John Cembruch and John Cyr in Germany - 1946. Cembruch is on the left in the left picture and on the right in the right picture.
The wheels were turning in my 10-year-old mind. Remember, it was 1937 and we were still in the Depression. There were no jobs for kids. After speaking to me in Polish, Mr. Sniderman and the Russian explained their dilemma. The Russian worked for the company and was not allowed to pick junk as they were paying his salary. Mr. Sniderman was not allowed in the dump at all, so the Russian would gather rags and Mr. Sniderman would sneak into the dump after hours and buy the rags. They knew I saw them dealing so they asked me not to say anything. That’s when I made them a deal they couldn’t refuse. I would get some of the kids to help me pick scrap metal, barrels and rags. We would throw all the rags behind the Russian’s shed so that made him happy. Mr. Sniderman would show up after the Russian went home for the night. Mr. Sniderman would buy the junk from us. Now this went on for eight years, until I went into the Army. I know that Drapers knew what was going on but they never once tried to stop it even though they could have because it was private property.
Nineteen thirty-nine and the war was coming. Scrap metal was constantly going up in price and we made a lot of money, plus when the war started we were considered patriotic. Mr. Sniderman made tons. I was stunned in the early 60s when the Russian who retired in the 50s and probably never made more than $25 a week. He died and left an estate of $150,000. Mr. Sniderman was my mentor. We fought like cats and dogs. He was constantly trying to cheat us on the weights and what category certain junk would come under. When I felt cheated, I would ask him for a ride out of the dump on the back of his truck. I would have a couple of kids stand in front of the back window of the truck. Then I was stand on the back of the truck and throw stuff off. Then I would go back and pick it up and put it with the metal we gathered for the next day. This went on for years with no animosity between us. It was just doing business. What this gentleman taught me about business I could not learn in college. Not even come close.
Fall, 1938: I got up, dressed, had breakfast and walked to the Dutcher Street School. Kids were talking about a bad hurricane with winds over 100 miles per hour crossing Long Island. Did the town officials send us home? No! Like every other day, we went home for lunch and had to come back for the afternoon session. By the time school closed at 3:30, the winds were blowing 45 to 50 miles an hour. I got home, changed my clothes and went out. Kids in those days were always outdoors. By 5 p.m. the wind was really blowing. Standing near the Freedom Street gate of Drapers, I saw a large section of a three to four stories high wall come crashing down. Some kids told us the bridge over the railroad yard was swaying in the wind. This was the bridge that spanned the railroad yard starting at the Coal & Ice Company to the library on Hopedale Street. The bridge had a hot top road. The sidewalks were made out of boards along the bridge. I was trying to entice guys to go on the bridge with me. In a few seconds the winds really started blowing. Then came a big gust. That gust lifted the wooden walkway from one side of the bridge to the other. It lifted it up over the railing. A quarter mile of the walkway laid destroyed on the railroad tracks, 25 feet below. It had been raining and we were all soaked. It was 6:30 so we decided to go home. The storm ended that night around midnight. In the morning just about every tree in town had been blown down. Wires were down everywhere. A lot of chimneys were down or hanging over the edge of roofs. Believe it or not, school was in session. Did I go to school? No way! There was gold lying in the streets. I got a hatchet out of our cellar and started working my way down the street pulling the copper wires out of the trees that came off of the light poles. I cut them in long lengths, rolled them up, ran home and threw the wire into the cellar window. I also stripped the lead flashing off the chimneys that fell to the ground. Four or five weeks after the storm, things got back to normal. No officials came knocking at our door so I sold the copper for close to $125. That was close to six weeks pay for someone working in the mill. To this day I never understood why grownups didn’t take advantage of making extra money by gathering up copper and lead. I guess it was the fear that they might lose their jobs at Drapers because the unseen “them” might not want anyone picking up the copper.
The Seven Sisters gang was not all bad. As we were getting older, we were betting more and more in trouble. One hot summer day, 1940 or 1941, we were desperate for a new idea for something to do. We were hanging out in the woods between the Seven Sisters and the dump when someone found a dead cat. That’s when I suggested we bury it properly. Someone went to the dump and got a large glass jar and cover and we buried the cat. This was with full honors, the Seven Sisters gang standing at attention. That’s when the idea struck me. Let’s make a pet cemetery. The gang spent the next two days cleaning a small patch in the woods, making pathways with white painted stones. We busted our butts. A beautiful cemetery for pets. A couple of guys were sent to the dump for gathering caskets – glass jars or tin containers. Some guys were sent to the dump to look for customers for our cemetery. They came back with a couple of dead rats, a dead dog, and one more dead cat. Another group went over by the ice house near the pond where the German lady, Mrs. Kunz from the Seven Sisters, used to feed the birds and they brought back a half dozen birds. We buried all these animals with little white crosses. This was very impressive. Then someone told his parents what we were doing. The next day a couple of disbelieving parents showed up. When the word got out, all the women from Progress Street and Bancroft Park and other surrounding streets came. After work, some of the men showed up. By the next day a couple of town officials were there. The best surprise of all was when the Milford Daily News showed up and took pictures. They printed a story about what these wonderful kids were doing, not wasting their time that summer.
