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FASTENER HISTORY
2007 FIN – Distributors Link Marks 30th Anniversary

LINK co-founder Leo Coar

Link co-founder MaryAnn Marzocchi

October 10, 2007 FIN – In 1977 Leo Coar was a rep for companies selling in New York and noticed all these companies could use the exposure of a national fastener magazine.

Coar was on the road making sales calls as a rep, so he recruited his sister-in-law, MaryAnn Marzocchi, from Southern Screw, to help start a distribution-oriented magazine.
“We made money from the first issue,” Coar declared. This year Distributor’s Link is marking its 30th anniversary.

The publishing business has changed over the decades. For years Coar had to drive a trunk full of picture boards to the Link printer.
“Today we send off a six-inch box,” Coar told FIN. “Our printer has brought us into the high-tech age.”

In the early issues Coar used pen names so readers wouldn’t think the magazine had just one writer. As the years went by we started getting real writers and they were much better, Coar quipped.

Coar’s fastener history dates decades before Link and includes manufacturing and distribution in addition to being a rep. He started in the fastener industry in 1954 with Southern Screw Company.
By 1967 Coar was seeing the signs of a changing North American industry. Every thing they made was importable, Coar recalled of domestic manufacturing in the 1960s.

So Coar left Southern Screw to start his own rep agency and by 1970 he expanded it into a national rep agency. That agency is still named Leo J. Coar associates even though Coar sold it to David Shuster 20 years ago.

Along the way Coar also owned a nut manufacturing business in Detroit. When he writes about fastener manufacturing, he writes from experience. He has dealt with issues such as finding workers to operate cold heading machines.

Coar and his wife, Myra, have owned a house in Florida since the 1960s and 20 years ago they began to look for a way to move from New Jersey full time.
Fortunately, one of his other businesses, Aluminum Fastener Supply Co. Inc., distributes light for shipping fasteners and Coar could move both to share space in Naples.
“Freight for steel would kill us,” Coar explained.

Over the decades Link has developed its own style, with each issue having hundreds of pictures of people at fastener events.
“We keep involved,” Coar emphasized.

There is no bad news in Link, Coar pointed out. We publish good news for the fastener industry. Bad news travels fast and as a quarterly magazine people will already have heard about a bankruptcy.
However, if he wanted to publish bad news, “I know a lot of people I could have nailed,” Coar quipped.

Link is domestic oriented with ads primarily from North American manufacturers and U.S.-based importers or master distributors.
Distributors read it and relate to it, Coar finds. “The formula has worked and we’ve stuck to it,” Coar told FIN.

Though Coar has known everybody over the years, even at age 75 he is still meeting new fastener people at the many fastener events he attends.
Many of the fastener leaders his age have retired or passed away. Coar still goes to work every day.
“Four of us are busy all the time,” Coar said of his team of Tracey Lumia, Gayle Bohall and Marzocchi.

Coar knows his magazine’s future is in distributors reading it. He wants advertisers to keep coming back in the next issue “for the good reason that they get a return. They get calls.”

Editor’s Note: Coar can be contacted at 4297 Corporate Square, Naples, FL 24104. Tel: 239 643-2713 or 800 356-1639 Fax 239 643-5220 E-mail: leojcoar@linkmagazine.com Web: linkmagazine.com ©2007/2009 FastenerNews.com
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