James Irwin "Zack" Wallover was
born on 17 June 1921 in East Liverpool, Ohio, to Edwin M. and
Mary Louise Wallover. Zack and his brother, Edwin M. Jr., or "Ted"
as he was nicknamed, were raised in Midland, PA. Both sons were
well behaved and performed all of the housework for their parents.
Zack worked in the coke plant at Crucible Steel during the summers,
while he attended Midland High School the rest of the year. He
also worked at a stable where some men from Crucible owned horses.
He would clean out the stalls in exchange for the opportunity
to ride on weekends. Zack was also athletic during High School,
participating on Midland's baseball team. After graduating from
Midland High School in 1939, Zack decided to attend Washington
and Jefferson College, where he initially studied engineering.
He continued his sporting career at W&J by playing baseball
and football, although his football career was limited to his
use as a "practice dummy." While at W&J, WWII in
Europe erupted. Like most young men during that time, Zack was
anxious to fight in the war. He made a trip to Canada, to join
the British navy, but was told that he would need his father's
permission. When Zack asked his father, he said, "You had
better get the hell back to school. When we join the war, I want
to see a Wallover name listed beside everyone else's, but until
then you stay in school." This was the only time that Zack
heard his father swear. While still at W&J, Zack joined the
Marines, but this was before Pearl Harbor, so they told him that
he should stay in school, and as soon as he finished, to tell
them. Zack graduated from Washington and Jefferson on 18 December
1942 with a degree in biology and premed. The next morning, 19
Dec., he was on a train to Paris Island for boot camp.
Zack says that at Paris Island they broke you down until, "you looked up to a snake's belly." While at basic, Zack's mother would send him letters and packages of food, but Zack never received any of them. They were addressed to James Irwin Wallover, and as his drill sergeant said, "the Marines only know a James I. Wallover, until your mother addresses the mail correctly, you're not going to get it." So the drill sergeants were well fed while Zack was in training. After basic training, Zack married Marjean Wilson in a small chapel in Quantico, Virginia. Marjean was the daughter of Samuel B. Wilson, a lawyer from Beaver. Samuel was the grandson of Samuel B. Wilson, also a lawyer from Beaver and a contemporary of Matthew Stanley Quay. Marjean grew up in Beaver and graduated from Beaver High School. Marjean's parents did not accompany her to Quantico because her sister was graduating from college on the same day as the wedding. They were number nine out of ten couples married that day. He was then assigned to the artillery school at Camp Lejuene, North Carolina. Zack did considerably better in his studies there than he had at college and graduated first in his class.
After a short stop in San Francisco, Zack was assigned to Pearl Harbor. He was assigned as a 1st Lt.-Forward Observer in G. Battery, 3rd Btn., 14th Mar. Reg., 4th Marine Division based in Maui. In January of 1945, the 4th Div. Ieft Maui in transports, stopping for several days in Pearl Harbor for supplies. After the procurement of the needed supplies, the Marines sailed west. Once at sea, the soldiers were then notified of the subject of their mission - Iwo Jima. The 4th Div. Marines were told that the island was theirs to take, along with the 5th Div. and, if necessary, the 3rd Division. On 19 February 1945, the Marines hit the beaches. The 5th Div. landed on the left side of the beach, while the 4th Div. Ianded on the right side. After the first day of fighting, the Marines had taken the beach, and were there to stay. Three days later, the Marines of the 5th Div. had taken Mt. Suribachi, the highest ground on the island. The toughest fighting was on the right side of the beaches. Zack had been calling artillery on a part of the island known as the "meat grinder," when he found himself surrounded by Japanese soldiers. He called to his artillery for a volley on his position. They refused but he said, "Either we get those rounds or we're done!" He heard, "They're on the way." He and his men ran down off of the mound, while the 6 or 8 Japanese ran up on it just as the shells hit. Needless to say, his men survived and the enemy didn't. Zack received his Bronze Star for this act of courage. The fighting on Iwo continued until 16 March 1945, when Gen. Kuribayashi surrendered to the Marines.
