A Train For Under The Christmas Tree Read online

  Chapter 6

  America was a country in flux in the summer of 63 or so it seemed to many. The Cuban missile crisis and the fiasco called the Bay of Pigs shook the American psychic. After World War II we were convinced that America could not be defeated, we were the new Rome, but a Rome that could stand forever because we were built on principles of fairness and justice and liberty, ethics that made us different, better than Rome. Yet great threats lay just around the corner. An extended, pointless war in Vietnam and the conspiracy laden murder of a President, especially one loved as much as John Kennedy was loved, seemed impossible, yet these events would alter America like only a few other events in history had done.

  Hanover too was a community in turmoil. Hanover was caught half way between being a Little City or a Large Town, and just like many other towns and cities around the country the effects of the Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System was having a positive and a negative sway on local activity. Yes it was now far easier, faster, and safer for Americans to get from Miami to Philadelphia, or Chicago to Saint Louis, the intended goal, but it was now also possible for a person to live forty miles away from his or her job, which allowed for the great urban flight and the decay of center cities, an unintended result. The rise of shopping centers robbed downtown merchants of customers, the spread of Interstate Commerce allowed for distribution centers to flourish and no longer did communities need to have a local supplier of many goods and services as these could now be provided from afar. This drained local jobs away from downtown areas. Merchants in these downtown areas were slow to react to the changes, having had things their way, so to speak, for many years, thanks to their convenient of location in the center of town and the cluster of merchants offering the customer limited choice but some form of handiness. But shopping centers offered greater choice and had free parking and were near, in many cases, the Interstates.

  Downtown Hanover was still king of the hill in 1963, but the mall north of town was putting more and more pressure on local merchants, some more so than others. One that was indeed feeling the pressure was Myers Pharmacy. The Rexall Drug Store at the mall was slowly but surely leaching customers away from Myers. And Ira Myers was going to put a stop to it

  Chapter 7

  It was Wednesday, August 7th, a few minutes past 10 PM, and Ira is fretting over the decline in sales that his establishment has suffered over the past few years. The Rexall at the shopping center was slowly sifting away his customer base. It wasn’t awful, yet. He was still able to make a profit, pay his bills, take a week-long vacation in February to visit with his brother in Boca, life was good. But he hated the Rexall. They made a mockery of the pharmacy business. They sold candy and greeting cards and cheap toys in aisles next to aspirin and bandages and worse of all they sold tobacco products. Didn’t they know that tobacco products hurt people, or was that their plan, to make their customers sick so they’d need to buy more medicines?

  Never-the-less he needed to turn the tide and he needed to do it soon. His wife, Evelyn, had been after him to modernize the store, add some character and bring it up to date. Ira had resisted her chiding, saying that he liked the store just the way it was, it had character and was full of tradition, but in truth he just didn’t want to be forced to do something by people like those who put in the Rexall.

  Ira studied the drawings of a new store design that his wife had prepared for him, back at the beginning of the summer, and Ira rejected them at once, claiming that business was about to turn around with the Centennial celebration of the Battle of Hanover at the end of June, and Hanover Days Celebration, which were to take place from the ninth till the nineteenth of July, during which every night but Friday and Sunday had an event planned; including a parade, a variety stage show right on the Square, and a new car raffle. But there had been no noticeable upswing in business, in fact, despite indications that there may have been an increase in foot traffic in the store, sales dipped slightly.

