Don't Sing at the Table (6 page)

Viola did not coddle, but there was modulated respect when a job was done well. I can see, from the gifts the employees gave my grandparents, that they had respect for them, if not affection. They wrote funny poems upon anniversaries in the mill and on their retirement, but they were never called Viola and Dick. They were Mr. and Mrs. Trigiani.

Viola's years as a forelady working for Mr. Rosenberg helped her develop her managerial style. The output of the factory and the excellence of the product was
her
responsibility. There was no way Viola was going to lose her job or botch an order, so she was a stern taskmaster. Time was not only money; her reputation was on the line. And for Viola, her good reputation and ability to deliver the goods was all they had when my grandfather got on the train in a suit and hat to travel into New York City to find work.

Viola told me that she and Grandpop designed a business plan that they would not vary from in the years that they owned and operated the mill. My grandfather was the front man. This was a natural position for Grandpop, as he was intelligent, had good taste and was easygoing. He would dress up, go into New York City by train, and meet with various companies in the garment district, where he'd make deals to manufacture blouses, created and sold by the dozen.

As a machinist, my grandfather purchased the equipment and maintained it. He also, according to their partnership contract (they had a very detailed legal agreement between them as full partners), leased the machinery to my grandmother, who owned the building. I learned from them to go to a proper attorney and arrange contracts for any business venture. Further, a proper will saved my grandmother a great deal of anxiety when my grandfather died. Every detail was discussed prior to his death, so Viola had few surprises when tragedy struck.

Yolanda Manufacturing stayed in production fifty weeks a year. The traditional vacation period for the blouse mills was the first two weeks of July. During those weeks, when my grandparents had young children, they went to Atlantic City, to Lake George in upstate New York, or to New England. While they worked hard year-round, when they were off the clock, they relaxed.

Once the operators and suppliers were paid, my grandparents took their cut above the small salaries they pulled from the mill. There were times when they did well, and times when they had to take a lesser deal to keep the factory in operation. Luckily, my grandfather's skill with the machines kept any money that might have gone to repairs in their pockets. He worked in the factory on a daily basis also, but his schedule was more flexible than Viola's. She left before dawn and returned home in time for dinner. He would get the kids off to school and then go to work. The family life thrived around the business.

The Yolanda Manufacturing Company in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania.

The mill was an all-consuming, often family-wide venture. Viola would invite her sisters over in a crunch when a deadline was looming. Her children were enlisted to help when the pressure was on. Cousins came through to pitch in. It was natural for Viola to ask for extra hands, as she took the rule of farm life into the factory. If you wanted to eat, you had to work.

When the tough times came, Viola was ready for them because she didn't squander her time and money when the coffers were flush. She told me that when you own your own business, you can never coast, because there is no way to predict what will come. You must rise to meet every challenge, because if you fail, you lose your mill, and the jobs that you provide with it. While the mill employed upward of fifty people, the number grows into the hundreds when you consider the businesses that thrived off the mill. Viola's ledgers are neatly filled with payments to locally owned businesses like the Roseto Paper Box Company, Leader Thread, Fremont Thread, and Silver Line Trucking.

There was a sense of community among her fellow manufacturers, who were also the competition. They knew that the success of their small enterprises extended beyond their profit margins; many families beyond those employed by the mill benefited from this way of life. When a competitor couldn't fulfill an order, he'd swing the work your way. Places like Perfect Shirt often shared an order, thus keeping a workforce active in two mills, both benefiting from the deal.

Yolanda Manufacturing made blouses for Alice Wills Fashions, Dersh Blouse Company, and Lady Helene Blouses, among others. My grandparents' old boss Mr. Rosenberg at Bangor Clothing Company threw them a deal here and there. They had put in their years under him, and now he considered them equals, and made sure that opportunities came their way. He recommended Yolanda Manufacturing with the full knowledge that Viola would deliver.

Relationships, Relationships, Relationships

The
schmatte
business, or the rag trade, as it was known then, whose epicenter was in midtown Manhattan, was built on years of relationships, cultivated from the time when my grandparents were young. These alliances and, ultimately, friendships were the fuel that drove the engine of the Yolanda Manufacturing Company. All the years on the floor of the factory mastering new tasks and equipment taught my grandparents everything they needed to know to run their own shop. But, they knew they couldn't do it alone. Relationships would sustain the new operation and help it grow. Loyalty was rewarded. If they liked you in the garment district, they looked out for you, and would recommend you for extra work, or offer you new opportunities that would challenge your work force, and build your business.

In those days (Yolanda Manufacturing was founded in 1943, with the official paperwork of my grandparents' business partnership filed in 1945), most clothes worn in the United States and around the world were made in these small American factories (northeastern Pennsylvania was loaded with them). My grandparents created higher-end blouses sold in department stores by middlemen who also took a cut, many of the designs inspired by fashions worn in the movies. In our current celebrity-driven culture, it's an interesting note that the hunger for Hollywood glamour was key to design, production, and sales even then.

