Small Town America in World War II: War Stories from Wrightsville, Pennsylvania
Small Town America in World War II: War Stories from Wrightsville, Pennsylvania
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| ISBN-13: | 9781574415612 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of North Texas Press |
| Publication date: | 04/15/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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Small Town America in World War II
By Ronald E. Marcello
University of North Texas Press
Copyright © 2014 Ronald E. MarcelloAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57441-561-2
CHAPTER 1
Donald "Red" Smith
Riverside Foundry Executive
Born on 28 September 1912, Donald "Red" Smith was the son of the founder of Riverside Foundry, Harry K. Smith. After a very short collegiate career, Donald returned to the foundry and never left. In his interview he sheds light on the attitude of his father and other small businessmen toward Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, the effects of the Great Depression on the foundry business, organized labor, and the return to prosperity as the country entered World War II. Federal spending for the war effort, not the New Deal programs, lifted the economy from the depths of economic hard times during the 1930s. During the war, Riverside prospered due to government subcontracts for the production of cast iron hand grenade and rifle grenade casings, fuse wells for bombs, and cast iron collars for parachute flares. The contracts meant steady wages for foundry workers while labor shortages due to men going into the military services led to the employment of women in the foundry for the first time, a trend that continued during the postwar years. Profits resulting from the government contracts enabled Riverside Foundry to modernize and expand. Because of wartime shortages and rationing, workers who now had income had nowhere to spend it. As a result of this pent-up demand, Riverside was able to make a smooth transition from military to civilian production after the war. Donald Smith raised his family in Wrightsville, and he continued to play an active role in the management of Riverside Foundry right up to his death on 7 October 2004.
Never a very serious college student, Donald Smith left the University of Delaware in 1933 after attending for two years and went to work in his father's foundry. He remained active in the operations of Riverside Foundry for the rest of his life:
"I didn't like school, and I was not a very good student. So, I think my father was glad that I dropped out. There were three of us going to college at that time, so my father said it was getting to be too much of a financial load for him to send my sister, brother, and me to college. It was right at the depth of the Depression, so I came home and worked at the foundry, the days that the foundry worked. At that time we were working two, maybe three, days a week. I helped out wherever they needed someone to fill in. I really did a little bit of everything. I did some drilling and tapping; I shifted weights in the afternoons; and I helped with the cupola. I even tried my hand at molding a little bit. That way I got a pretty well-rounded experience after learning all facets of foundry work. I never left the foundry again. Then, for some reason or another, foundry work just got into my blood, and I liked it.
"My father never encouraged me to get interested because he thought the foundry business was not going to be a good business. A lot of foundries closed altogether during the Depression. In fact, the Wrightsville Hardware Company temporarily closed down altogether, and Susquehanna Casting just limped along. Our workforce went from thirty down to twenty-two or twenty-three men. If we got two or three days a week, it was good. Our old ledger book from which I'm reading indicates that in 1934 we worked a total of 104 days. The total wages paid to molders was $6,843, while day laborers received $4,003. Including salaried employees and the office force, we paid out a total of $13,707 in 1934. Sales in that year amounted to $22,641, and we shipped just 345,343 pounds of castings. But the men seemed to survive because everybody had their own gardens, or they'd go out and help farmers and get things. When we had work, we worked full days. There's one thing about a foundry that's different from other industries—you needed a full day to perform all the processes. The molders started at 7:00 in the morning and molded until 2:00 in the afternoon. Then at 2:00 they would 'pour off' for about an hour-and-a-half. Then everybody from other departments of the foundry had to come in after they poured the iron, and they would shift weights and knock off the castings.
The travails of the Great Depression led to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the coming of the New Deal. Like many small businessmen, Smith's father, Harry K. Smith, reacted angrily to new federal regulations, labor legislation, wages and hours legislation, unions, and Social Security:
"My father was a solid Republican, and he was solidly for Herbert Hoover. All you had to do was come into his office and say, 'Did you see what Roosevelt is doing?' and that would set him off. Of course, unions became very strong during that time, and in 1936 they organized all the foundries in this area. My father went into the foundry and told the workers that if they joined a union, he was closing the doors: 'That's all there is to it! I'm not going to have a union!' We had a group of older men, and they were pretty sensible. They said they wouldn't go along with it. The workers at Susquehanna Casting and Wrightsville Hardware joined the union, but we never had any. So, for some reason or another, they never bothered us after that. But they organized all the foundries in the York and Lancaster county area.
