Marty Krasnov, June 22, 2016

Marty Krasnov, June 22, 2016

Marty Krasnov talks about how his father got into the furniture slipcover manufacturing business as well as how the company got the “SureFit” name. During World War II, the firm switched from making slipcovers for furniture to making parachutes for the military because the specialized equipment SureFit already owned to produce slipcovers was easily retrofitted to make parachutes. Marty and his brothers-in-law sold the business in 1990. SureFit is one of the very few brands that still remains.

Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives

Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives

2016-06-22

Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs.

video

LVTNT-27

Susan Clemens-Bruder

Marty Krasnov

01:59:21

5.4 June 22, 2016 Marty Krasnov, June 22, 2016 LVTNT-27 1:59:22 LVTNT Lehigh Valley Textile and Needlework Trades Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Marty Krasnov Susan Clemens-Bruder Gail Eisenberg video/mp4 KrasnovMarty_20160622 1.0:|15(5)|30(7)|45(7)|60(2)|73(15)|90(9)|105(13)|122(2)|135(10)|158(6)|179(12)|196(5)|211(7)|226(8)|243(10)|256(4)|271(4)|286(4)|303(5)|320(7)|335(7)|350(11)|365(14)|382(11)|401(5)|416(15)|435(10)|452(2)|469(10)|486(3)|503(10)|520(8)|533(5)|548(11)|563(5)|578(10)|591(9)|606(14)|621(4)|632(10)|645(10)|660(15)|675(6)|692(2)|707(9)|726(16)|743(8)|760(13)|779(6)|796(12)|813(10)|828(2)|847(5)|862(12)|875(7)|892(9)|911(14)|930(12)|947(6)|964(14)|983(9)|998(16)|1019(5)|1036(7)|1055(6)|1072(7)|1095(9)|1112(13)|1129(14)|1144(7)|1163(11)|1182(11)|1201(4)|1216(6)|1233(4)|1250(2)|1265(2)|1284(5)|1299(10)|1318(6)|1335(5)|1354(8)|1369(13)|1384(9)|1401(4)|1428(8)|1447(7)|1462(4)|1479(11)|1500(3)|1519(3)|1536(2)|1551(8)|1572(3)|1589(15)|1608(9)|1625(8)|1646(9)|1665(8)|1684(11)|1705(4)|1722(9)|1745(10)|1762(6)|1779(3)|1794(6)|1809(14)|1826(12)|1843(8)|1862(16)|1881(6)|1896(5)|1911(10)|1926(9)|1945(5)|1968(7)|1987(15)|2002(7)|2013(13)|2020(6) 0 https://youtu.be/y-5xsqEILEI YouTube video 0 Family History SC: Today is June 22, 2016. First I’d like you to put yourself into some kind of context. What’s your full name, when were you born and where were you born? &#13 ; &#13 ; MK: I’m Marty Krasnov, I was born in 1938 in the Jewish Hospital of Philadelphia.&#13 ; &#13 ; SC: Over your life where have you lived? Sort of to see an arc of where you’ve lived from Philadelphia perhaps to where you are now?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: I believe it was 1940 when the family moved to Allentown, and I basically have lived here ever since. 0 1053 Women Working Culture SC: Do you know where any other people worked in this country, whether the women worked because they were poor?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: My mother, apparently, always had to work, and she went to night school so I presume, but she didn’t talk much about it. I think she worked in a department store. My father and his older brother Joseph and, I presume, my grandfather because there's a safe . . . but we had one time, Isadore Krasnov &amp ; Sons. My grandfather was Isadore. I don’t know why they had this huge safe because they didn’t have too much at the time. They started peddling on the street and started making blouses and dresses in their own home, and I guess the business kind of grew. 0 1291 Education SC: Would you now talk about where you have gone to school and where you’ve worked from the time you were a little kid, all the way to when you started working? &#13 ; &#13 ; MK: My recollection of growing up was in what would today be referred to as the Jewish ghetto, which was somewhere between South Fulton or S. 15th St. to South 17th St. I grew up on 16th St. and, even today, some of the people you’ve interviewed grew up on that street. And I know almost every house when I drive by, who lived here, who lived there and what have you. 0 2021 More Family History GE: Can you give me the names of your parents and grandparents?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Sure. I’m gonna take these pictures out so you can look at them. I knew I was going to show these pictures to someone. I have them, and we have many more and you’ve seen pictures very similar to these. We’ll start with my family, as children, my older sister, as you can tell, my sister, Roz, that is me, my older sister, Roz. She is living in New Jersey and she is seven years older than I, and my sister, Mitsi Goldenberg, living in Florida. Parents passed away, my father was 85. He died on my birthday in 1980 and my mother passed away in 1995 and she was 88.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: What were their names?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Sam, Samuel and Fanny, with a Y.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: So, it’s Samuel Krasnov, and his father was Isidore?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Isidore, and my mother’s father was Marcus, and I’m named after my mother’s father&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: And what was your mother’s maiden name?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Abramson. And this is when she was a little girl in Russia with her governess and brother. Both of those were born in Odessa. And this is her family in Russia. My Uncle Leon is on the left. 0 2363 Who Ran the Business GE: So Marty, we’re just going to continue now and talk more about the business. You shared with us a little bit about the origins. If you want to share with us a little bit more, I don’t know quite who is in the business, in your family?