When Doris Tanguay talks about
the William Skinner Manufacturing Company (see here for previous post), it is easy to see the thrill of
adventure in a career in this company through her eyes; for her, this was an adventure and something to look
upon, many years later, as golden years.
Mrs. Tanguay, now in
her early nineties, allowed me the privilege of an interview with her earlier
this year to discuss her memories of the famous Holyoke, Massachusetts, silk
manufacturing company through the perspective of a young woman who’d spent over
twenty years in the office. She learned
all aspects of the manufacturing process, rubbing shoulders with the famous
Skinner family, and experiencing the singular delight of loving her job. Hers is tale that belongs to another era—the
more shame for us—of employees remaining with the same company for decades, of
feeling a sense of belonging and sense family with that company, and of the
company treating them with, at the very least, a paternalistic sense of
responsibility and partnership. It was a
workplace before the computer, before automation, where labor-intensive man-hours brought product to the
marketplace.She began her career in 1939, in the final years of the Great Depression.
Mrs. Doris Tanguay: First
job out of high school. I graduated in ’38. You know, it was Depression, and I was
looking for work, and I just get a part-time job at White & Wyckoff [printing company]. It was a holiday, I guess, you know where
they have a lot of cards going out.
And then I had another
part-time job at Christmas with the Electric Game Company, typing labels. My father worked at the Second Congo Church [Second Congregational Church, Holyoke]. He worked there for about thirty-five
years. Of course, Skinner [Joseph Skinner, son of the founder of the
William Skinner Mfg. Co.] was very prominent in that church and the Skinner
Chapel. Every second week my father got
paid by Skinner, because that was his share of the Chapel. That was their agreement they had. Sometimes I would go up to church to see him
and walk down—we walked everywhere in those days—Appleton Street. We’d have to go into the officer at Skinner’s
[William Skinner Manufacturing Company]
to get his pay for the week. Sometimes
he would send me in.
There was a man in
there who was—they didn’t really have titles back then—but he paid the
bills. He used to always ask my father
about me, and my father said I was looking for a job. So this particular day I went in and he asked
me if I had job yet, and I said no. He
says, “Well, why don’t you go right upstairs and apply. There’s a girl up there who’s leaving.” He told me where to go and who to see, and
that’s how I got my job. ‘Thirty-nine,
and I always thought I would be there till I retired. We all did.
But, ’63 we finally locked the door.
It was a sad day.
We also doubled up in
the salesroom. We had a salesroom
there. So when they were shorthanded in
there, one of us could go in there and help.
It’s amazing to me today how—during the war we had over 1,000 employees—with
such a small office and, you know, not all the equipment that they have today,
we ran everything. Because it was a lot
of extra work during the war.
Oh, and I was the first one to have an electric
typewriter. You know, IBM came in to
sell their electric typewriter. Back
then, we had a copy machine that we had to use a lot, because we had to
send—when we got orders we had to send copies of our written order to all the
different departments. We used to have
to make copies on the copy machine, you know, that old purple stuff. [Mimeograph
machine.
You got that purple all over you. Well, I typed up the orders. I would have to make six copies. So you take six copies with carbon paper in
between, you got to pound your keys. So,
when I got the electric typewriter, I thought it was wonderful because—you
know, actually, I was only a young girl, but my wrists used to ache from
pushing those keys.
The other girls were afraid of the electric
typewriter. They thought they were going
to get shocks. It was a long time before
some of the others got talked into it.
But I had the first electric one, and boy, I loved it.
Then, you know, Dictaphones became popular. I was working more for Mr. Hubbard at that
time [William H. Hubbard, grandson of the
founder]. He called me his Girl
Friday. Part of the week, he spend in
New York. You know, we had the sales
offices in New York, and he would come in on the train back and forth. He’d come in on Wednesdays and would go into
his office, and he’d call me and we’d go through his mail and he’d
dictate. He didn’t want any part of
Dictaphones. He liked to talk to you
when he was dictating and talk about it, and ask your opinion, or tell you
about something.
He used to call me to see, “Where’s this? Where’s that?” Because would just scatter everything all
around. I would pile it up. But I knew where everything was, and he would
call me in, “Where’s this? Where’s
that?” And he’d say to me, “You must be
a holy terror at home.” He told me that
he had twin beds, and he slept in one bed and he had all his books and
everything spread out on the other bed.
