My father Harry only saved a few mementos of his early life.  He was not interested in family history and when I asked him about writing his memories for posterity, he replied, “Why would posterity be interested?” But he did save two things, carefully packing and taking them along on his many moves. They were his diploma from Tyrone High School in 1935 and his chemical engineering degree from Penn State in 1940. His father John had graduated from Tyrone High School in 1905, and that was enough to get him what passed for a white-collar job at the time, a clerk for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the “Pennsy” as it was called. John made enough money to buy a house and support his family, and he must have pushed his four sons to follow in his footsteps. The oldest son, David, went to Juniata College, and then on to become a Methodist minister. The second son, Joe, became an engineer for Pratt and Whitney, but did not graduate from college.

My father aimed higher. Rather than going to a regional school like Juniata, he chose to go to Penn State and enroll in the school of chemical engineering. It was a brave choice and a hard one. The family lost their savings when the Tyrone bank failed in the crash of 1929. My father told several stories about what he had to do to go to Penn State. He hitched a ride with the mailman in the morning to get to State College, getting up at four o’clock in the morning to be on time. To pay his expenses he washed dishes and peeled potatoes in a fraternity. And he got a grant from the National Youth Administration, paying him the princely salary of twenty-five cents an hour – a grant he claimed was responsible for his lifelong liberal politics. He earned the salary by washing glassware in the chemistry lab, “the amines with their fishy smell” and later by helping Dr. Rose run chemistry experiments. Whatever sacrifices Harry made must have seemed worth it when he graduated in the spring of 1940, as one of forty-one students to graduate in chemical engineering that year, all men of course, in the custom of the time. He remembered it as only thirteen graduates, out of the 200 who started in the program. Either way it was an impressive achievement for a poor boy from a small town.

He must have gotten a job offer just after graduation, since by the fall of 1940 he was living and working in Germantown, Pennsylvania. The job was with Fischer and Porter, a company making instrumentation systems, which would be my father’s specialty his entire working life. The company had been founded a few years before by Kermit Fischer, and they made rotameters, devices to measure flow. Harry worked for Kermit Fischer for several years before something soured between them. As my mother put it, in a letter to her mother, both of his jobs were “hazardous relations”. He was then living north of the city and taking the bus into Philadelphia during the evenings, taking classes toward a medical degree, but after America joined the war there was a shortage of instructors, and the classes he needed were only given during the day. Of course he couldn’t afford to quit his job to take classes full time.

My father then got a job with a competitor, another company that made rotameters. This was Brooks, started in 1946 by Stephen Brooks, a “fledgling company” as my father later told me. Brooks had a new design for rotameters – a “side-plate, dowel-pin construction”. It’s possible that Stephen lured my father away from Kermit Fischer, which makes me wonder about industrial property rights and non-disclosure agreements, but my father was an upright man, honest to the bone, and would not have spilled other people’s secrets.

He worked for Brooks until 1948, when he and my mother decided to move to California in hopes of improving her asthma. They believed that a dry climate would be better for her, so they packed up and left for El Centro, at the southern end of Death Valley, where my father got a job with U.S. Gypsum. He had been promised a job that would take advantage of his engineering skills, but when he got there, he found himself making gypsum wallboard. They did not have a car and he had to hitchhike or find a ride to work, and it was the most miserable year of their lives. My mother was home alone with a toddler (me) and pregnant with my younger sister, far from her friends and family. My father formed a life-long hatred of the desert. They barely scraped by, but the country was in a postwar recession and he could find nothing better. Finally, as the last straw, my mother’s asthma took a turn for the worse and they decided to move back to Pennsylvania.

Kermit Fischer had made one last attempt to hire my father back while they were still in California. He wrote a letter, very “sweet” as my mother put it, asking Harry to meet with the company vice president in San Diego. My father believed that this was an attempt to pump him for information, possibly about Brooks and its rotameters, and he refused to go. Apparently Kermit was spreading a rumor about my father, probably that he was coming back to Fischer and Porter. As my mother put it, “We think Kermit spread the news to hurt Harry’s chances locally and the news would naturally infuriate Steve so that’s just plain revenge.  … all I can say is that he won’t ever go back to Fischer and Porter and (almost as positively) never go back to Brooks Rotameter.”

