In april, after 17 years in upper management at Quaker Oats, Whirlpool and FMC Corp., the jovial, 64-year-old Michael Callahan gave up retirement and the occasional consulting gig to run a sleepy manufacturer that last year netted $2.2 million pretax on $267 million in sales. Material Sciences Corp. of Elk Grove Village, 111. was formed in 1971 to buy companies inventing new materials. Most never took off, but it managed to go public in 1984 on the back of a unit that had found a fast way to paint the raw steel and aluminum used to make car bodies, roofing and garage doors. Coil coating―which involves priming metal rolls weighing up to 50,000 pounds with absorbent chemicals, then painting them at up to 700 feet per minute on a mill―accounts for two-thirds of the company's revenues.
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