Rudy Graf said April 30, that the work of The Science Source, the Waldoboro company he owned from 1986 until December 2011, would continue.
“There won’t be any major changes,” he said in his living room in Newcastle. “I think it will continue to grow. There’s a great management team. It will be good for the employees and the community.”
Graf and his wife, Dorothy, were discussing the transition under which The Science Source was sold to Anania and Associates, a Portland-based investment company that has a portfolio of small manufacturing companies in Maine.
“We feel good about what we were doing,” Graf said. “In some small way, we made a real contribution to the teaching of science in the U.S.”
Anania’s president, Peter Anania, said May 1 that investors usually expect to get their money back within five-to-seven years. After that period, they hope either The Science Source’s management team or “another company in the area” would buy the company.
“We want to grow it and then make it available,” he said.
Eventually, he found Bond Manufacturing in Coopers Mills.
“I met a banker who had a couple of businesses in his portfolio – owners who were sick or wanted out. He didn’t know much about [Bond Manufacturing] because he didn’t lend much money to [the company]. Cliff Bond was getting old and wanted out.”
“It was like a candy store when I walked into it. It was a mess. Cliff started in the early 1960s and he was still making products from the early 1960s.” Graf said there were a half-dozen people working in the Coopers Mills factory, fewer in winter when Bond would cut back.
“At the time, there were a lot of small manufacturers that supplied to large distribution companies,” said Science Source CEO Paul Rogers, one of four company managers who became part of Anania’s investment group at the time of the sale. “The distributors were the middle-men providing the science kits and materials to schools.”
“When little companies, such as the one that we are today, even, for some reason or other went out of business, distributors would sometimes approach Rudy. He got bigger through acquisition of other small companies as well as by developing new products.”
“Along the way, we became [more than] just a physics company,” Rogers said. “In 2001 we purchased a biological model company from Wisconsin and brought the manufacturing here.” The Science Source also acquired a chemistry kit manufacturer and other small product-specific companies.
Currently, approximately 30 people work at the plant at 299 Atlantic Highway, Waldoboro, a number that peaked to more than 40 while the company was fulfilling a contract to provide science materials to schools in Kurdish northern Iraq during that country’s reconstruction.
At the time that Graf bought the company, the National Science Foundation began to focus on science education.
“This was the sputnik era, when we thought the Russians were getting ahead of us.” Graf said the federal government was beginning to make grants to provide opportunities for students to do hands-on learning, instead of the previous practice of having only one, more expensive, experimental apparatus at the front of the room that students were not allowed to touch.
“They developed new experiments using inexpensive materials.” Classrooms could purchase these new kits in sets of 20 or more for a fraction of the cost of one teacher’s model.
“That’s really teaching,” Graf said.
He continued to operate Bond Manufacturing out of the original location for the first six months, living part of that time at a sheep ranch run by evangelists who spoke in tongues and held monthly revival meetings.
“It was fascinating.”
Graf changed the name to The Science Source because, “Bond Manufacturing didn’t tell the world anything.” A year later, he built the building on Rt. 1 that has since been through two expansions.
“I practiced everything I’d learned on someone else’s payroll. Working for larger corporations you don’t always see where the product goes. In a small company, you really have a sense of ownership.
“I understand capitalism better than I ever did, and the importance of a small business to the growth of the nation,” he said.
Graf began to attend meetings with science teachers, something he said the former owner had not done, and exhibited in trade shows targeting educators. He expanded product offerings by working with teachers who develop materials get those materials into classrooms all over the country.
“I extended that reach to Europe and England to look for products that we might make and sell here in the U.S.” In England, Graf learned about design engineering, a discipline that trains students to “use real tools to build their own designs.”
He began building stronger relationships with distributors, sold directly to teachers and school districts and with the help of Dorothy, a former teacher, began development programs to familiarize the teachers with the materials.
The Science Source makes models and kits that provide hands-on learning opportunities for students in grades K-16. In order to get these tools into the classroom, Graf developed his own distribution network.
“What we found with a lot of teachers in elementary schools, was they were afraid of these tools,” Dorothy Graf said.
“It wasn’t fitting in with the main stream of U.S. education,” Rudy said. He said the No Child Left Behind Act only requires testing in mathematics and reading, reducing the emphasis on science that began during the Cold War.
In some Maine school districts, elementary students only receive one hour of science instruction per week that seldom focuses on the physical sciences, Graf said.
“Physical science is the most important subject of all, because it’s about understanding the natural laws,” he said. “It’s got to change if we want to catch up with the rest of the world.”
Graf named his design engineering curriculum LINX, because it was designed to help learners make connections between science and math.
With the materials made at the Waldoboro factory, elementary and middle school students can design and build their own apparatus to create their experiments. The science discipline that educators now refer to as STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – are all integrated into the LINX system.
“It’s not like sitting in front of a computer with a mouse,” Graf said. Dorothy Graf said hands-on learning allows experimenters to collect and analyze their own data, rather than relying on models generated by a computer program.
“If we want people to know how to move science along they need to use the scientific method,” she said. “We’re really talking about science literacy.”
“If you look at the political issues that face us – climate change, nuclear power, environmental issues – all of them have a technological base,” Rudy Graf said. “If the citizenry doesn’t have at least a basic understanding, our politicians won’t.”
“We’ve had offers through the years,” Rogers said. “We’re a successful little company. When the time came to consider continuity for the company, he entertained a number of offers.”
Rogers said Anania looks for relationships and synergies between the companies it owns and that The Science Source is already finding commonalities with some of the four or five other technology businesses that are part of the group’s portfolio.
Currently, all Anania’s companies are located in Maine and under the agreement negotiated between Graf and Anania, The Science Source will stay where it is and keep all of its staff.
“None of the employees have changed, except for the owner,” Rogers said.
Graf praised all the employees at The Science Source, and made special mention of Tom Ford, a teacher and former chairman of the science department at Gould Academy, who was “the most prolific developer I ever saw of products that teach science.”
Ford was a national resource for science teachers across the U.S. and lived in Waldoboro until his death in 2005.
One of the products he developed was an edible optic program that allowed children to cast lenses in a variety of colors using gelatin. After using them to study magnification and other principles, the students could eat the lenses.
Anania said there had been no operational changes at The Science Source, since the acquisition.
“We hope to be hiring a marketing person to help grow the domestic market,” he said. Anania and Associates has a one-person sales office in Europe and is looking to add other distributors in that region.
“The rest is to try to make things more efficient – new accounting software, new equipment. Things like that.”
“We’re excited about the acquisition of The Science Source,” Anania said. “It’s a nice company with a good workforce. We think we can acquire other product lines from other companies and grow it that way as well.”
“There no guarantees in business,” he said. “We’d like to see it stay in local control.” He said one way that could happen is if management stepped in to buy The Science Source. “Of the businesses we’ve owned, we had one in 1996 move out of state after being purchased by a larger company. All the rest have stayed in the state.”
“Suddenly you go from 100 down to zero,” he said of retirement. “You’ve lost your identity.”
He said he was looking at opportunities to work in the nonprofit sector. Graf is chairman of the industry council for the Maine State Prison System, active in municipal government in Isle au Haut and with the Island Institute’s Maine Islands Coalition.
“I believe in giving time to the community,” he said.
