INDUSTRY WATCH

Industry Pioneer Dies
Steel framing industry pioneer, Daniel Kingston “King” Cable, passed away at his home in Lakewood, California in the early morning hours of January 23, 2008. King was the founder and owner of Angeles Metal Systems which for almost 40 years made ground-breaking strides in technical services, market penetration and distribution. He was 89.

His first foray into construction was in his family’s retail lumber business, which he joined after earning advanced degrees from UCLA and USC. Prior to that, he worked in the aerospace industry, and in WWII was an Army Air Corps navigator. When the lumber mill he was running in Eureka, Calif., shut down in 1952, he returned to his father’s operations in Southern California to learn the elder Cable had teamed with two partners to form a business called Angeles Metal Trim Co., which held patent applications on metal drywall trims. Three patents were subsequently issued in 1955.

Attempts to patent coupled with disputes over marketing led King Cable to buy out the partners and to file the DBA Angeles Metal Systems in 1956, which originally sub-contracted the manufacture of corner bead and trim. The company’s first task was removing excess lubricant from the steel product, and then drying, packaging, selling and delivering it. When “screwable” steel studs were introduced into the market by USG in the late 1950s, Angeles was the “first in the West” to tool up one roll former for the product. Angeles first shipped material for a steel-framed house in the early 1960s, and during the 1970s Angeles began adding product lines and expanding. The business grew to become one of the most formidable steel-stud manufacturers in the West, pioneering the use of steel in the residential segment and helping to make drywall the mainstay it is today.

Since selling Angeles Metal Systems in 1997, Cable had remained peripherally involved in the steel framing industry.