Spenard Builders Supply celebrates 50 years.

• Author: Campbell, Melissa
• Position: Company Profile

Things were a bit different when George Lagerquist and A.J. Johnson found a strip of land on the corner of Tudor Road and Minnesota Boulevard in Anchorage. On the outskirts of town, the land sat smack in the middle of the woods, a dirt crossroads connecting them to town and the nearby railroad connecting them to the rest of the world.

"The chief deterrent was the road coming in from the main Spenard Road," said Lagerquist, according to an SBS release, "in that oft times, this cow path was bogged down with mud and rut holes, making it impassable."

It was 1952. Alaska was still a territory. Test wells were being drilled in the National Petroleum Reserve and E.L. Bartlett represented Alaska as a nonvoting member of Congress, lobbying for Alaska to become the 49th state.

Amid these dreams of oil discoveries and statehood, Spenard Builders Supply--with three employees--opened its doors to dreams of helping the state grow by offering building materials to businesses and homebuilders.

"Spenard Builders Supply has obviously grown with the state," said Ed Waite, the company's president. "The history of the state since 1952 has been an intricate part of Spenard Builders Supply."

Today, SBS is Alaska's largest building materials supplier, with 11 locations around the state, from Barrow to Sitka. The company employs more than 750 people.

In its 50 years, SBS weathered the booms and busts that plagued Alaska's economy. Twice, the company lost nearly everything and still managed to open for business by daybreak. The original building off Tudor Road was destroyed during the 1964 earthquake. Business was conducted from a couple of trailers until a new building was erected. Three years later, a fire destroyed the rebuilt store, its warehouses, offices and much of its inventory.

"It was interesting to see plywood burning in stacks," said Jim Campbell, former manager and CEO. "We lost a lot of supply then."

After the fire, owners and employees salvaged two 16-foot by 18-foot cabins and opened the store for business the next day.

"We worked out of those cabins for almost a year," Campbell said. "The customers were good to us, they kept coming. We did more business in the year after the fire than we did the year before.

"We had a business interruption policy," he added. "The insurance people didn't understand why they should pay us if we did better than the year before."

Business was good, and it was about to get better. The 1970s and early 1980s is marked as...