Mort Miller, May 31, 2016

Interview with Mort Miller, May 31, 2016

GAIL EISENBERG: So right now, it's recording.

SUSAN CLEMENS-BRUDER: Yes, it's going on, yes. OK. OK. Today is May 31, 2016, and we'd like to start with and continue with what your full name is, where you were born and where you lived in your life.

MORT MILLER: My name is Morton Jay Miller. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 12th, 1924.

SC: And we'll go back now into your family history. As much as you know about your family history. Where did they come from? Where did they work, et cetera?

MM: My father was an immigrant from Poland. He lived in a town called Kolno, which is 50 miles northwest of Warsaw. He arrived in this country in 1910. My 00:01:00mother was born in this country, in Brooklyn, and her father came to this country in eighteen eighty-five, I think. And her mother came about when my mother's mother, my grandmother came about the same time. I never saw my Polish grandmother. She died in Europe. My father, my grandfather -- my maternal grandfather -- did come to this country, and I did know him.

SC: Do you know where they specifically lived or and also what they did as far as work is concerned here? From the time they left Poland or what they were doing in Europe and then came to this country?

MM: My father, he came here in 1910, for a while lived with relatives in Mount 00:02:00Vernon, New York. And then he started a business shortly after he came here, manufacturing raincoats. And he did that until 1917 when he was drafted into the army for World War One. My mother was born in Brooklyn. She lived in Brooklyn until she, until she, moved actually to Allentown, which was in 1938. That's when our family moved from New York, from Brooklyn, to Allentown in 1938.

SC: So and the other side of your family, do you know what the grandfathers did working?

MM: Yeah, I'm not sure, my grandfather came from Odessa. And he came to this 00:03:00country when he was only 16 years old, I think, or 18 years old, and he found some sort of work selling plumbing materials. And he eventually went into business for himself, did rather well, and he acquired some real estate in New York, in the Lower East Side of New York. And that's basically how they supported themselves. I don't know anything about really about my maternal grandmother. I don't know exactly where she came from, in Europe, it was Russia, and I'm not really sure where.

JUDY MILLER: Your mother's family was from Odessa?

MM: Well, I don't know about that.

MM: Well, maybe.

SC: Thank you.

MM: My father's family came from Kolno.

JM: And what did they do there?

MM: My father's family in Europe had a flour mill in the little town of Kolno. I would say the town was about 50 miles from Warsaw and it was two thirds of the town was Jewish. And unfortunately, it was only six miles from the German border, and when World War II started, within a few days, all the Jews in the city would be killed. None survived. I think my father did have family in this little town. They were all killed during the German occupation.

SC: But he had already left.

MM: He left in 1910.

JM: His sister . . . [unintelligible]

MM: He left after the war, that was World War I, but here they were killed in World War Two.

SC: Yes. So so the family- the sister and brother were both okay.

MM: Yes. But they had other family. He had a father, had three sisters, all who came to this country and one brother who came to this country and his father.

JM: Tell the story that they went to Germany. The story that the grandmother was a smuggler.

SC: Was a smuggler . . . oh

MM: So they lived only six miles from the German border and they had this flour mill, and they used to send wagon loads of flour into Germany. And the wagon would go with flour and my grandmother, apparently would hide a few things in 00:06:00the wagon, which were then sold in Poland. And they would come back with things in Germany, and they would come back with things from Germany.

SC: They could smuggle some people away from Germany. They didn't wouldn't have thought of that.

MM: No, no, no, no, no. No need to smuggle.

SC: Not then.

JM: There's no need to . . .

[unintelligible by Judy Miller] . . . She brought pearls and fabric . . . because fabric was really essential because no one was manufacturing them.

MM: My father had a cousin in this little town who went to Germany and went to medical school in Germany. And my father used to often go to Germany and visit with him. And as a result, my father was reasonably fluent in German.

SC: It's coming. I'm watching the red button. So let's go to your youth. Can you 00:07:00talk about what you did as a young boy, where you worked, if you worked anywhere through your entire life? But stop at when you got, you know, when you started working as an adult.

MM: I said I was born in Brooklyn in community of Boro Park, which was almost 100 percent Jewish community. Interesting community in the sense that it was. . . and to this day, it's the only community in the United States that was started by Jews, in the late eighteen 1800s, and to this day has never been anything but Jewish. Today it is ultra-orthodox, as a matter of fact. Anyway, I went to a Hebrew school, a yeshiva, started in kindergarten, went through ninth grade. 00:08:00When I was at that point, I was 14 years old. At that point, my parents moved to Allentown. My father had a business in Brooklyn, but in 1934 he moved it to Allentown, and he commuted for four years. His sister moved here with him, so he had a place to live. And in 1938, our family moved to Allentown. And I've been here ever since. I attended Allen high school. And I then went on to the University of Pennsylvania. And in my beginning of my sophomore year . . . the war had started my freshman year. At the beginning of my sophomore year, I was drafted. I was in the Army for almost three years, came back and then finished school. And I graduated from Penn -- University of Pennsylvania -- in nineteen forty-seven. The Wharton School.

SC: Yes. And so what- do you have any memories of your father's business when you were young?

MM: Not really, we were very little involved with his business. It was a very successful business. Even during the Depression, my family was financially, reasonably well off. We never suffered from the Depression at all. And I think it was a good-sized business that employed about two hundred and fifty people. This was in Brooklyn and then employed almost the same number when they moved here to Allentown. At that time, he was no longer manufacturing raincoats, he was manufacturing ladies sleepwear, and eventually when I graduated from college, I went into my father's business for two years. And then my brother-in-law and my sister had just gotten married. This was in nineteen 00:10:00forty-seven. In nineteen forty-nine, my brother-in-law and I started our own business. I remained in business until I was sixty-six years old. I retired in nineteen ninety. What's that?

