Peddler’s Cart | Stores | Scrap Yard | Tobacco
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 />  />  />  /> A Latvian immigrant, Frank Brenner came to Winston-Salem in 1921 and opened a scrap yard. When the Depression hit, his son Morris quit school at fifteen to help out, joined soon by brothers Abe and Herb. The work involved cutting scrap metal with axes and torches and using wheelbarrows to dump it into railroad cars for shipment north to mills and foundries. In the 1950s the brothers, with the help of their mother, Jenny, started: the Amarr Company, which manufactured garage doors; Brenner Steel, a fabricator for major buildings; and Sanitary Container Service, which became the regions largest waste’ removal service. They expanded their scrap business with United Metal Recyclers, operating yards in Kernersville, Winston-Salem, and Wilmington.
 />  />  />  /> “We were reared seeing charity boxes on our mother’s kitchen wall, where coins were placed each Sabbath evening,” Herbert Brenner recalls. Herb served on the Wake Forest University Board of Trustees and chaired the board of the Bowman Gray Medical Center. Morris at his death served as an officer or board member for thirty-one civic organizations. Abe’s civic involvements include the Jaycees, Temple Emanuel, and the Brenner Center for Adolescent Medicine. Wanting to give something significant back to the community, the Brenners endowed Brenner Children’s Hospital in Winston-Salem. |
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