Cy Mulder was an adventurist.
He was born in 1904. During the Great Depression, he was so poor, yet daring, he caught rides on railroad cars and ended up in California. There he found carpentry work on movie sets. During World War II, back in Zeeland, he built landing craft at Chris Craft. In 1945 he left his secure but monotonous assembly line job to open an untested knickknack shop in an abandoned livery building behind the Zeeland State Bank.
Cy’s wife, Clara, was understandably concerned for herself and her children. But Cy wanted to run his own business. He called his startup the Art Craft Novelty Shop.
At first, he made chairs, chests of drawers, playroom tables and toys. Because he didn’t have commercial customers, retailers, or a budget, word-of-mouth was his only advertising. At first, sales were slow. Then Cy had an idea: because house-hold goods manufacturers had shifted production to war materials, no one could find wooden clothespins to purchase. So, that is what he made.
The clothespins were an immediate money-maker because Cy could get all the wood he needed for free from Chris Craft, which was looking for a place to dispose of hardwood cutouts left over from making decks for landing boats.
After he hauled the cutouts to his shop, Cy ripped and slotted them, then put them in a tumbling machine along with pieces of paraffin to coat them with wax. Two of his relatives then put them in burlap bags and brought them to retail stores in Holland. Cy’s wife Clara and their son Larry, then 7 or 8 years old, would put two or three dozen clothespins in small boxes and sell them to grocery stores.
Unfortunately, when World War II ended, Cy lost his supply of free hardwood scraps and nearly his business. Then he discovered that returning GIs wanted houses, and houses needed doors.
So, Cy experimented with hollow-core, plywood doors which he made for his brother, Louie, a fast-talking salesman by nature, who owned the Michigan Door Company, a small manufacturer in Grand Rapids. When Louie discovered that 10% of his customers wanted a small window in their wooden doors, he asked Cy if he could accomplish the task. Soon Cy’s company had a new name: Zeeland Sash and Door.
Because the demand for doors exceeded the manufacturing space he had, Cy purchased a three-acre lot on Harrison Avenue on the north side of Zeeland. There, he and his father Lawrence slowly built a 10,000 square foot cement block building.
When finished, Cy determined he could build his doors more efficiently if he had one group of people prefabricate the windows, which the industry called “door lights,” and a second group of people route the openings and install the door lights into the doors.