Jack Henkels had a quick and biting wit as everybody who met him can testify. Plain spoken and brutally honest, the founder did not mince words. He knew when to praise and when to scold. Below are just a very few of the many memorable -- and by turn hilarious, sage, or ribald quotations to be found within the pages of An American Adventure, the memoirs of John B. Henkels, Jr. written and published in 1966 and detailing the birth, growth, failures and successes of the company. 1925 "Anne Henkels did all the accounting, billing, payrolls, and a lot of other work in our back-kitchen office and paid the men — when we could — out the kitchen window."

1926 "All during these pioneer days we tried hard to get big jobs, prestige jobs. We tried to do them well, and we tried to know what we were doing. The size of our operations has changed considerably over the years, but not our approach. We still try to know what we are doing." 1928 "If I had observed anything since we started, it is this. A shovel won’t shovel unless there is a man shoveling it. It’s the people that count, and Henkels & McCoy has real people from the first." 1929 "We were beginning to get there (business success), but so was an irresistible force, an all-embracing, not to say choking, circumstance, a bottom of the cycle stagnation -- call it what you will -- that along with a few million other people I had failed to see coming. We hadn't solicited the business. We hadn't bid on it. We didn't want it, but along the aforementioned other millions of people, we got it anyway. The Depression." 1931 "In 1931, we bought a half interest in a farm. The idea at the time was that it would be a pleasant vacation spot, good for us and good for the children, including at least five extra children each summer. The farm was, however, ideal in other ways. We played softball with various Philadelphia Electric and Bell teams, afterwards having freshly pulled corn and beer. The Norristown Philadelphia Electric Co. had a steady date for such a celebration." 1956 (excerpt from newspaper account in Germantown Courier) "Give the other fellow a chance. The backbone of our business is the men who work with us. If we ever forget them, we deserve to go broke." 1966 On Religion and Race Relations in the Workplace: "Sometimes I would like to call ours a Christian business. It never was. I am a Catholic, which none of my partners were. Three of the real architects of the business were Jews... If we were never wholly a Christian business, we certainly were not all the same color. African and Caucasian have worked side by side in Henkels & McCoy since the beginning. We were never interested in the pigmentation of a man's skin. If he could do the job, he was on; if he couldn't, we didn't want him -- no matter what his color."