It looks like I'm going to have to go find and correct every instance of my inadvertent misinformation campaign regarding post-war Duplex tool box history.
I've been accurate about everything up through 1958, but it looks as though I may have conflated one of the 600 lb. gorillas (Snap-on) with another (Plomb), probably because I have no recollection of Plomb even using the Duplex type box with the external cantilevered hinges in my collecting interest period (pre 1950), whereas Snap-on was famous for it with their private-labeled versions known as the K-9, K-10, and K-11 HandiKits. No excuse. Just sayin'.
According to the
Historic Annals of Southwestern New York, Vol 3, page 346 (1946), linked
here if anyone wants to read it in the original periodical, John E. Coe was operating Duplex Manufacturing Corporation in Sherman as late as 1946.
Note that when he patented the design, granted on July 3, 1928, he had not yet formed the company. The patent was unassigned. While this article doesn’t say it, I think he may have been working for another company. I have seen a box with the Coe design marked "Good Mfg. Co." and "PATENT PENDING", but can't find anything to substantiate that. According to this article, he started Duplex in Sherman no earlier than 1932.
I will provide the address later. I have it in a reference (WPB Major War Supply Contracts Listings) at home.
According to a local newspaper, the Oil City Derrick, the Duplex Mfg Corp plant was razed by fire on March 6, 1958.
Note that there is no mention of Pendleton Tool Industries, Inc., or any other hint of ownership, and the president is one Paul Coe, ostensibly John's son.
According to a snippet only view of a trade mag called the
Hardware Detailer, dated 1958, Pendleton Tool Industries, Inc. (a wholly-owned division of Ingersoll-Rand at the time) acquired a facility in Fort Smith, Arkansas, "for the manufacture of Duplex tool boxes."
That's a little ambiguous. It could mean that PTTI already owned Duplex when the fire burned the old site down. Or it could mean that PTTI acquired what was left of Duplex after the fire, which may have been no more than its name.
The earliest ad I can find of Duplex tool boxes as a subsidiary of PTTI is
this ad, in
Popular Mechanics, January 1959, when the address was already Fort Smith, Arkansas.
If someone can show that Plomb was selling Duplex tool boxes prior to then, it could mean they already owned, it, or it could mean Duplex was a supplier and they decided to carry on the brand after the fire. I have no 1950's Plomb catalogs and not enough interest in it to pursue that.
Either way, Duplex was making them for themselves, Snap-on, Old Forge, and others at least through 1946, and perhaps as long as 1958.
