The original Curtis Machine opened business in a chicken house behind the family residence on Sunnyside Street in Dodge City. Its tools came from military surplus, and its products were precision machine parts made on a job shop basis. The year was 1946, and the company founder was Stuart Curtis Sr.

“The chicken house was the only building that was available,” says Janie Curtis, the current company owner. “There was no room for that kind of machinery anywhere else.”

Today, Curtis Machine Co. is one of the largest designers and manufacturers of right-angle gearboxes in its torque range in North America, and its new Curtis Machine Model 214 stainless steel 1:1 spiral bevel gearbox is the winner of the Western Kansas Manufacturers Association New Product of the Year.

The path from the chicken house to the modern machine shop is the story of three generations of hard work and innovation.

It was Stuart Curtis Jr. who set the company on a track of rapid growth. He had graduated from Kansas State University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering and worked for a time in California where he was part of the team at Vandenberg Air Force Base working on the Titan missile program.

After a missile accident and explosion at Vandenberg, he decided to return to Kansas to be part of the family business. Right away, he spotted a problem with the way the job shop operated.

Related:Curtis Machine is this year’s Western Kansas Manufacturers Association New Product of Year winner

“You either had a contract and people working overtime, or you didn’t have a contract and people were standing around, painting machines and eventually leaving for other jobs,” Janie says. “Then, you got another contract and had to hire people, try to get them trained and up to speed. It was very uneven for sales and workforce. It needed stability and some way to level out cash flow.

“Stuart said, ‘We need a product,’ and he sat down with his slide rule and paper to design one,” Janie says. A week later, he had the first design for a bevel gear. More designs for gears and gearboxes soon followed, and the company flourished.

Soon, however, another problem emerged.

“I was working on my master’s in business management at the University of Kansas when Stuart said he was having trouble getting the sales department organized and up to speed. He wanted to know if I would be willing to take a leave of absence from my studies and come back to help for a couple of months to get everything on track. Now, 36 years later …”

MAKING A GEAR: Automated equipment now makes the creation of a gear a precision process. At left, stock material is loaded into the cutting machine and the instructions for the cut are entered into the computerized controller. In center, the cutting arm cuts the gear while fluid washes away the metal chips. When the process is complete, at right, you have a precisely cut new gear.

Stuart and Janie Curtis bought out other family members to become sole owners of the company in 1994, and after Stuart’s death, Janie became the leader of a now woman-owned small business, certified with the Small Business Administration at both the state and national level.

Their son, John, earned a bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering from K-State and a master’s in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked for Entergy at a nuclear power plant on the Mississippi River.

“One day we got a call from John saying he was tired of looking at a computer screen all day and making calculations about how much power could be wrung out of a specific amount of enriched uranium,” Janie recalls. “He said, ‘I want bottom-line responsibilities; I want to manage a company myself,’ and we said, ‘Boy, do we have a job for you.’ So John came back to the family business and became president and general manager of the company, and we have flourished under his leadership.”

In a business like Curtis Machine, every employee is a critical part of the operation, Janie says. “We try to promote a team atmosphere and make it clear that everybody has to do his or her job just right to make sure the gearboxes we ship perform just as they are supposed to.”

Today, Janie is still involved in helping with important company decisions, but John is in charge of day-to-day operations at the factory. She takes comfort in knowing that the company she devoted her life to helping establish has a solid future in the family.

“It’s good knowing someone is there to take care of the company and the employees,” she says. “Those workers depend on us for their livelihood. That’s important to me and to John.”

The next generation of the Curtis family is coming up as well. John and his wife have twins — John Stuart and Jane Marie — who will carry the family name forward. It’s a little too early to tell how strongly their engineering genes will be expressed.

“They are only 2 years old,” Janie says. “We’ll have to wait and see.”