Alaskan Paint Manufacturing Company: 20-year paint masters Ron & Pat Fullerton maintain family tradition.

• Author: Maschmeyer, Gloria
• Position: Company Profile

When Ron Fullerton drove his pickup and trailer up the Alaska Highway in 1971, he arrived in Anchorage with a 15-horsepower dissolver used to mix paint ... and a dream. He wanted to start a paint manufacturing company like the one he helped his father run in Wisconsin. Twenty years later, Fullerton's dream is a reality and his Alaskan Paint Manufacturing Co. produces between 50,000 and 70,000 gallons of paint a year.

The company is family owned and operated, a prototype of the elder Fullerton's business. Ron and his wife Pat co-own the company. He operates the production side, and she does the book work. Drake, the couple's only son, works with his father formulating and producing paint. During the off-season, November to March, only one extra person is needed. But when business starts hopping -- during less frigid months -- three or four seasonal workers join the force.

Ron Fullerton had set his sights on Anchorage while doing a stint in the military during the 1950s. It took him nearly 15 years to make it back. When he arrived, he found that Anchorage wasn't the easiest place to open a paint shop. "Nobody bought, because they didn't know how long they would be here," Fullerton recalls.

When the business started, most of the raw materials had to be barged up from Outside. During the course of Alaska Paint's first shipment, Seattle dock workers went on strike, stranding the company's order. "The bank immediately made us another loan so that we could have a duplicate order hauled up by truck," Pat Fullerton says. "Everyone pictures banks as being heartless and taking the family farm from the widow, but that's not the way it is." The firm's lender was First National Bank.

The Fullertons manufactured paint in a rented 3,200-square-foot building. Using the dissolver to mix pigments, resins, solvents and other additives, the hard-working couple produced about 4,000 gallons the first year. Additional manpower consisted of their three children, ages 6, 9 and 12 years. The children poured the paint into cans, snapped on the lids and pasted on the labels. "We (the kids) were easier to train and cheaper to use," says Drake Fullerton. By the time he was 16, the youth also was mixing paint and helping to formulate it.

The harsh Alaskan climate presented a challenge. At a minimum, paint had to be formulated to withstand extremely cold temperatures. "Mixing paint is like baking a cake," Pat Fullerton says. "It depends upon what you want to come out." For...