  Actually, Ira liked the design his wife had made, he kind of wished he’d been the one to come up with a lot of the great ideas. Ideas like custom sized shelves, a raised platform pharmaceutical preparation area with slotted shuttered windows that would allow privacy for the pharmacist while still permitting a full view of the entire store, a double bow window at the front of the store that would allow for ample advertisement and yet large enough to allow lots of outside light and a clear view of the activity on the square and a steel door designed to look like a country cottage door but on hinges that allowed the door to swing both ways. The plan also allowed for non-pharmaceutical items to be sold, but the plan was to have them be seasonal and of very high quality or very unusual. Some of her ideas had to go, of course, like the paint having lavender highlight trim against gloss white walls, the upside down candy gum drop shaped hanging lamps, and the new sign for the front of the store changing the name of the store from ‘Myers Pharmacy’, a good and trusted name for nearly twenty years, to ‘Ye Olde Pharmaceutical Company’, that just wasn’t going to happen, old with an ‘e’, she has got to be kidding. The best part of her plan was the way she staged the work such that at no time would the store need to be closed to business. It was a touch of genius.

  Chapter 8

  When Ira Myers finished his redesign work, he had had limited success over the Thanksgiving Holiday, which he wrote off as being due to the death of John Kennedy and the subsequent events with Jack Ruby murdering that Oswald fellow. America had come to a stop, well actually the country slowed down considerably, but everyone’s attention was on the Kennedy’s and little Caroline and Jack Junior were the darlings of the whole world, with their mother just one step behind them. Ira kind of liked John Kennedy, despite the fact that he was a Democrat and a Catholic, he thought that the man did make a good President, especially on the subject of the economy, but the mess he made in Cuba was unforgivable, thank God he didn’t vote for him, of course Richard Nixon would have never blotched anything as badly as what Kennedy had done. Christmas was another matter altogether; nobody would allow the doings of the Kennedy Assassination to interfere with their Christmas.

  Ira loved Christmas, always his favorite time of year. He had big plans for his seasonal department for the Christmas Season. Hand painted ornaments from Germany and France would be offered, stuff you couldn’t get anywhere near Hanover. Hand-made Christmas Wreaths, with local pine and silk flowers, silk flowers had just not been available before this in Hanover. He convinced Lionel Trains to allow his store to have exclusive rights to sell their Chesapeake and Ohio Cannonball Express. He was able to convince them by purchasing fifty of the sets, the total allocation that the Lionel Marketing Department had assigned for the York and Adams county area for that set for the ’63 year. Ira would sell the sets at his cost and he intended to give one away in a drawing that he had planned for the evening of Friday December the 20th.

  Chapter 9

  The day Jack Kennedy died, a bit of America died along with him. Word of Alex Huxley’s death on the exact same day set about a belief that the Brave New World complete with Big Brother was just around the corner. The youth of America, the baby boomers born in the financial and technological explosion following the Second World War, and raised on a steady input of broadcast television, suddenly became disenchanted with their fragile and fickle existence.

  But America had been at this cross road for some time. Mass transit and the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System was only one of the many factors pulling at the fabric of the culture in the United States: television; Detroit; the Music Industry; sports; Hollywood; and many other dynamics were in play. People like Dave Garraway, Arthur Godfrey, Ed Sullivan, Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley were trusted friends invited into our homes daily with subtle messages about the expectations that we should be living with. Then there was Detroit, which was producing the best cars in the world. American know-how was on parade and we thought that the king would never die, yeah the Japanese were building cars and the Germa
ns had the Mercedes Benz and the funny little Volkswagen, the Italians had the Lamborghini and the Fiat, but these were specialty markets and no threat to the juggernaut known as Detroit and we thought that it would stay like that forever. The Music Industry was not yet ready for the British Invasion but the explosion known as Motown was taking place and as a result the young people in this country were taking a very serious look at race relationships and how things just didn’t seem fair. It wasn’t fair that white artist like Pat Boone would be allowed to steal a hit from a black artist and turn it into a gold record and the black artist got nothing for that effort. But slowly black artist gained radio airwave time and their music got out and the young people loved it. Sports also contributed to this turn in social conscience that was slowly starting to sweep through the country. Black athletes like Willie Mays and Oscar Robertson, were becoming heroes and role models for many of the young people, both black and white. This gave raise to many young blacks looking for their fair share, things like being able to ride wherever they wished on a bus or eat at whichever café they chose. And although many whites opposed these actions, many also supported it and this fostered other social defiance to garner liberties. Movies also started to portray blacks in leading roles that were not the slap stick roles that had been previously reserved for blacks. Likewise Hollywood and television to a subtle yet lesser degree was introducing America to a subculture based upon the big three: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The message was if it feels good then do it.

