Conrad Industries Celebrating 60 Years In Business
By Capt. Richard Eberhardt
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| Parker Conrad, seated, founded Conrad Industries 60 years ago. Standing are his son, Johnny Conrad, left, who is now president, and grandson, Daniel Conrad, who is director of sales. In the background is a supply boat on the drydock on the Atchafalaya River in Morgan City, La. |
Conrad Industries is quietly celebrating 60 years in business at the same location at its Front Street shipyard in Morgan City, La. The company employs 700 workers at three yards in Louisiana and one in Texas.
J. Parker Conrad founded the company in 1948 to build wooden shrimp boats for the Gulf of Mexico. He had just sold his seafood buying and transporting business to General Foods, which had decided to build nine shrimp boats on the site. Conrad was asked to stay on and oversee the construction. It was his first foray into boat building.
After the nine boats were built, he bought the shipyard site, and continues to work there to this day, despite his 92 years. He serves as cochairman with his son Johnny Conrad. Grandson Daniel Conrad, Johnny’s son, is now a salesman for the company.
About half of the revenue for Conrad Industries comes from repair work, with the other half from a variety of new-construction projects, which have included Z-drive tugs, deck barges, lift boats, an aluminum ferry for Bolivar-Galveston in Texas, and several boats for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Oil barge construction is becoming a big part of the business. Conrad recently signed a contract with Settoon Towing to build tank barges for inland and near-coastal collection of oil.
Johnny Conrad started Johnny’s Propeller Shop 45 years ago, a company that is well known along the South Louisiana waterways. Johnny’s other two sons, Glenn and Ken, manage the two locations of Johnny’s Propeller Shop in Morgan City and Houma, La.
Conrad Industries owns three other shipyards, including Orange Shipbuilding in Orange, Texas, which was purchased in 1997; Amelia Deep Water Yard, where five of the company’s six drydocks are located; and Amelia Aluminum, where a 300-ton travel lift is used to repair small tugs and “up to the largest offshore aluminum crew boats.”
One of the drydocks at the Amelia Deep Water yard on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW) can handle the biggest towboats and supply boats in the Gulf of Mexico, and measures 280 feet in length with 140 feet between the wing walls. Its rated capacity is 10,000 tons.
The original yard in Morgan City handles new construction of barges and repair work, with one of the company’s six drydocks. The corporate headquarters are there.
Conrad Industries went public in 1998, but the never-ending paperwork of a public company dictated the delisting of the company three years ago. Shares are still traded over the counter.
“At board meetings, most of the time was spent discussing federal regulations and very little time was available to discuss the future of the company,” Dan Conrad said. “It made a lot more sense to delist, so we could concentrate on running the business.”
Changing Waterways
The changing waterways on the Louisiana coast forced the company to move all but the one drydock from Morgan City on the Atchafalaya River. While there was 90 feet of water just off the docks on Front Street years ago, silting now requires dredging as much as twice a year to maintain the 30-foot draft required for the drydock operation.
“It’s a different problem than most of Louisiana is facing,” Johnny explained to The Waterways Journal while sitting in his father’s office, which has a picture window that looks out over the shipyard to the Atchafalaya River. “Most of the Louisiana coastline is disappearing, while we fight to maintain navigation in the Atchafalaya Basin as silt builds up land.”
The Atchafalaya Spillway drains the Red River, and 30 percent of the Mississippi River is diverted to the Atchafalaya River at the Old River Control Structure above Baton Rouge. With the levees 15 to 20 miles apart, silt from the waterway is filling in the Atchafalaya Basin.
The flood of 1973 covered the yard for eight months. But that was the only time the yard flooded. Since then, the Corps of Engineers built a flood wall that divides traffic on Front Street, one way on each side of the concrete barrier. The shipyard sits on the river side of the wall.
“We managed to survive, despite the obstacles,” Johnny said. He began “helping” his dad in the shipyard at age five.
During the flood of 1973, the Corps of Engineers almost lost the Old River Control Structure to the raging currents of the Mississippi River. Bargeloads of rock to shore up the facility were brought in, only to have the eddies consume the entire load, barge and all. Some barges that were sucked into the river at the Old River Control Structure were never found.
Had the Corps lost the battle to the Mississippi River, it would have changed its course and flowed down the shorter route of the Atchafalaya Basin to the Gulf of Mexico, bypassing New Orleans.
Office Packed With History
Parker Conrad’s office has a wealth of history in its files, including magazines, photo albums and scrapbooks that document much of the maritime history of Louisiana, including photos taken from shrimp boats of tankers sinking off the Louisiana coastline during World War II.
“Those U-boats had a field day until the blimp base was built in Houma,” he said. German U-boats were intercepting tankers loaded with fuel oil and gasoline destined from the coastal refineries of Texas and Louisiana for wartime England. More than 40 tankers were torpedoed off Louisiana in World War II.
Parker grew up on Lagonda Plantation on Jefferson Island west of Morgan City, where rice and sugar cane were grown. From age 12 until he was 17, he was away at a seminary where there was little contact with the outside world. There were no newspapers and, of course, no radio or television. Roads were so bad that his parents would visit only about twice a year.
