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 Howard Naylor became a veterinarian on the rebound. His father, a farmer, saw no purpose in his son’s desire to go to college, but the younger Naylar prevailed. “He decided to go to Cornell University,” his wife Dorothy recalls, “against his father’s wishes and without any money. He wanted to be an engineer, but he couldn’t get into the programs. He looked around and veterinary science was all he could get into.”
From this dubious start, Naylor returned to Morris in 1913 with his wife, whom he had met in college, and set up practice as one of the area’s few licensed veterinarians. This was Morris before television, radios and the movies, and it could be a lonely place. For Naylor’s wife, now 87, the times were often trying. “I’d always lived in the city,” she said, “and I always had close neighbors. And here I was. The early part was very lonely. Sometimes he’d leave at four in the morning and come back at midnight.”Dr. Jerome Payton, a veterinarian and an associate of Naylor’s for 30 years, describes the animal care situation as “quite crude, by present medicine.
There was little preventive medicine. It was more a fire engine process. You’d go and treat the diseases as they occurred.” Naylor went, first by horse and buggy, and then by Model-T Ford, except when snows forced the car to be garaged, at which time he would hook up a horse and cutter combination.On his rounds, the young veterinarian was disturbed by the use of folk remedies, which often led to infection and disease. Most irksome were the pieces of wood, match sticks and clove sticks that farmers inserted into the wounded teats of their cows. Meant to keep the teat open during the milking period, the unsanitary objects often caused mastitis. With few veterinary products to choose from, Dr. Naylor designed and constructed, with the help of his wife, his own remedy—teat dilators made with pipe cleaners and wax stored in an antiseptic lotion.
Payton explained that Naylor entered veterinary practice at a time when there were still a considerable number of quacks “doctoring” animals, and a great deal of nostrums being sold in the marketplace.When Naylor began manufacturing, his products earned the reputation of being both scientifically valuable and effective, earning him an enviable reputation. Although now manufactured with increasingly modern techniques, there have been few changes in Dr. Naylor’s 60-year-old design.
According to his 29-year-old grandson, John Elliott, who is currently the vice president of H.W. Naylor Company, Inc., Naylor was a frustrated engineer who liked to work with new ideas. It was his inquisitiveness—which now might be labeled something like “scientific imagination “and then was known as “tinkering” — that led to the company’s growth and reputation for quality. When word of Naylor’s invention spread, orders for the dilators increased. What was originally a husband and wife operation expanded into a village industry. Although his wife had challenged Naylor that she could make as many dilators as he could sell, the demand quickly outstripped her capacity. Neighbors were enlisted in the venture, but by 1926 the orders outgrew the cottage industry and Dr. Naylor opened a small factory by expanding his animal hospital.
Although his dilator business and veterinary practice produced a good living, Naylor kept tinkering and wound up moving into horse-care lines. During World War II, his daughter Alma remembers, “We used to go down to Chambers horse auctions [in nearby Unadilla]. They brought in railroad carloads of horses. One or two of them would invariably be beat up and we would buy the beat up ones.Naylor grazed these animals on his 640-acre farm and experimented with wound dressings on them. He was intense and preoccupied with his studies. “When he was working,” his wife remembers, “he worked so hard he got sick. He said it was from eating wound paint.., he could tell better about the grain by eating it.” At the time, he had concocted about 100 samples. The wound paint was an early animal dressing that was taken off the market shortly after Naylor perfected it, because of Federal Drug Administration (FDA) objections to the use of the word “wound” in the product name. It was later refined into Red-Kote, an oil-based wound dressing for horses, and Blu-Kote, a fast drying, alcohol-based antiseptic.
Because of his growing business, Naylor spent less of his time as a practicing veterinarian, but a few of his patients are worth noting. Naylor was once called as a consultant to the Busch estate (of Budweiser beer fame) in Cooperstown, about 20 miles away. The sick animal was a baby elephant. “He looked the animal over for quite awhile,” grandson John related, “as if he did know something about elephants. He asked if there was any young stock. They said, ‘Yes, there’s a goat,’ Grandfather said ‘Put it in with the elephant,’ and, boom, it recovered in a week. The elephant was lonely.”
Generally, however, Naylor attended to the business. A silent, reflective man, he had little use for idle talk and found marketing an almost painful experience. “Sometimes he’d make trips to visit distributorships,” his wife recalled, “and of course they thought they had to entertain him. He always told them he’d brought a wife along who was sick—he didn’t like socializing.”
It was Naylor’s simplicity, his honesty and bedrock independence that people usually remember about him. He was a man of a different century and he conducted business that way. No frills, no cheap promotions, no catchy names or advertising slogans, just a good product that filled a need. An anonymous gift presented in Naylor’s memory each year at the local high school lists “humility, forebearance, honesty and integrity” as the traits to be honored. That was Naylor himself, associates say. It is also a litany of personal values that were prized in rural America and are admired to this day.
From 1926 onward, Naylor’s business grew. He added an equine line after World War II and the company now hopes to expand that market. Still, the Naylor company remains little more than a family business working to fill cracks and crevices in the market left by bigger corporations. The company grosses less than $1 million annually and employs 25 people. Although it is the largest business in Morris (population 675), it is dwarfed in the region by the payrolls of two colleges, the state and local government and several industries. Naylor’s achievements still permeate the company. “Most of the formulas originated with him,” Payton said. “He called on chemists originally associated with Norwich Pharmaceutical and they did the technical work. He tested them in his practice and then, as new chemicals were discovered and proved, he would incorporate them into his products or build a new series around them. He was quite progressive.’’
Naylor died in May, 1969, when he was 81 years old. He worked until a year before his death. His business then passed to his daughter, her husband, and then, to their children. Although Alma Naylor Elliott is currently president of the corporation, her children, John and Howard, run the business. The personnel policy of the business follows the principles practiced by Naylor.
The company gets its employees from the surrounding area and employee loyalty is phenomenal. “If they’re there [at Naylor’s], they’ll stay there,” said Barry Valentine, a building superintendent. “I’ve been there 10 years, one or two have been there eight or nine years. But the rest have been there up to 30 years.” Or, in the words of John Elliott, “People don’t retire from Naylor Co., they spend a lifetime here” The reasons for the fierce loyalty are complex, but not attributable to a scarcity of work in the area. First, there are the personal relationships. Work at Naylor’s is not a life apart from family and community, but an extension of it: seventy years ago sociologist Max Weber wrote, “Labor must be performed as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling. But such an attitude is by no means a product of nature. It cannot be evoked by low wages or high ones alone, but can only be the product of a long and arduous process of education.”
Although both John and Howard Elliott have traveled and have been touched by the social changes of the past decade, they adhere to the work ethic of their grandfather. They are quite aware of the Naylor Company’s position—a small, family business in a conglomerate sea.
Future expansion plans are tempered by a realistic appraisal of the market. “We want to strengthen our position in the equine market,” John said. “That’s where the growth is.” But, Howard added, “We can’t introduce radically new products anymore.” The cost of testing, proving the drugs’ effectiveness to the FDA and marketing them are prohibitive to a small company.
Payton compared drug development today to Naylor’s early years. “Nowadays, it’s teamwork,” he said. “It’s so much more complex. There were no specifics then. The compounds were directed to help the body overcome the illness. Now the drugs attack the disease directly.” Are they just waiting for the opportunity to sell out to a conglomerate and shake the small-town dust from their heels?“ If I got filthy rich,” answers John, “selling a company that my grandfather, father and mother built, it would be selfish. I couldn’t sleep nights.”
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