I used to hear them on their phones outside my office door.
Their names were Marge and Eileen, and they represented the customer service department of the clothing manufacturing company for which I handled marketing and public relations.
"How’s that grandchild of yours?” Marge would say, in her 40s at the time, heavyset and full of emotion with no children or husband of her own. “Did you like the brisket recipe I gave you? It was my grandmother’s Passover version.”
Eileen, divorced and living with her mother, had a sarcastic wit, “Are you ordering two dozen more today?” she’d shout into the phone. “I thought I told you last week that one dozen wasn’t going to be enough. And by the way, someday I will get to Connecticut and visit you. I have never really left Ohio.”
It was the late 1980s, and this was the second job of my career. The company was family-owned, and, in fact, the founder would still wander around outside my office door. Frederick DiCiccio founded the company in the early 1940s. Actually, he didn’t really even start the company -- it was given to him.
A tiny man of few words in his 80s when I began, Frederick stowed away from Italy at the age of 16, hidden in the ship’s cargo deck. He landed in America with no knowledge of the language and somehow found a job sewing coats in a factory in Cleveland Ohio owned by an elderly female. Frederick soon became her best and hardest worker, and when she retired, she offered him the business in lieu of all the back pay she owed him from his never having missed one day of work or taken a vacation.
The war came, and with it, rations and specific government assistance to pregnant mothers and manufacturers of related items – including nursing and maternity bras. Frederick borrowed train ticket collector punches and used them and college students to make holes in the then-corseted bras. Soon, he had a completely different business model.
Frederick tells of the day he took a bus to New York to show his samples to a Macy’s lingerie buyer-- a story I actually videotaped once. “I sat in the lobby all day, and she walked past me," Frederick says to the camera. "I never said a word, and spent the night on the couch. The next day, she told me to come into her office, (he motions in the video with his hand) and I gave her six samples," he says with the gleam still in his eye.
He reenacts her movements and says, “She studied each one just like this. And then she put three in her lap. Those three were the first ever products I sold to a big department store!” and his eyes widen on the video as if this were still fresh news.
By the time I arrived, this company was the largest niche manufacturer of these items and many more SKUs to the maternity and breastfeeding markets. Our customer base was thousands of small maternity stores, maternity store chains, and also mid-sized and other major department stores across the United States. We sold through an independent sales rep team of old timers with names like Seymour and Al, who spent their careers in the garment district of New York and other areas of the country, peddling woman’s lingerie. I loved these old-timers. They knew all the buyers by name for generations. They could draw flow charts from memory of all of them. They had large personalities and even larger stories to go with them. Of course they did, for their people skills was their currency.
And we made the items in America, in mostly two brand new manufacturing facilities in rural South Central Illinois.
One of my first duties was to organize the first company-wide sales meeting near these manufacturing facilities. And I remember swooping in over the cornfields in a tiny plane, renting a car and checking into the Thelma Keller Convention Center in Effingham, Illinois (which was really just a Ramada Inn with a fancy name.)
Thelma, too, had a story, and it began with a one-pump gas station she and her husband Lolami owned and from which she served the best barbecue sandwiches in the region. From there, came a gas distribution business and this convention center, inspired by Thelma’s passion for cooking and treating each guest as special as the next.
At that time, there were dozens if not hundreds of manufacturing facilities in the area. And the convention center, though not fancy but just right, served many of them with lodging and sales meetings. The grand dame was probably in her 80s at that time, and she was actually at the front desk when I checked in late in the evening a few days in advance of our meeting. She was a whisp of a thing who never stopped moving, with a big smile and auburn hair piled on top of her head in a beehive. And when I came down for breakfast early the next morning, there she was again at the hostess stand.
But Thelma wasn’t the only kind and gracious hard worker around. The area was teeming with them, which I soon found out when I visited our factories. From the plant managers, to assistants to the maintenance man sweeping a broom, I was greeted with hugs and offers of pie the very first time I visited those facilities and during the times I would visit them in the years to come.
These people were not just paycheck-collecting robots. They were real people in real rural America, and since I was raised in the suburbs of larger US cities, this was a completely new experience for me. I loved visiting those plants. There’d always be homemade food in the lunchroom someone had brought in to share. There were stories of babies, and parades, and rotary meetings. There were dinners at people’s homes I’d be invited to as guest, sitting around their family dinner table. There were town diners with some of the best food I’d ever eaten then or since.
These facilities didn’t just produce garments, they housed mini-communities of their own, filled with fellowship and humanity.
The sales meeting came and went -- my first project a resounding success -- but more importantly, a perfect way to immerse myself into what would be the next six years of my life. And as I look back at the six years I spent with that company, I consider it a microcosm of American manufacturing then versus now.
Because a year or two after I started, Wal-Mart, Target and the big mass merchandising chains came calling as they in many ways were just in their infancies on the big retail stage of America. And how could we say no? Someone else was going to get the business, and we had people to employ.