  Hanover was no different

  Chapter 10

  In 1963 Hanover boasted two hundred and twenty four industries, while the vast majority of the industries were small, hiring less than twenty workers; many of them were large, hiring many workers. You had Keystone Wire Cloth; Hanover Wire Cloth; Acme Industries, makers of quilts and bed spreads; Warehime Canning, producer of Hi-C drinks; Middleburg Industries, children clothing; Hanover Canning, the green bean and kidney bean canners; Revonah Mills, manufactures of fine carpeting; Pentex Box Company, makers of packing and shipping materials; Pitts Wood Heels, supplying heels to the shoe industry; Doubleday Press; Utz Potato Chips; Snyder Foods; Wege Pretzels; Freeman Shoes; and the granddaddy of them all Hanover Shoe.

  When Harper D. Sheppard, the marketing specialist, and H.C. Myers- no relation to Ira - a master shoemaker, shook hands in 1899 and created the Hanover Shoe Company, they turned Hanover from a sleepy little agriculture center to an industrial powerhouse. Their concept was to produce a quality yet affordable shoe for the working class person, and they did so by eliminating the middlemen. Their plan was to manufacture, distribute and sell the shoes themselves at the inexpensive price of $2.50 a pair. In twenty short years, they had established dominance in the shoe market from Boston to Richmond and from Philadelphia to Chicago. By 1963 the price of shoes that they sold had indeed gone up to just about $10.00 a pair, but they were still a fine high quality shoe that no other similar quality shoemaker could match for the price and they had saturated that market area, but success had its cost. First and foremost was that it was increasingly harder to hire and keep good workers who were willing to work for wages that would keep the cost of their shoes low. The success of their operation attracted other entrepreneurs to the area, some to support the shoe industry, others to compete directly against them by hiring away skilled and trained workers, while others were just looking for a place where people were known to be hard workers. The people that lived in Hanover Pennsylvania were hard workers.

  Take the example of Pius Dunlap. Pius dropped out of school in the eighth grade to go to work to help support his family. He was fourteen years old and was a strapping lad with a good intelligence and a strong back. He was assigned a position at the end of a production line where he would assemble wire cloth into shippable quantities. This required him to measure the wire cloth as it came off the line to match out bound order ticket. When sufficient lengths were reached, Pius would roll off a tare percentage of extra cloth to assure that the customer would always be certain that their order was complete, then he would cut the cloth, bound the roll with strips of baling wire tag it with an identification number, weigh the bale and record the weight on the ID tag and stage the bale for removal to the proper storage or staging location within the factory. Pius was so good at that job that he continued to do it for the next sixty years, retiring at the age of seventy four. Sixty years at the same position. During that time the measuring devices were upgraded with newer technology but the operator remained the same. And in sixty years Pius missed work for other than holidays and vacation – 5 days per year – only eleven days. During those sixty years Pius married, and he lived for six years with his wife’s family on High Street in Hanover which required him to ride his bicycle to work each day. But he and his wife saved their money and he purchased a house on Fulton Street about two blocks from the factory, where Pius and his wife raised their family and for the next fifty four years Pius walked to work, would walk home for lunch break every day, regardless of the weather.

