No Room for Lazy People - Walter Aho

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.

Walter Aho

If you did an analysis, you would find more contractors per capita in New Ipswich than any town this size. And sizeable contractors: concrete floor contractors, building contractors, plumbers, electricians. And they all spun off from Seppala & Aho Construction, directly or indirectly. I was there when Seppala & Aho was formed in the living room of Marty Seppala’s house in Ashby, Massachusetts, in 1952, when it was conceived by Semmi Frigard’s two sons-in-law, Marty Seppala and Hjalmar Aho. I worked on the company’s first job. I was 14 years old; still in school. At the time, Marty worked as a carpenter and built himself a poultry house. When we were kids, nearly everybody in this area had a chicken house. Raising broilers got to be a pretty lucrative thing. I remember when broilers were selling for 26 cents a pound live weight. You didn’t have to be too careful or too expert in raising them to make a profit.

Marty built the three-story broiler house, then got laid off from his job. When he went down to collect unemployment they asked, “Do you have any other income?” And he said, “Well, I have some broilers.” And they asked, “What kind of income do you get from that?” And he said, “Sometimes none, sometimes some. It depends what the market is when I sell it and if they’re diseased...” It’s a very iffy thing. And they asked, “How much did you make the last time you sold them?” So he told them. And they said, “If you list that down, then you won’t be able to collect because you’re going to have to extrapolate that as income.” And Marty said, “I don’t have any income.” They said, “Nevertheless, those broilers, when you sell them, will be income. So my advice is, ‘Don’t put that down.’” Marty said, “I can’t lie about it. I’ve got broilers.” They said, “Then we won’t be able to give you an unemployment check.” That was on a Friday.

Sunday afternoon Hjalmar came down to visit Marty and we’re all sitting in the living room. Marty and Hjalmar called Mr. Frigard ‘Pappa’ because he was their mutual father-in-law. They were married to Mr. Frigard’s daughters Barbara and Elmi. Marty and Hjalmar said, “You know, Pappa’s got this old stone foundation right next door here.” And Marty told Hjalmar, “What if we patch up that foundation and go down and see Chris Johnson at Johnson Lumber and see if he’ll foot the bill for material? We’ll build a spec house and see if he’ll wait until we sell the house to get paid.” Hjalmar said, “Sure,” because he was out of work, too. The next day they went down and saw Chris Johnson, who said, “I’ll go along with that.” So they bought some mortar and a trowel and started patching that stone foundation on Richardson Road. Then they built a house on it and sold it to Marty’s brother-in-law. I remember working on the house and I’d skip days from school and go to work there. In that business, everyone did everything. Everyone was expected to, and that was the nice thing about it. When you’re raised on a farm, there’s one thing you never say and that’s ‘I don’t know how to do it.’ You will do everything because you have to. So farmers have that mentality,

I’d say, “What should I do, Marty?” “Start trimming those windows.” “How do you trim a window?” “Just take this sill. Mark it like this.” And he’d show me how to do it, and I’d start trimming windows.

I was in the Air Force from 1955 through ’59, and when I got out I spent a year on job sites for Seppala & Aho. And then I went in the offices in 1960. And there was just Marty and Hjalmar and Marty’s sister Elaine in the office at that time. But I found out they were $50,000 in the red. That was their financial statement after eight years in business. When I heard that, I said, “This guy, if he makes it, he deserves it.” I had not read one in one trace or sign of Marty’s body language indicating that things at Seppala & Aho were anything but great. Fifty-thousand dollars in the hole: that was big money. We operated out of Hjalmar’s den and every Tuesday morning we had a breakfast meeting. We’d have it at their mother-in-law’s house because it was quiet. She liked to cook and we’d sit there and discuss business. And whenever we had visitors from out West, we’d invite them to the breakfast meetings and have a social thing.

