History of Huntsville Glass
Robert V.
Turner grew up in Montgomery, Alabama. His
dad owned fifty two rental houses and it
became Bob’s job to paint either the
exterior or interior of one of the houses
each week. “Mr. Bob” as he was known later
in life said he never went to any ballgame
or practice that he didn’t have paint on him
somewhere.
He attended
The University of Alabama on a four year
athletic scholarship. He played end, on both
offense and defense, for Wallace Wade and
Frank Thomas. He played on the first Alabama
team to play in the Rose Bowl. An
exciting aspect of the Rose Bowl game for
Mr. Turner was that the team traveled cross
country by train.
After
graduating Mr. Turner went to work for
Pittsburgh Plate Glass out of their
Birmingham office. In 1940 he wanted to
start his own business and decided
Huntsville needed a full service glass shop.
On January 14, 1940 an announcement stated:
“New Business Opened Here” Mr. Turner had a
partner, W. G. Miller (his wife’s uncle) who
had been an electrician in Athens, AL. Among
the first employees were two brothers:
Arnold and Ed Sibley who worked for
Huntsville Glass their entire careers.
He was just
getting his business up and running when
Pearl Harbor was bombed. Mr. Turner and both
Sibley brothers immediately enlisted, and he
decided he had to close the shop. His wife
Mary said no and she ran Huntsville Glass
while the guys were gone. There was so much
work at Redstone Arsenal they could hardly
keep up.
They loaded
all the glass their old truck would hold in
the morning and repeated this at lunch. This
was before vehicles had tempered and
laminated glass and they replaced lots of
construction vehicle glass.
The business
flourished and soon outgrew the original
location at 221 Washington Street. They
built a new building at 2201 Holmes Avenue,
where the business is still located.
A side note,
there is a small building at the rear of the
property on Holmes that housed R.V. Turner
Salve Company, which was made from a recipe
passed down from Mr. Turner’s father. He
advertised and sold the small round tins all
over the world! The Food & Drug
Administration shut his operation down
sometime in the 1960’s, but he got orders
for years, sometime with a small bit of cash
enclosed.
Mr. Bob
retired in 1975 and turned the day to day
operations over to Arnold Sibley. Arnold
hired his youngest brother Ira, who had been
in the floor covering trade. Arnold ran the
business until 1980 and it was turned over
to Ira. He ran the business until 1987 and
turned it over to Stan Wells, his
son-in-law.
The company became affiliated with
North Alabama Glass Company of Decatur
in the early 1990s.
