Roebling: Company Town (eBook)

Steel, Immigrants, Moonshine and Crap Tables

Louis Borbi (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
454 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-3366-6 (ISBN)

ROEBLING: Company Town is the first ever book that chronicles the life of the workers who made the wire for the George Washington Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge and the wire rope to win two World Wars. Follow the newly arriving immigrants from Eastern Europe as they work around three thousand degrees open-hearth furnaces, endure epidemics, Prohibition and moonshine, the Great Depression, Blue Center football, and segregation. Using hundreds of interviews, antiquated newspapers and pictures gathered over the past fifty years, Louis Borbi tells the story of ROEBLING that will keep generations of readers spellbound.

Steel--the backbone of a growing industrial nation. Roebling--John A. Roebling and Sons Company, well-known for building the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, was ready to expand into the steel-making business. Land--the right piece of property was located alongside the Delaware River just eleven miles south of its Trenton, NJ plant. Workforce--it was an era when immigrants were welcomed for the labor they could provide. In ROEBLING: Company Town 1905-1947, discover how these major components worked together to build the unique community of Roebling, NJ. Louis Borbi, a life-long resident of Roebling with a keen interest and passion for its history, meticulously compiled a wealth of information over the past fifty years. He interviewed hundreds of residents, collected news articles and pictures of bygone days, and searched through century-old employment records. His family members, at one time numbering over fifty people, all lived in Roebling and many worked in the plant. The author also worked in many departments of the plant during summer breaks while teaching at the Roebling Public School. Through vivid descriptions and dialogue influenced by these reference materials, Borbi enables readers to step into the past and learn about everyday life in ethnic neighborhoods. He follows the journey of the impoverished Eastern European immigrants to America where a job and a home awaited. It is their story. Discover how they worked around open-hearth furnaces with the temperature fluctuating near 3,000 degrees to make the wire for the George Washington Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge and the wire cables to help win two World Wars. Read about the epidemics, Prohibition and moonshine, the Great Depression, Blue Center football, and the town Walter Winchell proclaimed as having the biggest gambling joint east of the Mississippi River in 1947. With their faith and perseverance, the immigrants and their children adapted to the American way of life while preserving their distinct ethnic traditions which added to the unique flavor of the melting pot that formed in Roebling. Nurtured by the Roebling Company, a community was built where pride in their workmanship and the contributions they made to their newly-adopted country, America, flourished. Roebling was a great place to grow up. Roebling took care of its people, while they were busy taking care of the world.

Prologue

He counted three chimes coming from the Seth Thomas grandfather clock in the downstairs hallway. For the past four hours, he lay in bed tossing and turning. His mind tells him to go ahead with the project, and then something tells him not to. He doesn’t know what way to go. His heart is racing, and his underclothes are soused in perspiration. He cannot clear his mind of tomorrow’s ensuing meeting with Jacob D. Hoffner, owner of the land he is considering buying. This encounter will be crucial in determining the future of the John A. Roebling and Sons Company.

Charles G. Roebling was born the third son of John A. Roebling in 1849. He grew up to be a master builder and mechanical engineer like his father and founder of the Company. Charles became president of the wire rope company after his brother, Washington A. Roebling, was struck down by the caisson disease in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. From that day forward, his life was consumed with the desire for the expansion of the plant and the design of new machinery. It was his premonition that this was essential to keep ahead of the competition in the bridge building business.

What Charles did not realize was the fact that tomorrow morning’s meeting would not only change his life, but the lives of thousands of others forever. That is the basis for this story.

* * *

My interest in Roebling history was sparked shortly after I began my teaching career in 1967 at the Roebling Public School. It was while walking down the cellar steps of the row house on Third Avenue where I lived all my life, that I looked up to see folded newspapers turning brown and large manila envelopes stuffed between the floor joists. Although these items had been there since I was a young boy, only now was I curious to find out why my father had put them there.

I carefully pulled out one of the newspapers which had laid covered in dust since last put there by my father years earlier. Gently unfolding the brittle paper, the bold headlines caught my attention. BERLIN FALLS: HITLER CALLED SUICIDE. It was from the Morning Post dated May 3, 1945. On the front page were other such articles titled “Mussolini Widow Held by U.S. Troops” and “Capitulation in Norway and Holland Near.”

I discovered many other newspapers. Some of them were published as far back as the 1930’s. My father had saved papers of historical interest from the Trenton Evening Times, the Florence Township News, Record Sports, the Trentonian, the Camden Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

As I browsed through this fascinating collection, what really piqued my interest were the articles about the John A. Roebling and Sons Company and local events taking place in the Village of Roebling. An article in the Florence Township News dated June 1, 1933, titled “Roebling Mills Start Work on Golden Gate Bridge Cables” overwhelmed me with curiosity, and I wanted to see more. Another story from that same year, “Racketeers Held After Raid by State Troopers on Gambling House,” came as a shock. And then there was the New York Herald Tribune dated January 17, 1947, whose headline shouted, “ROEBLING TOWN PUT UP FOR SALE BY WIRE PLANT.” Reading this article provided me with information of which I was never aware.