"There is no question that Roosevelt was a very controversial figure, and my father, with every election that would come up, was hoping that he would be defeated. Like most small business people, he had a laissez-faire attitude. I don't think you would have found a Democrat among them because the Democrats started to tell them how to run their business. They would tell them how many hours the workers could work, and they set minimum wages. Of course, then we had to pay them time-and-half for overtime, and they now had paid holidays—all those things that were new. In the foundry, they used to work a ten-hour day. That was the standard day. My father said, 'We just can't do those things. That's going to wreck everything.' At that time they also had Social Security, and that was another thing that my father did not like. That was quite an innovation. They were radical changes, and for someone in his sixties, he thought it was awful that he had to make all those changes. He didn't like Mrs. Roosevelt either because she was kind of radical for that age. Women just didn't do those things, I mean, go around and talk and stir up people. But I think, however, that history is going to record that Franklin Roosevelt did a good job.
With war clouds gathering in Europe and Asia during the late 1930s, the foundry business began to show signs of improvement. This, in turn, led to labor shortages:
"It was really in 1937 that there seemed to be a little more business, and then in 1938 we were getting orders. We started getting in five days a week, and we were getting backlogs on orders. People now had more money to spend. But then the labor market started getting short because everybody was busy. The federal government built the Naval Ordnance Plant in York, and they needed six or seven hundred people. That plant paid wages that were 10 to 20 percent higher than what we paid, and the foundry was never the first choice of most young boys to work in. Then it wasn't too long that they started drafting kids, and that took another bite out of the labor market. It was tough, but we were fortunate that our men were older. Of course, the new companies that needed workers kind of overlooked these older people, and they didn't try to hire them. So, we had a lot of older people, and they stayed with us. Also, very few of the older working people had automobiles, so they had no transportation to get to the Naval Ordnance Plant. Plus, there was the matter of education. A lot of them couldn't read or write, so they couldn't fill out an application.
Once the United States got into the war, dislike for Roosevelt and the New Deal receded into the background as patriotism and profits received top priority at Riverside Foundry. In 1941 the foundry received a very lucrative government sub-contract from a larger foundry in Littlestown, Pennsylvania.
"At the Littlestown foundry, there were two men from Wrightsville who started that foundry. They went up there in 1915, a little before World War I. Their name was Snyder. My father had always been good to them; he helped them when they wanted to get started. They had a hand grenade contract, and then they got a rifle grenade contract. They also made a thing that you screwed into the end of a bomb [called the fuse well]. It was more or less a plug where the fuse would go in. They had so much work that they couldn't handle it all themselves, so they asked if we would help them out by making the castings. They did the machining and the painting. They said, 'Hey! We won't be able to make this many castings. Will you help us out?' And we said, 'Yes, we'll help you out.' Then we got together on a price. It was a very informal agreement. I don't think there was any legal document, but I think they sent us one of their order forms, ordering so many grenades. The Snyders did not have a cost-plus contract with the government. They had to submit a bid every year because all the foundries wanted to get that hand grenade contract, so they had to bid them tight. Littlestown was not the only foundry making hand grenades. There were a lot of foundries that were making many, many more. That work lasted for two years for us.
"After they got the hand grenade contract, they got the rifle grenade contract. Then they got this big contract for making the fuse wells for bombs. They also made a lot of other little things. For instance, we were making a ring for when they put out these flares from an airplane. It was another government contract. It was like a collar and was made of cast iron. It had a little parachute attached to it, and it would come down slowly. On this contract, the guy came in and said he needed to have more of these rings. He said, 'I've got to have more of those. What can I do to get more of them?' I said, 'We can't give you any more than one molder to increase the number.' He then said, 'You get me more, and I'll give you twenty-five cents for every one you make over the original order.' I thought, 'Oh, my goodness!' He didn't know that I was the owner's son. I did make him more. So, between the two foundries, it was good business.
"We made more than half their hand grenades. During the war the two foundries made 100,000 hand grenades a month, and we made about 60,000 of them and sent them up to Littlestown. We also made about the same number of rifle grenades each month. We also got priority to buy material when we were making those grenades. The Snyders had to deliver the grenades to the Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey—100,000 castings a month. They had to get this shipment ready and put it in a certain space. Then the inspectors would come up and pick boxes and check them. The Snyders always worried that the inspector would pick out a couple boxes and find that they weren't what they were supposed to be.
"We had at that time a good group of molders. For instance, there was Karl Stroppel, Jim Townsley, Harry Fahringer, and 'Nutcher' [Clyde] Siltzer. 'Nutcher' was our biggest producer of hand grenades. He used to run 200-220 molds a day, which is a lot. The only problem with him was that now and then he'd take a day off, and he wouldn't show up. But he was a good molder, and fast.
"We were one of the last foundries to make hand grenades. In fact, the last year, Littlestown didn't want to bid on them. The war was over, so this was a much smaller contract. We then bid that directly to the Picatinny Arsenal. We got much more for that contract because the war was over and everyone was converting to peacetime work.