And he says, “Nobody touches them!”
He used to love to cook, and he used to tell me about
things he cooked.
I said, “Yeah, but do you do your dishes?”
“Oh, no,” he says, “I’ve got all kinds of dirty
dishes. I don’t do those.”
I said, “Well, it’s easy to cook when you don’t have to
clean up after yourself.” They had a
maid do it. But he did like to
cook. He used to get cookbooks.
The Skinner Company
also had offices in New York City, but Doris did not travel for her job.
Mrs. Doris
Tanguay: I never went, no, never went to New
York. When I first [worked for the
company] both Old Joe and Will Skinner [sons
of the founder] were living. Will
Skinner lived in New York on Park Avenue.
He was the one that used to come up every summer to live at
Wistariahurst. He had a car with a
chauffeur. I can’t remember when he
died. They must have had the funeral in
New York, because it wasn’t at the church.
Postcard, Image Museum website
There were a lot of people there that had been there for
many years before I [worked at Skinner’s], and they had such great stories, you
know, about the Skinner house up on the mountain [The Mt. Holyoke Summit House].
That used to be a hotel, and there were a lot of famous people that went
to that hotel. There was Jenny
Lind. She was a singer, I think. And then there was a president. I think it was McKinley.
And I don’t know what—they had a guestbook. Back then, we didn’t have copy machines, but
we did have a darkroom where we would make pictures. You know, we had to put them in the fixer and
the developer and all that stuff. Well,
every once in a while they would bring this guestbook in and ask me to make a
copy of a page because there was a name on that page that they were interested
in. And I don’t know whatever happened
to that guestbook. That would be a great
thing to have. Somebody must have it,
though. I asked one time up at the
Skinner house. They don’t have it up
there. But maybe Wistariahurst has
it. I don’t know. But Bill Skinner [grandson of the founder] had it at the time. That was how we had to make a copy. It was half a day’s chore to make a copy of a
page.
At that time we had a little hospital, and we had a
full-time nurse. We had a doctor that
came in every morning. People could
leave their job and go see the doctor.
When the doctor was there, the switchboard operator pushed a button, and
a red light came on in all the departments that showed the doctor was in.
Having our own hospital like that, that’s where I got my
first flu shot, you know, because they didn’t want us out sick. During the war they needed people around the
clock. That’s when they started coming
out with the flu vaccine. Everybody
there got flu shots.
Later on they got rid of the doctor, and then they finally
got rid of the nurse to save money. But
I had taken—well, I took a lot of the first aid courses, but I was also a
volunteer nurse aide during the war. So,
my original boss, anytime there was a medical problem, he’d say to me, “Come on,
let’s go take care of this.” And we
did.
Bobbin room, Image Museum website, 1920s?
When crepe went out, all the machines in the room where
they used to get the yarn prepared for the crepe, they sold those for
junk. Metal was very scarce during the
war, because they were using it for shrapnel.
They had this company that came with big sledgehammers and they just
broke up all that machinery and carted it away.
One day, one of them hit himself in the leg with one of those
things. He had a real bad cut, but Jack
and I gave him first aid before we took him to the hospital. You know, I wasn’t afraid of blood or
anything.
We pinched hit for a lot of things because we didn’t have
people that just said, “That’s my job. I
don’t do anything else.” It was so
different.
In 1948, we celebrated our 100th anniversary,
and that was a real big thing. It lasted
several nights, and the Kilbornes [children
of Katharine Skinner Kilborne, daughter of the founder] came up from New
York. Kilborne wives worked with
us. They were just like another girl in
the office. They were so nice. They had this very famous advertising firm
from New York City who ran the program, and they gave out key chains. Every key chain had a number on it, and we
had them register. I kept that. I don’t know what happened to that. We had a card with people’s names and
addresses and the number of their key chain, so if you lost your keys, all you
had to do was, if you found some keys, just drop them in a mailbox and the post
office would bring them to us, and we would pay the postage on it, and then we
would look up the number and return the keys to their owner, because we had,
you know, it was very easy, just by number.
We paid in cash for the whole mill. Four of us used to go every week to the Hadley
Falls Trust Company. We had a room
downstairs. They had all the money ready
for us, and we would fill up the envelopes with the cash, and we would bring
back the office payroll with us. We had
one man with us and three girls. Joe
Skinner used to say, “If anybody wants the money, give them it. Don’t hold it back.”