I opened the manila envelopes that were addressed to the St. Mary’s Romanian Society and Club of which my father was an officer. Inside them I found colorful prints issued by the Office of War Information during World War II. These twenty-eight by twenty-inch posters promoted patriotism with such titles as “United We Are Strong, and United We Will Win” and “Warning From the FBI.”

In the days and weeks that followed my unexpected discovery, I began to realize that a great deal had been documented about the Roebling family and the bridges the Company built, but practically nothing was recorded about the workers who performed the laborious jobs to make the wire. My intuition was that the story of the Swedes who came here in 1905 to start the Steel Mill and the hundreds of immigrants from Eastern Europe that followed must be told. Since no one was collecting this rich history, I took it upon myself to gather their stories before they vanished from the minds of man. It was with great duty and respect that I began my fifty-year journey to create a reclamation of the past with the purpose that it would endure for the people of generations moving forward. This book is the realization of that goal.

My understanding of the life of the immigrants began while growing up in their midst on Third Avenue in the Village of Roebling. Their languages and customs are clearly embedded in my mind. I sat with them in their living rooms and on porches as they poignantly spoke about life in the Old Country and their struggles to get to America. The description of how they adjusted to the new way of life in Roebling held me spellbound for hours.

Over the next two years, I continued my interviews with the aid of tape cassettes and video recorders. Long-time residents of Roebling were invited to my classroom to share their experiences with the students. Bar room interviews were very productive. The more beer they poured down their throats, the more stories flowed from their hearts. Beer coasters and bar napkins filled with their memories (that I had jotted down), emotionally came to life as they unfolded in front of me.

Residents were happy to share copies of the Blue Center magazine and Roebling Record that dated back to 1925. The rescue of thousands of the Roebling Company’s employment records, police logs, old pictures, and work orders destined for the landfill provided a treasure trove of information. After spending hours reading the thousands of work records, their DNA began to become part of me.

In addition, I made two trips back to Romania from where my grandparents emigrated to America in the early 1900’s. These were life-changing experiences. The first trip was with my father in 1977 and the second one with my wife in 2004. Both trips to the Old Country, the villages of my ancestors, yielded a wealth of information on life there which in some instances hadn’t changed much in the last hundred years.

Work on the manuscript for this book began in 1970 after three years of doing interviews and research; however, by the end of 1974, the commitment to paper was interrupted by other obligations. For the next thirty years, my story of Roebling was put to the side. Despite the cessation of writing, the accumulation of eyewitness accounts of events of the past continued unabated.

During the interim, the Roebling Historical Society was organized in 1980 by a group of fourteen individuals dedicated to the preservation of the history of Roebling, and many activities were sponsored which brought the first and second generations together. It was through my involvement in these activities that I became acquainted with many of the individuals who provided source material for this book and afforded opportunities for me to record their memorable days gone by.

My work on the manuscript resumed in earnest in the fall of 2014 with the encouragement of Alice Totten LaVecchia, a dear friend and author of several books. Scores of new information gathered over the years were added to the original manuscript. I was able to include my own experience of working alongside the men and women in the Roebling plant, people I idolized as a young boy. The sight for the first time of seeing my neighbors working next to the furnaces in the Steel Mill and tending machines in the Wire Mills was so captivating.

In the process of writing this book of historical fiction, I utilized the narrative from interviews collected over the past fifty years. Where no dialogue was found for certain situations, I created my own to keep the story flowing. I tried at all times to stay as close to the documented facts as possible. At times I realized that the memories of a few of the first generation were not faultless due to their age. This was taken into consideration, and only what I considered to be true was used in the book. During the telling of the story, I used names of places interchangeably as time moved on: for example, Kinkora and Roebling, Workingmen’s Hotel and Boarding House, and Knickerbocker Avenue and Hornberger Avenue.

At no time was there ever any intent to embarrass any person or family. And for any inaccuracies or omissions of time, place, or names, I have no one else to blame but myself. For that, I apologize.

It is with deep regret that I did not finish this book sooner. There was so much interest when I started in 1967. Then the manuscript was set aside for what turned out to be many years, but once I continued, more than three years ago, it became an obsession. I was resolved to see it to the conclusion. I still feel contrite about not telling more of the saga of our ancestry. There is so much more I could have said.

Finally, I am sorry that the hundreds of people from whom I gathered information for the stories told in this book are not around to read it. It is my great desire that their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and all future generations will read and enjoy what their ancestors contributed to the history of Roebling and our country.

I hope I have rendered an adequate...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	1.2.2024
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-13	979-8-3509-3366-6 / 9798350933666

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