I remember all 26 years of me telling the owner that I believed we’d see a drastic shift in our customers. And it happened. By the time I left, our top few accounts made up 80 percent of our business, Wal-Mart was calling us collect, and recommending overseas manufacturers to keep prices down.
And Marge and Eileen had fewer and fewer people to talk to outside my office door. For Wal-Mart and Target placed orders using technology and not people.
I think back to that time often, for I believe I witnessed both the glory days and the beginning of the downfall of American manufacturing in those six short years. I remember the people. I remember their hearts. I remember Seymour Klein with his distinct New York accent, disheveled oversized suit, worn suitcase full of bra samples he’d schlep around New York whenever I came to visit during market week. I remember his kind eyes, easy laugh, shock of grey hair and his attempt to ease his young daughter into his business near the end, not realizing that the end was something much bigger than his own retirement.
I remember the silencing of the phones outside my office, as mom and pop retailers closed up shop, no match for Wal-Mart and Target (who sold our wares as private label, leaving me less to promote and weakening the brand name our proud founder once scratched out on a note pad.)
Frederick died, too, during the time I was employed there. He was a humble man, whose life was his work, evidenced by the funeral guests consisting exclusively of family and employees including factory workers. Yes, many travelled to Cleveland to attend this man’s funeral – a man they never met. But they respected him because his grit and determination as a 16-year-old off the boat from Italy with no knowledge of the English language is exactly why they could feed their families.
Will we ever have a period like this in America again? When people talked to each other while doing business instead of hitting “send” from their computer screens? When whole communities were employed at a few manufacturing facilities owned by actual Americans, and not some Brazilian conglomerate? Where not only could you trace back that product you were assembling to a person, but you had the humanity and grace to travel 600 miles to attend his funeral?
I don’t think we will. But I feel honored and humbled that I was there. Because it formed me, too. I was a few years out of college, and a year into my employment when I broke up with my controlling fiancĂ©. And for the first time in my life, I supported myself exclusively and found an apartment of my own.
The apartment where an office mate would help me sew curtains and sponge paint my living room walls a deep shade of coral. When another quiet colleague who on the day of my move-in placed a bottle of wine on my desk, giving me hope for new beginnings. When the founder’s son took me aside and gave me a raise that day too, just because he knew that moving into my own place came with a greater financial burden.
How lucky I was to land in the lap of that family- owned business at that point in history! Where humanity, resilience and community modeled for me all that was right in this world. If even for just a few short years.
*** Names have been changed to protect privacy. But the Thelma Keller Conference Center remains. For more about Thelma:
http://www.kellerconventioncenter.com/about-us)
Their names were Marge and Eileen, and they represented the customer service department of the clothing manufacturing company for which I handled marketing and public relations.
"How’s that grandchild of yours?” Marge would say, in her 40s at the time, heavyset and full of emotion with no children or husband of her own. “Did you like the brisket recipe I gave you? It was my grandmother’s Passover version.”
Eileen, divorced and living with her mother, had a sarcastic wit, “Are you ordering two dozen more today?” she’d shout into the phone. “I thought I told you last week that one dozen wasn’t going to be enough. And by the way, someday I will get to Connecticut and visit you. I have never really left Ohio.”
It was the late 1980s, and this was the second job of my career. The company was family-owned, and, in fact, the founder would still wander around outside my office door. Frederick DiCiccio founded the company in the early 1940s. Actually, he didn’t really even start the company -- it was given to him.
A tiny man of few words in his 80s when I began, Frederick stowed away from Italy at the age of 16, hidden in the ship’s cargo deck. He landed in America with no knowledge of the language and somehow found a job sewing coats in a factory in Cleveland Ohio owned by an elderly female. Frederick soon became her best and hardest worker, and when she retired, she offered him the business in lieu of all the back pay she owed him from his never having missed one day of work or taken a vacation.
The war came, and with it, rations and specific government assistance to pregnant mothers and manufacturers of related items – including nursing and maternity bras. Frederick borrowed train ticket collector punches and used them and college students to make holes in the then-corseted bras. Soon, he had a completely different business model.
Frederick tells of the day he took a bus to New York to show his samples to a Macy’s lingerie buyer-- a story I actually videotaped once. “I sat in the lobby all day, and she walked past me," Frederick says to the camera. "I never said a word, and spent the night on the couch. The next day, she told me to come into her office, (he motions in the video with his hand) and I gave her six samples," he says with the gleam still in his eye.
He reenacts her movements and says, “She studied each one just like this. And then she put three in her lap. Those three were the first ever products I sold to a big department store!” and his eyes widen on the video as if this were still fresh news.
By the time I arrived, this company was the largest niche manufacturer of these items and many more SKUs to the maternity and breastfeeding markets. Our customer base was thousands of small maternity stores, maternity store chains, and also mid-sized and other major department stores across the United States. We sold through an independent sales rep team of old timers with names like Seymour and Al, who spent their careers in the garment district of New York and other areas of the country, peddling woman’s lingerie. I loved these old-timers. They knew all the buyers by name for generations. They could draw flow charts from memory of all of them. They had large personalities and even larger stories to go with them. Of course they did, for their people skills was their currency.
