And yet, all of these innovations pale in comparison with the "old-fashioned" values of hard work, fair business, and sheer strength personality.

The Nathan Kimmel Company, started by Nathan Kimmel in 1956, is an prime example of how one family´s hard work, lead by a memorable man with an unwavering philosophy of how to do business, laid the foundation for a company that continues to thrive a half century later.

Nathan Kimmel´s company was started in 1956, in the garage of the family home, with a bundle of surplus parachutes purchased from Douglas Aircraft.

Nathan´s daughter Carol Kimmel Schary, now president of the company, recalls how it all began.

"This little mom and pop industry started out of our garage. He bought a ´lot´ (container) of parachutes, and he decided he was going to take the webbing from them and resell it.

We would come home from school and we´d take out the webbing, and my parents would go to the Laundromat at night and wash it, and then he´d sell it. He could make a huge profit from it since he did all the labor himself."

Part of Nathan´s success was his ingenuity. Carol remembers when Barrington Plaza in Los Angeles was undergoing renovation. Fireproofing and plastering debris was coating the area, including all cars parked nearby. Someone asked Nathan if he had a solution, so he started making tarps out of his surplus parachutes.

"All the buildings were covered in camouflage!"

"Initially, he started selling surplus. The second or third time he bought one of these ´lots´, there was hose in it. It was bulletproof hose.

He didn´t know what it was, so he researched it, and he found a plasterer that said `this is great!´ and asked him if he could get more. So he´d go buy a ´lot´ that had this hose in it, and it would have other items, and so on."

The surplus selling business was, in every sense of the word, a family business.

"There were 4 kids at home, and since we ran the business out of our house, whenever the phone would ring, we would have to freeze and turn the television off and no one could talk. Now when the phone rings, I think I still freeze!"

"Everybody loved my father. He worked out of his station wagon, and they loved his personality and his pricing and the quality of service. They would ask him `Can you get me this? Can you get me that?´

He moved into a warehouse, and from there moved into this business. Whatever he could find, he would sell. That was about 1952. In 1956, he incorporated."

In the nearly fifty years that have followed, the Nathan Kimmel Co. has continued to serve the niches that got the company off the ground- and out of the garage. Today, the building trades still represent the company´s biggest lines.

"Since he had started with the plastering industry, that became one of his main niches, and from there he moved into sandblasting, and the drywall industry, and the moving industry. We opened a retail store and started selling to the pest control industry. That´s our second big line."

But in those early years, Nathan didn´t limit himself. Buying surplus lots means buying blind, and sometimes what he wound up with had absolutely nothing to do with the construction industry. It made no difference, however. Whatever Nathan came home with was packaged and sold in the family´s cottage industry.

"One time, he got thousands and thousands of Purple Heart and Stars and Stripes medals. We put an ad in Popular Mechanics and we would sell 10 for a dollar. After school we would package them in plastic bags.

The big excitement every day was when the mail came- deciding who would get to take the dollar bills out of the envelopes! To this day, when the mail comes, I get excited. It´s a throwback to that time, I´m sure."

As Carol and her siblings grew, their roles in the business grew deeper and more varied. But as the kids grew, generational conflicts- so familiar to those of us in family businesses- began to arise.

"My older brother became the delivery boy, and as he got older, he started developing products and helping with the buying. He worked with my dad until 1990. He and my father butted heads because he had gone to college and gotten his degree in business. [My brother] knew the right way to run a business, but my father wouldn´t give in."

"He was of the 'old school.'— girls don´t know about machines, girls don´t know about parts. But I used to sit in a chair across from him in the office and listen to his philosophies of buying and selling. He was a super salesman."

Her father´s philosophies and skills as a "super salesman" kept her at the company through college and beyond.

"I used to work here part-time typing statements for my father, and that paid for my college. I came back to work full-time for a while, and part-time once I had my kids. I´ve done almost everything here. I never realized that I was getting another college education in how to run a business."

When Nathan died in 1993, the family convened to discuss the future of the business their father and mother had worked so hard to develop. No one felt prepared to shoulder the responsibilities of standing at the helm.

After a great deal of thought, Carol decided that, with her mother´s blessing, she would take on the challenge. She bought out her siblings, and now runs the Nathan Kimmel Company out of a rapidly expanding warehouse space in Los Angeles.

