SALVAGE: Five Rose Wreckers

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Today, with seven salvage, sales and wrecking subsidiaries, Cleveland Wrecking is one of six big wrecking companies whose relative size no man can list because wreckers are closemouthed about sales and profits. This year, with wrecking contracts all over the country (examples: 800 buildings in Louisville, 550 in Cincinnati, 300 in Columbus, Ohio, 75 in Oakland, Calif.), Cleveland Wrecking is having one of the big years of its career, can well look forward to salvage coups like its saving of 6,000,000 feet of lumber from Duluth grain elevators. To keep up with their destruction, the Roses need 200 administrative employes, sometimes employ as much as $100,000 worth of equipment on a single job, including bulldozers, clam shell buckets, a two-ton steel weight swung from a boom to batter walls and floors. But peacetime wrecking technology is not subject to much change.

Chief Rose cost is still a small army (1,000-2,000) of men with crowbars and hammers.