Asbury Park Press du lieu suivant : Asbury Park, New Jersey • Page 24

Asbury Park Press CI INSIDE Trouble Shooter Getting ID. number of mobile home is beyond owner's means. page C2 Money market funds 4 page C2 i is 4.09 Close 664.39 ami mmmQU 36.57 Close 5,682.70 19.29 Close 1,153.29 Stocks: Listings begin on page C4 Thursday, June 27. 1996 6 Loss of jobs turned into success story First QptiirM CEO out of job The prepared statement announcing the change simply said Adessa was "no longer with the company" and said the board had named John W. Rohfritch the acting replacement.

For the past year Rohf-' ritch has been brings in revenues of about $20 million a month, Booth said. Last month First Option announced it planned to merge with QualCare Preferred Partners, a Piscataway Township firm that also has about 200,000 members. Unlike First Option, QualCare provides just the administrative support, not the insurance money, for employers looking to set up health insurance plans. Two weeks ago the two companies announced they had called the deal off for confidential reasons. Annette Catino, president of QualCare, Please see CEO, pageC6 Adessa's Rumson home said he was traveling in Florida on business.

While Booth said he could not comment on why the board made its decision, he said the board felt it needed to look toward the company's future and manage what it has accomplished now, rather than concentrating strictly on growth. "John was a tremendous visionary," Booth said. "He was great for a start-up company. We're certainly no longer a start-up company." Under Adessa's stewardship, First Option grew quickly. Since its start, it has signed up more than 200,000 members who patronize 51 hospitals and 9,500 doctors.

The company By DENNIS P. CARMODY BUSINESS WRITER RED BANK Just two weeks after a merger deal fell through, the board of directors at First Option Health Plan has apparently ousted the leader of the growing managed-care health insurer. John L. Adessa, who was president and chief executive officer of the holding company, FOHP has run the company since its founding in 1993. "At the direction of the board, John elected to move on," said Terry Booth, executive vice president of the company, in an interview yesterday.

The board of directors voted to make the changes Tuesday, he said. Qmagine this. You get laid off, but instead of knocking the wind out of your gut, the news energizes you to start your own company. You and a couple of buddies try your hand at manufacturing the same gizmos your ex-boss makes. Your business takes off.

Your company grows 200 percent in the first year. In your wildest dreams, right? Actually, it's a true story. Alan Newell, vice president of Bank of Mid-Jersey likes to cite the story of Onyx Valve Co. in Cinnaminson Township as a classic example of David and Goliath, which is an appropriate description because a man Adessa working on the launch of First Option's New York operations. A woman who answered the telephone at by the name of David Gardellin managed to beat a Fortune 500 giant, Ohio-based Robbins Myers, at its own game.

Onyx Valve makes pinch valves, an industrial contraption designed to control the flow of gloppy, gooey stuff 1 1 I i fc SAM ALI $8 million paid for purchase ofWABD MMMMMIM 1 Afcal'tl'WM fL TIM MC CARTHVStaff Photographer pumped through hoses, like slurry or sewage. Robbins Myers does the same thing. Once upon a time, the guys at Onyx were making pinch valves for Robbins Myers at a small plant in Lumberton Township. Rob- bins Myers had purchased the pinch valve company RKL Inc. 15 years ago from an independent businessman, Robert K.

Little of Mount Holly. Then two years ago, on Christmas, Robbins Myers laid some bad news on its 35 New Jersey employees. It was closing its New Jersey plant and moving the entire operation to Dayton, Ohio. Not the entire operation, actually, just the equipment, thank you very much. Gardellin and his 35 co-workers didn't get angry.

They did, however, get even. "As soon as that meeting with Robbins Myers was over with downstairs, we all went upstairs and looked at each other and said, 'I think we can do this said Mark Masimilla, 35, a designer at Onyx. "The company was born that day." The employees kicked in $10,000 each to raise the needed capital, and Gardellin put his house on the line as collateral. The only problem was that venture capitalists and dozens of banks wanted nothing to do with Gardellin and his pinch valve gang. Then Gardellin found Newell and the Bank of Mid-Jersey, a $600 million asset bank with 20 branches in Mercer, Burlington and Ocean counties.