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: The business was set up with basically . . . I don’t know exactly when my grandfather died, but he wasn’t really active in the business. He didn’t speak the language. My father, and I guess his older brother, picked it up rather quickly, I’m not sure how quick. They both spoke with a little dialect, you know, that we’re all used to hearing from that generation. So, basically, it was my Uncle Joe and my father, and, at the start of the business, my dad was the “inside manufacturing person” and my uncle was the sales and marketing person. 0 2628 The Business During the War GE: And so the two had the military contract throughout the war?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Surefit had. We were the only ones making slipcovers up until the end of the war and because the retail stores wanted slipcovers, somehow this Comfy was able to get fabrics or what have you. My dad’s whole factory was dedicated to the war products so they couldn’t flip back. They didn’t have the capacity to do that. And there are a number of old-time employees who stayed with the company for many many years, and I was able to get a flavor of what they did during the war. They employed hundreds of people in this silk mill on Sand Island in Bethlehem. 0 2946 Transition from Wartime to Peacetime for the Business GE: Marty, want to share with us a little bit, what was the transition from wartime to peacetime like for your father’s business?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Well I think they did rather well during the war because of the contracts they had with the government and it kept a lot of people out of the Army. Maybe some of them wouldn’t have survived, I don’t know. The other thing about the war and shortly after, well even prior to the period, when I came into the business, and I’m a young know-nothing who thought I knew everything, Wharton graduate and all of that stuff. I asked, we have too many relatives working here. I remember everyone, because they were mostly immigrants, they talked loud, and we had an intercom system. I felt a little embarrassed because everyone would hear shouting, even when we would go to my grandmother’s house in Philadelphia every weekend. To me, as a kid, everyone was talking loudly. He hired a number of relatives. My attitude towards that was, you know, this is not a good thing because they’re not necessarily the best qualified.&#13 ; &#13 ; Only later did I realize that he was doing a good thing and providing jobs. Many of them were hired during the Depression. After the war, he brought a number of relatives and others that survived the war, Holocaust survivors in, and provided jobs to them. 0 3162 Steady Growth of the Business GE: So it sounds, from what I’m hearing, that it was a little bit recession-proof. It didn’t really go up during good times that strongly or down during bad times. It was pretty steady.&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: It was kind of steady.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: Steady but growing.&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Steady but growing. You know the ups and downs and what have you. My dad was very conservative. At that time, the major customers were the national chains like Sears, Montgomery Wards, and every major city had their homegrown department store and they sold to most of every city’s homegrown department store.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: And it sounds like it was nationwide. 0 3623 Marty's Active Involvement in the Business GE: So you really started actively in the business about 1960?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: 1960 and my brother in-laws, both brother in-laws, were in the business. And we also had my three cousins from my Uncle Joe. He had passed away in 1957 and the family, like a lot of situations, it wasn’t a good fit. And we bought them out in 1963. Our family acquired their interest and it was at a time where, I think, there was a recession or something. We lost some key people because of the family, not a feud, but it was a problem that existed.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: What did they end up doing?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: One ended up teaching, one lived in Philadelphia, two of them worked in New York, but one commuted from Philadelphia. He ended up teaching in Philly and he died at an early age. 0 3818 Diversification of Products MK: Now, from that time on, in more recent years, the company diversified in other products and had a very nice growth rate.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: Want to tell us about that?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: We were a little concerned about the slipcover industry and the furniture covering industry because we also went into furniture throws. As the market expanded, with the K-Marts of the world, they couldn’t handle the slipcovers, per say, but they could handle furniture throws. We were producing, I remember, ten thousand throws a day.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: And what is a throw, versus a slipcover?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: A slipcover is a fitted slipcover, with the cushions.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: And it kind of has that elastic edge, right?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Well, they’re a little different today. But the way we did it, we did it with mostly knitted stretch slipcovers. 