We didn’t have a car, and my father rode back and forth to work every day with Bill Baker, one of his fellow foremen at the carpet mill. Baker would pick up my father every morning and drop him off every night a block and a half away at Third and Delphine Streets. Bobby Yanks, the kid across the street, had first noted that my father looked a lot like Clark Kent in the Superman Comic Books. Looking at my father in his brown felt hat and plastic rimmed eyeglasses, I had to acknowledge the resemblance. He’d come down the sidewalk from Fourth Street, and one of kids standing in the street, Bobby Yanks or Sammy Kasanjian, would start the chant. “Look! Up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No! No! It’s Mister Byrne.”
My father worked in a carpet factory, Archibald Holmes and Sons, at “K” Street and Erie Avenue, along an industrial corridor that stretched for miles across North Philadelphia. When he was nineteen he had gotten got a job at Holmes’, rising to become foreman of the yarn room. Years of listening to my father go on over dinner about what was happening in “the place” or in “our place,” a whole cast of disembodied names emerged and took on colorful and often demonic characteristics. There were people named Chamberlain, Thorpey, Lyle, Young Archie, Martha Webb and more. His older twin sisters, my Aunts Norah and Nelly both worked in Holmes’, as did his younger brother, Frank. Unfortunately for my father, his twin sisters, Norah and Nellie worked with him in the yarn room, directly under his supervision. Worse yet, both of my aunts were known, as it was said at the time, to take a drink. Not showing up for work, usually on Mondays, forced my father to face accusations of either managerial favoritism or family disloyalty.
I was inside Holmes’s just once. Home from the Army before going overseas, I thought it would be fun to go down to the plant and surprise my father. I also thought I looked cool in my uniform and wasn’t above showing off. I’d hardly led a sheltered life, but I was completely unprepared for the reality of Archibald Holmes and Sons, Manufacturers of Fine Wilton Broadloom Carpets. It was summer. It was hot, and the place hit me like a nightmare out of the industrial revolution, a dark satanic mill filled with a menacing and deafening roar of giant machines, the air thick with heat, floating lint and dust. I could barely hear myself think let alone talk to anyone. Flapping belts, gigantic power looms, endless rows of spinning bobbins all bathed in the weak light from row upon row of small, painted-over, industrial windows. Everything I’d remembered hearing about it at home, but had barely listened to, all began coming to life in its own overwhelming context. Which were the jacquards? Where were the yarn bins? Who were the weavers, the fixers, the creelers? Hands were extended and shaken. People stopped and in the din moved their lips to make a fuss over me. My father beamed proudly. I had known he was a foreman, but I had no idea as to what he actually had to do to provide for us. He worked from, and ate his brown-bag lunch at, a stand-up desk surrounded by machinery, by people moving all around, by noise and chaos. He was responsible for the production of forty or fifty women called creelers, working piece-work. Many of the women working for him lived in varying degrees of desperation; not a few of them the sole breadwinners for large families presided over by unemployable, alcoholic husbands. I remembered him telling my mother about what would happen if one or more of them seemed to get any kind of an advantage. The others would immediately gang up and square off against those who had gotten got what was judged easier work that resulted a higher rate of pay. My father’s job was to keep the industrial madhouse that was the yarn room running smoothly, and to keep an always potentially explosive and hostile work environment from breaking out into open warfare. And sitting like an unpinned grenade within that equation was the presence of his own twin sisters, my unpredictable and temperamental aunts. My Aunt Norah, childless and with a working husband, oblivious to the awful necessity surrounding her, would often forget to cash her weekly paychecks. When the word got back among her fellow creelers in the yarn room, women to whom five dollars was the difference between sustenance and an empty ice box or empty coal bin, Norah would become a lightening rod for their gossip and collective discontents. Tedious arguments of insidious intent would ensue, with my father caught in the middle. I don’t know how he did it. I can’t begin to imagine how he was able to go in there every day and face those kinds of conditions. I knew that I could never have done it.
I wasn’t yet nineteen years old the day that I went to Holmes’ to show off in front of my father. Smiling and shaking more hands, I kept looking for a way to get out of there as quickly as I could. My father walked me toward the freight elevator, smiling and pointing to me over the din, showing everyone that I was his. I told him I’d see him at home that night. Out on the sidewalk, I shook the noise out my head and made myself a promise. I would never ever willingly go back inside a place like Holmes’s. My father worked at Holmes’s for thirty-three years, and later at another carpet mill for ten more ten years, until the day he died at the age of sixty-two.
Tags: 1945-1955, archibald holmes & sons, carpet factory, clark kent, erie avenue, industrial revolution, memoir, north philly, olney, philadelphia, superman, wilton broadloom carpets