And we’d come out of the bank with the office payroll. We stop in Chester’s Drug Store, and the man
that was with us, he’d buy us all a soda.
And then we’d walk down Appleton Street carrying all that money. Can you imagine that today? And then armored cars would bring the rest of
the payroll to the various plants. You
know, we had Bond Street and we had the one across to Dwight Street, and then
we had a mill behind the offices.
When you worked fifty years, you got a gold watch. There were quite a few people that had the
gold watch. There was this—I don’t even
remember his last name—Tommy, he was sort of head in the maintenance
department, and he used to talk about he used to take care of the horses. The maintenance department opened up onto the
canal bank, and of course, then we had electric trucks that ran from plant to
plant, and at night they would have to take the batteries and charge them
overnight. But he was telling us how
before that they had horses. He used to
take care of the horses, too.
They used to have such interesting stories. At that time, our superintendent was Donald
Purrington. He’s the one who designed
the YMCA up on Appleton Street. It used
to be on the corner of High and Appleton, right across from the 2nd
Congo Church. We had, behind our offices
on the 2nd floor, there was a big conference room, and there was a
big section in there where he had his drawing tables. That’s where he designed the YMCA as it is
today. He would do that during his lunch
hour and when he had any free time, he’d be in there at his drawing table.
Back then, every July, the first two weeks of July, they
would shut the canals down so you could work on the waterwheels or do any
repair work that you needed. I was
always curious about things—this is the great thing about it, too, if I didn’t
know about something, I’d ask and they say, “Come on, we’ll show you.” And they’d take me right out in the mill and
show me what we were talking about.
So I wanted to see the waterwheel. Don Purrington came in, and he’d been out
checking on the waterwheel. I said, “I’d
like to see that waterwheel.”
He says, “Well, I’ll get some boots and you come with me.”
So I went. It was
under the building. I got to go under
the building to see the waterwheel. I’d
never left home out of high school. In
purchasing, buying something, we used to get a lot of what they call “bastard
files.” And I said to my boss, “What are
those?"
"He said, “I’ll show you.”
Different things. He was
great. I got a college education from
him. He would take me out and when you
actually see something, you don’t forget it.
Inspecting. Image Museum website
We had very simple calculators, and he showed me how to run
the slide rule. I used to use the slide
rule, because we used to use that for checking.
He taught me how to take a piece of cloth and count the pics in it. We’d have to make up a construction sheet. Sometimes we’d get an order and they would
send us a sample, and they’d say, “We want it like this.” But they want it 42 inches wide or
whatever. So we’d have to make up the
construction sheet. I had all those, a
book, we used to call it our bible, the figures to convert the different types
of yarn. I gave that to Wistariahurst
also. And I had a little, it was a
microscope, but it was a counter. You
put the cloth under there and you could count—you know when they talk about so
many threads? We’d count how many
threads per inch under there. I gave all
that stuff to Wistariahurst.
I gave them—I had a little black book that I used to
keep. Mr. Hubbard, a lot of his mail,
letters that I did for him were on the personal side. So if I got a date of an anniversary or
birthday or whatever, I would write it down in that book, and I would also
write addresses down in there.
He had three sailboats.
They had a beautiful home on Fisher’s Island. Every summer, there were sailboats. They used to have races, and used to hire a
college boy to work on his boat for the summer, and then he’d put it up in the
wintertime. And he’d be talking about
the mainsail and the jib and so it was all Greek to me, but he would spell it
for me and I would write it in my book, because then the next time I knew what
he was talking about. I gave that little
book to Wistariahurst also.
Winding room, Image Museum website
Women ran the machines, mostly. The men did the heavy jobs, and a lot of the
men were, you know, actually foremen and supervisors and stuff. There was a room, one room where they
inspected all the cloth before it went out to the dye house, and that was all
women in there. We even had some women
that were supervisors, which was kind of unique back in those days.
Her office was
on Appleton Street. The company hospital
was in a building across the street.
Mrs. Doris
Tanguay: It burned down. It was at the—it was on Appleton Street, the
Appleton Street end, but you had to go in the gate along the canal to go
in. It was a big, big room and it had a
lot of equipment in it. And there was
another little room, you know, where there was a couch where you could lie
down. They had bathrooms and sinks and
everything down there. It was really well-equipped. Dr. Putnam was our doctor. He came every morning.
