Eight Different Roads to the Plastics Hall of Fame.

On Thursday, June 22, during NPE week, eight new members of the Plastics Hall of Fame will be honored at a banquet and ceremony at the Hilton Hotel in Chicago. They represent virtually every facet of the industry, from processors to resin and machinery suppliers to academia.

Eric Baer is founder and first chairman of the Dept. of Macromolecular Science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. It was the first comprehensive polymer science and engineering department at a major American university. He has been called by his peers "one of the most widely known polymer scientists in the world." He began his career at DuPont before becoming an educator in 1960. Baer is editor of the Journal of Applied Polymer Science and has published more than 350 research papers and edited five books.

Rudolph D. Deanin was founder of the graduate program in Plastics Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and directed the program for more than 30 years. Deanin developed and taught courses that trained more than 4000 plastics engineering students. He also authored a pioneering textbook on the relationship between polymer structure, properties, and applications.

Harold A. Holz has been in the plastics industry for 53 years and is widely credited for developing the first commercial applications for polyethylene. At Union Carbide for 29 years, he contributed to the development of granular LLDPE and HDPE and was at the forefront of converting film extruders from LDPE to LLDPE.

Gordon B. Lankton, president and CEO of Nypro, Inc., Clinton, Mass., built from scratch a worldwide, half-billion-dollar injection molding company. Then he turned its ownership over to the employees in the form of a stock offering. Lankton established the first state-accredited plastics training school within his company to educate both Nypro employees and the general public.

Guy A. Martinelli began a career in the plastics industry shortly after World War II. Over time, he has served as president of three separate companies: Sylvan Plastics, Dimensional Pigments, Inc., and American Polymers Inc. He founded and was the first chairman of the SPE's Polymer Modifiers & Additives Div. and is a member of the Plastics Pioneers Association.

Frank R. Nissel is widely recognized as the father of sheet extrusion. He developed vented extrusion, engineered and built the first commercial sheet coextrusion line, and invented the self-adjusting, flexible-lip die. Nissel began his plastics career in 1946 with Union Carbide and later was co-founder and president of Prodex, Inc. before forming Welex in 1967. Nissel was named a fellow of SPE in 1993. He founded the SPE Extrusion Div. and received that group's Distinguished Service Award in 1992.

Don L. Peters is known as Mr. Blow Molding. He began his career as an R&D engineer with Phillips Petroleum 47 years ago and remains there as principal engineer in blow molding. Among his innovations were moving mold sections that permit processing irregularly shaped parts. He was also part of the team that developed the first blow molded fuel tank. Peters has presented more than 200 technical papers, written a blow molding textbook, and holds 86 patents. He holds SPE's Lifetime Outstanding Achievement Award.

L.C. "Bud" Rubens spearheaded new developments in the area of polymer foams during more than 50 years with Dow Chemical Co. He is known as the father of polymeric foams, particularly for his work on organic blowing agents. Rubens holds 58 U.S. patents--35 of them in foam technology.