N.J. Drug Firm Buys Stanback, Plans Expansion

By ROSE POST
SALISBURY POST

A New Jersey drug company has agreed to buy Stanback Co., the enterprise born nearly a century ago in a Spencer drugstore that made famous the phrase "Snap back with Stanback."

Representatives of the Block Drug Co. of Jersey City, N.J., and Memphis, Tenn., visited Stanback's multi-million-dollar headache powder plant on South Main Street on Wednesday, says owner W.C. "Bill" Stanback.

"They were talking to our people about taking over after the sale is completed early in January 1999, probably about Jan. 4," he says.

The two firms have reached an agreement to sell the assets of Stanback Company to Block for an undisclosed sum, Stanback told employees Tuesday - with a touch of humor and an admission that he has mixed emotions.

"Despite my intentions to the contrary," he told them, "I've come to realize I'm not going to live forever." None of his three children, Anne, John and Mark, are affiliated with the family-owned corporation founded by his father, Thomas M. Stanback, and uncle, Fred J. Stanback.

"I have come to realize that our Stanback Headache Powders, our Snap Back Stimulant Powders and our line of Chap-et Lip Conditioners, need the advantages of association with a larger family of consumer products and the increased advertising and promotional backing of a larger corporation."

The Block firm is interested "in having Stanback Powders," he says. "It already has BC and Goody's,"

Stanback's two headache powder competitors.

The powders are considered the cheapest, least expensive form of branded pain reliever on the market.

"The company has approached us in previous years - four years ago when they bought Goody's and about 30 years ago when they bought BC," Stanback says.

The major market for headache powders, Stanback says, is in the Southeast and "in the places where Southerners go, like Chicago, New York, Detroit and Washington."

Block also manufactures and sells a wide line of consumer and dental products, including Sensodyne Toothpaste, Polident Dental Cleanser, Poli-grip Denture Adhesive, Tegrin Dandruff Shampoo, Beano and others.

Sales during its last fiscal year, which ended in March, reached almost $89 million, 58 percent of that outside the United States. Seventy percent of its business is in dental products.

"Our agreement with Block Drug Co. insures that the operation will remain here in Rowan County,"

Stanback says, and that pleases him. "They are planning to grow this business and will be seeking a larger facility here. Their employee benefits program is an excellent one, and we know they will treat our people fairly."

Stanback employs 56 people, including three in sales in Georgia and Michigan.

All employees automatically become Block employees, getting their first paychecks and joining Block's benefit plans in January.

Sale of the assets, Stanback says, "means all trademarks, machinery, inventory, everything" with one exception. The Stanback family will continue to own the original Stanback building at 1500 S. Main St., which the company has occupied since 1932 when it moved from Spencer to Salisbury.

The company, certainly the most familiar product "made in Salisbury" during this century, no longer keeps an accurate count of the number of headache powders it has manufactured. Or the pills.

"We used to keep the powders counted," Stanback says.

On its 50th anniversary in 1961, the company noted it had sold more than 3 billion Stanback headache powders since Tom Stanback got his first mail order. At that time, Stanback had sold more than 200 million tablets since introducing that product in 1948. The tablets never approached the powders in popularity and have since seen demand drop.

But now figures like that can only be estimates, his son says. "Maybe, as the McDonald's man says, billions and billions have been sold."

The Stanback Company got its start in 1911 when Tom Stanback was a young pharmacist working in a Thomasville drug store.

And he probably would have stayed there but for a broken heart.

When he and his girlfriend parted, he quit his job in Thomasville and had visions of heading west where a pharmacist, it was said, could make up to $100 a month.

Meanwhile, the pharmacist at Rowan Drug Store in Spencer decided to go on vacation, and Stanback, then 26, accepted a job as relief man with a salary of $88 a month. He gave samples of his new headache powders to railroaders who carried them up and down the Southern line. Hence, that mail order from a woman, Mrs. W.F. Fife, in May 1911, and she forever was considered the first person to "snap back with Stanback."

But his was just the formula for success. He had combined a new drug, aspirin, with several other ingredients to make the powder he sold over the counter to some of his customers.

Aspirin had been discovered in Germany in 1897 and migrated to this country.

BC and Goody's both started about the same time - and so did Alexander Block who opened a small pharmacy in 1907.

Stanback became known to more customers but remained a sideline of Dr. Tom's until 1924 when the young druggist persuaded his younger brother, Fred J. Stanback, to try his hand at selling the powders to retail stores in the area.

Fred Stanback was considered a "live-wire" youngster with a T-model Ford and a zest for dancing.

And he became the ingredient that made Stanback sales soar and the product a national success.

Dr. Tom prepared Stanbacks by night, and Fred sold them by day. Sales went well from the first day, and in two weeks, the brothers decided to invest $1,500 each and form a partnership which they called Stanback Medicine Co.

Dr. Tom speeded up production by using a flour sifter, then a sifter with a hand crank. Fred sampled industrial plants.

Soon the production requirements were too great for the tiny corner in the rear of the drug store. The upstairs of Dr. Tom's home became his plant.

By 1927, they were renting a 35-by-80-foot building in Spencer and selling their powders from Richmond to Columbus, Ga.

And in 1932, the firm bought a new Italian-made folding machine and moved to Salisbury. Full-scale national advertising began, and Stanback was on its way to becoming a national success.

The plant doubled in size by 1941. Since then the manufacturing operation has been mechanized.

Dr. Tom's son, Bill, joined the firm in 1948, and Fred Stanback's son, Fred Jr., entered the business in 1952.

The firm added Chap-et, a lip balm for dry lips, in 1959, and in a short time it grew into one of the leading lip conditioners. Gradually, they added a wide variety of flavors, and today the lip conditioner has outgrown the powder.

Only last year, the company, which has expanded into foreign markets, added a stimulant powder, Snap Back. It is the equivalent of the caffeine in two cups of coffee and is considered the fastest acting "alertness aid" on the market.

Bill Stanback finds it interesting that major dates in the history of the Block Company correspond closely with those in the life of the Stanback Company.

In 1925, Block purchased a denture powder - and dental products now comprise three of the four major product areas it offers around the world.

Moreover, the company moved from New York to New Jersey in 1932, the same year the Stanback Company moved to Salisbury.

Today Block is a publicly traded company, with its stock listed on the NASDAQ exchange. It was selling for $39 a share Wednesday.

"And it is a family company," Bill Stanback says.

"The senior chairman is Leonard Block. James Block is chairman of the board. Thomas Block is president, and Peter Block is president of the European Division, so there's a lot of family still in it."

Fred Stanback died in 1972. Dr. Tom, who continued to be called that all his life, remained active in the management of the company until he was 94 when he got the flu and stopped going to the office.

"And he just never came back," his son says. He died in June 1982, at the age of 97.

The company was incorporated in the early 1980s and brought in an outside president and chief executive officer at that time. Bill Stanback became chairman. In 1986, he bought out his brother, Tom, of Larchmont, N.Y.; his cousins, Fred of Salisbury and Jean Stanback Brumley of Atlanta, Ga.; and his aunt Elizabeth Stanback.

In 1996 the Stanback Company made the largest capital investment in the company's history, buying automatic production equipment for both powders and lip conditioners which significantly increased the company's production capacity and flexibility and allowed it to introduce the Snap Back Packet, the industry's first fully-sealed, single-dose packet of an alertness aid powder.