Carol has clearly followed in her father´s footsteps, and the company continues to grow in size and in profits. It is now a thriving business with 15 employees. And yet, the company remains very much the same company opened by Nathan Kimmel in the family garage.

"In the beginning, I was under the shadow of my father. We used the goodwill of his name. We didn´t change much of anything because I wanted to take baby steps. His philosophy of doing business, the integrity, the way we did business, was excellent."

Carol has also continued the tradition of keeping the family involved. Her mom, who turns 92 in March 2002, is very important and comes in every day for a half day. Bridging the generations really is a key to long term success.

Her oldest son is a recent USC graduate who has come to work for the four days a week while he pursues his dream of being in the music business. Jason's goal is the business end of the music industry by having his own record label and represent artists. He has been working on the mock-up of their extensive full product print catalog.

Her other son,Adam,is another important part of the business. An art major preparing to graduate from UC Irvine, he puts his digital art experience to work on the photos for the online component of the catalog.

This 3rd generation is technically savvy. When Carol decided to put her business on line, she outsourced her initial effort, but now her son Jason serves as the webmaster and handles all updates.

Under Carol´s guidance, the company has extended its reach, both in the bricks-and-mortar world and in cyberspace.

"This year, we are setting up 4 separate divisions. The first is Tarpfactory.com, our tarp division, a separate entity in itself."

"Then, we took on doing research and development and manufacturing of machines and equipment for W.R. Grace."

The third division is General Sales, and the fourth is their retail store.

"We´re moving into a 14,000 Square foot space, and we´d like to turn our current space into the Nathan Kimmel Superstore. We´re in a commercial community, so we´d like to be the little Home Depot for the area."

They´ve augmented their physical growth with a growing Internet presence. Their initial brochure site has expanded to fit their focus on a variety of niches. As with many e-commerce sites, search engine ranking is a crucial part of their strategy.

"From NathanKimmel.com, we decided to create smaller niche sites, so that if people put `fireproofing´ or `tarps´ or `plastering´ in a search engine, they could find us."

NathanKimmel.com has relied heavily on an off-the-shelf software package to fulfill their e-commerce needs. Best Software´s Mas90 accounting program (http://www.mas90.com/) includes an e-commerce component that takes Carol´s inventory, plugs it into template, and uploads it onto the live site quickly and easily.

Carol finds this software incredibly efficient because new products get added automatically, it processes credit card orders, and takes sold items out of inventory. It has provided her with a totally integrated solution.

Although Carol champions her father´s "old school" business techniques and sales philosophies, she believes that Internet technology will only help her business to grow. Her father, she concedes, might not have agreed.

"When you get to a certain age, you´re so happy that you´ve accomplished your goals that you don´t want to move to the next step. The older people were afraid of computers and felt that we were already doing very well. They weren´t able to step outside of the box, which I´ve been fortunate to be able to do."

And stepping out of the box has meant that her sales now reach much farther than the Los Angeles environs. 60% of her sales are out-of-state. She feels that out-of-state companies may find it more cost effective to order all of their items from NathanKimmel.com rather than sit on the phone and order from many other stores.

Mainly, however, she credits the company´s success to their low prices, a result of smart buying and in-house manufacturing.

"One of the things we really push for is to keep the pricing down, be it through good shopping, be it through manufacturing products. We have a lot of products that are ours that you can´t buy anywhere else, or that are copies of items you can buy elsewhere that we have improved on. We manufacture in mass so we can keep our prices down."

"Even my competitors buy from us, our prices are so low!"

We asked Carol what role she believed the Internet would play in her business in the years to come.

"I think it will be an integral part. If you had asked me that question five years ago, I would have said `No, no one will use it.´ A lot of these people were the older owners of the companies, and now younger people are coming in, and they´re Internet-proficient."

"To be able to buy online offers convenience. People are very busy. They need to be able to have a 24-7 source from which to buy."

Nathan Kimmel sold everything from hoses to Purple Hearts. Carol has continued in his footsteps by embracing diversity in her product line.

"Nobody has a store online that will have everything. I wanted to be the first person in this big niche industry to do this. There isn´t anyone I know in the wall and ceiling industry that is a full-service company that also allows you to buy online."

But while Carol has embraced new technology with open arms, she knows she´ll never lose sight of the values instilled in her by her father. She knows how vastly important it is, no matter how big a business grows, to maintain a personal touch.

"I don´t care how big we get, there will always be a human being answering the phone!"