Mort and Judy Miller, June 25, 2014

Interview with Mort and Judy Miller, June 25, 2014

SUSAN CLEMENS-BRUDER: Today is June 25, 2014. Interview with Mort Miller, tape number 2.

GAIL EISENBERG: Mort was just sharing with us a little bit about his college experience. Tell us again about your experience.

MORT MILLER: When I graduated from Allen High, I applied to four schools: Columbia, NYU, Penn, and Lehigh. I got into Columbia, NYU and Penn. I did not get into Lehigh because Lehigh in those days had a 2% quota. For every hundred students they took in, two were Jewish. I had an interview and they had my 00:01:00records 9th through 12th grade, and it listed the Hebrew Institute of Boro Park. The man who was interviewing me said, 'Hebrew Institute of Boro Park, what kind of school is that?' And I figured that's it I'm not getting in. And I didn't. I got into two Ivy League schools but did not get in there.

GE: And then if you could just recap for us, since we talked about it off tape, what you did as far as your educational career.

MM: I started out as an accounting major. I was still an accounting major when I was drafted in the middle of my sophomore year. When I came back after the war, 00:02:00I stopped being an accounting major and became just a general economics major. I took liberal arts classes whenever I could.

JUDY MILLER: How about the fraternity?

GE: If you'd like to share with us that's fine.

MM: I had belonged to two fraternities which is something no one did. The way that happened was the fraternity that I was in originally was suspended during the war, and when I came back they were closed. Then my best friend, who belonged to Kappa Nu, said 'come on join us.' So I went there and spent the rest 00:03:00of my time in Kappa Nu. So I was actually in two fraternities.

GE: And tell us briefly about the war experience that you had just shared with us.

MM: I was drafted in March of 1943; I had my basic training at Miami Beach. I was then sent to Finance School at Wake Forest College. I was then sent back to Saint Petersburg, Florida. Then I was sent overseas to a little town called Sudbury, which was north of London. I was there for almost two years then I came back to this country. The group that I was with, the war was over, but we were still fighting in Japan. My group was scheduled to be sent to the pacific. They 00:04:00gave us a thirty day leave and we came home. While I was on that thirty day leave, they dropped the atomic bomb and the war was over and three months later I was out of the army. I was in the Eighth Air Force in England.

GE: So now, tell us about the business. So as you said, it was first started by your father and his brother, it sounds like.

MM: It was started by my father. He then brought his brother from Poland to this country, and took him into the business immediately, and made him a partner. They remained together until 1943 or '44 and then they split up.

GE: By that time did the two of them pretty much retire?

MM: No. My uncle remained in business. My father did retire in 1945 but then he went back into business in 1947.

GE: And now if you want to share with us about you and your brother-in-law.

MM: Yes. We were both working for my father, and my father then merged his business with a cousin in New York. And part of the agreement was when they merged the businesses, that there would be no children in the business. So my brother-in-law and I left, and we started our own business. Subsequently, three of the partners' children wound up in business. Even though that was the initial condition. But we remained in the building we started in. A few of the people 00:06:00who came to work with us were people that had worked for my father. One of them in particular who worked for my father for many many years, she [Mary] became our floor lady. She was a great floor lady.

GE: Tell us about what products.

MM: We started out originally manufacturing panties and then we switched to ladies sleepwear.

GE: Why did you make that switch?

MM: I think we just started manufacturing overseas and panties were not very labor intensive. But they began to manufacture them in the Caribbean and it was difficult to compete with that. On the other hand, sleepwear was being 00:07:00manufactured only in this country, and that we could compete with.

GE: Were you a contractor or were you a manufacturer?

MM: We started out as contractors. We remained as contractors for a few years. We had a gentleman who sold for us in New York. He was an older man. He retired. So we took on a new salesperson. We had a New York office on Madison Avenue. And he took over the office and then asked to become a partner, which we accepted. He ran the sales out of New York. And so the manufacturing began.

GE: So you were their exclusive supplier?

MM: It was our business. We manufactured ladies sleepwear. We sold to many of 00:08:00the major chains. We sold to Sears, Kresge, Newberry, JCPenny, most of the major chains. And we also sold to many of the department stores around the country through buying offices. Our product was a low-end product.

GE: What was the label? What was the brand?