These government contracts returned Riverside Foundry to profitability and led to the modernization and expansion of the company:
"Those were two good jobs for us. By this time, I was pretty much in sole command of the company, so I was able to get some things that we wanted to improve the efficiency of our business. We bought our first core machine. Before that, cores were always made by hand. Then we bought a second core machine and a third one to keep up with production. We also had to enlarge our cupola so that we could melt more metal. By doing these things we were growing. And, through all this, we seemed to be able to pick up enough people. I'd say that by that time we were probably up to around ninety workers.
For the first time in its history, Riverside Foundry began hiring women to meet production demands:
"We did start to use some women in the machine shop. Some were used in the core room, like, filing the fins off the cores. That was the first time we used women laborers. We had no bathroom facilities for women. I don't know what they did. My father wasn't very much in favor of hiring women, but at the time he didn't say too much. I think the male workers on the foundry floor accepted our use of women.
"As a rule at that time, there was some discrimination against women here in that they didn't get paid quite as much. They didn't make quite as much as men. They were hired at a lesser starting wage, because they used to say, 'Well, they can't lift heavy boxes and move them here and there.' Some of the men around that area had to do that. But when it came to the machine shop, the women could do the work better than men.
"Work like this was something new for women, a new opportunity for them, and they worked hard. Women were more conscientious than men because women were glad to have the opportunity. Most women in Wrightsville worked in silk mills or garment factories or cigar factories, and foundry wages were much better than that type of work. As I remember, the first women we hired were young and single.
Even with a priority for obtaining raw materials, at times Donald Smith had to use ingenuity in obtaining what was needed to produce the grenades:
"We had our normal suppliers that we used before the war, one like Bethlehem Steel. We used to buy pig iron from them. With the coming of war, however, they just simply quit supplying us; they cut us off. They wouldn't sell us anything because they said they needed it themselves. That's the way Bethlehem Steel operated. They needed the pig iron to make their own steel, so they weren't going to give up any of their pig iron. Then there were a couple independent furnaces that made only pig iron, but their pig iron was so much in demand by everybody. So, we really had a difficult time in scurrying around to meet the demand.
"One time my cousin, Mike Smith, who had a coal truck, and I went all over town hunting iron, wherever we found a piece, to get enough to charge the cupola for one day. On another occasion we took up railroad tracks and searched anyplace we could to find a piece of steel. It was part of the patriotic spirit that we worked to keep the fighting going.
"I was responsible for obtaining the necessary pig iron. That was my job. There was a fellow by the name of Boots, who came into the office one day, a pig iron broker. He said, 'Did you ever try Spanish iron?' Of course, we were always concerned about quality, for instance, that the analysis would be off. We had used pig iron from South America before, but whether or not this was made in South America, I can't say. But this was one of those times that I took a chance, and I bought eight carloads. That was a lot for us. I went up to the bank to get a draft. We had to send a letter of credit to get the eight carloads. We had money in the bank for a letter of credit, but the local cashier at First National Bank didn't know how to handle a letter of credit, so he got help from somebody in York.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Small Town America in World War II by Ronald E. Marcello. Copyright © 2014 Ronald E. Marcello. Excerpted by permission of University of North Texas Press.
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Table of Contents
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
Wrightsville, Pennsylvania xiii
Introduction 1
Part I Wrightsville: The Home Front 13
Chapter 1 Donald "Red" Smith 19
Chapter 2 Pauline "Sis" Leber 31
Chapter 3 Mary Jane Dellinger 49
Chapter 4 Evelyn "Ebs" Myers 61
Chapter 5 Alfred "Skip" Marcello, Jr 81
Chapter 6 Mervin "Merv" Garver 97
Part II The North African and Italian Theaters 111
Chapter 7 Staff Sgt. Mervin "Bo" Haugh 117
Chapter 8 Pfc. Glenn Blouse 131
Chapter 9 Pfc. Alfred "Bud" Forry 157
Chapter 10 Pvt. Donald W. Peters 179
Part III The Northwestern European Theater 199
Chapter 11 MSgt. Edward "Tarp" Reisinger 207
Chapter 12 Pfc. Lloyd "Lem" Crumbling 235
Chapter 13 SSgt. Mervin "Bo" Haugh 249
Chapter 14 Sgt. Charles Kervin "Kirvey" Hake 265
Chapter 15 Pfc. William "Bill" Haugh 283
Chapter 16 Cpl. William "Bill" Smeltzer 301
Part IV The Pacific Theater 311
Chapter 17 Cpl. Jacob W. "Jakie" Snyder 315
Chapter 18 Electrician's Mate 2d Class Leonard "Son" Bock 333
Part V Stateside Military Service 353
Chapter 19 CPO Elmira "Jane" Bock 357
Chapter 20 Sgt. Charles "Pete" Yeager 373
Part VI Army of Occupation: Germany 387
Chapter 21 TSgt. Gerald "Jerry" Johns and Irmgard "Jackie" Stieger-Johns 393
Chapter 22 Pvt. William "Bill" Crumbling 417
Conclusions: "Home" 429
Bibliography 437
Index 447