USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Naugatuck > History of Naugatuck, Connecticut > Part 19
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partly because they were big and partly because the synthetic THIOKOL and cements had a nauseating odor and were hard to handle. The shops where these large articles were made were stripped of the conveyors and completely rear- ranged. People had to be carefully taught how to use the new cements and how to assemble the numerous pieces, many of which looked confusingly similar. But production in the course of a few months was stepped up and in less than four years the Naugatuck plant turned out approximately 78,000 fuel cells.
In addition, manufacture of footwear went on. Besides rubbers and gaiters for men in regular branches of the serv- ice, special shoes for particular purposes were soon rolling off the conveyors-shoe pacs for the mountain troops, aviators' winter flying shoes, mukluks, jungle boots for men in the tropics, sea boots for submarine crews, waders for the engi- neers. Ingenious use of plastics, textiles, and leather con- trived to stretch the shrinking supply of natural rubber until synthetic was available in quantity. In spite of having to de- vise new methods of manufacture-adaptations of both ma- terials and processing-with decreased personnel the foot- wear plant succeeded in turning out the largest volume of essential articles in its history.
While no other industry faced equal difficulties, because no other plant was so handicapped for want of its basic raw material, Peter Paul had an only lesser problem when loss of the Philippines cut off the supply of cocoanut, the chief ingredient of the company's best selling candy. Finding a new source of cocoanut in islands in the Carribean and Central America could answer only if shipping could be found to transport it to this country. This difficulty Peter Paul met by purchasing a fleet of small 35 to 500 ton auxiliary schooners which German submarines considered too small to sink. The schooners, however, not only brought in cocoa- nut for Peter Paul but information useful to the Navy on the whereabouts of enemy submarines. Moreover, the com-
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pany was able to supply the chemical industry with cocoa- nut shells for manufacture of activated carbon for gas masks and high explosives. Since candy was known to be a quickly energizing food the Quartermaster Corps from the beginning of the war bought large quantities of Peter Paul candy-bars for Post Exchanges and later introduced "Choclettos" into "C" and "K" combat rations. At the height of the war Peter Paul was packing 5,000,000 of these candy bars monthly into these ration units.
Every manufacturer in Naugatuck, as indeed producers in all sections of the country, had to struggle with some short- ages-tin, copper, lumber, steels, especially tool steels, and, most of all, manpower. In coping with these shortages the Risdon Company, by devising methods of saving critical materials and man-hours, probably made its most distin- guished contribution to the war effort. For though the com- pany produced a long list of items, all requiring precision work kept to exacting tolerances, its engineers rendered a still greater service in the redesign of parts for ordnance, radio, radar, and aircraft that permitted fabrication from sheet metal at fractional expenditure of time. Every plant had to increase production with fewer hands at work. The 9,500 workers in Naugatuck factories before Pearl Harbor had shrunk to less than 7,000 in the fall of 1944. And every concern employed people overtime, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, sometimes hiring housewives, schoolteachers, high school students, bank clerks and others for part-time work as well. At the foundry where much of the work was too heavy for women and over-age men, the manpower prob- lem was so acute that the company resorted to importing a few negroes from White Plains, New York. Since housing for these negroes was not available in the borough, they had to commute daily by bus, two hours every morning and two every evening. Such handicaps to efficiency notwithstanding, month after month there poured from the foundry thousands of malleable iron tank clutches, Navy valves, anti-aircraft
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gun brackets, 75 millimeter shells, submarine detector cast- ings and the like.
