Rocks run in the family for Large Business of the Year

BARSTOW • Rocks run in the Depue family.

The family-owned Diamond Pacific Tool Corporation has been manufacturing equipment used to cut, sand, grind and polish gem stones since 1973.

The company won the Barstow Area Chamber of Commerce’s 2008 Large Business of the Year award. It was nominated, among other things, because of its charitable contributions to groups like Barstow Youth Football and the Boys and Girls Club, its participation in events like Bureau of Land Management clean-up and trail creation, and because it allows the use of its building as a meeting space for various local organizations, as well as putting on occasional classes on rock identification, polishing and cutting.

Company founder and co-owner Bill Depue, now 83 years old, began collecting rocks when he was a boy growing up in the Harper Lake area.
With little else to do in the way of recreation, Depue would go out looking for Indian arrowheads or explore abandoned mines, bringing home interesting rocks like onyx or petrified palm in the process. His parents shared his interest, and his mother later ran her own gem shop in Lenwood for several years in the 1960s, Depue said.

As a college student at UCLA, Depue would come home on summer vacations in the late 1940s and make his own diamond saws to cut the rocks he collected. Still, Depue said he had never pictured himself going into the lapidary business. Instead, he went to work as a mathematics professor at the Northrop Institute of Technology, a small engineering college in Inglewood.

One of Depue’s other hobbies was flying, and he met his future partner George Ujihara while looking for someone who could build him a gyrocopter, which is similar to a helicopter but has its blades powered by propellers rather than directly through the engine.

Depue had just put down a $100 deposit to have Ujihara build him a gyrocopter when Ujihara’s business partner died in a gyrocopter crash, dampening Depue’s enthusiasm for the project. Still, Ujihara and Depue discovered a common interest in gems as well as aircraft.

“He had done some prospecting in Mexico before I met him, so it wasn’t hard to make a rock hound out of him,” Depue said.

The pair started Gem Tech Diamond Tool Corporation, the precursor to Diamond Pacific, in 1969. They came up with an innovative concept in the industry, producing a new type of diamond wheels used for grinding the gems. Diamond wheels had been used in the past, but they were always flat, Depue said. He and Ujihara were the first people to begin making wheels with the diamonds placed on the periphery.

They found a ready market, and the business grew quickly. Eventually, Depue’s brother Bob, who died in December of 2007, and their sister’s husband joined the team, Depue said. A few years later, the partnership between Bill and Ujihara split, although Bill said they remained friends, and Ujihara kept the Gem Tech name, while the Depues started Diamond Pacific. They moved the operations from Inglewood to Barstow in 1974, and in 1977, Bill quit his teaching job and moved back to Barstow to work at Diamond Pacific full time.

The company is now owned by Bill, his sister Beth Pinnell, and Bob’s widow, Sandra Depue, with Bob’s three sons, Don, Steve and Jerry, also working there.

The company has about 25 employees in Barstow and in 2008 shipped its products to 54 different countries, Steve Depue said. They also bought two side ventures, Contempo Lapidary Equipment, a Sylmar-based company that makes heavier equipment, and Geosonics, a company in Iowa that makes tumblers, office manager Jill Durbin said.

Unlike many other businesses, Diamond Pacific did not take an immediate hit from the economic downturn, Durbin said.

“It took a while, and actually we found business increased when the economy started slowing down — people were looking for hobbies and not traveling,” she said.

Still, sales began to take a hit over the winter, and the company will have to ride out the economic downturn before it can expand its facilities on West Main Street.

In the meantime, Bill is hard at work with one of his other hobbies — airplanes — building an aircraft with short takeoff and landing so that he can land in the desert and hunt for rocks.

Contact the writer:
(760) 256-4123 or asewell@desertdispatch.com