production more than anywhere else in the world. We were known in Finland, Norway, and Sweden as the contractor in America to work for. Next to Finns, we had a lot of French. Frenchmen tend to be good construction people. In fact, I felt that the top super of all time was French-Canadian: Rene Bouchard. He could handle a job. Outstanding. One of the finest in the country. And there was a period of 15 years where we didn’t lay anybody off. This was unusual for a construction company. We just kept them right through because we had that much work.

We were approached by the U.S. government to do construction in Vietnam. During the war, the government had done research on companies they could trust. Throughout the years, we had many situations where, for example, we bid on a shopping center and the guy awarding the contract said, “Look, the job is yours. But we’ve got one small problem. I need a $50,000 commission on this.” And so we said, “Well, if this is above board, if everybody knows about it, we’d consider paying it.” He said, “No, this is under the table.” So we said, “Absolutely not.” Not knowingly did we ever pay anybody off. And that’s what happened in Vietnam. We were the ones chosen to go. And the government was guaranteeing our contracts. We could even insure our contracts because that was one of my questions to the government: what if North Vietnam pushed the Americans out? Our contact told us that would be taken care of. We were all set to go and then he said, “There’s one other thing that I’ve got to tell you. In Vietnam, there is not one job done without these landlords getting paid graft money on every job. You can figure it right in your contract and it’s nothing to worry about.” And I told him, “No way.” So he told me, “In your lifetime, you’re not going to get another opportunity like this.” I said, “I believe you; I know what you’re saying is true, but I can’t do that.” There’s so much of it in the big time.

The same thing happened in Kuwait. I knew Warren Rudman during the times when it was so tough economically up there in New England. I was going to ask if he could get us an opportunity to go to Kuwait and build and he said sure. And so we were going to joint-venture with Sam Tamposi and had people anxious to go because there wasn’t any work here. And the deal kept being procrastinated. Finally Warren told Sam, “I know Marty would never go there.” He said, “I don’t care how big or how small the contractor is, they pay a 15 percent kickback to the royal family. It’s unavoidable. You have to pay it. Even the biggest companies are paying it.” I said, “We’re not.” Warren knew us. No matter what they pay and no matter how many times they let you add it in, I said, “Life isn’t worth that. We’ve gotten along without it.” I think in the ‘Top 400” put out by Engineering News Record, about the best Seppala & Aho ever reached was 150th. As far as open shop, we were the biggest in New England and, as far as the nation goes, we were probably in the Top 10. And that’s why the unions were so upset with us. Those were the most difficult years, starting about 1965 until 1973 or something like that. We lost a lot ofprofit fighting unions. But I believed it was well worth it.

We were always open shop. And so we had union pickets and it was brutal. They dynamited our concrete plant, Minuteman Concrete, in Leominster, Massachusetts, in the 70s.They actually blew it up: the union did it. They smashed our equipment and put sugar in the gas tanks and burned our shacks. All of the unions were against us, but the electrical union and the plumbers were particularly strong. And it was unfair. I’m an American and believe that freedom is freedom.

The instant the topic of unionizing came up, we said, “We’ll let our men vote. If they want to go union, we’ll go union.” But the unions would never let us vote. They’d say, “No. You’ve got to force your men to be union.” Because they knew we were treating our men good and that they wouldn’t vote for the union. The union actions were illegal; they threatened my life right in front of the newspapers. The newspapers were kind of pro-union, so they wouldn’t print that in the paper. When the union attacked a job, they physically attacked. It happened in Hartford, Connecticut, that three or four people went to the hospital in a big fight they had between the union and the open-shop masons. The union men would take short pieces of steel chains: they can swing them long distances and hit somebody alongside the head. But the masons had what they called nunchaks: a Billy club with a rope between it and another billy club attached that swings free It was tough. But our exhortation to all our men was, Run. Don’t fight. We won every single picket because the other side always did something illegal. We were the first open shop, but eventually, because union wages were going so high, there were a lot of open shops nationwide and they had what they called the ABC: something like ‘American Builders and Contractors.’ The union had the General Contractors Association. The ABC would come in and help us. And finally there were so many of them that after awhile the unions started to give up. I was scared sometimes: I went through the picket lines. I led my men through and it was worse than a hotly contested sports event. It was more like a little war. I went through the lines once when they punctured the tires of the pickup before me and pulled out the aerials and threw everything out of the box. The police had to open up the lines for us because we had a legal right to cross them with 500 or 600 pickets and maybe 15 police.

I went through with a brand-new Mercury station wagon and they did the same to us. They booted it with their boots. They kicked that thing in until it looked like the Atlantic Ocean. And they punctured our tires too: they did that to every vehicle that went through. But we never caved. That’s Finn sisu.

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