MM: Well the label was Ardru Undergarments. A-R-D-R-U. That came from, my son was Andrew and my nephew was Sheppard. We took the last part of both of their names and made it Ardru. That was the name we sold uner.

GE: Was it exclusively under that name?

MM: The name of the company itself was Millcrest [Manufacturing].

GE: But the product, the brand was Ardru. Did you also do private labeling? Did you do store brands or everything was under Ardru?

MM: Everything was under Ardru. You know there was one store brand, it was Sears. I think Sears, JCPenny was its own name, Kresge was its own name.

GE: So the ones that were its own name, you used the store name. Any difference in those products? Between Ardru and Penny or Ardru and Sears?

MM: Sears we only made them one star. Just that same one year in and year out. 00:10:00Made of the same material, exactly the same garment. Huge, extra large. But yes they were different than we sold to other people.

GE: So there, in these cases, the store specified.

MM: In cases of major chains. For other stores, it was ours. To be honest, they were knockoffs of more expensive garments.

GE: How was the relationship between your end, the operations end, and the sales end? Were there any conflicts?

MM: No, we worked well together.

GE: What was your brother-in-laws' name?

MM: Charles Dweck. D-W-E-C-K

JD: He's a Syrian Jew from Brooklyn.

GE: So the two of you started in the business together in 1947?

MM: '48.

GE: Can you just give us a sense of how things went through the fifties, sixties?

MM: Everything went well, it was smooth. At our peak, we put in Bethlehem about 125 people. We also put another factory in Coatesville.

GE: Coatsville is where?

MM: Coatesville is northwest of Philadelphia. 50 miles. Primarily west.

GE: So more like Reading?

MM: No, it's south of here and slightly west.

SC: Close to Lancaster.

MM: Yeah. We had almost about 175 people working there.

GE: You said it was never unionized?

MM: For forty years they tried to unionize us, and they were never able to.

GE: Why?

MM: We provided wages that were as good or better than union wages. We provided all the same benefits, and in some cases even better. We had complete healthcare. All of our employees were registered with Blue Cross/ Blue Shield. And they paid nothing toward that. We also had something that appealed to people. We did not have seniority. In the union shop, if you were a collar 00:13:00sewer, and they ran out of collars, you were sent home. In our shop, if you were a collar sewer, and we ran out of collars, we had you sewing sleeves. So we never sent anybody home and that appealed to many people. One of my operators, she and two sisters and a nephew and a niece worked for us. Her husband was the president of the Bethlehem Steel Union. And I used to say to her, Margaret, how does your husband feel about you working in a non-union shop. She said, Mort, we've talked about it, and he said, "Margaret, you like the people, you like the 00:14:00shop, they give you everything you would get at a union shop, stay thee." So here I had this woman whose husband was the president of the Bethlehem Steel Union.

GE: And how would you say the relationships were between you as the owner and the managers and the people working there?

MM: I think everything was really good. The only one I didn't get along with was my brother-in-law. I ran the sewing. My brother-in-law took care primarily of the cutting of the fabric and the pattern making.

GE: So he took care of the first part?

MM: And then I did the sewing.

GE: What were the difficulties?

MM: He was not an honest man. Had a sense of cheating. He was Syrian. He had this Arab mentality. He lied. He lied quite a bit. He misinformed. I didn't particularly like him, and he didn't particularly like me.

GE: How long did you two stay in business together?

MM: We stayed in business for 40 years. I retired first. And the reason I retired was that offshore manufacturing had become big, and the business was going down. The man we had selling at the New York office, was 10 years older than I was. And he retired. And we closed the sales office and had no one to run the sales office.

GE: When was that about?

MM: That was the 1980s.

GE: How old do you think he was when he retired?

MM: My partner [New York]? He was exactly 65.

GE: When were you born?

MM: 1924. So he was born 1914.

GE: So '79 he retired.

MM: And we went for the next 10 years, until I retired, we were contractors. Except Sears.

GE: Okay Sears was the one client you were able to keep. This is still pajamas?

MM: Once we started contracting, we manufactured other things like blouses, 00:18:00t-shirts, almost anything.

GE: And your women had the skills?

MM: Yeah.

GE: So the one customer you still managed was Sears but you became a contractor for others. Who was it that you became contractors for? Like were they ones in the area here?

