Last December, I posted a photo of a mystery portable restroom I came across at a Dubuque, Iowa, construction site while on vacation. I called its owner, PRO Clark Wolff of Selco Inc., who said the tough-as-nails green unit went back about 30 years, and that he still placed a number of them at construction sites most vulnerable to vandalism.
I asked readers if they could identify the early rotomolded unit. I received tremendous response, with most industry veterans guessing the same answer as Wolff gave, the Strongbox from El Monte, Calif.-based USANCO Inc. Kevin Keegan of KeeVac Industries Inc. in Denver was the first reader to give the USANCO answer.
But it appears that the answer is only partially correct.
One of the many e-mails and phone calls I received over the trivia question came from Jim and Jamie Wachsman of Ventura, Calif.-based JW Enterprises, who said Jim’s father-in-law, Harvey Heather, owner of United Sanitation, had developed the revolutionary one-piece plastic Strongbox in the late 1970s or early ’80s as a way to update his own inventory of thousands of handmade wooden restrooms. Jamie, the fourth generation to work in the portable sanitation industry, and Jim got the retired Heather on the phone to discuss the unit in the photo.
DEMAND GREW
As he replaced his wooden units with the featherweight (by comparison) Strongbox, Heather started seeing a demand from other contractors for the unit. So he went into production, manufacturing the unit eventually at a facility near Fort Worth, Texas. By 1985, according to the Wachsmans, Heather tired of manufacturing and sold USANCO.
That’s where industry veteran Gregg de Long, currently the Western Regional sales manager for PolyJohn Enterprises Corp., picks up the fuzzy history of the Strongbox. According to de Long, Heather sold USANCO to Dow Chemical Co., which continued to produce the unit under the Union Plastics brand. Dow altered the original molds to produce the design shown in the photo. The Wachsmans and de Long said the plastic outline of a square waste tank and the black plastic skid give away that Wolff’s unit was the Union Plastics version of the USANCO design.
The USANCO company molds changed hands a few more times, and were eventually bought by PolyJohn, which kept them for a time, but never produced a unit on that design, de Long said. The company eventually disposed of the restroom molds, and de Long and a few others said they heard some of the molds wound up in Australia.
The importance of the Strongbox and USANCO is that Heather had a vision to replace the bulky wooden units of the industry’s infancy with a lighter, sturdier and easy-to-clean unit that changed portable sanitation service, de Long said. While Heather was producing the units, de Long went to work at USANCO as a salesman.
