Somebody asked me not long ago if I had any involvement in the southern pine plywood movement. I’ll state here what I said then: I was involved right up to my ears.
The first company that looked into manufacturing southern pine plywood and began building a plant was Kirby Forest Industries at Silsbee, Texas. Then Georgia-Pacific started building a plant at Fordyce, Arkansas and may have made the first plywood before Kirby, but both of them were producing southern pine plywood in 1964.