Zack missed the last 18 days of fighting because he was hit in the back with mortar shrapnel while in a foxhole in the Amphitheater. He and his radioman were on the far side of the amphitheater, when they noticed large mortars called ' daisy-cutters, which were "the size of 5- gallon buckets," coming down from right to left. When they saw that they were going to be hit next, they dove into a shallow crater. Three other infantrymen, who were carrying a litter, dropped the litter and jumped into the other side of the crater. The mortar hit the edge of the crater and when the smoke cleared, the other three men were dead. Zack and his radioman picked up the litter and carried it back to a first aid tent on the friendly side of the amphitheater. It was then that another corpsman saw that he was hit. He told Zack, "Sir, you've been hit," and hit him on the shoulder. This was the first time that Zack felt the pain. The shrapnel from the mortar had hit him across his back and in his hip. He was then flown to a M.A.S.H. unit on Guam to remove some of the shrapnel. He was then transferred to Aiea Naval Hospital on Oahu, where more of the shrapnel was removed. Iwo Jima was the proposed staging area for the unrealized invasion of Japan, but due to the two Atomic bombs, the invasion was never executed. Zack believes that he would not be alive today, nor the entire Marine Corps, had the US invaded Japan. He returned from WWII with 2 Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. It is interesting to note that he was actually nominated for a Silver Star, but because he was in the artillery, he was not considered part of the front line, and therefore he could only receive the Bronze Star.
After WWII, Zack returned to Beaver and a job at Mayer China in Beaver Falls. He worked in the machine shop with a man who had served with Zack's father in WWI. The first thing that this man did was dump out all the equipment boxes and told Zack to replace them. This was how he taught Zack where to place everything. He continued to work there for six or seven years as he learned the trade. Then in 1952, Zack saw a sign on the side of a building in East Liverpool that read "Wallover Oil Co." He thought to himself, 'The happiest men I see are the men that own their own businesses." He went to Mr. Mayer, a close friend, to tell him his idea of reopening the company. Mr. Mayer said to him, "Do it, and I'll be your first customer. If it doesn't work, you can have your old job back." Zack never needed to return to Mayer China. In 1952, Zack borrowed some money from his father and began to buy the property in East Liverpool from his aunt. "When he went down there, it was nothing," Marjean Wallover remembers. "There was a building with a dirt floor and the property."
At that time the Wallovers were expecting their third child, Marjean remembered. He told me, "If I can't make it work, I'll go back into the Marines." (He was a captain in the Marine Reserves at that time.) And she said, "You'd better make it work."
Zack Wallover did make it work. The company has prospered ever since 1952 when he first bought it. Not an oilman by training, his background was in the pottery industry and the military. As Marjean says, "In the beginning, he didn't know beans. He'd make business calls on anything with a high smoke stack." Wallover would then take orders from these businesses and drive a truck up to Cleveland to pick up a load of the drums.
Zack Wallover got his early "education" in the waiting rooms of his customers "talking to other salesman." His big break came when the important Crucible Steel Company (Colt Industries) in Midland, Pa., asked him if he could supply some lanolin, an oil derived from wool. At that time, lanolin was "next to impossible" to come by because it was all being used in the Korean War. Crucible's representative had asked for the lanolin on a lark. For naive Zack, anything was something to be excited about; so he looked up "lanolin" in the dictionary and began calling suppliers listed in the Thomas's Register. He called, and he called, and no one had it. By a stroke of luck, he chanced upon a company in New York called Malmstrom & Sons. Malmstrom had been supplying lanolin through a relationship that had just been severed, and happened to have 40 drums of lanolin available per month. So Zack borrowed some money from his father and flew up to New York to meet with the representatives of Malmstrom. "They looked him up and down, and asked him questions about himself," stated Marjean, and he confirmed what they learned from Dun & Bradstreet - and they agreed to supply the 40 drums per month. Zack returned to Crucible and informed the representative he had what they asked for. So impressed were the procurement officials there that they "put him in a car and sent him up to Pittsburgh to meet with the higher ups" said Marjean. His honesty and earnestness led to a profitable relationship with Crucible, Zack admits, hastening to add that it was Wallover Oil's dedication and reliability which retained it. The oil company benefited tremendously from its relationship with Crucible, he adds. "As people left Crucible for other companies, we benefited from those contacts," explains Wallover. The oil company's base of contacts grew over the years, and its reputation for service grew with it.
