Published: December 4, 2017 |

Kenton McElhattan
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The story of how Kenton McElhattan started Industrial Scientific 32 years ago is legendary, if chiseled for maximum effect by generations of employees and admirers.

No doubt it was told again and again in recent days in remembrance of this Pittsburgh titan who died Thursday at Providence Point, an assisted living facility in Scott. He was 95.

The story goes like this: The year was 1984 and Mr. McElhattan, then head of a mining machinery supplier called the National Mine Service Co., was in Scotland for a meeting with the firm’s majority owner. He wanted to buy a $600 used microscope, but the CFO of the Scottish parent company pushed back. There was a lively debate at the end of which Mr. Elhattan reached into his briefcase, pulled out his checkbook and asked to whom he should make out the check.

He returned home after that trip with a deal for his son Kent McElhattan and himself to buy the industrial safety division of National Mine Service Co., which they’d built into the successful firm Industrial Scientific. Earlier this year, the Robinson-based gas detection business was sold to Fortive Corp.

It was such a good story, Kent McElhattan said this week, that people just ran with it. One of the company’s lead trainers started adding embellishments. Someone found an old microscope and crowned it as the microscope that launched it all. It still stands in a glass trophy case inscribed with the legend.

The real story, according to Kent, has all the same elements but in a slightly different soup.

He may not have arrived from Scotland with a deal to buy the company, but the seed was already there. Mr. McElhattan knew that his son wanted to start his own business and he, after a long and successful career as an engineer and executive in the mining manufacturing business, wanted to step back from direct management.

He told his son that if Kent could find another investor, Mr. McElhattan would fund the rest.

“I thought that was a really good lesson for me,” Kent McElhattan said.

It was one of many in an informal curriculum that stretched from Saturday morning trips with his father to the Joy Manufacturing Co. factory he once managed to the dining room table where Kent says he got his MBA by listening to his parents talk about business.

The lessons trickled down through the generations — Mr. McElhattan’s grandson, Justin McElhattan, took over as the president of Industrial Scientific in 2010.

Kenton McElhattan, or K.E. as he was known to friends, grew up in a small company town of Knox in Clarion County. His father managed the glass factory there and his mother, a homemaker and church pianist, often led her five children in sing-alongs. Mr. McElhattan inherited her easy warmth, his son said, and his father’s business sense.

“He always said his father was the smartest man he ever knew. And I would say that too — my father was the smartest man I ever knew,” Kent McElhattan said.

In high school, Mr. McElhattan met Florence Ditty — “the prettiest, smartest girl in town,” according to Kent. Getting her interested in him “was his first big sales job,” he said. Eventually, after Mr. McElhattan returned from the Air Force after World War II, he landed the deal and the couple married. They had two children, Kent McElhattan, who lives in Pittsburgh and Elaine Bonoma, of Concord, Mass, seven grandchildren and 14 great grandchildren. This year they marked their 71st anniversary.

Sharp until the end, Mr. McElhattan remained curious and forward looking.

When in 2009 Thomas Sturgeon was installed as the Rightful Worship Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania — the largest Masonic organization in the world — promising an agenda of change that made many old-timers bristle, he invoked in his opening speech the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln, Niccolo Machiavelli,and his “dear friend” Kenton McElhattan.

“The next generation must always be the greatest generation,” Mr. McElhattan wrote in his book “Hurry Up, Son!” which delved into his search for a divine truth. “Knowing how to use the future requires an understanding of the past. We should learn from the mistakes of our ancestors.”

Faith was a huge part of Mr. McElhattan’s life, but it wasn’t a full surrender.

In fact, it “came really hard to him,” his son said. “He was raised in the Christian faith and always went to church, but I felt that he never really bought it. A lot of his life was spent seeking the truth.

“We all felt sure that he’d found it,” he added.

His pastor Leslie Holmes, now the provost at Erskine Theological Seminary in South Carolina, said Mr. McElhattan found it particularly hard to accept the idea of salvation by grace.

“Scientific types, super intellectual types and self made men” — Mr. McElhattan was all of those, Mr. Holmes said — “often struggle with that,” he said. “They think, ‘To be saved I need to do good works.’ The problem with that is you never end up feeling that you’ve done enough good work.”

Mr. Sturgeon also suggested it was the way his friend’s brain wanted to organize things into neat formulas and equations that might have given him pause in his spiritual search.

Mr. McElhattan despised disorder. He once grew so irritated passing by a messy employee’s desk after hours that he felt compelled to swipe all loose papers into a waste basket.

“The next day, everybody’s desk got remarkably cleaner,” Kent McElhattan said.

The same tendencies drove his love of clocks — their “infinite capacity for accuracy,” his son said. In the early days of Industrial Scientific, Mr. McElhattan painstakingly made mantle clocks for retirees. Everyone in the family also has one, the younger Mr. Elhattan said.

Mr. Sturgeon first met Mr. McElhattan as the chief of police at North Fayette Township who had sent letters to local business leaders to see if they’d consider starting a fund for police officers’ education. Mr. McElhattan took to the idea right away but suggested that he be the one to solicit donations.

“You shouldn’t be sending letters out asking for money. Let me do that,” he told Mr. Sturgeon. Their friendship grew from there.

One day, when the fund was getting low, Mr. Sturgeon asked his friend to see about shoring up more contributions.

“Any police officer that wants to go to college, I’ll take care of it personally,” Mr. McElhattan said.

After Mr. McElhattan’s death last week, Mr. Sturgeon, 74 who now lives in Florida, dug up a souvenir of Mr. McElhattan’s friendship and wisdom. It’s a term paper that Mr. Sturgeon wrote when he went back to school in his 60s. Mr. McElhattan asked if he could read and then it returned it with dozens of notes covering the pages. Some are nit-picky word use quips and others are grand ideas.

All are treasured, Mr. Sturgeon said.

— By:  Anya Litvak, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette