STRICTLY BUSINESS: COMPANY OUT TO FIND 40 WORKERS

Pavestone Company is one of more than a dozen employers which will have representatives at the Career Job Fair, to be held at the Show Me Center today from noon to 7:30 p.m.

Pavestone, headquartered at Dallas, Tex., is a leader in the nation's landscape product industry, and is the nation's largest producer of interlocking concrete paving stones and retaining walls.

The company has a new facility under construction in a part of Seven-Thirty Industrial Park, across Interstate 55 from Nash Road Industrial Park.

The company is in the market for a number of employees, many of them for the Cape Girardeau area.

"We'll be looking for key personnel for our new operation here," said Ed Boudreaux, plant manager of the new facility here. The Pavestone wish list will include plant electricians, maintenance mechanics sales representatives, administrative, warehouse and yard personnel.

Pavestone will be employing about 40 people here to start.

"And we'll be shipping out about 100 truckloads of finished products a day," said Boudreaux.

Paul Kelly will be coming in from Pennsylvania as general manager of the Pavestone operation.

Pavestone Company, founded in 1980, has a presence in 33 states, with sales in excess of $100 million annually. The company is looking at six new operations over the next two or three years, including Cape Girardeau, Boston, Sacramento and Hagerstown, Md.

Wood stave operation

A local company, Timberline International Forest Products Inc., 2525 State Highway 177 in Cape Girardeau County, will provide a wood veneering operation in the near future in Nash Road Industrial Park.

Timberline's new operation, producing wood staves for oak barrels. will employ about 15 workers.

Timberline will probably use the new railroad being extended to BioKyowa in Nash Road Industry Park.

The Cape Girardeau City Council recently approved the extension of rail spur in the Nash Road Industrial Park, passing an ordinance accepting temporary and permanent easements for right of way needed in the construction. Spur extension on 'go'

The rail spur extension project began in 1997 when BioKyowa announced a major expansion. The city was asked to help with grant funding to extend the rail spur in the industrial park. The spur will serve the expansion of the plant's animal-food and new human-food additive divisions.

The city was awarded a $445,300 grant from the Community Development Block Program for the industrial park infrastructure. Of the grant amount, $421,800 was to be devoted to construction and $23,500 used for engineering inspection.

Bids have been awarded for a segment of the rail spur construction.

BioKyowa update

BioKyowa will officially open its new food-processing center in the near future.

Over the past two years, BioKyowa has completed a $35 million expansion of its feed grain L-lysine product facility in Nash Road Industrial Park, and is nearing completion of a new $50 million Kyowa Food Plant at the same site.

The L-lysine construction was finished during the summer, and Kyowa Foods Inc. is expected to open officially soon.

The expansion and new plant will double the facility's work force to about 200 employees.

BioKyowa and Kyowa Foods are owned by Kyowa Hakko Kogyo Co. Ltd. of Tokyo, Japan, which announced the new projects in late 1997 and early 1998, at a total new investment of more than $85 million. Kyowa Hakko Kogyo of Tokyo is also a big manufacturer of pharmaceuticals, food, agri-chemicals and liquor products in Japan, with annual sales of more than $3 billion.

The BioKyowa L-lysine expansion provided space to manufacture two new feed-grade amino acids, L-theonine and L-tryptophan, and will increase capacity up to 25,000 metric tons a year for L-lysine. The combined capacity for the two new feed-grade products will be about 5,000 metric tons a year.

The L-lysine expansion project called for 10,000-square-foot and 15,000-square-foot processing plants, a 13,000-square-foot warehouse extension and two other buildings with a combined 10,000 square feet, and six new storage tanks.

BioKyowa was the first producer of L-lysine monohydrochloride feed supplement for swine and poultry in the United States.

Kyowa Food, a new company of Kyowa Hakko Kogyo Co. Ltd., will produce food seasonings. Initially the new, 32,000-square-foot plant will employ 50 people.

Kyowa Foods will manufacture and sell nucleotide seasonings developed by the company. The manufactured seasonings provide five basic tastes sweet, bitter, sour and salty, as well as "umami," which consists of naturally occurring glutamic acids and nucleotides found in bonito, seaweed and shitake mushrooms.

Another product will be a fermented seasoning in flavors like beef, pork, chicken and fish that will be used for broths, soups, bullions and pre-mixes.

Congratulations, Ken

Ken Gray, a former U.S. Representative who will turn 76 next month, recently remarried. He married a local minister, Margaret Holley.

Gray was a widower. Gwendolyn June, his wife of 52 years, died in 1995.

Gray has been going through rehabilitation the past few months after suffering a stroke in December.

Gray was first elected to Congress in 1954. He gained he name "Prince of Pork" for the billions of dollars in federal projects he brought to the region.

His many projects included the federal prison at Marion that replaced Alcatraz, Rend Lake Conservancy District, Devils Kitchen Lake, the start of the billion-dollar Olmsted Dam and Locks project, and many federal buildings and post offices throughout the region.

Gray first retired from Congress in 1974, after 10 terms. Then he ran for Congress again in 1984. He retired after two terms, citing health problems.