MM: No, they were in New York. Our biggest was Katz up in Pennsylvania, and they were big manufacturers. They owned the factory in Coatesville that we bought 00:19:00from. We did a great deal of contracting for them.

GE: At this point did you still have both factories for them?

MM: No, we closed the Coatesville factory; we had both of them up until right before I retired. That was one of the things I did every week or twice a week. I drove down to Coatsville and took care of things there. We closed that a few years before I retired. Also the other thing was that my two nephews, my brother-in-laws' sons, came into the business and for a while one of the sons was managing the plant and living in Coatesville. The other one was working here 00:20:00with us.

GE: When did they come into the business? Like in the '70s?

MM: Probably the early '80s, I would imagine.

GE: So when would you say were the best times?

MM: Best times I think were the early '50s probably to the early '80s.

GE: Okay so during that whole time it was still thriving?

MM: Yes.

GE: And then in the 80s was when you saw steady decline.

MM: Yes.

JD: Tell them about the workforce.

MM: The largest part of the workforce were the Hungarian women. The Hungarians were native to Bethlehem. Then there was the Hungarian revolution where the Russians invaded Hungary, and a lot of Hungarians got out because they had family and friends in Bethlehem so they came to Bethlehem. A lot of them came to work for us.

GE: Was it primarily women?

MM: Yes.

JD: There was a name.

SC: Windish.

JD: Yes.

GE: Was that the community?

SC: Yeah they came from Slovenia.

MM: The majority were Catholic.

SC: There were Windish Catholics and Windish Lutherans in Bethlehem; there were two groups.

MM: They gradually were replaced by Puerto Ricans and there were some Portuguese.

GE: Was there anything done to accommodate the women, since many of them were moms? Anything that was often needed to accommodate them and the families or children's schedules?

MM: If they had to take time off, I would certainly allow that.

JD: One woman worked until the day before she had her baby. Helen Donovan.

MM: We didn't really do anything special but if they needed something, we worked with them.

GE: Tell us about the ending of the business.

MM: The business had declined, I was 66 years old, and I'd decided that I had enough. I told my brother-in-law that I wanted out. One of the things we had done at that time was we had sold the building so I was no longer involved in that, just the business. I told him I wanted out, and he wanted to stay in the business because his sons were in it. So he bought me out at a fair price.

GE: How long did his business continue?

MM: Well he stayed in business I think 3 or 4 years after that. The building was sold, and he at that point had to move out. He opened another factory, and he was there for about 3 years. And then he stopped as well.

GE: How about his children?

MM: His one son left earlier and had jobs, I think he was living primarily in Connecticut. And the one son stayed with him until the day that he closed the business. An interesting thing, one day one of the women working there said I'm going out to buy lottery tickets, anyone want to contribute? Thirty-five women 00:25:00gave her a dollar a piece, and my nephew gave her a dollar. They won two million dollars. I think everyone who was in the pool got something like $65,000. Those days that was a fair amount of money. When they closed the business, the Morning Call ran an article about how they won the lottery and a year later they were closing.

GE: When the business closed, how many people were still working there?

MM: I'm guessing about 75.

GE: Okay, and then just a couple of other more broad questions. At this point, 00:26:00this was a very prominent industry in the area from around the 1930s to 1980 or so. How do you think the area has been affected by its life?

MM: Not that much in a sense that most of the work was through the women. There were very few men so the husbands were not really affected. I guess, the women who wanted to work were able to get jobs. One of the things about the industry was there was always a shortage of sewing machine operators. The other thing was 00:27:00that almost from the very beginning, coming back to the 1900s, the women who worked in sewing were primarily immigrants. By the time I got ready to retire and the industry started to close up here, the children were now second or third generation. They were going to school, going to college, they were able to do other things. And so that was dwindling as well.

GE: So it was becoming even more acute, the shortage of operators.

MM: Yes. I think the fact that there were no longer these kinds of jobs didn't affect the women of the area very much because they didn't want to do that.

GE: Thank you.

Interview with Judy Miller, June 25, 2014

SUSAN CLEMENS-BRUDER: So you were talking about your volunteer work. But, did 00:28:00you ever work with the business at all?

JUDY MILLER: Yes. When did I start that? I think Nancy was in high school. So in the 70s. And I had an outlet store, and it was called The Hole in the Wall. And it was a hole in the wall.

