Family Business

Thriving in West Virginia

Photo Credit: Huntington Herald Dispatch

Tools:

The archives of local papers are invaluable in researching family history, whether you access them through a service like Newspapers.com or through the local paper itself. Birth, wedding, and death announcements are of great use for doing genealogical research, but I’m more interested in the stories about the other things my family did. Our local paper, The Huntington Herald Dispatch, ran a series of photos from their archives under the title “Do You Remember,” and under the photos included the reminiscences of someone who did, in fact, remember. The photo above is from one such article, featuring photos of Zenith Optical, a family business that built bomb sites and other military optical equipment during WWII. All the quotations in this newsletter are taken from that article.

The Story:

My great-grandfather was an optician in private practice, and most of his sons trained to join him in that business. Uncle Charles was an ophthalmologist, my grandfather and at least one of his brothers were optometrists or opticians. (Maybe a family member here can help me out with who was what?) In 1934, my great-grandfather and his children founded Polan Industries, which had a number of subsidiaries. One of these was Zenith Optical, which manufactured lenses and specialized gunsights for the war effort.

Mr. Polan was a clever man, as well as his sons and grandsons,” said Richard McCoy of Huntington. “The city of Huntington was just the climate where they could thrive. Mr. Polan saw opportunity in the failure of a glass canning jar manufacturing facility in West Huntington. He converted it to making optical quality glass. He produced optical glass of a type and quality that previously had been imported from Germany.”

I think often of how having a family business allowed my family to thrive, as the article says, in a part of the country usually portrayed as antithetical to thriving. When the national media talks about West Virginia, it most often tells stories of endemic poverty and isolation, or of the ravages an extraction economy levees on those who live there, but that isn’t the only story. Plenty of people, and families, thrive in West Virginia, and our family history is only one of many that shows just that.

In the article, McCoy remembers interviewing for a job at Zenith optical.

“My second visit, the job interview, to Polan Industries in 1962 was also very revealing. With the constant stream of Defense contracts and the ‘can do’ spirit of the Polans, they were, by then, producing in addition to the basic military optics of the 1940s and 1950s, very sophisticated optical devices employing materials, electronics, and mechanical systems…

“While there, Dr. (sic) Lake Polan, one of the brothers, took me around, introduced me to others, and showed me other things they were making for the Defense Department.”

“One in particular being a dome shaped lens some 6 inches in diameter. It was made of silicon and opaque to normal light, but passed the infra-red (heat). It was to be mounted in the nose of of heat-seeking missiles and once the missile was launched the optics, electronic and guidance mechanism would send the missile up the exhaust pipe of a plane or tank or into a ‘hottest’ object.”

Uncle Lake (who was not a doctor, hence the above “sic”) is the only one of the brothers to see combat during WWII. He was present at the liberation of one of the concentration camps, and the only story of that time I know—told to me by his son, Lake III—is of going around with a fellow Jewish soldier to see if they could find any family members among the camp’s survivors.

My grandfather and his siblings did not love war. In fact, according to Lake III, my grandfather was the financial support for Marshall University’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which formed in 1968. By then, the family business was no longer focused on defense contracts, but had pivoted to building mining equipment. But one can hate war and still know that sometimes it’s righteous to fight, or aid the efforts of those who fight, war waged against great evils. Polan Industries built military optics during the era when we were fighting Hitler, or preparing to fight Stalin (and later Khrushchev). Even I—a huge peacenik and aging hippie—can’t find anything but admiration for their work arming the US against those twin evils.