Newell was swayed by the group's com-t mitment. "The employees were the company," said Newell. "It wasn't Robbins Myers." So Robbins Myers bet on the equipment, and Onyx bet on the employees and Gardellin believes he made the better bet. "We feel they were throwing away a valuable resource the people and we saw an opportunity," Gardellin said. Onyx officially opened on April 13, 1995 and so far has had a growth rate of 200 percent, he said.

Robbins Myers, which specializes in manufacturing cavity pumps, glass-lined vessels and industrial mixers in addition to pinch valves, did not return calls. It earned $11.6 million in 1995 on sales of $303 million. By comparison, Onyx had sales of only $350,000 in 1995. Still, Onyx has not gone unnoticed by its much larger competitor. Please see Loss, pageC6 By WILLIAM CONROY BUSINESS WRITER A MORRISTOWN-BASED broadcaster announced yesterday it has agreed to buy South Belmar-based WADB for $8 million, the latest in a wave of radio station deals since federal communications laws were relaxed in February, eliminating most restrictions on radio station ownership by one company.

The rush to buy stations has sparked profit-taking by some station owners. Seawood Broadcasting Inc. bought WADB from its founder, Adamant Brown, for $4 million in 1993. New Jersey Broadcast Partners LP, which took -over operations of WADB Monday, owns WDHA which broadcasts a new rock and classic rock format on the 105.5 FM frequency, and WMTR, 1250 AM, which has a "beautiful music" format similar to the current format at WADB, 95.9 FM, said Beth Colon, president of New Jersey Broadcast Partners. WDHA and WMTR are based in Morristown.

Asked if the purchase portends a change in format for WADB, which has had basically the same format since it began in 1968, Colon said: "No decision has been made. We want to give Monmouth and Ocean County residents whatever the market calls for, and we're studying that." For now, it is "business as usual" at WADB, and no layoffs or changes among the approximately 18 WADB employees are planned, Colon said. The station has more than 100,000 listeners in Monmouth, Ocean, Middlesex and Mercer counties, according to a prepared statement from New Jersey Broadcast Partners. WDHA and WMTR have Please see WADB, page C2 Concurrent may make its move soon Because a blimp's surface is curved, Dodge said he relies on sight and instinct to draw a proportionally correct image. Just about everybody has seen this former area man work Facts figures By RAYMOND FAZZI BUSINESS WRITER AFTER YEARS of painting billboards and wall murals, Burton Dodge's artistic career finally started to take off 10 years ago.

It soared so high, in fact, that you've probably seen his work hovering in the clouds. Snoopy, Shamu the whale, the Fuji Film-and Budweiser logos, and the wild imagery of the Pink Floyd rock band are among Dodge's subjects all painted on helium-filled blimps. "It's like an artist putting his work up in a gallery, except the sky's the limit," the 46-year-old Dodge said. A Monmouth County resident until he moved to Philadelphia in January, the tall, lanky artist has built up a national reputation for his high-flying creations. Dodge has painted blimps about 14 or 15 times over the past 10 years, including the Metropolitan Life blimp that featured two 35-foot-high paintings of Snoopy, and the Sea World blimp with the leaping image of Shamu.

He's often painted the same blimp more than once. Blimps for Budweiser, Fuji and the Pink Floyd rock band are also on the resume of Dodge, who recently spent about a month working on a Kroger Food Store blimp at the Naval Air Engineering Station in Lakehurst that will be one of about a half dozen airships flying over the Olympic Games in Atlanta. One airship aficionado said Dodge is the only artist he knows of who specializes in blimp painting. "He's sort of carved a niche out for himself," said Eric Brothers of the Lighter Than Air Society, an association of airship and balloon fans based in Akron, Ohio. "Mr.