Most of the kids by then either owned a .22 rifle of a BB gun. The dog and cat that we first buried died of natural causes. The rest came with the help of the Seven Sisters gang.
The town had a lot of great programs for kids. I think that just about every kid in town knew how to swim. Once the gang learned to swim, we never went to the town bathhouse, because of the segregation. We swam at the old icehouse. Town officials tried for a couple of years to get us to stop and finally gave up and let us along.
There is something I’d like to inject here because the more I write, the more I remember. All the years growing up in Hopedale and the bad things that people did to me, I can’t remember any animosity, hard feelings, or hate for anyone. As a very young boy, all I remember is having this feeling of being free. Regardless of what someone said or did, no one could make me lose that feeling of freedom. That feeling is still with me to this day, and because of that feeling, I am living a great life. The only regret I have is quitting school. I believe the four years of high school that I gave up took many years out of my life. Now I keep reading and studying to make up for those four lost years.
We had no school buses. Everyone walked to school. If my mind serves me correctly, the kids that lived a certain distance from school brought their lunch and stayed in school all day. The rest of us had to go home for lunch.
All of our regular teachers were spinsters. Married schoolteachers were used to fill in part time. The 8th grade had a male teacher, Mr. B, who was also the principal of the lower grades. One of his jobs was to kick butt of the guys and troublemakers. And he did. I only had one or two minor problems with Mr. B. He took me down to the boys’ room and shoved me around a little. I don’t remember any kid complaining about him, because when he shoved you, you definitely deserved it. When I told him six months in advance that I was quitting, he tried to convince me not to leave school.
In the 7th grade we had a 4’8” teacher at about 85 pounds. This lady would have walked away with any honors for “Teacher of the Year” award. You must remember that when you marched into the classroom in the morning, you stayed in that room all day and Miss Cressey would teach you every subject. The only subjects she did not teach were music and art. Someone else taught those subjects. If you went into her class at the beginning of the year and didn’t understand any subject she taught, by the end of the year you definitely understood all the subjects. Miss Cressey was one of the hardest driving and no nonsense persons I ever came in contact with in my whole lifetime.
When WWII started, I was 15 years old. Almost nothing changed in Hopedale. Drapers was still producing looms. The war effort needed cloth, so Drapers wasn’t converted into some other industry. They did add on a four-story addition to the shop on Hopedale Street. That part of the shop was used to make howitzers. After the war it was converted into the shipping room. But everything else remained pretty much the same. Drapers ran the shop and the town and the people had no input into running the town. Drapers, to people then, was like the Federal Government is today. People want “Big Brother” to take care of them. In any election in Hopedale there were five positions open and only five people ran and never two for the same position. Remember, that up until the war started, no working people paid income or sales taxes. I guess Drapers paid for the beautiful par with tennis courts, baseball fields, Community House, bathhouse and ski hill. They had the right to run them.
1943: I was 17 years old and just about everybody in town told me I would either be dead or in jail before I was 21. In the fall of 1943, I finally got caught. Two other guys and I stole a car battery out of the motor in the ski hill hut. We tried to start an old car. The battery was dead so we threw it away. The cops found it and got one of the guys to rat me out. I was told that the police wanted to make an example out of me. I got one month in jail. But was sentenced to one year on probation. On the day of my 18th birthday I sat in the police station being offered a deal I couldn’t refuse. They could not draft me while I was on probation and I had nine more months to go. They would drop the charges, and if I went into the service and came out with an Honorable Discharge, all the charges would be erased. Two weeks later I was in Boston for my physical, and four weeks later I was on the troop train to Fort McCullen, Alabama. In seventeen weeks, the Army turned my life around. After one and a half years in Germany, I got out with the Honorable Discharge. The Army taught me something I lived by all my life. Three words: “No excuse, Sir.”