0 4065 Struggles with Competition MK: We acquired a little competitor that had a . . . from Beatrice Foods that sold certain discounters on consignments that we were able to have service people now go in and count the inventory. We controlled it and we got bigger margins. Then, around the early 70s, we could see that some of these major catalogs and department stores started going out of business. The Wanamakers, the Gimbels, and we were doing slipcovers with them as well, but not to the extent that we were doing it with Sears and Montgomery Ward. We had the opportunity and we decided we should diversify so we bought a company that was manufacturing bedspreads in Japan and it was a very niche market.&#13 ; &#13 ; We couldn’t compete with the big mills, the Burlington or J.P. Stevens, with selling bedspreads and that was even pre-comforters. They owned the space and what have you in the stores. So we found this niche market where they call it outline quilting where the stitching is done around the design, so it brought it out and they called that outline. 0 4379 Opportunity for 60 Minutes Interview MK: At one point, I get a call from 60 Minutes and they want to interview me. They were doing a whole thing on the twin plants in Mexico, the assembly operations and I said, “all the major companies, Philips, General Motors, Ford, none of them use their own names. In Mexico, they use a different name, but they were employing thousands and thousands of people. Why don’t you interview them?” They wanted to come into our facility. It was a girl with an English accent on the phone and she said, “well we’d really like to interview you about it” and I said, “It’s not all bad. This Mexico opportunity that a lot of American companies are taking advantage of, if it wasn’t in Mexico, it would be in Asia. The law is that you can assemble US products, and you don’t pay duty when they come back. You only pay duty on the added value which is the labor.” 0 4543 Expanding into Women's Apparel MK: Then we eventually went into women’s apparel because we were making our knitting when the lycra pants became very popular with the women’s fashion. We had a knitting operation because of our stretchy fabrics that we made. We started selling that fabric, lycra fabric, and then we said, because of Mexico, we might as well manufacture the whole product. Through the period, the business grew steady and it was pretty sound. We had such a diversity of products and a diversity of customers. Our largest customer when we sold it in 1990 was J.C. Penney, that represented 6% of our business, so we had a lot of good attributes to it. And the reason we sold the company, much of it was through my initiating the processes. 0 4620 Multi-Generational Business MK: Both brothers in law were 10 years older than I. I was 50 at the time, they were 60. I had 2 nephews in the business, and my children were young, and my sister Mitzi just had girls. We didn’t have any direction that the family would go. I remember the problems we had with my uncle’s son, and I said, you know, we’re having a pretty good run. There’s a time. When the first generation comes up with the idea, and they’re the ones that struggle through it, and they’re uneducated. So they get it to a point and then the second generation comes in and they’re educated. They still have some values because they remember growing up in a row house and what have you. And they move it to the next level. The third generation could start running into problems because now you’re not dealing with brothers and sisters, you’re dealing with cousins. I went through a number of family succession seminars, and I had that implanted that someday--my dad had already passed away, and my mother had Alzheimer’s so we didn’t want her to know. 0 5110 Operations in Mexico GE: So a couple of questions about the business. When you were in Mexico, that’s where the assembly was taking place and you said you had about 500 people?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Yes.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: Back here in Bethlehem, how many people were still here?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: We still had about 400-500 people here.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: And they were just doing everything but assembling?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Well they were assembling slipcovers. We were still manufacturing furniture throws and slipcovers in Bethlehem.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: This was the other pieces? What was being assembled in Mexico?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: The bed coverings. The outline quilting. We had that niche and that whole niche was very labor intensive. So that was our only way we could sell a product because we were one of the first ones to go into outline quilting and the stores, you had a flower and you just bring the quilt around it. And you see that today. Now it’s a lot of automatic equipment that does that. They program it, but at that time, it was all very extensive labor. 0 5327 Unions SC: And the other question was, which labor union would it have been?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: The United Textile Workers of America. It was a smaller union, and we always had a pretty good relationship with them. We had strikes, I remember we’ve had strikes, but nothing really long-lasting.&#13 ; &#13 ; GE: Just so I understand, you started out with Slipcovers, then you very much did the throws, the quilting became a niche that you were producing in Mexico, then you were also doing the throw pillows and curtains, right?