“After 5-1/2 years, I decided the seminary was not for me,” he explains. “When I came home, I had to re-introduce myself to my brothers and sisters because I was away so long.”
‘Parker’s Follies’
While the seminary taught him discipline, the Great Depression that he now faced offered few jobs. He tried several ways of making money, but each became known as Parker’s Folly #1, Parker’s Folly #2, etc., he remembers with a smile.
Fishing, trapping, harvesting cypress timber and raising chickens did not produce a profit.
“My brothers said my chickens ate more corn than our mules,” Parker remembers. “By the time I fixed up an old truck chassis with a winch to haul logs, I only broke even in the logging business. I raised vegetables, but when mine were ripe, so were all the other farmers’, so I couldn’t sell mine.”
He said he read government literature on frog farms, and did the math. Female frogs lay 30,000 eggs. Sometimes they lay twice a year. Even if only 1 percent of his frog eggs hatched and grew to maturity, he could make money.
Parker took a pirogue, a Cajun canoe, to a remote area of the expansive plantation with a shovel, built a levee to create a pond, and dug a small channel to the bayou to flood it.
He lived in an abandoned farm house, repairing one room in which to cook and sleep. At night he would catch frogs to stock the pond. With a lot of work, it looked like he finally had a business that would prosper.
He stayed at his frog farm, leaving only on Saturday night in his pirogue to paddle to the family home. After church on Sunday morning, he returned to his business.
“A good friend” watched his routine. One Sunday when he returned to his frog farm, he discovered his “friend” had raided his farm while he was at church and all his frogs were gone. It became another Parker’s Folly.
“I couldn’t get depressed,” he said. “I had no place to go and no money to get there.” He tells of seeing a picture of the Rocky Mountains and imagining how beautiful they must be. To feed the wanderlust, and with no money, he decided to hop on a freight train.
During the Depression, open box cars often carried so many hobos one only had room to sleep sitting up. Homes within walking distance of a railroad were constantly besieged by hungry hobos looking for meals. They could not feed everyone. He would spend many hungry nights on the journey.
He managed to see the Rocky Mountains, and returned home about two weeks later, quite lean and covered with soot. Passenger trains made the best time, he learned, and the only place to hide on them was behind the engine where the smoke was the worst.
Once he was discovered on a train near Dallas, and was put off the train 15 miles from the nearest town, having no option but to walk.
During the interview, he sang a song of a hobo that he learned during his two-week journey, 70 years ago, much to the delight of his son and grandson.
His first real break came when he turned to the sea and started buying shrimp, icing it down in a truck, and driving to New York. It was a tough 60-hour run, with no interstate highways, and he stopped only for gas. He paid a helper $25 for the entire trip.
The shrimp were not sold before he got to New York. He would take his loads to the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan. The price for jumbo headless was 12 cents a pound.
Later he would hire someone to drive as he worked the business.
After General Foods bought his shrimp-brokering business, he began building wooden shrimp boats, first with cypress until it became hard to find. He shopped around until he found a source in New Orleans that imported mahogany from Honduras. It made beautiful boats.
Repair work quickly became a big part of the business. With no drydock between New Orleans and Texas, he bought his first drydock from St. Louis Shipbuilding in 1951 or 1952, he remembers. It was steel, which he had never used.
By 1962, he abandoned wooden hulls and started building with steel.
While his shipyard business was booming, Parker also got into the boat rental business. He bought several used wooden PT boats from the Navy and converted them into seismograph boats for the growing Louisiana oil industry.
“But I mostly stayed away from the oil business, with its booms and downturns,” Parker said. “In the early days you had to buy your contracts from the big oil companies. I didn’t want to do business that way.”
He also mostly avoided building tugboats for the oil industry, although he has built some for his customers. His niche was mostly deck barges and expanding into specialty vessels.
Like his father, Johnny Conrad is also good at recognizing business opportunities. He started a trucking business, which he later sold to return to the shipyard.
“Trucking is much like the oil business,” Johnny said. “It was boom and bust. I had 6,000 customers but only about 600 would be busy at any one time. At another time, those 600 customers would be idle and it would be a different 600 that would be busy.”
He also opened a communications business, which focuses on paging equipment. He still owns that.
Johnny’s Propeller Shop was started when he saw an opportunity while he was delivering propellers for repairs from his dad’s drydock to a shipyard in New Orleans.
“I saw that stainless steel would be the material of choice for propellers, so we bought the equipment to handle it,” he said. “Forty years later, it’s still the preferred material for propellers.”
Today, Johnny’s Propeller Shop continues as one of the largest on the Gulf Coast and Mississippi River Valley.
In 2004, Parker handed control of the company to Johnny. Together they are cochairmen of the board. Johnny also serves as president and chief executive officer.
A company press release issued in May 2007 said it had “a record current backlog of $97 million in contracts.” A press release issued nine months later in February 2008, announced contracts for new construction of 14 barges, two tugs, a ferry and a major ferry repair, with a backlog of $106 million.
“Business has never been better,” Parker said with a big smile.