Often a movie star would lend her name to a pattern company, sponsor a fashion line, or let a character she played take the honors to sell a particular garment to the general public. There were varying degrees of participation by the actresses, and their compensation reflected their input and effort. The tags that hung on the blouses featured their glamorous faces, often printed with their signatures. Sometimes their signature was a true endorsement; other times, their image was simply on contractual loan for a set time period, to push ready-made goods to the discerning shopper looking for her own handful of Hollywood stardust.

Viola told me about the various styles of blouses made in their factory, including one that was known as the Gene Tierney, a blouse with a horse embroidered on the pocket, a variation of which was worn by the starlet in a movie. For my grandparents, whose own romance had blossomed in the early 1930s, with dates to Hollywood movies as their favorite pastime, it seemed that things had come full circle. How long would the good times last?

Eventually, ceding to my grandfather's illness, they sold the Yolanda Manufacturing Company in 1967. They had been in business for themselves for twenty-four years. Later, when we talked about the closing of the factory, it was with great sadness on Viola's part. They closed the factory on March 15, 1967. Ironically, one year later to the day, Michael Trigiani died. Viola lost her husband and her factory in close proximity, responding to the loss of both with her typical pluck: she went back to work.

While Viola retired from the Yolanda Manufacturing Company, she did not officially from the workforce. Within a year of my grandfather's death, she found herself back on the machines, subbing as an operator in a friend's blouse mill. She became a factory temp, and loved it. When she reached the age of seventy-two, she was thrilled, because that's the official age when the United States government waives income tax. She could put in an eight-hour day on the machine and keep the tax money. The drive and ambition that had served her all of her working life now came with a bonus at the end, and she reveled in it.

One by one, the bustling, busy, profitable, family-owned factories closed in Northampton County until only a few stalwarts remained through the 1970s, pushing hard, using the old manufacturing model as long as they could, until the work was no longer there. By the mid-1980s, most manufacturing had decamped overseas for cheaper labor and materials. By the early 1990s, most of the mills were closed. The small towns punctuated with mills became bedroom communities as younger generations moved to more populous cities, seeking work.

Today, when you drive through my grandmother's stomping grounds in Pennsylvania, you see the abandoned factories, nestled among weeds, with broken-out windows and empty parking lots. Once-vibrant operations with names like Rose Marie Fashions etched in cursive letters on factory doors are gone. Small business was personal in those days, and often you honored a mother or a daughter by naming the factory after her. The entrance doors painted with signs indicating the operations within: office, cutting room, shipping, have peeled off with age.

The mills that sustained these communities are gone.

When I was in college in the early 1980s, I asked Viola to ask the current owner of her factory building for her sign over the door, which had remained there twenty-five years after she had sold the building. A few months later she gave it to me, rusted, with nail holes in it, but there is no mistaking the original grandeur: in bold white the name of her company, on a field of bright red. You could see the sign from a distance, a poppy against the gray sandstone. “Why do you want this, Adri?” she asked me. “I want to remember your mill,” I told her.

The loss of the mill and all it represented was a blow to our family, and by extension, and no less devastatingly, to our country. Here we are, years later, and the effects of the loss remain vivid. Imagine a time when a machinist and a seamstress, one with a sixth-grade education, the other less, could join forces, form a partnership, start their own mill, employ a diligent workforce, and
thrive
.

The entrance to Viola's mill. Note the sign over the door.

Imagine a time when you could fulfill a lifelong dream, after years of experience working for others, walk into a bank, and secure a loan to start your own business, building upon the knowledge that comes from making a living from the labor of your own hands.

Imagine a time when you could operate the business, and provide a community with steady jobs, buy a home, and educate your children. My grandparents did all of that, and as a sidebar, they were active in their community. They helped to build a convent for the Salesian nuns and subsequently a school in Roseto, with their fellow Rosetans, who pledged, at that time, a great deal of money, because they believed in education—and put their money where their hearts were. When I read the ledgers now, I am so proud of them. They gave generously to causes they believed in. I never knew the extent of their philanthropy in financial terms until I studied the ledgers, because they never talked about these gifts, but I certainly understood their emotional commitment.

In later years, Viola could not understand how our country would succeed if we weren't supplying our people and the world's people with products we had made here, with our own hands. She knew that her small factory affected hundreds of lives, and the income of countless families, from the machine operator who placed the collar at her station in the mill in Martins Creek to the salesgirl who earned a commission selling that same blouse, off the rack, on the floor of Macy's.

Every stratum of worker benefited from American-made goods. We demonstrated through our own efforts goods of quality, durability, and excellence. As immigrants, we were assured jobs, and once having mastered the skill, we could turn around and teach it to others. We were, in a sense, our product, as we defined it: consistent craftsmanship and excellent results, which meant
American
in the marketplace.