But Maier, a Rhodes Scholar who studied at Harvard, was no dummy. A lawyer who had already earned a buck or two in the natural gas industry, Maier had a couple of aces up his sleeves -- a contract with Dupont to store something called ethylene glycol, and a plan to revolutionize the area's warehousing industry.

Ed Maier, his son, tells the story from his penthouse suite in City Center West, which towers over that first warehouse, the Fidelity Building, on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Maier recently sold the office building to the state Lottery Commission and expects to sell the warehouse to CAMC any day now, to make way for a parking lot.

The Maier family first got involved in the storage business through Ed's grandfather, William Sr., who opened a warehouse in Huntington in the early 1900s. The WJ Maier Storage Co. still operates a warehouse on Seventh Avenue in Huntington. But it was William Jr. who really established the business, Maier said.

Around 1942, at the height of World War II, the federal government wondered what William Jr. was doing to help the war effort, Maier said.

"They said, 'We'd like you to head up the Emergency Warehouse Relief Act.'"

The idea was to find warehouses to store munitions, camouflage and other gear for the war effort. "They were afraid the Germans would attack the East Coast. So they wanted to make sure there were enough munitions stored on this side of the mountains.

"Back in those days, warehousing was done in multistory buildings, with elevators and backbreaking labor, using two-wheeled and four-wheeled hand trucks or dollies."

But at Army bases along the East Coast, the military had adopted a new system developed in the late '30s to load ships bound for Europe -- forklifts and pallets. "That was unheard of at the time," Maier said. "Dad saw that and said, 'At the end of the war, this could be put to commercial use ...'"

A chance meeting in Washington completed the plan.

"He was drinking at a bar, talking to a scientist from Dupont who said, 'You know, we're making a product down there in Charleston. It's a byproduct, and we need to store it during the year. It's called antifreeze. We need a place to store it and ship it out real fast.'

"Dad said, 'I've got an idea. I'll build you a 100,000-square-foot building. We'll put railroad tracks on both sides. You can bring in 20 railroad cars, 10 on each side, every day and we'll ship it out.'

"Dad hired an architect and a contractor, found it would cost $250,000. He choked on that." But when he told a clerk at Kanawha Valley Bank he had contract with Dupont that would pay off the loan in five years, he got his money, Maier said. The rest, as they say, is history.

For the name, William Jr. tapped his knowledge of Latin. "Faith ... <I>fidelis<P> ... Fidelity Storage Corp. It took two years, but the Fidelity Building opened in 1947.

"I remember Dad telling me, the first shipping season came in September. Twenty cars lined up, we shipped them out, so we lined up 20 more and shipped them out, too. They called the Columbus storage facility [for Dupont] and asked, 'How many cars did you ship today?' They said, 'We had a good day, we shipped two.' 'Well we shipped 40.'

"Word got out, and Carbide called and asked Dad to build a warehouse to store their miscellaneous materials."

He did, right in front of, and attached to, the Fidelity Building. He named it the Merchants Building, 89,000 square feet. It opened in 1951.

Four more warehouses followed, in rapid succession: The Atlas Building (1952-53), the Inland Building, the Eureka Building and the Rex Building, in 1957-58.

"You'll notice: Merchants, Atlas, Inland, Eureka, Rex -- M A I E R," Maier said.

"He also built a tremendous 250,000-square-foot warehouse in Columbus, one in Clarksburg, Huntington, and Dunbar."

Through the 1950s and '60s, the storage business flourished. The two Maiers -- Ed joined his father after college, sharing a tiny office just inside the Fidelity Building -- employed more than 100 people across the state.

"We had Monsanto, Dupont, FMC and Carbide, four huge chemical companies, all storing materials here, especially Carbide. It was mostly chemicals -- dry chemicals, in bags and boxes. So much of it was for the plastics industry, like chewing gum resin."

Agricultural products, too. "We handled herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, that kind of thing, not so much here, but in Dunbar."

And antifreeze, always, first in tin containers, then plastic. "When plastic first came out, they found it didn't work as well. They had to redesign. They had a lot of leakers.

"Only toward the late '60s did we start leasing out some of these buildings," Maier said. "When I took over in '73, we pretty much got out of public warehousing. We found we could do better by leasing and letting others run the business.

"We had a variety of tenants. One of the first was Medpac Corp. They manufactured medical supplies -- cotton swabs that had alcohol in them. Chesapeake Energy for the last 15 years. They had office space that they converted, and well equipment.

"The skate park was there. We had three different owners try to make a go of it over the years." (Remember Focus Skate Park? How about Area 51?)

In the 1950s, as the Interstate highway system was being designed, federal planners took aim at a corner of Merchant's Building.

"A young engineer came into the office and said, 'We'll need 35,000 square feet of your building. How much will that cost?' Dad said, 'Are you sure? Let me see your plans.' He said this part will be elevated. Just keep the building and put it over the top.

"The engineer said you can't do that, it's never been done before. But Dad had seen a similar situation in Massachusetts. He got on the phone the next day: 'Arch [Moore, the governor], let me tell you how to save the state some money.'"

Drive by the warehouse today and you'll see a concrete pier sticking out of the roof, holding up a section of I-64.

"We had to cut a big hole in the roof because they had to have cranes drive 29 piles 50 feet into the ground, to bedrock," Maier said. The concrete piles form the foundation for the pier.

"They were able to save the building except for 120 square feet. Yes, they have air rights. Yes, we can't store flammable materials underneath. But it's been income-producing property all these years."

William Jr. worked the angles to keep taxes down, too. He set up about a dozen corporations to hold his assets, with ownership split among family members, Maier said.

"The Internal Revenue Service eventually caught up with him. They said, 'They're really all the same company and you should be paying higher taxes.'"

So he struck a deal with the IRS. All the corporations would be merged in one, a Clarksburg entity called General Storage Co. that he'd already signed over to his four children. With a slight renaming, General Corp. was born.

Maier presides over the empire, and the charitable foundation his dad set up, from his spacious suite on the top floor of City Center West. He no longer owns the building, though. He sold it to the state Lottery Commission earlier this summer. He's making final arrangements to move out.

The warehouses next door are nearly gone, too. Maier figures CAMC will tear them down soon, while the weather is still warm enough to pave its new parking lot.

"It's tough to define my emotions now, although I've thought a lot about it," he said.

"Divesting ourselves of the principal assets of the family business is monumental, to say the least. I'll probably be a little more emotional or maudlin when they take the Fidelity. That was Dad's first venture in the public warehousing business.

"My sisters and nephew each want to keep a brick. I haven't informed CAMC yet; I hope they don't mind. We're hoping to take a brick and maybe we'll make a doorstop."

Reach Jim Balow at ba...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5102.