And we made the items in America, in mostly two brand new manufacturing facilities in rural South Central Illinois.
One of my first duties was to organize the first company-wide sales meeting near these manufacturing facilities. And I remember swooping in over the cornfields in a tiny plane, renting a car and checking into the Thelma Keller Convention Center in Effingham, Illinois (which was really just a Ramada Inn with a fancy name.)
Thelma, too, had a story, and it began with a one-pump gas station she and her husband Lolami owned and from which she served the best barbecue sandwiches in the region. From there, came a gas distribution business and this convention center, inspired by Thelma’s passion for cooking and treating each guest as special as the next.
At that time, there were dozens if not hundreds of manufacturing facilities in the area. And the convention center, though not fancy but just right, served many of them with lodging and sales meetings. The grand dame was probably in her 80s at that time, and she was actually at the front desk when I checked in late in the evening a few days in advance of our meeting. She was a whisp of a thing who never stopped moving, with a big smile and auburn hair piled on top of her head in a beehive. And when I came down for breakfast early the next morning, there she was again at the hostess stand.
But Thelma wasn’t the only kind and gracious hard worker around. The area was teeming with them, which I soon found out when I visited our factories. From the plant managers, to assistants to the maintenance man sweeping a broom, I was greeted with hugs and offers of pie the very first time I visited those facilities and during the times I would visit them in the years to come.
These people were not just paycheck-collecting robots. They were real people in real rural America, and since I was raised in the suburbs of larger US cities, this was a completely new experience for me. I loved visiting those plants. There’d always be homemade food in the lunchroom someone had brought in to share. There were stories of babies, and parades, and rotary meetings. There were dinners at people’s homes I’d be invited to as guest, sitting around their family dinner table. There were town diners with some of the best food I’d ever eaten then or since.
These facilities didn’t just produce garments, they housed mini-communities of their own, filled with fellowship and humanity.
The sales meeting came and went -- my first project a resounding success -- but more importantly, a perfect way to immerse myself into what would be the next six years of my life. And as I look back at the six years I spent with that company, I consider it a microcosm of American manufacturing then versus now.
Because a year or two after I started, Wal-Mart, Target and the big mass merchandising chains came calling as they in many ways were just in their infancies on the big retail stage of America. And how could we say no? Someone else was going to get the business, and we had people to employ.
I remember all 26 years of me telling the owner that I believed we’d see a drastic shift in our customers. And it happened. By the time I left, our top few accounts made up 80 percent of our business, Wal-Mart was calling us collect, and recommending overseas manufacturers to keep prices down.
And Marge and Eileen had fewer and fewer people to talk to outside my office door. For Wal-Mart and Target placed orders using technology and not people.
I think back to that time often, for I believe I witnessed both the glory days and the beginning of the downfall of American manufacturing in those six short years. I remember the people. I remember their hearts. I remember Seymour Klein with his distinct New York accent, disheveled oversized suit, worn suitcase full of bra samples he’d schlep around New York whenever I came to visit during market week. I remember his kind eyes, easy laugh, shock of grey hair and his attempt to ease his young daughter into his business near the end, not realizing that the end was something much bigger than his own retirement.
I remember the silencing of the phones outside my office, as mom and pop retailers closed up shop, no match for Wal-Mart and Target (who sold our wares as private label, leaving me less to promote and weakening the brand name our proud founder once scratched out on a note pad.)
Frederick died, too, during the time I was employed there. He was a humble man, whose life was his work, evidenced by the funeral guests consisting exclusively of family and employees including factory workers. Yes, many travelled to Cleveland to attend this man’s funeral – a man they never met. But they respected him because his grit and determination as a 16-year-old off the boat from Italy with no knowledge of the English language is exactly why they could feed their families.
Will we ever have a period like this in America again? When people talked to each other while doing business instead of hitting “send” from their computer screens? When whole communities were employed at a few manufacturing facilities owned by actual Americans, and not some Brazilian conglomerate? Where not only could you trace back that product you were assembling to a person, but you had the humanity and grace to travel 600 miles to attend his funeral?
I don’t think we will. But I feel honored and humbled that I was there. Because it formed me, too. I was a few years out of college, and a year into my employment when I broke up with my controlling fiancĂ©. And for the first time in my life, I supported myself exclusively and found an apartment of my own.
The apartment where an office mate would help me sew curtains and sponge paint my living room walls a deep shade of coral. When another quiet colleague who on the day of my move-in placed a bottle of wine on my desk, giving me hope for new beginnings. When the founder’s son took me aside and gave me a raise that day too, just because he knew that moving into my own place came with a greater financial burden.
How lucky I was to land in the lap of that family- owned business at that point in history! Where humanity, resilience and community modeled for me all that was right in this world. If even for just a few short years.
*** Names have been changed to protect privacy. But the Thelma Keller Conference Center remains. For more about Thelma:
http://www.kellerconventioncenter.com/about-us)
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