After they moved back, my father worked for Minneapolis Honeywell, the thermostat company. He never talked about those years, and I was too young to remember anything, since I was living with my aunt and uncle up in Woolrich, a small town far from Montgomery County where my parents were. He must have owned a car by then, since he would come up on weekends to see me. My mother died in May of 1952 and he was a single father for two years, until he remarried in 1954, and we all went to live in Philadelphia.

When my father got a job offer from DuPont in the spring of 1955, he must have felt that his ship had come in. Finally he would be working for a company that provided security, a good salary with benefits including medical care and a pension. It was truly his ticket to the middle class. He signed a non-disclosure agreement with DuPont on April 18, 1955, agreeing that any “improvements and inventions” he made as an employee would be the property of DuPont, and also agreeing not to disclose any “secret or confidential information”. My dad was a careful man and he saved that agreement for the next fifty years.

He worked at first at the Chambers Works, a sprawling manufacturing plant in Bridgewater, New Jersey, a half-hour drive from our new house in Brookside Park, outside Newark Delaware. The Chambers Works was tucked in next to the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and whenever we went over the bridge on our way to New York City, I would always look for my father’s building, a tiny two-story building in the very back left corner of the Works, hard to spot in the large plant. Four years later he was transferred to Jackson Labs, a separate department in the same location, as a senior research engineer.

Unfortunately, and there is no way to sugar-coat this, the Jackson Labs was responsible for the development of four main products: tetraethyl lead, Teflon, coal tar dyes, and fluorocarbon refrigerants. At the time, these fell under the rubric of DuPont’s motto of “Better Living through Chemistry”, but we now know that they were harmful for the environment and for living things. Chlorofluorocarbons were “once hailed as a pinnacle of 20th century industrial chemistry. CFCs showed up in refrigerators, aerosol cans, and solvents of all kind. They were everywhere, like some sort of miracle compound specifically designed for modern consumerism.” Tetraethyl lead is now banned as an additive for car gasoline; coal tar dyes are banned in some places, as is Teflon; CFCs are banned from refrigerants and aerosols. When I asked my father how he felt about his work, years after he had retired, he shrugged. As an intelligent man who read newspapers, he would have seen the implications, but if he felt any great remorse, he did not share it with me.

Toward the end of his working life with DuPont, when he only had to commute a few miles over to the Louviers Building, my dad was sent down to Louisiana, where DuPont was building a new plant. He was in charge of the instrumentation for the plant, designing where the instruments would be placed to analyze the chemicals as they were made. He was proud of this assignment, which showed the confidence the company placed in him.

When he retired in 1955, DuPont gave him a red binder with a portrait, pages of good wishes from his co-workers, and sheets with cards from friends and family. This was another of the few artifacts he saved down through the years, showing how much his work meant to him.

Sources:

Obituary of Kermit Fischer, died 1971, a New York Times obituary.

History of Brooks Instrument Company, on their website at https://www.brooksinstrument.com/, accessed 2022.

Personal Communications from Harry Long, 1982, 1993-94.

Letters written by Dorothy Long to her mother Helen Tyson from El Centro, California, 1948-49.

Image of a Brooks Rotameter from EBay.

History of the Jackson Laboratory, at https://snaccooperative.org/ark:/99166/w6rp1scc.

Article by Neel Patel on CFCs, Popular Science, 2018, at https://www.popsci.com/cfc-ozone-emission/.

A clipping from a DuPont publication on the occasion of Harry’s retirement.

The few books Harry saved: his high school and college yearbooks, his red retirement binder, his chemistry handbooks.

Note: My dad said that there were only thirteen graduates in the chemical engineering program in 1940, but the graduation program lists forty-one. Perhaps the chemical engineers were distinct from the chemists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

timeline:

born May 1917

graduated from Tyrone High School in May 1935

graduated from Penn State in June 1940; was it normal to need 5 years?