Naugatuck's war-time difficulties were not unique. Whether due to lack of materials and tools, to delay in trans- port, or to labor turnover and absenteeism born of cumula- tive fatigue, nearly overwhelming obstacles to production were common to all manufacturing communities. Nauga- tuck's distinction lay not so much in the success with which these problems were met as in the variety of essential com- modities the shops here turned out. In addition to the rub- ber and synthetic rubber goods, the chemicals and the candy, the malleable iron and aluminum castings, and the metal components of the Risdon Company, Naugatuck factories produced underwater submarine detectors, mechanisms for the atomic bomb development, torpedo explorer mecha- nisms, and aircraft control instruments made by the Bristol Company; the Lewis air-cooled engine cylinder thermome- ters and fighter aircraft control devices; the Butterfield molded plastic gas mask exhaust valves and insulators for electrical units of aircraft and naval vessels; Russell chains, buckles, and slide fasteners for Morner life-saving suits; precision tools and gages; and crystals for dials and instru- ment panels of ships, tanks, and airplanes made in quantity by the Naugatuck Glass Company. The list could be ex- tended almost indefinitely. Each company had its specialties, often the exclusive developments of the particular company, the results of scientific research and years of experimenta- tion; each had its own manufacturing problems; each met its production schedules efficiently. Three companies won Army-Navy "E" awards, and others, as sub-contractors, played a role in winning "E" awards for primary contractors. Corporations not themselves manufacturing war matériel also did their part, such as the work performed by the Nau- gatuck Lumber Company in providing containers and pack- ing cases for outgoing shipments.
Illustrative of the type of problem management had to
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solve was the difficulty the Lewis Engineering Company encountered when delicate test instruments made in its shop proved on assembly to be faulty. Investigation revealed that the young women in the assembly room had occasionally been powdering their noses in the room and microscopic particles of face powder had lodged within the assembled mechanisms. As soon as the women working on the job were forbidden to take compacts into that section of the shop, the trouble stopped and perfect assemblies emerged.
Still when all has been said about the ingenuity with which industrial management evolved effective production meth- ods in the face of unforeseeable difficulties, it was the ordi- nary working people of America who turned out the goods- the clothing, the foodstuffs, the munitions, the aircraft, and the tanks. While Naugatuck companies provided the facili- ties, it was the factory wage-earners that kept the machines in operation.
In 1941, in order to improve labor relations, the United States Rubber Company adopted a wage guarantee plan whereby an employee's earnings would not fall more than five points below his previous four weeks' average earnings, with the stipulation that in no case would the guarantee be more than 100 per cent efficiency or less than 90 per cent efficiency after six months from the date of employment. Here was a foreshadowing of the comprehensive annual wage guarantee which the CIO was to make one of its primary country-wide objectives in the post-war era. Everywhere, un- til the time of the War Labor Board's freezing decree, wages rose, but even fat weekly pay envelopes could not wholly com- pensate for the fatigue that mounted week after week as the nation's drive for increased output intensified.
In the days of growing tension before Pearl Harbor, the CIO rubber workers' union negotiated its first written con- tract with the company. Laboratory workers, clerical and supervisory employees were excluded from union member- ship; and anyone who was promoted to a management posi-
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tion was to be furnished with an honorable withdrawal certif- icate supplied by the union. The contract also contained a maintenance of membership clause which applied to all covered by the contract. The machinists, who were members of the AF of L International Machinists' Union, did not come under this. In contrast to the post World War II system when the "Big Four" of the rubber industry jointly determined basic rates, local company engineers set schedules for the standard day's performance. Production standards were peculiarly hard to set because much of the work was new. Vacations with pay were agreed upon, in itself a provision little short of revolutionary by America's standards of the 1930's. On the whole, that first written contract was satis- factory. In July 1944, a new election in the plant swung the machinists into the CIO camp. An endeavor a year later on the part of the AF of L to unite the whole shop under the AF of L banner was unsuccessful. In the interim two other CIO locals came into existence, at the chemical plant No. 218, and at the synthetic rubber plant No. 308. Both of these were granted charters by the United Rubber, Cork, Lino- leum and Plastic Workers of America.
