G/B International makes a 1,820 percent comeback

This is a story about great loss and a reconstruction.

For years, Lee Schiller managed scores of employees as his company shipped everything from food to weapons overseas to U.S. military bases.

But all that experience was for naught when the military downsized in the mid-1980s and then changed its distribution system in the 1990s. From 1970s peak of employing 160 workers for round-the-clock shifts, G&B Packing of Harrisburg was reduced by 1995 to a two-man shop: Schiller and his new partner, Marc Bonawitz.

G&B was hardest hit by the 1985 closure of the New Cumberland Army Depot and the government's decision in 1995 to have private-sector manufacturers send …