1940 draft card: Living in Germantown, working at Fischer & Porter

1942: probably still at F & P, saved the group picture from 1942, from a F&P newsletter

June 1943, married Dorothy

after that, probably lived in Hatboro

between 1946 & fall 1948, worked for Steve Brooks at Brooks Rotameter, possibly recruited soon after 1946, when Brooks founded the company.

1948, got a job with U.S. Gypsum, moved to El Centro

spring 1949, recession still on, moved back to Pennsylvania

May 1952, Dorothy died.

Where did he live?

Married Hildegarde around 1954, when I was in 2^nd grade

Moved to Philadelphia

I remember my dad coming up to visit me on the weekends, but I never saw my mother again. My sister was living with my mother’s parents Raymond and Helen in Perkasie. Nowadays a single dad might keep two young children with the aid of paid help, but in the 1950s it was assumed that young children needed a mother figure.

My sister was the beneficiary of three medical miracles. She never talked about them in these terms, and probably didn’t see them as miracles, especially the last one. But we did, and were grateful for all three.

When she was born she suffered from celiac. Nobody knew it at first, and there are pictures of her as a toddler with a sickly face and distended stomach. ¹ My parents took her to a doctor in Philadelphia who diagnosed the disease and put her on a gluten-free diet. According to my grandmother Helen, Shar was the first child with celiac successfully diagnosed and saved. Since the disease had been identified and named years before, she must have meant the first child in Philadelphia or with this particular doctor. ² Shar grew up without acquiring a taste for baked goods, and although she did stray off the gluten-free diet occasionally, she basically stayed on it for the rest of her life.

The second miracle was a happy one. Shar lived the life of a single woman in New York city for many years, going out to the Hamptons shared house in the summer, dating, travelling. We often compared our quiet suburban family life with her more glamorous one. But it turned out that she yearned for a child of her own. Although she refused (wisely) to marry Bill, she was willing to have a child with him. She was able to conceive at the advanced age of 42, without any medical intervention, and to give birth safely, with the aid of a C-section. The result was a healthy daughter who became Shar’s closest companion.

The third miracle was probably due to geography. Shar’s apartment on East 94th Street is a five-minute drive from Mount Sinai Hospital. When she had her first massive stroke in November 2015, the medics rushed her to the hospital, where she was saved through hours of surgery and days of intensive care. If she had lived further away from a top-notch hospital, or if her dog had not alerted Lauren that something was wrong in the early hours of the morning, Shar would not have been saved, and we would not have had the nine bonus months of her life. She didn’t see this as a miracle, and always referred to the first stroke as the “incident”, but we knew better and were grateful.

My father was not interested in old things. He did not save any heirlooms. It was hard to get him to talk about the past, and impossible to get him to write anything. Except for one piece. One vivid memory that he was willing to put down on paper.

When he was growing up in Tyrone, in a house built by his grandfather David, the furnace ran on coal.

Here is what he wrote about it. It was such an evocative piece that it makes me sorry I could not persuade him to write more.

“… the coal was delivered to our house one ton at a time.  The coal was hauled by a horse team and wagon, up the steep hill to a point above our house.  Chutes were then placed from the wagon to the cellar, via a window, and the coal was shoveled onto the chute and then rolled down the chute into the cellar.

One memorable instance:  winter day, snow on ground, cold wind, horses straining mightily to haul the wagon up the hill, slipping and sliding backwards sometimes.  Teamsters shouting and whipping, the horses steaming and, finally, the wagon reached to the top of the hill.  What a scene!”

The four brothers, Dick, David, Harry, and Joe at their mother Ada’s funeral in Tyrone.

My father Harry was born in Tyrone, in the hills of central Pennsylvania. His family had been there for three generations. He was born in the house his grandfather David built on Lincoln Avenue, a white frame house that still stands there. David lived in that house first and raised his children there. When David’s son John grew up and married Ada and started a family, David built another house up the hill and moved into it, leaving the lower house for John and Ada and the four boys. My dad said that they traded because the lower house had a bigger garden, very important for raising food for four boys, to supplement John’s salary as a clerk for the Pennsylvania Railroad.