Doris worked
for Skinner’s even after she married, and returned after a brief leave when her
son was born.
Mrs. Doris Tanguay: I had my son while
I was working there and I went back to work.
Of course, I had my mother. I
never could have done it without her.
But Billy was born in October and one of my main jobs was the inventory. Every year we had to take an inventory. We had to buy tickets, and they were
color-coded, a different color for each operation, and we had got them all from
Marcus Printing. So my job was to order
the tickets and to send them out when it was time for the inventory to the
different departments. Usually, they
took inventory like on New Year’s Day, you know, when everything was closed.
So I was out at the end of the year [on maternity leave]. The
office, well he was called the controller.
He lived in South Hadley and he would stop in once in a while to see
me. He stopped in and said, “Well, are
you ready to come back? It’s time to
take the inventory.” So I went back in
time to take the inventory right after New Year’s.
But that was always a big thing. The year we sold the company, we had to do it
twice, because they needed—we had Price, Waterhouse came up. They wanted their own inventory, so we had to
do it all over again. But it was quite a
thing. At the very end, we would compare
our figures with the book figures, and we were always pretty close with what
the book figures said we should have in inventory. But that was a big job.
My original boss, he taught me how to use the office
machines, how to count the cloth, how to check the cloth, how to use a slide
rule. And I taught my son how to run a
slide rule. I was in PTA when he was
going to school, and I think he was in the fourth grade or fifth grade and he
had a man teacher. He told me that he
used to tell Billy, “We’re going to have a test tomorrow, but you leave your
slide rule at home.” Because Mr. Hubbard
gave me a pocket one, and I gave that to Billy.
He used to have his briefcase with all his school stuff in it, and he
had his slide rule.
The union came in, during the war, I believe it was. When the union came in, we started having
coffee breaks, because that was one of the things the people had to have, a
fifteen-minute coffee break. So that was
another job my boss and I got. We had to
go to each department and set up a little room for them. We didn’t have any vending machines, you
know, back then. They’d have a little
gas plate, two or three burners, with a coffee percolator. We’d put all that stuff in there for them so
they could have their coffee break. So
we said, “Well, the people in the mill can have it, the office, we want it
too.”
So they gave us a room.
It was quite a large room, and they bought—we had like a kitchen set in
there and we had our gas, little gas stove, and we had a sink where we could wash
the coffee pot out. And we had a couch
in there. We even had a heating
pad. You know, the girls would have
cramps, so they could go lay down on there with the heating pad for an hour or
so. It was like home.
A lot of the girls, we had our lunch there. We could warm up soup or do anything. Of course, we all loved to go uptown.
Mr. Will Skinner [son
of the founder], we only saw him in the summertime, because he came to Wistariahurst
in the summertime. He used to sit at a
desk—he used to come in. His chauffeur
would bring him in every day just to sit at a desk. He didn’t do anything. But he had a cane, and if we got too close to
him, we’d get that cane on the backside.
We’d all have to avoid him, because he’d sit there by the desk and he’d
hit you with the cane as you went by him.
He died shortly—I don’t remember too much about him. He wasn’t there—well, of course, he was only
there in the summertime. Mr. Joe [son of the founder], he had an office
there, but he was involved in everything, the Holyoke Hospital, Hadley Falls
Trust Company, all these places that they were always at meetings or some place.
The girls in the salesroom, one especially, she was there
for probably fifty years. They used to
bring things up from New York that models used to use, like wedding gowns. If a model used it, they couldn’t sell
it. They’d bring it up to the salesroom
to sell. Then when they started to make
that “tackle twill” [see description
below], they started using it for raincoats, so they would bring raincoats
up.
We used to buy silk ties.
Hickey Freeman used to make all their silk ties with our silk, and we
used to be able to buy them in the salesroom for a dollar. They were beautiful silk ties.
And then—we didn’t get any of those in the salesroom, but
Daniel Green used to make satin bedroom slippers, you know, with high heels and
everything. They used our satin
exclusively for their slippers, Daniel Green.
That was a big customer.
Before my time, behind the office in our section, they had
what they called the braid room, and they used to make braid. They used to trim things with braid, and then
that went out. But there was still one
girl left in the braid room. They were
still selling a little bit of braid, just that one girl. Her mother was in the braid room before
her. But that went out.
