In little more than a month, Quality Plating, a west side Salt Lake business that over the past 71 years has attached metal plating to just about anything — from bronzing Gene Fullmer’s boxing gloves to applying gold siding to the space shuttle — will be closing its doors.
The vats, bins, machinery and forklifts left in the 30,000-square-foot plant will be sold to the highest bidder, making way for whatever developer acquires the 2¾ acres the business occupies — so it can all be torn down to make way for more apartments in a city that needs a lot of them.
There will be no brass band, no fanfare. At the end of March, owner Glenn Fassmann will simply lock the front door and drive onto 600 West for the last time.
But he will be loaded down with memories.
Memories of a family and a business that survived both Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Josef Stalin’s USSR — and discovered an America that was great long before anyone felt the need to add “again.”
The story begins with Glenn’s grandfather, Walther Fassmann, who learned the electroplating trade in his native Germany in 1910 when he was 14 years old. Six years later, at the start of World War I, he was drafted into the German navy. After Germany lost the war, Walther returned to a country war-torn and economically devastated.
It was his skill at plating that enabled Walther and his wife, Anna, to survive — thanks to Walther and a partner taking over what was left of a defunct electroplating shop in Zwickau, Germany.
As the business found its stride, the Fassmanns watched as Adolf Hitler’s promises of prosperity turned to more war and destruction. Walther and Anna’s two sons, Walter and Heinz, were drafted to fight in World War II. Heinz died on the Russian front. Walter was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Yugoslavia. His captivity lasted four years, long after the war ended. He wasn’t released and united with his family until 1949.
By now, since Zwickau was in the eastern part of Germany that had been awarded to Stalin’s USSR, the communists had taken over from the Nazis.
The Fassmanns were active members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (in 1949, Walter baptized 8-year-old Dieter Uchtdorf in a Zwickau swimming pool and Walther confirmed the future Latter-day Saint apostle a member of the church). Their religion was the rock they clung to. Ironically, it was because of the church that the family had to flee.
Walther, a counselor in the mission presidency, traveled frequently to the Allied sector of Berlin for church business. On one of his trips, always carefully supervised by the Soviets, he was entrusted with cash to take back to East Germany so it could be used to purchase a building for a future Latter-day Saint meetinghouse.
Along the way, Soviet officials intercepted Walther, and the money.
Suspicious of a private citizen carrying that much cash, the communists put Walther in jail and set a court date. Looking at a long prison term, when Walther was temporarily released, he came home, gathered up the family, and didn’t look back. A Lutheran minister friend arranged for them to make it to Berlin and fly out of the country, the first step of a journey that ended in Salt Lake City.
Penniless, Walther found work as a janitor at Kingsbury Hall, Anna as a kitchen helper at Bratten’s fish restaurant. But always present in Walther’s mind was the plating business he’d learned in his youth. It had saved the day once, maybe it could save it again.
In 1955, at the age of 59, using two-gallon fish aquariums as plating tanks, he started over, setting up a small shop in his home at 762 E. 600 South. He began with a mail-order business gold plating baby shoes. His son Walter moved from Canada to help him.
After that, capitalism took over. In less than two years, Walther was doing so much business out of his basement that Salt Lake City said he’d have to move to a proper workplace. That’s when he found the 2¾ acres on the west side of 600 West — a location far, far away from downtown Salt Lake back in 1957. Quality Plating was born.
Walther and Walter just kept growing, kept expanding. Walther reported to work every day until he was 88. After that, he’d still come in once a week to fill up the pop machine. Walter, his successor, ran the family business until he turned 65 in 1987 and accepted a Latter-day Saint mission call to work in the new Frankfurt temple.
By that point, it was time for Walter’s son Glenn, with the valuable help of his sister Karen, to take the reins. With a degree in electrical engineering from BYU, Glenn wasn’t sure the plating business was what he wanted for a career. “I’ll give you five years,” he told his dad.
That was 39 years ago.
The business is still viable, and Glenn, at 62, would turn it over to his sons or sons-in-law to run, but they have already embarked on successful careers of their own.
Besides that, it’s gotten to the point where the dirt Quality Plating rests on is more valuable than what’s on top.
So that’s that. After 99 years of the Fassmann family plating things — 28 in Germany, followed by 71 in America — they’re calling it a day.
“It’s emotional,” says Glenn, “but you have to take all the facts into consideration when making a decision. I know it’s going to be hard leaving. I’m so proud of what my grandfather and father built. They were real survivors.”
One of Glenn’s first plans in retirement is to travel with his wife Heidi back to Zwickau, a place he’s visited before, and reconnect with his German roots.
He’ll make sure to see the building where his grandfather owned and operated his first plating shop. It’s still there, although the business is long gone. “Now it’s all apartments,” Glenn says.
It would seem the Fassmanns have come full circle.
