Art Weisberg, founder of State Electric Supply Co., and Huntington, W.Va., Service Wire Co., Culloden, W. Va., passed away Nov. 24 at age 88. He was well known throughout the electrical industry as the ultimate entrepreneur, a man who, according to an article in West Virginia’s Herald Dispatch, started up State Electric Supply 60 years ago with $2,500 and the moxie to move from his native Brooklyn to West Virginia to sell light bulbs, extension cable and fuses door-to-door from the back of his truck.
Weisberg earned an engineering degree at New York’s City College, and he and his wife, Joan, were big believers in the value of education and in 2008 donated $2.5 million to West Virginia’s Marshall University to fund the school’s engineering program. The Herald Dispatch article said Weisberg was at the groundbreaking of the engineering complex last month and served as grand marshal in Marshall University’s homecoming parade. Beneath his gruff, cantankerous outward demeanor was a heart of gold, and he gave generously of his time and wisdom to co-workers and to the West Virginia community that he adopted as his home.
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Jim Lucy Blog
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Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.