Over the course of his long career in business, Warren native Phillip Van Huffel worked at many different companies, met a multitude of people and learned a lot.
No matter the location or the company, Van Huffel said his experiences taught him one thing: “The only asset a company has is its people. That’s the most important thing in any business. Without people, there is no business.”
His journey to the top of several business, including a prominent position in his family company, stretched far and wide, but it started in Warren, where he was born and raised.
He attended St. Mary’s School throughout his childhood and began working for his family’s business, the Van Huffel Tube Co., “every day after school in grade school and high school.”
Van Huffel began his college career earlier than most. Since he had enough credits, he said he left high school during his junior year to attend the University of Notre Dame. However, Van Huffel said he never actually obtained his high school diploma.
He said he really enjoyed his time at Notre Dame, where he majored in general science with a focus on chemistry and bacteriology, which studies the morphology, ecology, genetics and biochemistry of bacteria, as well as many other aspects related to them.
“My senior year, I worked for the laboratories of bacteriology at Notre Dame,” he said.
Van Huffel graduated from Notre Dame in 1954 but never stopped educating himself, which led to a long line of various careers.
“I headed to the Army and was eventually at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (now called the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center) in Washington, D.C., preparing a germ-free laboratory for the Army,” he said.
While in the Army, he attended George Washington University for biochemistry but never graduated or received a degree.
Van Huffel then headed home in 1956 where he went back to work for his family company as a floor inspector. He became the chief inspector of finished goods two years later. A year after that, he was chief inspector of the whole company.
While working at his family’s company, he attended Youngstown College, now Youngstown State University, for metallurgy, which is a branch of science and technology concerned with the properties of metals and their production and purification, but never got a degree.
He quit Van Huffel Tube Co. in 1965 and began a new career as a general manager for the American Standard Air Quality Division. That led to another interesting journey in his career.
“I left American Standard to become president of Peabody Engineering Corp. (in Connecticut),” Van Huffel said.
“Within six months, I became group president for Peabody International (for) their Air Pollution Control Group (in New York City). I was responsible for subsidiaries, five in the U.S., five in Canada and five in Europe.”
He’s also worked as the president of Sanderson and Porter Inc., general manager of Anderson Automation, an executive vice president for Enegrid Investments, a vice president of Aero Liquid Transit Inc., CEO for Alloy Tek, and he held various consulting positions.
Van Huffel began working for Entela Inc. in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1996 and was promoted to president a year later. He and his family then moved to the company’s Taiwan location. He and his family lived there for four years before returning to Michigan, where he currently lives. He continued to work at Entela as a senior assessor. The company was later sold to Intertek, from which he retired in 2018.
After his retirement, Van Huffel found another way to occupy his time and wrote a book called “The Family Business” about Van Huffel Tube Co. It detailed how his family came from Belgium and how business-driven his ancestors were.
“My cousins continued to ask me to put down the stories they all heard about the family,” he said. “I am the oldest surviving Van Huffel, so I heard all the stories from my grandfather and grandmother. I wanted to write the story to help my family remember its roots.”
Van Huffel also serves as a member of the Knights of Columbus, where he helps assist people in need and provides services to various communities.
In his spare time, he said he enjoys nonfiction writing, reading and playing bridge.
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