Does this sound familiar: It
was a time of downturn in the steel industry, when a flood of foreign
steel products, the pressures of stricter environmental regulations and
a significant economic decline was forcing closures within the
industry.…
No, this isn’t a summary of yesterday’s headlines; this is
the economic climate into which Dale William App stepped as the newly
promoted general manager of U.S. Steel Corporation’s Great Lakes Fleet
in 1981.
The first question: What could Dale do to make a difference?
The second question, one that Dale might have asked himself at the
time: How did I get here?
Dale App, a Lake Superior lad from his birth in Duluth,
Minnesota, never expected the lake would be the focus of his life’s
work with 30 years in the marine shipping industry. His father, after
all, was an ore boat captain, and although Dale traveled summers on the
boats with his father, the youth had precious little interest in being
gone most of each season.
Still, Dale was used to challenges. After earning a
bachelor’s degree in business administration at the University of
Minnesota (later he earned a master’s degree in the field), Dale worked
far from Lake Superior for Collins Radio Company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
He administered engineering projects in spacecraft communications and
other - secret - military aircraft programs.
He then served four years in the U.S. Air Force, improving
aircraft procurement systems by using computer technology. Dale smiles
as he recalls his role of liaison between managers and computer
programmers in developing new procedures for acquiring aircraft
subsystems. These weren’t easy groups to reconcile, yet Dale earned two
commendation medals for his work.
After the military, an operations auditing job at 3M brought
Dale back to Minnesota in St. Paul, but not close enough to the north
woods and the lake, he discovered.
Thus he came to a job as senior industrial engineer with U.S.
Steel’s Great Lakes Fleet. The wonderful world of taconite was growing
by leaps and bounds then, and fleet activities tied the whole effort
together by moving company materials.
Dale worked his way through the fleet management, first
promoted to traffic manager and later, as we’ve said, to general
manager. The fleet at this time mostly moved U.S. Steel’s raw
materials. It did not provide services to many outside customers.
Faced with the financial crunches of the industry when he
became general manager, Dale worked to implement a new role for the
fleet that U.S. Steel had decided to undertake.
“When the steel industry in the late ’70s and early ’80s
really took a huge downturn, and U.S. Steel actually closed facilities
permanently, we asked, ‘Do we become a smaller company or can we carve
out a place in the commercial marketplace?’”
So Dale became a master carver - finding new customers,
developing a marketing plan to gain and retain them and negotiating
favorable long-term contracts beneficial to all.
Not the least of Dale’s concerns: USS Fleet was not alone in
the market. The Great Lakes in the early 1980s were home to a number of
fine fleets.
In pursuit of new customers and maintenance of old ones, Dale
wore out a number of airplane seats and a few vehicles - literally. He
flew millions of miles during his career and when he wasn’t in the air,
Dale, often accompanied by Tom Baltes, was on the road, circling the
Great Lakes and looking for customers.
“We’ve burned out five company cars. It’s a business that’s
very much person to person; you can’t do it on the telephone. You have
to look at how your ships fit the customer’s requirements.”
 In their circle-the-lake quests, says Dale, “We went around looking for stone piles and smokestacks.”
Lake Superior still attracts Dale App after 30 years in the business of shipping. (photo by Lake Superior Magazine)
Which is to say that piled stone and coal and an industrial
smokestack meant a potential customer. So taking back roads and main
byways, Dale dropped in on owners of those smokestacks and tried to
convince them to contract their shipping needs through USS Great Lakes
Fleet.
Dale admits that when he and Tom get together and start talking about their “work” on the road … well, they have to be careful.
“It sounds like too much fun,” Dale confides.
One can hardly blame them for enjoying the trips - especially
by Lake Superior. Plus road trips are no hardship for a man passionate
about racing, a man who scored a one-time gig in the pit crew at the
Molson Indy in Toronto. “That car just comes blazing in there. I was
the guy who, as soon as the fuel guy disconnected, I sprayed the water
so that it didn’t flame up.”
Road trips and air trips worked. Contracts came in for the
fleet and its parent company, U.S. Steel, recognized opportunity and
invested $30 million to upgrade three fleet vessels to
“self-unloaders,” equipped to unload their cargo. The fleet already had
several self-unloaders and today has eight.
Though at the time, the pressure to bring in the new business
was intense - “if we didn’t get into that commercial market, a lot of
us wouldn’t have jobs” - Dale has to admit he liked the work.
“It’s kind of funny, because until that point, I had never
thought about marketing. It was really a change and a challenge, and I
don’t say that just so it sounds good in print. I frankly enjoyed it.
It was not tedious, every day was something new.”
You’ll probably note that Dale says these things about his
work in the past tense. That’s because as of the end of June, Dale left
the challenge of his management position … mostly for the challenge of
casting fly-fishing lines into western trout streams, casting glances
at race cars or casting - and collecting - a few minerals in his
passion for rock hunting.
This is not, Dale emphasizes, “retirement.”
“Retirement sounds like something someone’s father does. I like calling it ‘concluding a career.’”
Dale has “concluded” a career before - leaving 16 years of
part-time teaching of strategic management at the University of
Minnesota-Duluth.
After this “conclusion,” Dale plans visits to the
southwestern desert. It reminds him, says the promoter of a Great Lakes
fleet, of Lake Superior.
“The desert,” says Dale, “is like the sea. Lake Superior is
constantly changing, because of the light and the wind. The desert is
like that.”
For a man facing his own changes, life can be like that, too.
A selection of Jim Marshall’s columns of lake lore and his inland sea voyages
has been published as Lake Superior Journal: Views from the Bridge
by Lake Superior Port Cities Inc. Follow this link
for more information.
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