SPE honors industry legend Glenn Beall at Antec

St. Louis — It's a big challenge to describe the plastics career of industry icon Glenn Beall, but on March 6, several of his colleagues tried their best.

On that date, Beall's career was the topic of a symposium hosted by the Society of Plastics Engineers as part of the Antec 2024 conference in St. Louis. Beall's longtime friend Len Czuba covered the highlights of Beall's career. Czuba is owner of Czuba Enterprises Inc. in Lombard, Ill.

Beall first studied engineering at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill. He had married Patsy, his high school sweetheart, in 1953, and she was an active part of his life and career from that point forward. Glenn and Patsy, who died in 2014, both were from small towns in Illinois.

"I always thought of it as Glenn Beall plus, and the plus was Patsy," Czuba said.

Patsy traveled with Beall throughout his career, Czuba added, and she supported them both by working while Beall was completing his degree and later when he went into business for himself. Patsy Beall also later helped him create and organize presentation materials for his seminars.

After graduating, Beall worked at General Electric for a year on machinery and equipment before moving on to a 10-year career designing products for Abbott Labs in the Chicago area.

Beall earned 12 of his 35 patents while working for Abbott, where he helped the firm transition from reusable medical devices to disposable plastic devices.

Czuba said the work Beall did at Abbott offered doctors and hospitals savings by eliminating the need for reprocessing reusable metal medical devices. Those metal devices required much care and processing, such as cleaning, packaging and sterilization, he added.

In 1968, Beall launched Glenn Beall Engineering, a product design firm that he ran for 25 years before selling it in 1993. At that point, he founded Glenn Beall Plastics Ltd., a business focused on teaching part design. Both businesses were based in Libertyville, Ill.

Along the way, Beall was extremely active in SPE. He joined the organization in 1960 and later became a founding member of four SPE divisions: medical plastics, rotational molding, plastics design and development and mold making/mold design.

Over Beall's career, he taught almost 800 seminars to almost 30,000 students. Beall seminar locations included the universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin and UCLA, as well as ones hosted by such companies as GE, Dow Inc. and DuPont Co.

Beall also published more than 50 technical papers and articles, wrote or co-wrote four technical reference books and wrote more than 80 articles for industry publications. He also was active in the Society of the Plastics Industry, now the Plastics Industry Association.

During his career, Beall has received numerous awards from SPE and many other technical organizations. He was elected to the Plastics Pioneers Association in 1983 and in 1997 was inducted into the Plastics Hall of Fame.

The 90-year-old Beall followed up the accolades with a 40-minute presentation at Antec.

He said Patsy "was an integral part of everything I did."

He also credited early friend and classmate Doug Dawson with introducing him to plastics.

Even early in his career, Beall said that he was gathering information about product design. This led to him establishing his four pillars of design: mold design and construction, part design, material selection and molding or process selection.

"All four [pillars] are there in a successful plastic product, even in something like a poker chip," he said. "And the most important [pillar] is the one you have to do twice — that's the one you remember."

Beall also commented on the design process. "Designers can see things that don't exist," he said. "They create mental images."

"There are many parts to the process, but that's what makes the wheels of commerce turn," Beall added. "A lot of injection molders have done well, but they couldn't do it without good design."

Michael Paloian, founder of Integrated Design Systems in Oyster Bay, N.Y., met Beall in the early 1980s when Beall asked him to join the SPE rotomolding division.

"He reached out to hundreds of us," Paloian said.

He added that Beall helped designers explore their creativity by combining what the product needed with plastics knowledge and innovation. As an example, he cited Oxo-brand storage units and kitchen tools. The tools have Santoprene TPV handles and sell at a premium price.

Mark MacLean-Belvins met Beall in the early 1980s, but even earlier he had used columns that Beall wrote for an industry magazine to better understand design and processing.

"My career wouldn't have been possible without what I learned from Glenn Beall," said MacLean-Blevins, owner of MacLean-Blevins & Associates Inc. in Westminster, Md.

"Early decisions about processing, material, design and tooling affect most of the potential for a completed part," he added. "And sustainability has to start right up front at the beginning of a project. It can be different for each one."

Mark Wolverton met Beall in the late 1970s when Wolverton was working for LNP Engineering Plastics. He's now with SPE's PlastiVan education program.

Wolverton credited Beall with helping him learn about the process of choosing a material. "Some materials aren't suitable for all processes," Wolverton said. "Materials can define a device and application in any market."

He cited the Black & Decker Snakelight as an example of successful product design. The product was a big seller when it was introduced at Home Depot stores in 1994.

Beall has continued to influence plastics pros well into his long career. David Tucker, owner of additive manufacturer New Wave Manufacturing in Camas, Wash., met Beall in 2019, after Tucker read a book that Beall had written about rotational molding.

Tucker said Beall taught him that "it's important to put new products on shelves instead of just focusing on savings."

Tucker said that additive manufacturing is "an enabling technology." He cited Invisalign teeth straighteners as an example of good design.

Ed Probst talked about Beall's impact on the thermoforming sector. Probst began his plastics career in the early 1980s with Profile Plastics in Lake Bluff, Ill., and now is principal of Probst Plastics Consulting LLC in Milwaukee. "At that time, thermoforming was a different process in different places, and we weren't always making great products," he said.

Beall — working with information from the SPE thermoforming division — wrote the first thermoforming design guide for Arrem Plastics in 1985.

Probst said that first guide "got attention because it had Glenn Beall's name on it. He had the reputation and experience and was well known in injection molding. A lot of us had attended Glenn Beall design seminars."

From that point, Profile and other firms made their own design guides, but Beall had laid the foundation.

"The importance that Glenn Beall has had to our industry as a whole is that he taught us how important it is to get people educated in the design of parts," Probst said.

Michael Sepe, Scott Peters, John Bozzelli and Eric Foltz also spoke at the Beall symposium, which was moderated by Al McGovern.