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A cut and pasted story from the NewsTimes, looking back while there was still time to do so...
Enjoy the read!
Patrick Wild still remembers his grandmother's wrist and the thin gray line that ran across it.
His grandmother, Catherine Tierney, was a trimmer in the Lee Hat Factory in Danbury -- one of the hundreds of women who sewed linings and hatbands on the millions of hats the city produced in the early decades of the 20th century.
The line was a needle that became embedded in her wrist. Rather than get a doctor to remove it, she carried that steely memento of her hatting days with her to the grave, said Wild, Bethel's town historian.
New Milford resident John Pierpaoli, 58, was a coner -- the worker in charge of making the first, very rough version of a hat -- at the Lee company during its last days of operation in the 1970s.
He was paid by the piece, and on a good day he could make 60 dozen hats. Because he worked fast, the others in the shop -- getting paid, in their turn, for the hats he made -- liked to be teamed with him.
"I could make a hat in 10 seconds," Pierpaoli said. "The women in the fur shop would say, `Hey, let me work with John today.' "
Dorothy Creter, 89, of Danbury, remembers her father, Andrew Hallabeck, coming home from the McLachlan Hat Factory with his hands bright orange-red.
He was a sizer -- also known as a wetter-down -- who worked shrinking the tall, rough cones into something more resembling a hat. Hallabeck spent his days with his hands in steaming-hot water that sloshed on the floor constantly, leaving the workers to constantly stand in deep puddles.
Hallabeck also -- for a while -- had the mercury shakes so bad his wife had to help him dress and eat.
"He told my brothers, `If any of you go to work in a hat shop, I'll cut your hands off,'" Creter recalled.
All these memories -- and there are still plenty around Greater Danbury today -- are part of a lost world.
A lost world in danbury
The days of a one-industry town, when each wave of immigrants coming to Danbury found work as hatters, has been gone for nearly a half-century, even though the last hat shop in the city -- the last, shrunken remnant of the Mallory Hat Factory -- closed in 1987.
"And that finished it,'' said John Rotello, who worked at the local Stetson plant until it closed. At 56, he and Pierpaoli may be among the few relatively young hatters alive in the area.
The men and women who worked in the factories -- and their memories -- are going away as well. Each year, more of these former hat workers die. And when they do, they take what they remember of factory life with them.
Part of those memories are of a different sense of a social order. In the 1930s and 1940s, a well-dressed man and woman always wore a hat -- especially in Danbury and the towns that surround it, where jobs depended on hats.
"In those days, any salesperson who wasn't wearing a hat, they wouldn't talk to them,'' said Helen Collischonn, 83, of Danbury, who worked in the office of the Melton Hat Co. in Bethel from 1949 to 1953.
And yet, the hat business lives on in Danbury. It's legacy is the city that survived it.
"The city is the city it is because of hatting,'' said Brigid Guertin, executive director of the Danbury Museum and Historical Society.
"It brought prosperity to the city and gave immigrants a chance at the American dream. People came here, bought homes, raised their families here. Since the 1850s, a portion of each wave of immigration worked in the hatting industry,'' Guertin said.
"The per capita income in Danbury was high. Compared to a lot of factory towns, there was a high rate of home ownership,'' said state Sen. Michael McLachlan, whose father, Harry, owned one of the last hat shops in the city. "It was good to Danbury.''
Continued...
Enjoy the read!
Patrick Wild still remembers his grandmother's wrist and the thin gray line that ran across it.
His grandmother, Catherine Tierney, was a trimmer in the Lee Hat Factory in Danbury -- one of the hundreds of women who sewed linings and hatbands on the millions of hats the city produced in the early decades of the 20th century.
The line was a needle that became embedded in her wrist. Rather than get a doctor to remove it, she carried that steely memento of her hatting days with her to the grave, said Wild, Bethel's town historian.
New Milford resident John Pierpaoli, 58, was a coner -- the worker in charge of making the first, very rough version of a hat -- at the Lee company during its last days of operation in the 1970s.
He was paid by the piece, and on a good day he could make 60 dozen hats. Because he worked fast, the others in the shop -- getting paid, in their turn, for the hats he made -- liked to be teamed with him.
"I could make a hat in 10 seconds," Pierpaoli said. "The women in the fur shop would say, `Hey, let me work with John today.' "
Dorothy Creter, 89, of Danbury, remembers her father, Andrew Hallabeck, coming home from the McLachlan Hat Factory with his hands bright orange-red.
He was a sizer -- also known as a wetter-down -- who worked shrinking the tall, rough cones into something more resembling a hat. Hallabeck spent his days with his hands in steaming-hot water that sloshed on the floor constantly, leaving the workers to constantly stand in deep puddles.
Hallabeck also -- for a while -- had the mercury shakes so bad his wife had to help him dress and eat.
"He told my brothers, `If any of you go to work in a hat shop, I'll cut your hands off,'" Creter recalled.
All these memories -- and there are still plenty around Greater Danbury today -- are part of a lost world.
A lost world in danbury
The days of a one-industry town, when each wave of immigrants coming to Danbury found work as hatters, has been gone for nearly a half-century, even though the last hat shop in the city -- the last, shrunken remnant of the Mallory Hat Factory -- closed in 1987.
"And that finished it,'' said John Rotello, who worked at the local Stetson plant until it closed. At 56, he and Pierpaoli may be among the few relatively young hatters alive in the area.
The men and women who worked in the factories -- and their memories -- are going away as well. Each year, more of these former hat workers die. And when they do, they take what they remember of factory life with them.
Part of those memories are of a different sense of a social order. In the 1930s and 1940s, a well-dressed man and woman always wore a hat -- especially in Danbury and the towns that surround it, where jobs depended on hats.
"In those days, any salesperson who wasn't wearing a hat, they wouldn't talk to them,'' said Helen Collischonn, 83, of Danbury, who worked in the office of the Melton Hat Co. in Bethel from 1949 to 1953.
And yet, the hat business lives on in Danbury. It's legacy is the city that survived it.
"The city is the city it is because of hatting,'' said Brigid Guertin, executive director of the Danbury Museum and Historical Society.
"It brought prosperity to the city and gave immigrants a chance at the American dream. People came here, bought homes, raised their families here. Since the 1850s, a portion of each wave of immigration worked in the hatting industry,'' Guertin said.
"The per capita income in Danbury was high. Compared to a lot of factory towns, there was a high rate of home ownership,'' said state Sen. Michael McLachlan, whose father, Harry, owned one of the last hat shops in the city. "It was good to Danbury.''
Continued...