Dodge is sort of out on the artistic edge developing new and unique images that are very memorable, and that's the whole idea with advertising." Brothers said there are about 11 commercial blimps flying around the nation and more under construction. Most are decorated with stick-on decals rather than painted, he said. Two the recently-painted Kroger blimp and the Fuji Film blimp were painted by Dodge. derwear advertisements, as well as cigarette and liquor billboards. He got into airship painting when a customer walked into a commercial art company he was working for and asked, "Do you paint airships?" Without knowing exactly what an airship was, Dodge responded, "Sure, I paint them all the time." His first job required him to take a blimp with a McDonald's logo on it, and paint the Sea World logo over it.

Pretty soon, Dodge discovered why there aren't a lot of people who paint blimps: painting on a curved surface isn't easy. In other words, think of what it's like painting an Easter egg. Then think of what it would be like to paint an Easter egg the size of a small house. Because blimps curve both horizontally and vertically, Dodge said he can't just sketch out an image on a flat surface and trace it onto the side of the blimp. Everything would look crooked and distorted, he said.

Instead, Dodge said he draws out a design on paper, then raises himself to the side of the blimp with a cherry picker. Using a yardstick and black chalk, he relies on sight and instinct to trace out a proportionally correct image that compensates for all the curves. After the image is traced, he paints in the image with paint rollers and brushes. "It's mind boggling," he said. "Let's just say I've snapped a lot of yardsticks and thrown a lot of chalk at the sides of these ships." Dodge makes $30,000 to $50,000 per blimp, which is just for his labor.

The 45 to 80 gallons of paint it takes to paint one blimp are paid for by the hiring company, he said. Industry observers said Dodge is known for adding his own touch to the blimps. A Metropolitan Life design he was given in 1987, for example, only called for a 10-foot high Snoopy. Dodge decided the effect would be better with a Snoopy three times that size. When he was asked to paint a second blimp for Sea World, they only told him they wanted Shamu on its side.

It was Dodge who came up with the design that, Brothers said, actually looked like a whale floating in the air. Please see Artist, page C2 First-quarter inflation Percent change in consumer prices from first quarter 1995 to first quarter 1996: By RAYMOND FAZZI BUSINESS WRITER CONCURRENT COMPUTER Corp. may move its administrative headquarters from Oceanport to Fort Lauderdale, as early as tomorrow as the result of shareholder approval of an acquisition yesterday. Concurrent officials, who last week said they intend to keep some operations in Oceanport, did not release any other details about the relocation. Shareholders of Concurrent, meeting in Fort Lauderdale, approved a plan that will result in Concurrent buying Harris Computer Systems a Fort Lauderale-based competitor in the high-performance computer business, said Kevin Dell, Concurrent's vice president and general counsel.

The company, which makes high-performance computer for applications such as military flight simulators, employs about 300 people in Oceanport It announced last week it will lay off something less than 50 of these workers over the next month because of the merger. Meeting in the same hotel, shareholders of Harris Computer Systems also approved the Please see Move, page C6 TIM MC CARTHYStaff Photographer It's like an artist putting his work up in a gallery, except the sky 's the limit. 5 5 Burton Dodge AIRSHIP ARTIST Dodge said he knew he wanted to be anartist from the time he attended school in Wall Township. After graduating from high school in the late 1960s, he spent several years living the life of a "beatnik," making ends meet by painting and selling portraits, seascapes and other works. That ended in 1973, when marriage forced Dodge to abandon his starving-artist way of life.

"I settled down a little and decided that I have to be a professional," he said. That led to a career painting commercial billboards and wall murals. Dodge said he's painted his share of scantily clad men and women for Calvin Klein un u.s. CL esrrA Canada 1A I Japan Germany i 1.4 eWat 4. Knight-Ridder Tribune.