JM: What's the name of the name of the business?

MM: It was Millcrest Manufacturing Company.

SC: Would you spell that?

MM: We also manufacture primarily sleepwear, and we sold to department stores and chain stores all over the country. It is Millcrest. All one word, M-I-L-L-C-R-E-S-T Manufacturing.

SC: And that's where we have, we- Is there anything that you can think of?

JM: We had a story. Yes, yes. Yes. I think you didn't tell them what you did in 00:11:00the Army.

MM: Would you want to know that?

SC: Yes, that would be wonderful.

MM: Right. In the Army, I was in the Air Force. I was not a flier because I had gone to the Wharton School. I got into finance, and I spent two years overseas in England, which is the best possible thing. I was stationed, again, 50 miles from London. And there was a train that ran directly from the town that I was stationed in into London. And every month I got a four-day pass to London. I spent four days in London every month for two years.

SC: Do you know the name of the town that you were in south of London?

MM: Yes. It was not south of London. It was north of London, Sudbury, Sudbury and East Anglia. Another story, I was just taking with a friend a few days ago, we were only about 20 miles from Cambridge, and a friend and I, on a number of 00:12:00occasions, would go into Cambridge and spend time there and go through the various buildings at the university. We met a few people. We never really got friendly with anybody there.

SC: That's a pretty area, East Anglia Base.

MM: Yeah, I've been back to my air base three times. Security back there and my children have actually been back with us.

GE: You want to tell us a little bit about your father's business once in Allentown.

JM: Why did he come to Allentown, tell them that?

GE: And also, once in Allentown, you and your brother-in-law went into your own business. Was that where he stayed with his son, with another son in business, or what was what? And what was the sequence of your father's business?

MM: OK, my father moved as best as I say here in nineteen thirty-four. There was 00:13:00a depression and things were difficult. And to be very honest, he moved here . . . he was unionized in New York, in Brooklyn, and he moved here to escape the union, which he did. A union did try to unionize them here in Allentown. They were never able to. He remained in business until nineteen forty-five, at which time he sold the business and retired. He then bought a building, good-sized building, in Bethlehem on Seneca Street. And after two years, in nineteen forty-seven, he decided that he was too young to be retired. And he went back into business and he then merged his business with a cousin who was- had a business in New York. And they manufactured not sleepwear like where they 00:14:00manufactured children's pajamas. And that's all right. And he remained in that business until nineteen forty-nine, I think, at which point he became ill, and he can no longer work. And he then sold his interest in the business. And move to El Paso, Texas, as a matter of fact. The reason for that being that he had developed a terrible skin condition -- terrible, he had broken out all over his entire body. They could not do anything to cure Father. He went to a doctor in New York and the doctor said, Mr. Miller, there's only one thing that's going to cure you. You have to move to El Paso, Texas. My father said, are you crazy? And he said, that's the only thing that's going to cure you. In fact, he was so desperate, he moved to El Paso, stayed there for two or three years, and it did cure him. And he came back and it never came back after that.

SC: Is there a reason why El Paso. . .

MM: Yes, it has a very dry because it's a very dry state. Yeah. Yeah. It's warm most of the time and very, very dry and sunny.

[some conversation about Phoenix--hard to hear and not relevant]

GE: What was the name of your father's. . .

MM: Actually, it was Miller Underwear, and he also had the trade name of Millcrest, which at that point he had stopped using, and my brother-in-law then took that as the name for our business.

SC: Do you have any other questions about the business?

JM: [hard to understand . . . talk about the name of the label]

MM: The name on the label, on the garments that we sold was ARDRU Undergarment 00:16:00-- A-R-D-R-U. We got the name . . my nephew was Shepherd, we took the last three letters of his name, and our son was Andrew, we took the last two letters of his name and it became ARDRU undergarment and that was the label that was on our . . .

[chatter by everyone . . . hard to understand]

MM: It was Stanley's father, who combined his business with my father's business. They had a factory in New York that they wanted to get out of that also. And they moved here. A distant cousin.

[chatter by everyone, unimportant, and hard to understand]

SC: OK, so you were talking about that Harry gave them donuts. Could you talk about the union and say, you know.

MM: As I say, we started our business in 1949, and we were nonunion, and the union did try to unionize us, the ILG, and they tried for 40 years, and were not able to. And one of the interesting things was one of the women who worked for me, she and two of her sisters and a niece, all worked for me, and her husband, 00:18:00this woman's husband was the president of the Bethlehem Steel Union. And I said to her, I said, Margaret, your husband is the head of the Bethlehem Steel Union. How does he feel about all of you working in a non-union shop? And she said, Mort, we've talked about this. And my husband says to me, they're good people, you like them, they treat you well, they pay you the same wages and give you the same benefits as a union. You don't have to work in a union shop, stay where you are.

JM: Tell them why a union, I mean nonunion shop was good for the women?

MM: One of the advantages of working in our shop as opposed to . . . women had particular jobs in a union shop. If you were a collar setter, you set collars. If you were a cuff setter, you set cuffs, but you did nothing else except that. 00:19:00And if there wasn't any work for collar setters, you were sent home. We didn't do that. If you, if you were a collar setter, and we had no collars, you could do something else. So our people were never sent home. They were never unemployed. And that was really an advantage. And also, they didn't have to pay dues to the, to the union, which was. . .

JM: You want to hear that?