By Nathan Mayberg
KIAMESHA LAKE — March 5, 2004 – One of Sullivan County’s longest-operated family businesses has changed hands – partially.
Leisure Time Ice was sold this week to Arctic Glacier, a Canadian-based producer, marketer and distributor of packaged ice. The company recently bought several of the largest ice packaging companies along the East Coast.
A.T. Reynolds, which owned the company through four generations, will retain control over Leisure Time Spring Water. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
A.T. Reynolds was established in 1884 as one of three ice packaging companies in the Monticello area, which was the second largest industry in America at the time, according to A.T. Reynolds President and CEO Harold Bruce Reynolds.
Reynolds estimated Leisure Time Ice’s annual sales to be over $5 million. The Spring Water division represents 2/3 of the entire A.T. Reynolds company’s business. Leisure Time’s ice and water products are distributed throughout New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
Arctic Glacier will be leasing about 40 percent of Leisure Time’s manufacturing plants, including a portion of the ones in Kiamesha Lake, Newburgh, and New Jersey. Long-time employee Al Feller will join Arctic Glacier as the manager of Leisure Time Ice.
Reynolds stressed that no employees would be laid off as a result of the deal. Leisure Time Ice employs 24 people, while Leisure Time Spring Water employs 80 workers. Reynolds expects both divisions to grow due to the sale.
Reynolds said, "As a family business for four generations, it was important to us to sell our business to an enterprise that shares our vision and value. This is what has enabled us to build a successful ice and water business over the past 120 years. A.T. Reynolds will now be able to concentrate on promoting our water division, Leisure Time Spring Water."
Reynolds is a fourth-generation descendant of the founders of the company. He started working for his parents at age 12. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in engineering 1970, he began working full-time doing "everything. . . . I was always helping."
For ten years, in fact, Reynolds drove the trucks which delivered the ice hundreds of miles away.
Reynolds took over as president of his family’s company in 1980. In 1982, he established Leisure Time Spring Water. Since that time, he has been involved in community groups like the Monticello Rotary Club, Monticello Elks, Monticello Bicentennial Committee, and was one of the founding members of the Sullivan County Partnership for Economic Development. In 1997, he was named the Sullivan County Chamber of Commerce’s Businessperson of the Year.
Also, Reynolds was a founding director of the Community Bank of Sullivan County, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary.
Reynolds' father, Harold, also had a long association with the company.
Harold, who died in 2001 at the age of 95, went to Cornell University, graduating in 1931 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering.
He then took a job with York Refrigeration. When his father, Atson Timothy Reynolds, bought a Block Ice Plant from York Refrigeration, Bruce returned home to install it and stayed with the company from the mid-1930s until his death.
And the company he will continue to oversee, Leisure Time Spring Water, will still obtain its water from natural springs in Livingston Manor.
"We’re going to concentrate 100 percent of our time in the water business. . . . Leisure Time’s long history of community involvement will continue,” he said.
Reynolds is a 1966 graduate of Monticello High School and a Liberty resident.
He has four daughters. His wife, Lorelei, is involved in many theatrical productions.