This is not to say there were no difficult periods after 1952. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Wallover oil suffered a setback when the East Liverpool pottery industry was hurt by cheaper Japanese imports. However, Wallover continued to prosper because of an abundance of steel and related industries up and down the Ohio River. Perhaps the biggest blow the company took was in the early 1980s when the U.S. steel industry fell upon hard times. Resourcefulness and imagination enabled Wallover Oil to turn difficulties into opportunities. For example, pollution from used oil, an environmental problem, enabled Wallover to enter the business of cleaning oil. In 1967, Wallover Oil began taking used oils from customers, cleaning them and returning them for re-use. To date, millions of gallons of used oil have been - and still are being - cleaned and returned. "The sale of virgin oils plus re-refined oils completes the circle of service to our customers," points out Wallover. As the steel industry began to fade, Wallover Oil found a strong source of customers to serve in the automotive industry. Today, the company's Strongsville, Ohio plant, built in 1975, serves predominantly the automotive industry in the Cleveland area. "We sell to engine plants, and casting plants," explained Zack. "Ford and GM are customers of ours."
The East Liverpool plant still primarily serves what remains of the steel industry in the Ohio River Valley. "Now-a-days, that's the specialty steel industry," he comments. "As the equipment [and the industries we serve] change, we change [to accommodate those changes]."
Though it adheres to "good old-fashioned values," Wallover Oil seems undaunted by change. Two years ago, Wallover Oil expanded into the environmental laboratory control arena "because we were required to do so much to meet EPA requirements that we thought it would be a good business to get into," says Joseph D. Early, sales manager for Wallover Oil. The company's Environmental Control Lab (ECL) in Cleveland conducts very sophisticated testing of products for "any company that is interested in doing environmental testing, NASA is our biggest customer."
Here again, the company seems to owe its success to commitment and ethics. The man behind ECL, Cary Mathias, was originally employed by another organization, which was unwilling to commit to purchasing much needed lab equipment. Mathias went to Wallover President George Marquis after hearing that Wallover Oil would acquire such equipment. Marquis turned him down. It wasn't because of hesitation to spend. Rather, Marquis refused to "steal an employee from another company."
So Mathias quit his job. He knocked on Marquis' door again with the same question. This time Marquis offered him a job, and ECL was born.; It's got a great future," Zack Wallover comments on the ECL. In the past six years it's grown from a staff of one to a staff of 23.
In 1992, Wallover Oil Co. Inc. changed its name to Wallover Enterprises Inc. as it acquired National Oil Products in Hamilton, Ohio. Wallover Enterprises is comprised of Wallover Oil Co., Wallover Synthetics Div., and Environmental Control Laboratories. These divisions incorporate three manufacturing plants, in Strongsville, East Liverpool, and Hamilton, and an environmental laboratory in Strongsville as well. Wallover Synthetics has distributors in Lancaster, PA, Gastonia, NC, and Atlanta, GA. From a staff of one, Wallover has expanded to a staff of 39, operating a $15.5 million corporation, but still remains "a family business." George "Hub" Marquis, current president, and William Cutri, current vice president, are James "Zack" Wallover's sons-in-law.
Wallover Oil hasn't been Zack's only business venture, though. In 1962, John O'Leary, Sr. called twelve men, including Zack, to his basement. He said that plastics were going to be big, and he was starting a company to produce them. Zack invested in the company and gave John the names of other potential investors. That small company, Tuscarawas Plastics has grown to 23 plants that serve over 35 states. It is also the largest manufacturer of custom molded polystyrene (Styrofoam) in the United States.
Not only has Zack been a successful businessman, but he has also been involved in his community. He has raised four children, 3 girls, Mary Margaret, the oldest, Susan, and Marjean, and one boy, David, the youngest. Mary Margaret married "Hub" Marquis, who is the current President of Wallover. Susan married Bill Cutri, who is the current Vice President of Wallover. Marjean married Bob Ingram, who is a Presbyterian Minister. And David, also a Presbyterian Minister married Lisa Nuss. He also has 11 grandchildren. At age 27, he was elected to the First Presbyterian Church session, becoming, at that time, the youngest elder to serve. He also taught 9th grade Sunday school at First Presbyterian Church in Beaver for 22 years. He has served on Beaver's Council and also on the Beaver Memorial Cemetery Board. Zack continues to attend Church regularly along with his wife Marjean.
Health has not been among one of the Wallover's many blessings. In July of 1985, Zack was diagnosed with having a major heart attack and underwent quintuple bypass surgery. Fortunately, he fully recovered from his affliction. Marjean has had it tougher, though. In 1964, at the age of 40, she was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. Since then, she has had numerous other illnesses associated to the arthritis and although she can walk short distances, she uses the aid of a wheelchair most of the time.
Zack Wallover has led an incredible life and still continues to be influential, despite all the hardships he has overcome. He and his wife are still living in Beaver, and he is still active on the Cemetery Board and as Wallover Enterprises' Chairman of the Board.
