The old standard Harrowgate neighborhood factory job at Penn Fibre & Specialty at 2024 E Westmoreland St in Philly started in 1937 with a desperate suddenly out of work in the middle of the Depression Vulcanized Fibre materials salesman rep out of Delaware who took his life savings of 700 dollars and bought one used punch press and one die to make a standard size Hard Vulcanized Fibre washer/spacer, suitable for electrics since the 1890s and kept running the press in Harrowgate with other workers with suitable industry skills, and selling and increasing the sizes available and finding the customers that would buy and store dies and get a vast discount on volume not available by some in the locked in (monopoly?) factories producing such out of the Wilmington Delaware area. The space became a larger factory with war contracts in the 1940s and the factory expanded its die library, archive for many sized washers - inner dimension/outer dimension sizes. The company expanded into sheet plastic extrusion with Nylon followed by Teflon as materials for adapted use of washers, spaces and gaskets in modern production. The plastics were hard on dies in terms of their life of use as opposed to the old natural materials of vulcanized fibre. A second factory was set up in rural Delaware to be near Dupont as the suppliers of Nylon and Teflon plastic pellets to be fed in the extruding hoppers to make the sheets of plastic to be cut to width suitable to be fed in ancient punch presses - the most profitable part of the companies business in the 60s and 70s. The other reason for the rural Delaware location was to avoid the fear of a union in the Harrowgate factory which never came to pass. Management hired one Charlie "D" part of the local Irish mafia, an independent collector / enforcer for loan sharks and such, to work in the factory and occasionally show up for his paycheck and discuss the disadvantage of unions and or union organizers in the Harrowgate plant. Off topic perhaps, but Charlie was not unknown to an uncle of mine in the "Auto Loan" business in a storefront along nearby Kensington Ave. Ironically, it was the farm boys in rural Delaware working two jobs, milking cows and feeding chickens and operating punch presses in the Delaware plant and not happy with $2 an hour wages as opposed to the $3 an hour Philly wages in (1970s wage money) - that they organized and got their union etc. This from memory. I never met Charlie "D" but heard many tales of him by the old timers in the plant where I briefly worked in the sales department's office in a row house on Willard Street on the back of the Harrowgate property, and of Charlie's mysterious violent demise of six bullets and being run over several times by an automobile and or truck, a crime that went unsolved. Charlie was a giant of a man and crazy as a bedbug or so some would say. Whatever. Think the Philly plant got sold or closed in the eighties. The Delaware plant still exists in some merged corporate form somewhere I think.
