Banjo Equipment is still in business

CEDAR RAPIDS — The squat, heavy piece of machinery sitting on a shipping pallet has the rounded edges and clean lines of industrial design from the 1940s, but it looks like new in a coat of gray paint.

“There’s something from back in the ’40s, all rebuilt and ready to go out,” said Ron “Pub” Melsha. “This takes time.”

The machine is a pump used to circulate ammonia through an industrial-scale refrigeration system.

The clean, efficient technology proven over more than a century still is used to chill cold-storage spaces in plants that process meat, dairy products and frozen foods.

Older pumps such as the one in Melsha’s old warehouse can continue to operate reliably if they’re maintained — which is where Banjo Equipment Co. comes in.

“We’ve been in business over 100 years,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of parts, so we sell it all over the country.

“That’s our niche. Our niche is to buy and sell used stuff, and we’ll do little jobs.”

Melsha’s grandfather Robert Melsha, the son of Czech immigrants, started Refrigeration Equipment Co. in 1918, after observing businesses in his neighborhood.

“It was Crystal Springs Ice,” Melsha said.

“That’s where he’d sit and watch the plant, and he got a job, then he got another. That’s how he quit school kind of early and fell into the trade.”

In addition to Cedar Rapids’ huge Sinclair packing house and local dairies, Melsha’s company equipped the ice companies that supplied household iceboxes before the development of kitchen refrigerators.

In 1933 the company moved to an office and warehouse building at 509 Fourth Ave. SE, where it operated until two years ago.

That’s where most local residents who aren’t in the business may have heard of Banjo.

The entire 500 block of Fourth Avenue SE was sold to developers who are clearing the space for a $49 million project that will include 244 units of mixed-income, multi-family housing.

The project takes its informal but widely recognized name, the “Banjo block,” from the parcel’s longtime occupant.

Melsha hopes the new building gets a new name.

“I don’t want my name being used,” he said.

“If you want to buy my name outright, that’s fine. I just let them go, but once it’s done Banjo is still down here. We’re still in business.”

Melsha has spent the past two years moving Banjo’s inventory to its new headquarters in one of the city’s oldest buildings.

The 1882 limestone-block structure was a cold-storage warehouse for the Sinclair plant, one of the world’s largest packing houses.

“They put all these walls about 12 inches thick, and they had ammonia coils,” Melsha said. “Down in the basement they had brick floors and they’d salt the hams.

“This room right next door was a cooperage shop. They’d build the barrels and salt the hams. You look around at some of the posts, and you can see where they’d be running into it with the barrels.”

Melsha’s father Leon “Tunnie” Melsha bought the building when Sinclair successor Farmstead Foods went bankrupt in the early 1990s.

Leon Melsha also gave the company its current name after Robert Melsha’s death in 1981, when the business split and another brother kept the Refrigeration Equipment name.

“My dad used to go to a place called Banjo Steel and Iron out of St. Louis,” Melsha recalled.

“We were going to call it Good Old Boys Refrigeration, but my old man said, ‘There’s name that’ll stick. We’ll call it Banjo Refrigeration.’”

Leon died in 2018, leaving the business to his son. From more than 70 employees in the 1980s, Banjo now has just five as its industrial market has changed.

“In the old days in the state of Iowa, you had 100, 200 little meat lockers, you had 100 dairies,” Melsha said. “Now there’s three, four main dairies, but the little lockers all of a sudden through this pandemic have been coming up like mini-breweries.

“We put the refrigeration down there in Millstream brewery in ’85. That was the first start of microbreweries.”

The old warehouse weathered about four feet of floodwater in June 2008.

The August 2020 derecho heavily damaged the building’s north wall, now a wood-frame replacement Melsha hopes will be temporary.

“I want to make it as original as we can,” he said. “We saved all the beams so we can put the beams back up.”

Banjo also maintains a warehouse in Bellevue.

“We’ve got a warehouse full of the same equipment up there, it’s like an overflow,” Melsha said.

“We’ve got 100-some years of inventory. The minute you throw something away, a month later someone will call and they’ll want something.”

As long as those customers keep calling, Melsha and his crew will keep them cool.

Know a business in the Corridor we should feature? Let us know by way of michaelchevy.castranova@thegazette.com.