Believe it or not, when I got back to Hopedale two years later, nothing had changed. They refused to clean my record and finally I threatened that I was going to the Veterans’ Administration. They backed off and cleaned up the criminal record.
1946: The war is over and the whole world is changing. Unions have gotten footholds into large corporations. How were the people of Hopedale progressing? Not too good. (My opinion.) They settled right back into the old routine. Drapers would say, “jump.” The people would say “how high?” My reply was “why?” With this attitude, the people, Drapers and town officials had a new name for me – “troublemaker.” My mother still lived in the house in Seven Sisters because my sister was working in Drapers and paying about $2.75 a week for rent.
Between 1946 and 1950 I worked for Drapers three different times. Once for a week, the second for one month, and the third time for one year. (1949 – 1950) The third time was working in the maintenance paint gang. (The same group that tried cleaning up the Roosevelt sign a few years before.) I must be truthful here. Because I could draw and sketch somewhat, Drapers offered to send me to night school at Worcester Trade to learn to be a sign painter. This meant a job for life in Drapers. I was predicting that Drapers would be closed in fifteen to twenty years. People called me nuts.
I quit my painting job and went trucking for the next four years. In the mid-50s Drapers sold off the houses, and you had to be there to see it. People turned on each other over a few inches of land between their houses. Like other houses, the Seven Sisters had a hot top road that went behind all seven. This was for the garbage men so they could pick up and it wouldn’t have to sit in front of the houses. This made it great because everyone was purchasing a car and they could drive on the road and park behind their houses. Because the road went over a few feet of the two end homes’ property, the minute they took ownership of their homes, people in the two end homes dug up the road. So now, the only way people could get to their backyard was to dig up their lawns. I am sure if those fourteen families could have worked out some way of leaving that road there, a road that had been there for years, it would have benefited everyone. Most of the people who lived in Hopedale walked to work for years. If there was an empty lot, people walking to work would cut across it to save steps. When these empty lots were sold with a house, within a short time there was a fence to stop people from walking there. Up until this time, Drapers was still running the town. If a town position was open, only one person was running for it. But things were starting to change. There were a few people starting to question – “Why?”
From 1950 to 1956: I had been married and lived in California one year and then in Milford, Massachusetts, but I was still connected to Hopedale and Drapers from 1952 until 1957. I worked for Hopedale Coal & Ice, driving an oil tanker from Providence, Rhode Island, to Hopedale. My job was to keep the million-gallon tank in Draper’s lower yard near the foundry full of oil to heat the factory. Hopedale Coal & Ice was owned by Bill Gannett. The Gannets were tied in with the Drapers through marriage. [Bill Gannett’s mother was the daughter of Gov. Eben Draper.] Between the Gannetts and Drapers, they held controlling interests in Draper Corporation. To give you an example of how much Draper still tried to control people, from the day the coal company hired me, my job was part-time. I worked five months through the winter and worked for Rosenfeld Ready-Mix six months in the summer. So every year everyone in town knew I got laid off from the coal company in April.
1955 – 1956: Drapers was having problems. They had let the Japanese in the 40s see how the looms were being made; now they were cutting into Draper’s market. Sitting in the town hall spa having coffee, people were talking rumors about Drapers selling or closing. Someone asked me if I heard anything. I answered that all I knew was that I was getting laid off in a week. The floodgates were open and one guy says, “If they’re getting rid of John, they’re not buying any more oil to heat the plant so they must be closing.” This was after my first trip to Providence for oil. I used to make three trips a day, six days a week. When I got back from my second trip, and had lunch at the spa, the rumor was, “Some big shot at Drapers let it slip out that Drapers wasn’t buying any more oil and the million-gallon tank was empty.” (It was full to the top.) “They must be closing.”
When I got back from my three trips and was pulling into the yard to park my truck, Mr. Hall, the boss of the coal company, came out of the office like he was shot out of a cannon, screaming that I was getting him fired. When I got him settled down, I took him to the spa and Norm Hanley, the owner, backed me up in what I had said. With the big shots in Drapers, it was still the same. The “Polack” was to blame. Drapers had a new approach. If someone uttered or thought the word “union,” they would say, “We will close Hopedale and move to Spartanburg.” (Spartanburg, South Carolina, where they had a large foundry.) In years of questioning, I could never get an answer as to who “they” were.
I quit the coal company in ’57 and had bought a house at 116 Freedom Street. This was across the street from the Seven Sisters. I got a job as a long distance truck driver.
