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emigrated 1920 · first yard 1943
Irving Rifkin emigrated from Russia in 1920 and began as so many Fort Wayne founders began — with almost nothing: he collected and resold scrap from a truck, and borrowed $7,500 from an uncle to get standing. In 1943 he and his brother-in-law Irving Walters bought their first scrap yard, on Clinton Street in Fort Wayne, and called it Superior Iron & Metal. A company-history chain lists an incorporation in 1946 as the Superior Iron and Metal Company; the Business record carries the 1943 start and the 1946 incorporation as separate records, not as a contradiction. Rifkin's son Leonard joined the firm full-time in 1956, and Leonard's sons Danny, Rick and Marty joined across the 1970s and 1980s. The company became OmniSource; Steel Dynamics' purchase of it in October 2007, for about $1.1 billion, is the Business section's.
Sources:
- Businesses — "Superior Iron & Metal → OmniSource Corporation" (the 1920 emigration, the truck years and the uncle's loan, the 1943 Clinton Street yard, the family successions).
- The company's history as carried in Recycling Today (23 July 2001) and the International Directory of Company Histories chain — the 1946 incorporation record.