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Yeah, we always did that. Now what had happened, as our bed covering business grew, it was around that time where Sears went out of the catalog business. They gave up a five billion dollar business overnight. Five billion is what they were doing in their catalog. The Sears catalog was an icon. Montgomery Wards went belly up, so we ended up with, in terms of catalogs, and again, this is all pre-internet days. If the internet would have been existing then, in fact, I had started my own catalog. 0 5485 Sales Force GE: Now tell me a little bit about how the sales force worked. It sounds like one of your brothers in law headed that part.&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Yeah, we had our main sales office. The showroom was on 34th Street, between Madison and 5th Avenue. That’s the later years, when I was there. We had offices on 26th Street when I first started, but that goes back. They were very attractive showrooms, and we displayed a lot of the bed coverings and furniture throws because the catalog people didn’t need showrooms. We had a showroom in Chicago for a number of years, and we had a showroom in California for a number of years. We had a warehouse in California. We had, initially, full time sales people, but then that became a very expensive thing, and we had a few full-time sales people that catered to the major accounts, but then we gravitated towards sales reps to handle other lines, as well. 0 6573 Jewish Involvement in the Industry GE: And the last question I’m going to ask before Sue asks you the final couple of questions, why do you think Jews were overrepresented in the needle-trade industry? This was an industry where they were really overrepresented.&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Well, I guess there was a number of reasons. I think they started out like my father, in their own homes, because it was easy to get a sewing machine. They came from Europe. They made their own clothes, so they had some inclination, you know, about that. They certainly couldn’t get jobs in banks. Most of them were uneducated anyway. They didn’t go to college, many didn’t even finish high school. They started these companies, but it was easy to get into. You buy a couple of sewing machines, and you go into it. 0 6710 What Has Made You Feel the Most Creative? SC: So, the last two questions are, what has made you feel the most creative in your life?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Well I think I inherited some of that from my father. When I retired and moved to California, I decided that, other than golf, I had to be a little productive and use my head. So we have a, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Osher program. Osher was an individual, and if you look it up, google Osher, they run senior citizen classes at universities. They have a terrific program in the desert because of so many retirees, and we were connected with Cal State of San Bernardino. I always managed to take courses there. 0 7053 What Do You Value Most in Life? SC: And this is very short. What do you value most in life?&#13 ; &#13 ; MK: Well, I value humor, obviously family and what have you. But I value humor and I kind of gravitate to the deprived. I’m a Republican, leaning to the right on financial and way to the left on social. That kind of describes me. But, I appreciate, particularly in the later years, my parents, the struggles they went through, and that provided for a good life to me and my family. You could value a lot of the good things, and you could become very verbal, but basically, I like good humor and I like nice people, and I’m tolerant, too. People have different viewpoints. So what? Let it be. I’m kind of like laid back. And that’s my story. 0 MovingImage Marty Krasnov talks about how his father got into the furniture slipcover manufacturing business as well as how the company got the “SureFit” name. During World War II, the firm switched from making slipcovers for furniture to making parachutes for the military because the specialized equipment SureFit already owned to produce slipcovers was easily retrofitted to make parachutes. Marty and his brothers-in-law sold the business in 1990. SureFit is one of the very few brands that still remains. Interview with Marty Krasnov, June 22, 2016 SUSAN CLEMENS-BRUDER: Today is June 22, 2016. First I'd like you to put yourself into some kind of context. What's your full name, when were you born and where were you born? MARTY KRASNOV: I'm Marty Krasnov, I was born in 1938 in the Jewish Hospital of Philadelphia. SC: Over your life where have you lived? Sort of to see an arc of where you've lived from Philadelphia perhaps to where you are now? MK: I believe it was 1940 when the family moved to Allentown, and I basically have lived here ever since. SC: And can you tell me a little bit about your family history? What you know, first of all, perhaps about your father's family as much as you know. Where they came from, how they got to the United States, and when they got to the United States? MK: My father and his family were from an area in the Ukraine called Unum, (u-n-u-m). Or u-n-a-m, I'm not quite sure. The city still exists, I looked it up once or twice and it was heavily populated by Jews, and they must've had some religious institutions that attracted people from other areas to visit periodically. My understanding is, his father ran a general store. The only story that my father ever told about that is when he was a little kid, they had a crawlspace, and they had cartons where people would sit and sit around a stovepipe or whatever, and he constructed a gadget where you pull a string and a needle would go through the seat, and whoever was sitting there would jump. It's the only