  The family would rise every Sunday and they’d dress in their Sunday duds, and walk the four blocks to Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church. They owned a car, throughout most of this time but it was always an older used vehicle and used sparingly for shopping trips or emergencies, or an occasional Sunday drives into the countryside around Hanover to enjoy a gentle spring day, with a picnic next to a lake or a stream in the area

  When Pius retired he was given a gold pocket watch and a check for $3200.00, which he used to purchase a cranberry red Olds Cutlass, the first new car that he had ever owned. Pius had family that lived in Texas and he and his wife made plans to go visit and they would do so in his new car. Maps were marked, plans laid out for a trip to Dallas, with a stop- over in Nashville Tennessee, where they would visit The Grand Ole Opry. Pius did the driving since his wife, like many other women of her age, had never learned to drive. They arrived at their destination and were greeted with a large meal, and then were shown to the guest room where Pius and his wife retired for the evening only to have Pius suffer a stroke during the night which resulted in him being rushed to the hospital where he stayed for the next ten days. Pius recovered from the stroke but was unable to drive. His son flew to Dallas and got his parents on a flight home and then drove the car back to the little house on Fulton Street where it sat un-driven for the next four years, except for a few trips to the inspection station to keep the car’s inspection current or to get gas as nearly every day, at some point in time during the day, Pius would go to his car and start the engine and he would listen to the sound of the engine for a few minutes and then he’d listen to the radio for a few more minutes before shutting the car down. He did that until the day before he died. Neighbors said that they suspected that old Pius had passed when they realized that he had not visited his car in over 24 hours.

  Pius was a rare breed of man, hard worker dedicated family man, true to his job and his country and his God. Hanover had many more people similar to Pius.

  Chapter 11

  Hanover Shoe wanted to expand its operation, and yet they were facing increasing pressure for wages. For years the Sheppard’s had kept a firm hold on the people of Hanover. When outside influence threatened, perceived or real, to bring new or radical ideas to town, the Sheppard’s did all that they could do to squash them, for example when the YMCA started a chapter in Hanover in 1938. They, the organizers of the YMCA chapter, came to town and rented a building on York Street just across the street from the McAllister Hotel. The building was a derelict, but they went to work to fix it up, even had plans, as membership grew, to install a swimming pool and basketball courts. The folks at Hanover Shoe saw this as a negative influence bringing in outside ideas that might have an adverse effect on their workers, so the next thing you know the Hanover Youth Club was born. A building on Carlisle Street only a few blocks from both the High School, the Junior High School, and the Shoe Factory was selected, and it had a pool and basketball courts as we
ll as squash and handball courts, tennis courts, bowling alleys, the works and membership cost was half of that of the YMCA, and if your parents worked at the Shoe Factory, it was only half of that. The YMCA shriveled up and left town. Then, six months later, The Hanover Youth Club, closed its doors, and six weeks after that the building reopened as the Republican Club.

  But the Sheppard’s could not shut down one major influence from outside, television. By 1963, 93% of the homes in Hanover had at least one television set, and over 10% of those had two sets, a handful even had three. These televisions were bringing in outside news, from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and, worst of all, New York. News of the outside world, and images of how that all worked was being streamed into Hanover every day. This in turn put pressure on wages, the good folks of Hanover saw what people in other parts of the country had as a standard of living and they wanted their piece of the pie. The Sheppard’s were not planning on sharing the pie with anybody that they didn’t have to.

  Chapter 12

  The Interstate Highway System that was now spreading across the country but it bypassed Hanover. York, Chambersburg, Carlisle, and Harrisburg were all connected but not Hanover. Hanover Shoe remained stuck with the rail system that they had had since 1900, and in an increasingly competitive market, that simply was not good enough to allow them to expand their markets. A team of junior executives was formed by Lawrence Sheppard- grandson of Harper - which included his son and two son-in-laws and they were assigned the task of finding a new location from which to manufacture and ship shoes. The facility in Hanover was declining, and pressure for higher wages made it simply not worth the expense that would be needed to keep it up to date. They would keep the old factory working temporarily, supplying the customer base in the northeast, but the mid-western and southern markets would be siphoned off to a new facility that would have less competition for labor cost and better access to the Interstate system, once the new locality was stable, all production would be moved to that facility. Several locations fit the bill, and Lawrence himself made the final decision, the new facility would be in Paducah Kentucky.