In 1902, when theater-going was in its heyday and “The Sultan of Sulu” was playing at Chicago’s Studebaker Theater to gentlemen and ladies decked out in their evening finery, a Minneapolis businessman named Charles T. Ozmun came to town to seek his fortune.
At the time, theater posters were mounted by hand on cardboard with a brush and a bucket of paste, and it was here that the enterprising Ozmun spied his business niche: supplying the board for the posters.
He stocked the paste and found a paper merchant to sell him the board. Soon, Ozmun discovered a process for laminating the printed poster and a backing paper to the pulpboard middle. Eventually he began selling blank paper glued to cardboard, and with this product the Chicago Matboard Co. was launched.
In its 93-year history, Chicago Matboard evolved into Chicago Cardboard and then into Crescent, now a division of Potomoc Corp., both headquartered in Wheeling. Somewhere in the company archives is a ledger tallying the first week’s sales: 6 boards, 2 buckets of paste.
Today, though the major components of its products are still paper and paste, the company has grown exponentially. It employs 250 workers in three locations across the country and has annual worldwide sales in excess of $50 million, according to John Alley, president of Crescent.
Its Wheeling location produces most of the several million sheets of specialized paper boards that are used in framing, fine and commercial art and photography, as well as school and office supplies and crafts, says Lynn Brown of Crescent’s product department.
In its regular mat board alone, Crescent stocks nearly 150 colors. Its customers are both large and small, from the framing company the Great Frame-Up to individual artists.
According to Scott Ozmun, great-grandson of the original founder, Crescent is the largest manufacturer in the United States of paperboard products for the art and framing industry.
“The reason that Crescent is here today is because all through the years Crescent has been willing to change,” said Ozmun, a Chicago-area resident and chairman of Potomoc Corp.
In the mid-1920s, Chicago Matboard changed its name to Chicago Cardboard to reflect the addition of die-cut advertising displays, cardboard shirt collars, illustration boards and jigsaw puzzles to its line. In fact, it was puzzles that got the company through the Depression years.
“People couldn’t afford much then,” said Hal Metzger of Elmhurst, vice president of marketing at Crescent, “but they could afford a nickel for a jigsaw puzzle.”
When the country was involved in World War I and II, Metzger noted, the company supplied the Army with a number of products, among them a special paraffin-laminated board for keeping moisture out of ammunition boxes and huge cardboard decoys of tanks, a kind of battlefield trompe l’oeil.
The tremendous growth in the advertising industry after World War II brought with it a demand for illustration and presentation board, and for the next 20 years, the main part of the company’s business would be supplying those products to advertising agencies, corporate art departments, design studios and art schools. At this time, the company became Crescent, the name deriving from the colored board samples that were often cut in the shape of crescent moons.
Crescent moved to Wheeling in 1969, building a 70,000-square-foot facility on land the Ozmun family had bought 40 years earlier. Shortly thereafter, Alley, who was just back from Vietnam, was hired to work at the order desk. Alley, a northwest suburban resident, was witness to trends that forced another change of direction for the company.
During the ’70s and ’80s, the demand for art board-the mainstay of Crescent’s business-declined, as computers replaced much of the work that was done by hand. But at the same time that illustration board sales were declining, picture framing began to emerge as an important segment of the home furnishings market. Since then, mat board for picture framing has been the company’s bread and butter.
In the late ’70s, Crescent introduced Light Fabric for do-it-yourself framers. The product came on a roll; the user mounted it to a board and cut it to size for use as matting.
“It wasn’t really the concept that was so bad,” Alley said, “but the real downfall of that product was that the fabrics themselves-burlap, grasscloth, basket-weave-were not contemporary. That was the moment when we realized we were living in the past.”
“You’ve got to be right on color, on texture,” Metzger said. “You’ve got to know what the trends are.”
Crescent is now involved with an international group of color marketing professionals who track trends in color for manufacturers and fabric mills.
The challenges of the last two decades brought about a kind of corporate soul-searching and a redefinition of mission. “We found out we were laminators. We want to sell board products, and we’re focused on that now,” said Metzger.