story I ever heard about this general store. Somewhere, at the age of 14 or 15, it's my understanding that to avoid the military school, and the Czars, and you've probably heard this from prior interviews, that was a time that they filtered a lot of these kids out of Russia through an underground railroad. He went through Italy so he ended up in Italy somehow and he had an uncle in Philadelphia. The family still remained in Russia. He had an older brother who I think was married at the time but maybe not. My father was born in 1895. I believe he was about 15 or 16 when he came over so that would've placed him coming here around 1910-1912, something in that timeframe. An interesting story, and this is an oral story that we heard, it was passed down in our immediate family. There are always question marks about it but this occurred with my father's grandmother, and we tried to put a date on it which would've been like the 1840s. They lived in a shtetl outside of this town, Unum. They had an ox and a cart and that's how they went from place to place and they were heading back to the shtetl in a blizzard. It was getting dark and when they got back to their home the baby who was a two-year-old or a one-year-old was missing and by now it was dark and you cannot go back. They didn't have flashlights or anything, and I guess they had a lot of children in anticipation of events like this and they presumed that the baby would freeze to death. We don't know what went through their mind. Obviously it must have been quite emotional. The next morning the villagers, the people in the shtetl, got up at daybreak and they went back the same way and they reached a certain point in the road and they see this black bear, and they startled the bear and the bear ran into the woods and at that spot, the baby was there, breathing, living, and in good shape. So they called this baby, which was my great-grandmother or my great great grandmother, I'm not really sure, the miracle baby of Unam. I and my older sister tried to find out if there's anything documented but obviously there wasn't. Whether it's a fable or whether it happened or not, it's a family story. Then my dad came over. He had an uncle living in Philadelphia at the age of 15 or 16, and incidentally, in Russia, my dad went to a yeshiva as a kid. That's how he got his education, so he was learned in the religion. Not overly religious himself, when he got here, but he was educated very well. He spoke Hebrew fluently, he spoke Yiddish. That's how they communicated in those days in the Ukraine. And he began working at the same textile factory as my uncle. So that brings them up to right before the First World War, and during the time that spanned when he got here and the First World War. His whole family came over and at that time, I know my uncle was married because my dad was drafted. Obviously he wasn't very anxious to go back to Europe. They didn't draft my uncle because he was the eldest and married. There was some regulation that absolved the eldest who was married from being drafted. My grandfather didn't speak English. The family consisted of my father and my uncle, Joe, who was the eldest, and he had another brother, two other brothers that were younger, and a sister. One of the brothers died from influenza that I never knew, but I knew all the other siblings of his. Another story, he was always very slight. I don't think he weighed more than a hundred pounds or a hundred and twenty pounds his whole life. There were certain weight requirements to meet when he was drafted and so they put him in Philadelphia. There's a place called the Camac that was the schvitz [Yiddish for baths] and they took him to the Camac the night before his physical. They wouldn't let him out of the [sauna] room so he would lose that extra eight pounds or five pounds. Then, at night, he was so thirsty, he snuck down to the kitchen and drank it all back, and he was drafted. They sent him to Fort Lee, Virginia. And the story is there were all these immigrants that they sent. All kinds of languages, you know, and he mentioned something strawfoot. They used to call it strawfoot, because they put a straw on the right leg or the left leg so the immigrants knew because they couldn't say right, left because half of them couldn't understand what was right or left. So they'd know that the straws were all supposed to march at the same time. And everyone went to sick call every day, except my father, he never went to sick call. A week before, he actually fainted and they took him to the hospital. He had like a sun-stroke, and they figured, well, he's credible because they never saw him in sick call before. And a week later, all of the others were shipped over to Europe and my dad never went. They just missed him. So that brings us to that point in time. My mother's family was quite interesting and we seem to know a little more about her because she spoke more than my dad. She was born in Odessa and, prior to her being born, her aunt married into the largest tea company in Russia. My grandfather, who I never met, was employed by them, and they sent him to South Africa, and he was there for seven years. And he wanted my grandmother, at the time living in Moscow, my mother had not been born yet, to move to South Africa. Things were good there, life was good there, the weather was nice, and it was cheap living but she wouldn't move out of Moscow. So seven years later he went back and the tea company moved him to Odessa, and that's where my mother and uncle Harry were born. It was a pretty large family of siblings. She had five brothers and she was the only girl, and the youngest in