The unions found company officials fair to deal with and ready to stand by an agreement without quibbling once it had been made, and all through the war relations between the union leaders and management were cordial. In fact, the chief sources of trouble were within the unions themselves, as rival factions threatened to oust the responsible agent or other union officials. Such internal dissensions fortunately were always patched up enough to keep the plants running and the outer surface of things calm. Work stoppages oc- curred, but rarely for more than an hour while one depart- ment or another thrashed out some departmental difficulty. More intensive intelligent efforts of the Industrial Rela- tions department made some headway in educating workers into an appreciation of the advantages to themselves of the conveyor racks and other labor-saving installations and so
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dug at the roots of the most serious fundamental problems of labor-management relations of the past.
Stirred doubtless by the ease with which the rubber work- ers had obtained a contract, and affected by the country-wide sweep of unionization, unions emerged between 1942 and 1944 at the foundry, and at the Butterfields' plant. Vigorous objection to the checkoff or maintenance of union member- ship failed to stem the tide now running in the direction of full recognition of the new power of organized labor.
It is probably testimony to the extraordinary, continued self-sufficiency of New England towns and cities that, in spite of the long-established strength of unions in Water- bury's brass foundries, Naugatuck, geographically close enough to be virtually an outlying section of that great industrial city, kept itself so long out of the main currents of American industrial life. In techniques of manufacture and scientific industrial research the borough ranked with the most progressive communities in the country; in labor rela- tions conformity to the usual pattern of unionization had lagged. By local stockholders, company officers, and plant managers this delay was considered a mark of distinction, a successful warding off of involvement in an unwholesome labor program which could only end in both local workers' and owners' losing all freedom of action. They believed Naugatuck's keeping free of large-scale labor organization for so much longer than neighboring cities gave evidence of employers' fair-mindedness and deep-seated, sound employee relationships. In the face of this attitude of business leaders, opinion of wage-earners, always less articulate, is not so easy to gage. Certainly many of the older men and women who had been employed in Naugatuck factories for years were not enthusiastic over the new order. And the fact that unioniza- tion took no hold in the smaller plants indicates that where contacts between shopowner and shop hands were close neither wished the existing scheme of things to change. Nevertheless, since unions did develop in the bigger plants,
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we must conclude that the rank and file of working people by 1944 welcomed unionization.
In spite of the high wages, the full employment, and the general prosperity of the manufacturing companies, many people felt sharply the pinch of war restrictions. Though there was money to spend there was so little to buy that mer- chants were at times hard pressed. Price ceilings on most goods added greatly to the clerical work involved in the simplest sale and every store was shorthanded. Building con- tractors and suppliers of building materials were hit still harder unless, like Megin, they had industrial maintenance contracts or, like the Naugatuck Lumber Company, under- took to furnish boxing and crates for local war plants. Even the banks suffered: the Savings Bank because many borrow- ers paid off their loans, and with no house building per- mitted, new loans were few; the Naugatuck National be- cause commercial loans were now frequently negotiated through the government; and both banks because they were forced to invest largely in government bonds, safe but not very profitable. The Savings Bank, therefore, had to cut its interest rate to 2 per cent, higher than that of many banks but scarcely more than half what it had previously paid depositors. Yet ultimately both banks emerged stronger than ever. Deposits at the National Bank by 1944 stood at about $8,500,000, while deposits at the Savings Bank mounted to $8,762,000 from over 10,500 people, 60 per cent of all bor- ough residents.
Impact on the Community
No one faintly aware of what peoples in other parts of the world were enduring in these years could feel that Americans were in dire material distress, but neither could anyone ignore wholly the sheer discomforts of life. Naugatuck was no worse off for housing than other industrial cities; yet every home was filled to capacity and long-distance commut-
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ing was common. Two families or more shared quarters de- signed for one; practically all householders, no matter how well-to-do or how wishful of preserving the privacy of their homes, rented spare rooms in order to ease the shortage of accommodations. In finding rooms for newcomers the Cham- ber of Commerce was of particular service. People walked the hilly streets to work or to market in order to save gas and tires; they stood in queues waiting their turn to buy what was available; they donned coats or sweaters to keep warm when fuel was too scarce adequately to heat their houses. Most disturbing for the ill and old or the mothers of small children was the want of medical attention: over- worked doctors could scarcely cover their rounds and the hospitals nearby were crowded. Still through all the real anxieties and minor annoyances people managed to keep an air of good cheer, restraining their grumbling to the "grip- ing" that made all men kin.