My dad was the third brother, after David and Joe and before Dick. They all had very different personalities. David was outgoing and affable, with a booming voice and a hail-fellow-well-met style; he made friends easily. Joe was sweet and funny. Harry, my dad, was a little reserved, likeable but not as outgoing as David. Dick, the youngest, always seemed shy, but sweet. I would say that David was the friendliest, Joe was the funniest, my dad was the smartest, and Dick was the quietest.

The picture shows the four of them, taken at their mother Ada’s funeral, the last time they were ever together. They had very different life experiences. Dick was the only one of the four who served in the Second World War, and was wounded while in the far east. My father wanted to enlist, to serve his country, but his poor hearing made him ineligible. Joe was deferred because of his work in an air depot in Connecticut, and David was deferred as a minister.

Dick and Doris had two children and the great sadness of their life was that Janet died as a young woman, the first of the cousins to die. Dick and Doris’ son Tommy never married and stayed in Hastings looking after his parents and working as a laborer. Some people would say he never amounted to much, but he was greatly mourned by his friends in the town when he died. Joe was sweet and funny and loved music and dancing. He and Helen had three sons. David would give you a big bear hug when you met him. He went to college, the first in the family to do so, and became a Methodist minister. He and his wife Veda moved around central Pennsylvania, as he was posted to different churches. I lived with them and their two children for a few years when my mother was ill, and after she died, but that’s a story for another post, as is Harry’s story.

The four brothers and their wives are all gone now, and no one from our family still lives in Tyrone. The cousins are scattered and we don’t keep in touch. It’s a shame, but it started when the brothers left Tyrone. There was nothing to keep them there.

My grandmother Ada lived most of her life in Tyrone, a drab town nestled in the hills of Blair County, Pennsylvania. It was the kind of place where everybody knew you and who your parents were, as in “the Herkimer girl married John Lukens’ boy.” The town had seen better days. The boom years of the railroad had long passed by the 1950’s when I first went back to visit my family. Several lines of the Pennsylvania Railroad converged in Tyrone, carrying coal from the northern mines to the cities, and in the thriving years of the early 1900’s many of the men in town worked for the railroad as engineers, car repairmen, or telegraph-men. My grandfather John had worked for the “Pennsy” as a clerk, a steady, respectable job. But as the cities turned to other fuels, the trains stopped running through the town.

By 1950, Ada lived alone, as a widow, in a little apartment house just off the main street. She stood on the front porch and watched for us when we drove to Tyrone to visit on weekends. During the week she worked as a clerk at the Benjamin Franklin store, the “five and dime”, around the corner. I remember seeing her in the aisles there, in the department for hairnets and shoe polish. She was cheerful and spry, with slender legs and a full bosom encased in mysterious garments with rows of laces. She was always turned out in a colorful print dress, never a housedress, even at home. When she took the train to visit us, she wore a hat and white gloves and carried shopping bags full of luscious chocolates from Gardner’s Candies, Tyrone’s most successful store.

Ada and John had raised their four sons in a white frame house on a run-down street on the outskirts of town. Beside the house stretched the extensive family garden, tended by the four boys. After the family savings were wiped out in the Depression, my father raised pepper and tomato seedlings and sold them wrapped in newspaper to earn spending money. Tomato seedlings cost ten cents a bundle; peppers cost fifteen cents since they were harder to grow. But most of the vegetables from the garden ended up in the family kitchen. Ada canned green beans, tomatoes and other vegetables, and cut up cabbage and salted it to make sauerkraut. She picked Concord grapes from the family vines and pressed them to make tangy grape juice.

By the 1950’s the pulp and paper mill employed many of the men of Tyrone. On the east end of town along the Juniata River, it announced its presence with a pungent sulfurous odor that wafted through the town on warm summer evenings. Ada, like many of the townspeople, was used to this, and hardly noticed it. It was the price to be paid for jobs. She did not live to see the closing of the mill in the 1990’s, which sent Tyrone even further into sleepy decline.