Distributing machine tools domestically and around the world. Fund at The Trust supports research into heart disease.
Jacques Allan Gerard (1899-1973)
Jacques A. Gerard, a Russian immigrant, was the “American Dream” come to life. He moved to New York as a young man, worked hard, made good friends, and started a successful company.
Jacques was born April 18, 1899, in Russian Empire-ruled Minsk, now the capital of Belarus. He attended junior college there, and at age 17 enlisted in the Russian Imperial Army. During the 1917 Russian Revolution, he fled to France, where he studied engineering.
In 1924, Jacques joined Compagnie Franco Belge as a salesman in Paris representing American machine tool manufacturers in Europe. By 1929, he was company president, and in the 1930s he negotiated the company’s exclusive representation in France for U.S. Steel Corp.
Jacques immigrated to the United States in 1936, aiming to expand relations with American tool companies. He settled in Windsor, Vermont, and became a salesman for Cone Automatic Machine Co., a tool manufacturer. Three years later, he was elected to the company’s board, then named first vice president for export and overseas operations.
In 1939, Jacques and his brother Michael started their own business in New York City, Gerard Machine Shop, to distribute machine tools, particularly Cone Automatic’s Conomatic, or “cone,” screw machines. Jacques also was vice president, director, and a member of the executive committee of Amertool Services, a cohort of 11 companies that exported machine tools to Latin America.
By the end of the 1940s, Gerard Machine was so successful the brothers moved their offices to 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Jacques was married to Valeria for more than 40 years; they had one son, George, who graduated from Harvard. Valeria died on August 28, 1964. Jacques married his second wife, Olga, in 1966.
While living in Vermont, Jacques became good friends with Cone Automatic’s president, Henry Chaplin, who was a trustee at Norwich University, a private military college in Northfield, Vermont. He also maintained a close relationship with the university’s president, Gen. Barksdale Hamlett. In 1959, Jacques was appointed a Norwich trustee, and he later donated money to build a new college dormitory that bears his name, Gerard Hall.
Jacques Allan Gerard died on June 3, 1973, in Bern, Switzerland, at age 74.
Jacques’s estate plan created a fund in The New York Community Trust for research in heart disease.