About

Marcells Paper and Metal

Back in the mid to late 70’s, Scott Lowell was your average college student. One of the classes he was taking at the time was Statistics 101. On his way to this particular class, he would pass a room designated for computers only. In those days, the computer industry was just entering its humble beginnings and in order to communicate to computers, one would feed them punch-tab cards in order to deliver information. This process has since been modernized to what we now refer to as hard-drives on present day computers.

Scott noticed that the used key punch cards were being saved and placed back into the original boxes they came in. He got to talking with someone in the room who explained that a service comes in, buys back the used punch cards and takes them away. As he continued, he learned that paper mills buy the old key punch cards and recycle them into other paper products. Scott found the name of a company in the Chicago area that was buying the tab cards, called them up and asked them how musch were they paying for scrap computer cards. He was told that they would pay roughly 10 ₵ per pound or $200/ton. After that, he figured there had to be hundreds of companies in the Chicago area alone using computer cards because in those days when you opened up the want ads in Sunday paper, there were 3 to 400 requests for Computer analysts, Data processing managers or key punch operators needed. So he clipped out pages of these want ads and started calling up all these data processing managers 1 at a time, asking to buy their scrap computer cards. He would offer them 5₵ per lb or $100 per ton. He recalls calling on banks, hospitals, brokerage firms any types of business you could imagine and all from the want ad leads. He chuckles about it to this day because the he claims that the computer operators were so maticulous, that after they finished using the cards, they put the used cards back in the original box, back in the original case so nice and neat that it looked brand new. And 1 box ALWAYS weighed 10 lbs and 1 case 50 lbs. (5 boxes to a case). He remembers going into an account and be able to count the number of boxes and calculating how much gross he was going to pick up; 1 case $5…20 cases…$100. Scott still jokes about the first pick up he ever made, saying that he loaded 10 cases of computer tab cards in the trunk and back seat of his Gran Torino.

Scott thought it could be a good venture, but needed to get a name for the company, an office, a truck, and open up a checking account. With little to no funds, Scott borrowed $1000 from his grandmother to buy a step van– which he paid back $50 a month . At that time, Scott’s mother, had a small dress shop located on Devon Avenue in Chicago. It was called “Marcells Custom Tailoring”. Scott explains that his mother always answered the phone the same way, “Marcells”. Marcells was the only word she ever said. She told Scott that she could take the calls for him and thus formed his new answering service with the name Marcells. And therein the new name of ” Marcells Paper” was adopted (Marcells for short). All four things were now completed. Scott was a viable one-truck operation and was calling on all sorts of institutions from his stack of newspaper want ads, in search of used computer cards. And as he soon learned, the place he was selling to was also buying used computer printout paper, which soon led into multiple areas of scrap paper purchases for him.

On off school days, holidays and such, Scott’s 12-year younger brother Jeff got involved, helping him out on the truck. Scott’s mother continued to answer his phone calls at her dress shop. Scott had business cards made up with the address and phone number of the dress shop. So when his mother answered the phones by saying “Marcells”, whether the caller was a customer of the dress shop or Scott’s recycling company, they had come to the right place!