“We sell to over 90 countries, and our markets are growing worldwide. Wherever there’s money, there’s going to be appreciation of art and presentation of art and wall art in people’s homes.”
Among the products Crescent supplies are high-fashion fabric mat boards in suede, leather, linen and moire silk; marbled surface papers; and embossed, metallic beveling strips known as mat fillets that are used to create a frame-within-a-frame effect.
The appeal of these products for the home furnishings industry is that they bring the artist and the interior designer together.
“With just a few tweaks, my painting fits into their setting,” said Arlington Heights watercolor artist Tom Lynch, who has had a long association with Crescent. Several of his landscapes hang in the firm’s corporate offices, and one appears on the cover of one of their catalogs. He noted that the agreement to use his work in their advertising was sealed with a handshake.
“They are a major company, but they deal with customers and vendors on a very personal level,” Lynch said. In addition, “I have a lot of respect for the way they handle their personnel,” he said.
“Upper management has an open-door policy,” said Ron Schloss of Schaumburg, a production supervisor who has been with the company 22 years. “Everybody is on a first-name basis.”
Schloss regularly travels to Lee, Mass., where two years ago Crescent opened its Preservation Products Division to manufacture, among other products, archival quality rag mat board for the museum market.
“Museums are a growing business worldwide,” Metzger said. “People are interested like never before in preserving the past.”
Rag mat, made of thick layers of 100 percent cotton fiber pulp like that used as far back as the 15th Century, is free of acids that might damage antique documents or fine art. Colors used in the surface papers are chosen to complement the colors in the framed work and are derived from natural pigments instead of dyes so they will not bleed.
Because of the liability involved in protecting fine art and rare documents, quality standards are extremely high. Finding the right materials is the most difficult part of the manufacturing process, according to Schloss.
“It’s not a very complicated process,” he said. “You’re basically pasting paper onto a cardboard core. But we depend on suppliers for raw materials. Our quality depends on theirs.”
Opening the Lee facility brought Crescent closer to the mills that supply the firm with cotton rag. A distribution center in Las Vegas was added last year to streamline delivery to customers in the West. The company, which now occupies 300,000 square feet in Wheeling, has expanded without borrowing money, according to Ozmun.
“In the early ’80s, there was a philosophy: put 10 percent down, borrow 90 percent. And I suppose if a guy would have done that and lived through it, he’d probably be 10 times bigger,” Ozmun said. “But my grandfather’s philosophy has always been never borrow money. He beat that in to me. He lived that, and I live that. If you can’t afford it, you don’t do it. And so, at Crescent, all of our expansion is financed from within.”
Logan Graphic Products of Wauconda sells precut mats made from Crescent board and is the country’s leading manufacturer of consumer-line mat cutting equipment. President Curtis Logan recalled how 20 years ago a Crescent salesman came to his father, Malcolm, a machine designer, and asked him to design a hand-held mat cutting tool. “We made a revolutionary product,” Logan said. “If it wasn’t for Crescent, we would not have this business.”
Recently, Crescent entered the craft and hobby market with a line of sand-painting kits for children that use self-adhesive artboard and a die-cut, peel-away paper. The pictures are landscapes or Nativity scenes. “It’s beautiful, the way it works,” Metzger said.
Heavily committed to the art community, Crescent belongs to a number of professional artists groups, participates in some 30 art material trade shows across the country each year and sponsors a National Watercolor Society award. Its corporate offices are filled with framed works and sculptures collected through the years by the Ozmuns.
A few years ago, at La Quinta Arts Festival in California, Scott Ozmun’s father, Bud, who has worked for Crescent for 48 years, discovered the works of a Montana artist who invented an art form that uses Crescent rag paperb boards as its medium.
The artist, Toby Mercer, bevels and layers the boards to create framed relief sculptures he calls “stratagraphics.” Depending upon how the light hits the work and the direction in which the viewer moves, an altered image is created.
It’s possible to interpret the shifting stratagraphic images as emblematic of Crescent itself and the subtle changes it has made throughout its history. The Ozmuns have collected about 20 of Mercer’s pieces, many of them gracing the walls of their corporate offices.
“We liked them so much,” said Scott Ozmun, “we bought almost all of them.”
