Each weekday morning, Dan Swartz eats breakfast with his wife, Joyce, and drives his white pickup with no phone 45 miles north from his rural home to this small community not far from the Wabash River.
It’s a routine that’s varied little in 33 years in this town about 90 miles west of Indianapolis. Structure, precision and routine are important to Dan Swartz. He’s an engineer, and he’s 70 years old.
“I look forward to the weekend, but long about Sunday afternoon, I’m thinking about work again,” he said. “People think I’m crazy, but I love bricks.”
He arrives at 7 a.m., checks a few things at his battered metal desk and begins another day as president of Colonial Brick Co., one of only two places left in the country that bake bricks the old-fashioned way in coal-fired kilns.
The unusual bricks, known as clinkers, are sold in 150 retail building-supply outlets in five Midwestern states.
Dan Swartz said making bricks is certainly not a job for the weak or timid.
It involves extracting huge, unwieldy chunks of shale and clay from the earth with a 160,000-pound backhoe, mixing it with water, molding it into four-pound rectangles and subjecting the bricks to intense, prolonged heat. It takes two weeks to make a batch of Dan Swartz clinkers.
In 1965, he was engineering things in a Clay County glazed tile and brick factory. Dan and co-worker Paul Atkinson heard the old Colonial Brick Co. was losing money and was for sale.
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They enlisted a third investor and bought 50 acres of shale and clay mines, 46 coal-burning furnaces and 11 beehive-shaped kilns that were built in 1904.
“We decided we could make money making good bricks,” Atkinson said.
And they did, using equipment and techniques unchanged in nearly a century, with 48 workers whose loyalty and pride in making a good clinker is truly astounding.
Atkinson and the third partner have since retired, and Swartz runs the place alone.
Most of the machines were built in the early 20th century. The furnaces operate up to 1,870 degrees, belching smoke and fire, and the work is hot and dirty.
Swartz never advertises, employs one salesman so he doesn’t have to do it, has never heard of a mission statement, rejects marketing and public relations schemes as fundamentally dishonest and, when asked his philosophy of running a business, pauses, rubs his forehead and says:
“I never gave any thought to a philosophy. Um, year after year, we do the same thing, and it works. We make 11 million bricks a year and sell every one because they’re good bricks.”