Then Seppala & Aho built an office on Town Hill in New Ipswich. And I remember Hjalmar standing there and saying, “Somehow we’ve got to get $35,000 in working capital so we can be bonded for $350,000. I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but somehow we’ve got to.” Shortly after that, we started doing buildings for Sam Tamposi in Nashua. I mean, we went whistling by that $35,000 so fast we didn’t know what happened. It just took off. Marty is Mr. Charisma. I mean, he’s a fantastic salesman. Everyone likes him. He’s very open, honest. He’ll give you the numbers. “How much for this building, Marty?” And he would say, “We’ll do that building for $150,000.” He would do a careful study first: sit down, write on a napkin. “How fast can you get it up?” “We’ll have that up in six weeks.” “Good. I want you to do it.” Marty would come back to the office: “Hey! We’ve got a job to do. Get the backhoe and order bar joists. We gotta get this done in six weeks.” So I’d call up one supplier, “What’s the timing for joist delivery now?” And they’d say, “Six weeks.” I’d say, “I thought so.” Marty said, “Tell them we’ll get it from Can-Am. We’ll send a truck up to Canada and haul it down from there. They can give us joists faster.” We’d go like crazy. But then he’d study his figures and call the customer and say, “I made a mistake. That site work cost me a lot more than that. It will probably be $170,000.” The customer might say, “Go jump in the lake,” or they might say, “Okay, I’ll give it to you.”

But Marty had no qualms about something like that. Hjalmar, on the other hand, if he said $150,000—even if it cost him $500,000—he would build it for $150,000. That was the difference in their natures. But not Marty: he didn’t care, he was flexible. And he didn’t care if somebody did that same thing to him.

I worked for Seppala & Aho in the 60s and older people at that time were products of the Depression and that experience really took the spice out of them as far as being entrepreneurs or taking financial risks of any kind. And so you ended up with a lot of people just plain happy to have a job and security and to be able to bring in a paycheck.

Construction companies just didn’t start up often in that era. You’d work against the same competition year after year, bid against the same contractors, hire the same subcontractors. There were a lot of talented people who were probably capable of running their own businesses. But they would work for Marty or someone like that because they didn’t dare take the risk. Then as time went by and there was no memory of a Depression, everybody who was qualified to do anything started their own business. Marty also started Vanguard, which evolved into a scaffolding manufacturer. My wife’s brother Jim Somero ran Vanguard for Seppala & Aho for quite awhile before they sold out. Danny Seppala and Albert Goddard started G&S Construction, then changed the name to Trace Construction, then sold out to Al Traffie. Al Traffie then sold Trace Construction and started Hutter Construction. Dave Olson now runs Trace Construction. Ray Aho, of Aho Construction, once worked for Marty.

Steve Krook, Marty’s son-in-law, was living in a downstairs apartment at Frigard’s when he first got married. I remember him saying, “I’m sick of working for other people.” And he went out and bought some forms and started pouring foundations. That was the beginning of SK Foundations. Fromthere, he went into developing. He bought some land and it ended up the land couldn’t be subdivided. He lost his deposit and told me, “I’ve never been so happy to get back into the trenches in all my life.” Well, that didn’t last long. He started developing again and he’s been extremely successful. Hisbrother Erik is in the foundation business and brother Tim is in his own concrete business. My brother Charlie was in the Air Force four years. After he got out, he went to the University of Miami. They wrote an article on him, “Dad goes to school on $5,000 a year.” He was working in a gas station, had a wife and two children, and going to college. He studied in summer and completed the four-year program in three years. After he got out, he went to work for Pratt & Whitney and eventually became assistant project engineer. He was getting up the ladder and had a considerable vested interest in their retirement program. I went to see him one day with Marty: “Charlie, we need someone to run our site division.” Charlie packed up and moved to New Ipswich and went to work for Seppala & Aho. That must have been around 1967. I quit my position as vice president at Seppala and Aho in 1969. Charlie took over the vice president’s job and worked there for quite a few years.

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