Had famed aviator Charles Lindbergh not intervened on Stanley Matczak’s behalf 60 years ago, race car driver Jimmie Johnson might never have won the 2005 Daytona.
It was a chance meeting on the floor of Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford in 1943. Matczak, who had recently purchased a few machine presses, went looking for work at the airplane engine-maker’s headquarters. He was promptly told to buzz off.
But as he headed out the door, a tall, extremely rushed man approached him. “Can you give me a ride to the airport?” he asked.
Sure, Matczak said. As they drove to Brainard Airport, he and Lindbergh exchanged pleasantries. Matczak mentioned how he’d just been rebuffed on the shop floor. Lindbergh, who more than a decade earlier set a transcontinental flightspeed record using a P&W engine, made a call. A day later, Matczak’s Allyn Tools was machining for Pratt & Whitney.
Flash forward 15 years. The company, now in East Hartford, had become one of the countless machine shops to which P&W outsourced work. Stanley’s son, also named Stanley, but known to his friends as Skip, worked in the shop making tools and learning the machinist’s art. He completed an apprenticeship in 1958.
Skip, joined by his brother, Joe, took over the family business by the early 1970s. They morphed it from a simple machine shop to a custom manufacturing business. Now, 30 years later and based in Ellington, the shop builds custom sub-assemblies for a number of well-known power generation equipment manufacturers.
It was from those humble origins that Seals-It was born, a genesis NASCAR owners, drivers and fans can be thankful for.
Skip Matczak — a gregarious, energetic fellow who fancies himself an “idea man” — had two passions: his racing car and his girl, Lois.
The affinity for cars started in his teenage years. His first was a red, custom-built 1948 racer which sits in the Maple Avenue headquarters of Seals-It and Allyn to this day. Skip’s had many cars over the years, including a super-modified race car that set a record time-trial at Oswego Speedway in the mid-90s. Through Seals-It, he still sponsors a four-car team.
The affinity for Lois started much earlier. She and Skip met in first grade; they married at 23 in 1965. The two spent the next 42 years pursuing their passion for the burgeoning amateur race car scene at tracks large and small throughout the East Coast and Midwest.
Through Saturday-night racing, they became well-acquainted with many of the drivers, owners and enthusiasts who would later become the largest names in contemporary racing: Johnson and his Hendricks Motorsports Team, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Tony Stewart, Carl Edwards to name a few.
So it was both easy and difficult for Skip and Lois when their eureka moment arrived.
Prototype
Skip, at work at Allyn Tools in the 1990s, agreed to build an unusual type of device: a steel coupler, fused with rubber, that would be used on runways to pump hot and cold air into airplanes.
Those first devices, which are now used on ground support equipment at most major domestic airports, were the basis for Seals-It’s products.
Skip applied the device to racing and found dozens of uses for it, including flexible axle seals, rod ends that resist corrosion and fire resistant grommets that keep hot oil, radiator fluid and other liquids from spraying onto race car drivers in the event of an accident.
Retracing their younger years, Skip and Lois traveled the trade show and racetrack circuits, and pitched their devices to drivers and owners, many of whom were old friends.
Lois, an outgoing, affable woman, found it easy to convince major race car owners to hop on her trade show golf cart and take a ride to the Seals-It booth. Together, she and Skip were a dynamic duo.
But it wasn’t until Jimmie Johnson, driving a car fitted with Seals-It-made grommets, won the Daytona 2005 that business really took off.
“There’s a saying in racing, ‘Win on Sunday, sell on Monday,’” Skip said. And sell he did.
Today, every NASCAR team’s cars employ grommets, seals and other device made by Seals-It. It’s fueled the business, run along with Allyn, to 25 people. They have doubled sales in the last two years.
For the Matczaks though, success is bittersweet. Just as the company they forged from the ground up has become a racing-world mainstay, Lois has been diagnosed with an agressive form of lung cancer.
The twilight of their racing-world success is unfortunately too often overshadowed by visits to doctors’ offices. The view from their brand new, 91-window house on a hill in Somers sometime proves difficult to enjoy.
“It’s been a long road,” Skip said, reflecting on the couple’s 42 years of Saturday nights. But he wouldn’t change a minute of it, he said.
Smiling, he looks over the framed plaques on his office wall. His eyes stop at a cover story from an old issue of Open Wheel Magazine. It’s about his race car winning a race in N.Y. He and his wife stand between their super-modified speedsters, grinning. The headline boldly declares: “Skip and Lois: Champions At Last.”n
Kenneth J. St. Onge is managing editor of the Hartford Business Journal.