While the primary job for industrial Naugatuck was pro- ducing the essential articles for total war, for every citizen there was the scarcely less urgent necessity of reshaping num- berless phases of community life to fit the new conditions im- posed by world events. Across the desks of the Draft Board passed the papers of nearly 9,000 men, residents of Cheshire, Wolcott, and Prospect, as well as of Naugatuck itself. Over 2,000 men and women of the borough departed to fight, to nurse, or to serve the government or the Red Cross in other capacities. Sixty-seven men gave their lives. In the eight War Loan Drives Naugatuck campaigners found ready support: purchases of bonds totalled $22,934,247.
The Ration Board, established in April 1942, staffed by Naugatuck schoolteachers and one paid clerk, had the thank- less task of doling out coupons, first for sugar, then for gaso- line, typewriters, bicycles, and footwear. But the school- teachers and others who passed upon the legitimacy of each appeal were confronted with a still more trying situation when rationing of fuel oil became necessary in the fall of
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1942. When, after registration and laborious figuring of floor space of homes to be heated, householders discovered that the basic formula used by the Ration Board was in- correct, necessitating the refiguring of all the computations, an additional horde of volunteers had to be recruited to hurry through the paper work in order to issue the coupons before the onslaught of bitter winter weather. Shoes, meat. lard, butter, and all processed foods-rationing here in- volved difficult decisions affecting the health of the elderly and the sick. The responsibility in time became so great that the local board requested a board of doctors in Hartford to render verdicts on the granting of exceptions based on certif- icates from Naugatuck physicians. Tires, canning sugar, and finally price controls created other problems both for the Ration Board and for every family in town.
The organization and functioning of the civilian defense program, the salvage drives for waste paper, tin cans, metals, rubber, and fats, and the enlisting of volunteers for local Red Cross and other humanitarian activities, all added to the demands upon the time, ingenuity, and good will of men, women and children. In working out ways and means of coping with these puzzling, new, urgent needs Naugatuck's problem was like that of most other American communities, save that the concentration of war plants in the borough made careful planning for emergency measures more vitally im- portant than for less industrialized towns. Full co-operation was essential and every group, every corporation, gave it. Any lingering latent hostility to the rubber company now disap- peared, for the sharpest critic of the absentee-owned com- pany could see how generously it gave of time, money, and interest to civic projects.
Naugatuck's Defense Council was launched in the sum- mer of 1941 under the guidance of Clarence Jones, ap- pointed by the Warden to organize it. In addition to the public services, such as police and fire protection, the Coun- cil started out with fifteen other divisions, each under the
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leadership of a particular person. Two years later two main units were created, the Citizen's Defense Corps to supervise all protective services, such as the Air Raid and Medical Divisions, and the Citizens' Service Corps under which came direction of victory gardens, good conservation, salvage, and the like. Recruitment of volunteers for these tasks offered no problem. Some 3,000 men and women cheerfully trained and kept themselves in readiness for any call, participating in practice drills, or sweating through the labor and discom- forts of collecting waste paper, weeding vegetable gardens, and canning foodstuffs.
Five hundred and sixty-nine volunteers enrolled as Air Raid Wardens, and after attending schools conducted by experts in bomb control, fire fighting, first aid, and other required techniques, took charge when warnings sounded. The Army Command in charge of the area more than once sent out warnings with no hint of their being only for prac- tice; so control center personnel proceeded on the assump- tion that an actual attack was coming. In March 1942, the state Office of Civilian Defense called a first test air raid drill and blackout, and in the course of the next three years there were twenty-six more. In retrospect we may smile at the earnestness of the steel-helmeted, arm-banded wardens bustling about unlighted streets on blackout nights, but the danger of enemy raids was far from imaginary at the time and the selfless devotion of the men and women who gave time and energy to organizing the community for that pro- spective emergency must command only admiration and gratitude. So real was the sense of imminent raids that the local clergy were assigned regular posts from which they could be summoned quickly to administer last rites to the fatally injured and spiritual comfort to all in need of it.
