News & Press

Macon Magazine: Up on the Roof

Forget your notions of a family business fraught with tension - of disagreeable relatives locked in a battle of egos with predictable consequences. At Macon's L. E. Schwartz & Son, celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2010, you'll find three generations who make working with kinfolk look easy.

The L.E. Schwartz story chronicles a family that parlayed its immigrant founders handiwork into a nationally renowned roofing company, one in which his descendants remain as devoted to one another as they are to the business he launched.

The company was named for Louis Ervin Schwartz who was known as Louie. Current CEO Melvin Kruger said his grandfather moved to texas with little more than his skills as a sheet-metal worker, a trade he learned in Hungary before immigrating to the United States. "He arrived with a soldering kit, a motorcycle, my grandmother Ester , any my mother Elsie, who was a year old," said Kruger. The company's senior family member.