Contractor headlines: 1954-2004: front pages from the last 50 years reflect what has...

The front page of CONTRACTOR has held up a mirror to the mechanical contracting industry since it was founded by Herb Walther in 1954. Frontpage headlines from the last 50 years show that contractors today are facing some of the same issues that their predecessors did--unfair competition from utilities, a shortage of skilled workers, home centers selling to do-it-yourselfers and swings in the national economy.

Although many of these issues are similar, contractors from each decade have faced challenges seemingly peculiar to their own era. In the 1960s, for example, the