An equally effective part of the civilian defense program was the equipping of a medical center at the Y.M.C.A. Doc- tors, nurses, and aides collaborated in arranging for this emergency casualty station. In the long-unused cafeteria
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and kitchen of the "Y," teams of women scrubbed, painted cupboards, and stored medical supplies. Two operating tables with powerful battery lights to be used if electric cur- rent gave out, surgical instruments, bandages, splints, and fifty cots supplied with bedding were in readiness by the time of the first air raid test. Later the medical center was used as a blood donor station. Less publicized than some of the other divisions but no less important was the planning of the Evacuation Division which carefully predetermined pro- cedures in case of a raid necessitating evacuation of local people.
One hundred auxiliary police, sworn in as deputies, spe- cially trained in first aid and traffic control, and 300 auxiliary firemen made up other units of the civilian defense organiza- tion. The latter, given lessons in extinguishing incendiaries, in detecting and correcting fire hazards, and in fire-fighting generally, were able to put into practice some of their knowl- edge when assigned to burning off dead grass and rubbish lying in vacant lots.
The Water Company was also called upon to take special precautions in order to protect the borough's water supply. Working in conjunction with the state Public Utilities Com- mission and state health and police authorities, company officials made surveys of the water shed and then posted guards about reservoirs and equipment installations. All personnel of the Water Company was sworn in as special police, and guard was maintained twenty-four hours a day. Sterilized tank trucks were ready to distribute water to any section of town if bombing damaged water mains. But the obligations of the Water Company did not end here. As twenty-four-hour operation of Naugatuck factories required a larger volume of water than ever before, eking out the supply became essential. Introduction of water meters saved about 800,000 gallons a day, but the increased consumption brought water reserves so low that a prolonged drought would have rendered them inadequate. To meet this situa-
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tion the company first opened up the Candee reservoir, which had not been drawn on in thirty years, and then in- stalled a well and a high pressure pump capable of supplying 500,000 gallons daily. Thus the increase in consumption, about 328,000,000 gallons larger per year in 1945 than in 1939, was handled.
Allied with the work of the Defense Council but wholly under Army Air Corps control was the Air Warden Service for "plane spotting." Before radar was perfected the ground observer had to act as "the eyes of the Air Force" to identify every plane in the sky. In Naugatuck the service was begun on a test basis as early as January 1941. When the war came the American Legion in Connecticut undertook the respon- sibility of obtaining personnel and organizing posts. Within four days of Pearl Harbor Naugatuck had its post established on Millville Avenue, telephones connected, and 200 volun- teers working in unbroken succession in four-hour or two- hour shifts, day and night. Throughout the first winter of the war all observing was done outdoors regardless of weather. But the next winter a tower with a walk around it and a kitchen were added to the original building. Until October 1943 the post was never unmanned. Then, by order of the Air Force, observation was reduced to one day a week and in May 1944 when radar stations were sufficiently numerous the service was inactivated altogether. Thirteen plane-spotters received medals in recognition of the 500 hours or more they had given to this service.
Though an enemy invasion of the United States such as threatened Great Britain was probably never seriously antici- pated after 1942, the danger of a quick surprise raid or sabotage made expansion of the State Guard wise. But lack of firearms and ammunition with which to equip new units presented a difficulty. The answer was found in enlisting sportsmen who owned rifles or shotguns and so could pro- vide their own. Through the efforts of the Naugatuck Fish and Game Club the Naugatuck Rangers came into being as
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a reserve company of the Connecticut State Guard. About seventy-five men including three officers served from Febru- ary 1943 till after V E Day taking part in maneuvers, estab- lishing road blocks, serving as patrolmen and, trained to fight forest fires, being on call for any emergency.
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