SC: In the factory building?

JM: At the factory building, on the ground floor. It was a true outlet. I sold ribbons and lace and all leftover rolls from the lingerie business. I had ends of piece goods, rolls of piece goods. I froze in that building because it wasn't heated. I had a space heater. I did have a telephone. I didn't make a lot of 00:29:00money, and I was open only two days a week. I had a lot of customers. People would come in-- oh, he forgot to tell you, Mort was a contractor for Christian Dior-- I sold some of their leftover things. That was when I met the woman who had said she rode our elevator in the factory because her friend's father owned the silk mill, when it was a silk mill. Anyhow, I sold whatever our leftovers were. And somehow, my brother-in-law always managed to-- shrink the patterns.

SC: Oh, we've heard that before.

JM: As a matter of fact, our scrap went to the Sheftels; they were our neighbors.

GAIL EISENBERG: Right, that was his business.

SC: It's wonderful how everything connects. If I could just interrupt for a second. I can't tell you how many families have said, "What do you value most? Family and a community."

JM: Well, we were a close-knit community. Okay, back to my business, people would come in for laces because they were making confirmation dresses and wedding gowns. I would sell it by the yard and measure it out. It was so basic. Oh that's the other thing, my father-in-law was the king of repossessing doors, 00:31:00and the doors were the tables.

SC: About what year did you start the outlet?

JM: This says '86, but I think I must have started earlier.

GE: You said your daughter was born in 1956, and you said you did it when she was in high school. So that would be '72, '73.

JM: Yeah.

SC: And that was the heyday of outlets, too.

JM: Yes.

GE: How long do you think you ran that business?

JM: From when I started until Mort retired. It wasn't that much of a business, but it put me on the payroll. At the time, my sister-in-law, Charles' wife, his 00:32:00sister Shirley, was working in the office. We did have an office. That's about it for the factory.

SC: You said you did volunteering. We didn't talk about volunteering in the Jewish community. Did you do that?

JM: The blood bank was with the Jewish Community Center. I did flowers with Ida Kinberg at the synagogue for Oneg Shabbat. She was our across the street neighbor, and she did that, and I always helped her cut and do flowers. I did Hadassah. I can't remember. . . . what you have done for me is... wow.

SC: It's wonderful, isn't it? To think of everything.

JM: Yes.

SC: Okay, the two filmy questions that I always ask, "What do you value most?

JM: That I've been so lucky, and I've had a good life. I really do. I'm getting teary. I don't usually cry easily.

SC: You'll make us teary, too. The other is, what has made you feel the most artistic or creative?

JM: I guess flowers. I did have more of a garden before we moved here. We never 00:34:00talked about that at our house.

SC: Oh, tell us about your house

JM: Well, we were married in 1952, Christmas. We lived in the Highland Street Apartments at 22nd and Highland and Livingston. Andy was born there. Then we bought a lot, and he said we are going to build a house. And I said wonderful, we are going to build a split level because when I was a home service representative, I loved the split levels. I always lived in apartments, and Mort always lived in two-story houses. So this was our, we made a mistake, that we should have bought a ranch house so we wouldn't be here [living in an apartment] because I decided that we would move before we needed to. We could still be in 00:35:00the house, we are both fine.

GE: So where was your house?

JM: Right around the corner from here. 3030 Tremont Street. On the corner of Marshal and Tremont St.

GE: You moved there in '55?

JM: No, '54. We built the house because I knew everything. I was a home economics major and it ended up that I had to redesign my kitchen too, but that was okay.

SC: Because kitchens change so much.

JM: No, it wasn't that. I was getting electric shocks from my refrigerator because where I had it was at right angles to the stove, I mean the sink, and when I did something, I think. I don't remember how long after we did it.

SC: It's always nice to redo a kitchen.

JM: Yeah, we are lucky. 46 years we had the house.

SC: So he has the mechanical skills, and you have the decorating?

JM: Well, he's wiring. We had all kinds of wiring because we had HiFi. We had CDs. And Mort didn't tell you, but we had 350 LPs that we gave to Cedar Crest College.

SC: Oh, that's nice.

JM: I wish we would've kept some vinyls.

SC: So you turned vinyls into CDs?

JM: Yes. First, they were cassettes.

SC: This was beautiful - thank you so much.