We didn’t have air conditioning back then, we just had the
open windows. It got pretty hot. On some of the real hot days, they used to
tell us girls—because there weren’t that many of us in the office. When you see what’s in an office today, how
many people they have to have to run it.
The office manager would say, “Take my car and go out to Hampton Ponds
swimming this afternoon.”
We didn’t even have a car, but he’d let us take his
car. We’d go swimming, because it was
just so hot. We were not killed with
work, either, you know, but we could jump in and do somebody else’s job. Like Rhoda, she paid the bills. She twisted or broke her ankle once, and she
was out for quite a long period. So I was
filling in for her, along with my job, paying the bills. We could go on the switchboard.
I never lost a day because of the weather, because my
husband would always get me to work. If
I couldn’t drive, he would put chains on his car and he would bring me. And I had to bring my son to my mother, to
drop him off in the morning. But there
was one storm where—he worked at the National [National Blank Book]. He
went in for 7:00, and he called me, and said, “Well, I made it okay.” He said, “I think maybe you can do it.”
But it had kept snowing all that time, and Granby Road is
always good because it’s a state road.
Well, I got down to the bridge, and it was terrible. But there was a policeman there, and he’s—you
know, we couldn’t stop. He wanted us to
get on the bridge. It hadn’t been
plowed. I got partway into Holyoke and I
got stuck. I finally got a couple of
streets away from where my mother lived.
I was right in the middle of the road and I couldn’t go any further,
because the road hadn’t been plowed. So
I picked my son up and I carried him, and we went to my mother’s house. I called my husband and work and I said, “I
left the car right in the middle of the street.” I said, “I don’t care what you do with
it. I couldn’t go any further. I’m going to walk to work from here.”
So he got a couple of his friends and they went over and
got the car and put it in Dreikorn’s parking lot for the day. I walked to work, and I was the only
girl. Bill Skinner [grandson of the founder] had skied down from Northampton
Street. A couple of the men were
there. I ran the switchboard all that
day. At the end of the day, my husband
came to pick me up, and he said to the men, “You need a ride home?”
So they all wanted a ride home. They all lived up in the Highlands or
Northampton Street. So we brought Bill
Skinner home first, and he invited us in to his family room for a drink. He was showing me, he had a collection of
banks. You put the money in the bank,
and the bank would do all kinds of things. He really had a beautiful collection. Years ago, banks used to give out banks if
you started an account or something, and had all these banks. They did things.
So we took everybody home that day. We had chains on the car. I guess you can’t even use chains
anymore. I think they’re outlawed. But it was just a fun adventurous day, as
long as I knew I could get rescued.
Another one of my jobs was every time they started a new
order in the mill, they would send over to us a sample, like a quarter of a
yard or a half a yard, so we would check it to make sure that it was
right. All of our customers, except
Sears & Roebuck, would allow us 10 percent seconds, but Sears & Roebuck
would never allow us any seconds, and they would tell us exactly how they wanted
it, how many "pics" and how wide. They
wanted a sample, because they would check it too. I always said if Sears & Roebuck, if all
their stuff is as good as our was, it’s got to be good, because they were
really very fussy, and no seconds.
Inspecting. Image Museum website
They would send over, they would call it “off the loom”
before it went to the dye house or anything—gray goods. We would check that. Then I would file them in file folders, and
we had these transfer files that we would put them in. We had our own truck that brought stuff to
the dye houses every week, and brought back stuff for us for the sales
room. The New York office would send us
back samples of everything that got dyed, you know, finished samples, so we
could put the finished samples in the file along with the gray goods. We had transfer file after transfer file full
of all these samples. I don’t know if
they ever came, but they told the nuns from the Mother House—they used to make
a lot of things that they had the kids selling in school and so forth—if they wanted,
because some of the material was like half a yard or something, they could have
all this material. When we locked up,
those files were still there. I don’t
know where they all ended up.
But my mother made a quilt out of those samples. Wistariahurst
would like it, and I would like to give it to Wistariahurst, but still, I want
to keep it in the family, but I don’t want it to be used.
JOIN US NEXT WEEK FOR PART 2 OF MRS. TANGUAY'S INTERVIEW - FEATURING THE SKINNER MFG. CO. IN WORLD WAR II.
For more on Belle Skinner, see this previous post.
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