Around 1958 the country was in a recession. There were a few large trucking companies that were unionizing the long distance truckers and the independent owners. These were having a hard time. I had borrowed money on my house, bought a tractor and went into business. After a few weeks, the truck engine blew up and I was out of business. Several months later I lost my house. There was unemployment insurance and some welfare. All over the country people were struggling. But Hopedale was proud and took care of their own. But like everything, you didn’t get anything for nothing. There were always strings attached. At this time, one of my sons had pneumonia and had to be in Milford Hospital. No money, no job. I was talking to the Veterans’ Administration in Milford and was told that the V.A. would help in cases like this. However, I would have to talk to the V.A. man in Hopedale. W, the fire chief, who was approved and appointed by Drapers, was the man. Explaining my case, W came up with a big “no.” He would not help, the reason being that there were jobs open at Drapers. It was a definite “take the job” because the V.A. would not help. I know that W lived to regret the day he forced me to take the job in Drapers. I had my choice of two jobs. Drill press operator or inside transportation, which was moving parts from one department to another with fork trucks and jetty.
I loved the job from day one because you had freedom to think and you worked all over the shop. The best part was working with the millwrights, moving and installing machinery from 500 lbs. To 50,0000 lbs. Four months after starting my new job, I was sent by my boss to the foundry storage room. Orders were to transfer 400 or 500 cases of emery cloth from the foundry storage to dump station. You put the cases into dump trucks and took them to the area which used to be my old stomping ground, “the dump.”
Drapers had a policy. Anything they were throwing away you could buy for a token dollar amount or the price of scrap. I couldn’t believe my eyes! Four hundred cases of unopened emery cloth. Observation and a quick count told me only twenty cases on the bottom of the huge pile were wet. They stunk to high heaven. Knowing human nature, and thanks to Mr. Sniderman, I made a deal with the gentleman in charge of the storage room. If I could buy the cloth, I would load it on pallets myself. Otherwise, it would go to the dump. He would have to help me load. I was broke and in debt for $9,000 to $10,000. At this time this was two to three years salary from my trucking business. Not knowing what it was going to cost to purchase the cloth, I went to two of my neighbors who were bosses. They both rejected my offer to make them partners for half the payment to purchase it. My offer to Drapers was going to be between $250 and $500. After talking to a half dozen other people to come into the deal, and listening to all the old excuses that they wouldn’t be throwing it away if it wasn’t any good, nobody would buy it, I thought to myself, “To hell with these people.” I went and saw the engineer in charge of the emery cloth. The fellow in charge of the storage room timed it right so he could help me purchase the cloth. We showed up at his boss’s office. He told his boss it was junk and they had no need for it anymore. This guy wasn’t here, I found out a couple of days later, to help me but to help himself. He thought I was an idiot. The way he was thinking, if I bought it, he wouldn’t have to repack the boxes onto the pallets. I had promised to do it myself. He was glad to help me. Well, I almost fell out of the chair when the engineer told me it would cost me $5.00 for the lot. I rented a truck and hauled my cloth over to an old garage on Lake Street. Within three months, I had sold all of it.
Purchase cloth $5.00
Rent truck 50.00
Rent garage 40.00
Run ad in paper 100.00
Salesman commission 8,000.00
Total cost 8,195.00
Sold cloth for 25,000.00
My profit $16,000.00
In the months to follow, every time the story was told, the numbers seemed to get larger. I had a new nickname – “The Sandpaper King.” And, believe me, the company did question me on what happened. My lesson in life from Mr. Sniderman, two years in the Army, and being a road scholar (driving a truck all over the country), was paying off. From all my observations, people in Hopedale were different in the way they thought about life.
Just about everyone that lived in town and worked at Drapers really believed that the sun rose and set on Draper Corporation. In the 50s, the unions were knocking on Draper’s door. Workers at large companies were striking to unionize. I actually had people telling me that they were glad other companies were being unionized and out on strike because it would make the pay go up in Drapers. When I asked if they would like to unionize, the answer was “no.” They couldn’t see paying some gangster to ride around in a Cadillac and represent them. Then I would ask if they were willing to donate a couple of dollars to help some people who were on strike a long time. In the long run, this would help us. The answer was “no.” They didn’t want to get involved. This was the same kind of mentality that went on during World War II with the Jews. Being able to speak Polish fluently, and being in Germany in 1945-46, I was able to translate for the Army. I talked to thousands of Jews and displaced persons. One question I always asked was, “How could a handful of soldiers herd hundreds of people into a given spot and shoot them when all these hundreds could have overwhelmed the few soldiers? This way the majority could survive.” I have never gotten an answer to this question.
Two and a half years later, I get up and go to work one morning and, lo and behold, who’s standing at the entrances to the shop? Steel Workers of America, passing out leaflets! I accepted the literature and put it into my pocket, figuring I would read it on coffee break. My neighbors took the leaflets and were thanking the gentlemen from the union for being there and for coming to Hopedale. But once inside the shop, they all to a man did the same thing. They looked around to see if there was a hidden camera or a boss standing around watching. With great pride, they threw the leaflets into the garbage bins. Again a question. If they are the enemy (the union), shouldn’t we read what they have to offer? I must admit that the few women deserve a pat on the back because they flatly stood up to the union guys and refused it.
I mentioned earlier that W, the veterans’ agent, forced me back to work in a degrading way. Well, payback time, W. Most people running things or having jobs with some authority love to shove it down other people’s throats. These people are called middle management. My point here is that two people out of two thousand came forward to work for the union. One of the two, was forced to work for Drapers by W, the VA rep…me! I went to a union meeting in Milford. There were only about a dozen people there from Drapers. Up until a few years before this, any company could fire an employee helping to unionize a shop. The law had changed and now the Federal Government protected you from this old practice. You had to be careful. The best way was to come out in the open and the way to do this was to stand in front of the main door of the shop. This was the area that the big shots used and the leaflets were passed out there to be very visible. Out of the dozen at the union meeting, only two of us opted to come out in the open. Myself and another man of my age, Joe DeRoach, were the ones. I was astounded that only two guys out of about 2000 eligible to vote for the union came out in the open.
This was the time I called it the lay down time for the American male. What happened? Hopedale only a few years earlier had their share of World War II heroes and people who died for the cause of freedom. Were we going backwards? I stood out in front of the main door every morning for months. My job was to make sure that all the big shots who ran Drapers got their copy of our literature. All the highest-ranking people were very polite and thanked me. A couple of middle management people gave me some derogatory remarks. I told them to take the material home and go into the smallest room in their house and do what they saw fit to do with it. And again, almost all the women refused to take the pamphlets and told me to my fact that they were not interested in unions. This made me admire these women very much for standing up for their beliefs. Through this period, most of the men in my neighborhood would not walk with me to work or stop and talk with me. They labeled me “Trouble Maker” again.
The union lost the election that year. The afternoon we lost the election, I was summoned to the main office. At this meeting was the President of Drapers and several other high ranking Draper people. The man from the steel workers union and the government officer running the election were there also. This government attorney informed Drapers that even though the union lost the election, Drapers had two people who had better than union protection. We had the United States of America’s government protecting us. Those two people were Joe DeRoach and myself. The next year and a half, Drapers treated me with kid gloves. I swear I could have gone to work in the morning and laid down on the boss’s desk and taken a nap and no one would have said a word. My direct boss’s name was “Goodie.” (Cannot remember his last name.) Goodie didn’t have a good reputation in the shop because he treated everyone in the department the same. (25 people in all) This was not the Draper way. There were certain people who thought that because of certain circumstances, they should be treated better. They really believed that jus doing your job had nothing to do with earning your way in life.
A year and a half after losing the election, I quit Drapers and went back to long distance trucking. A year or so later, the union got into Drapers. Now, all the people in town who would not talk to me were running around saying the union this, or the union that, or our union. The union did absolutely nothing for the people in Drapers. Remember, the union is not “they.” The union is the people who work in the factory.
A couple of years later Drapers sold out to Rockwell. It did not take long to realize what a loser they had bought. Rockwell International, a worldwide conglomerate, snuffed out Drapers like a match in the wind. They closed the doors and left town. I think I was a year off my prediction, fifteen years earlier.
Rockwell took over Draper Corporation in 1967. The plant was closed in 1980.
About the Author
John Cembruch
Born February 8, 1927, Hopedale, Mass.
Lived in Hopedale 1927 – 1945
U.S. Army, Germany, 1945 – 1946
Hopedale, 1946 – 1951
California, 1952
Milford, 1953 – 1956
Hopedale, 1957 – 1965
Millivlle, 1966 – 1978
Clinton, Connecticut, 1978 –
1968 – 1987 CEM Trucking, operated trucks hauling chemicals all over the U.S.
1985 – 2000 President of Connecticut Tank/Trailer Repair, Inc.
I believe I would have been in the Class of 1946/47. If there are any of you out there, I would love to hear from you.
1-860-669-8401 jcembr@gmail.com
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