the family. We have pictures of her with a governess. I have one here and you can tell the way, the photography of the whole family, they were very well dressed, and you can tell they were reasonably affluent and had a good life in Russia. They sent the oldest son, Leon, my uncle Leon, they sent him to Switzerland to medical school. but Leon was a philanderer and a womanizer, and they didn't realize at the time that he wasn't really going to medical school. What he was doing was hanging out at the Bern Library with Trotsky and Lenin. We don't know much about what went on there but they were able to rescue him when they immigrated to the United States, so he never got too much involved and lived a happy life in Hartford, Connecticut. When my mother was eight years, old, the tea company sent the family to the United States and on the way, the ship, I guess they came through the Baltic, hit an iceberg, and they had to wait six months in Norway for the ship to be repaired. During that six-month period, the Revolution occurred, and the tea company was nationalized. And they're heading to the United States with a promise that they're gonna get aid by the tea company, but that doesn't exist anymore. I didn't know very much of this as a child. All I know is that my mother was brought up in a very poor environment in Philadelphia. Her mother was an invalid, her father had passed away, I guess was heartbroken, a couple of years after they arrived. My mother was born in 1908, I believe, and the Revolution was in 1917, so, when she passed away in 1995, she was 88. We found a diary that she had kept as a girl, and there were references in Yiddish about money that was supposed to arrive from London this month, and it didn't come and it didn't come last month. So the family didn't have access to any of the monies that were promised because obviously, there was no money. She was brought up in Strawberry Mansion, in Philadelphia. As I say, we visited and she still had a brother that lived in the same house that she was brought up in. My perception of her background was being very very poor. She went to Temple University at night, she was the only daughter, and she had to take care of her mother who was an invalid. I don't remember my grandmother, she died when I was two years old or so. The only grandparent out of all four was my grandmother, Rose, and she died when I was eleven years old so I knew her pretty well. I have pictures of both sides of the family. So I'm bringing it up to a point when they were raised in this country. SC: Do you know where any other people worked in this country, whether the women worked because they were poor? MK: My mother, apparently, always had to work, and she went to night school so I presume, but she didn't talk much about it. I think she worked in a department store. My father and his older brother Joseph and, I presume, my grandfather because there's a safe . . . but we had one time, Isadore Krasnov &amp ; Sons. My grandfather was Isadore. I don't know why they had this huge safe because they didn't have too much at the time. They started peddling on the street and started making blouses and dresses in their own home, and I guess the business kind of grew. There's a story that we were told, not by my father, but by one of the other relatives that during the First World War they manufactured these sailor blouses for women, and they were able to get large quantities of the fabric. Then the war ended and no one bought these blouses, and they couldn't pay their bills. And it was the fear of going to debtors' prison, I guess, that my grandmother insisted that they pay off every penny. She didn't want her husband and her two boys to go to prison. I guess they had that mentality. So that's a period that's kind of hazy with me. I guess they persevered in manufacturing. I think they probably got moved out of their home, and began to build this business in the blouses and dresses, from what I understand. The reason they got into the company, which I inherited, Surefit Products, was, my grandmother asked my father, who was always very good with his hands and creating things, an inventive kind of thing. My grandmother asked him to bring some fabric home to cover the sofa. In Europe they covered stuff with sheets, that's just what everyone did. And my father took this fabric and he made a slipcover out of it. And her reaction after he put it on -- he did the measurements and everything -- She said, in Yiddish, "This sure fits". So that's how the name came about. And they went to Lit Brothers, which was a major department store in Philadelphia at the time, and they put it on consignment and they did rather well with it and that was the beginning of Surefit Products and the slipcover business, which eventually grew into a pretty large company. SC: Would you now talk about where you have gone to school and where you've worked from the time you were a little kid, all the way to when you started working? MK: My recollection of growing up was in what would today be referred to as the Jewish ghetto, which was somewhere between South Fulton or S. 15th St. to South 17th St. I grew up on 16th St. and, even today, some of the people you've interviewed grew up on that street. And I know almost every house when I drive by, who lived here, who lived there and what have you. I'll tell you one humorous story about living there. Across the street from us was a family, George Somach. They were in the bridal business and George was a prominent person in town and certainly, in our synagogue. He was president of Temple Beth El for many years ; they named an auditorium after him, Somach Auditorium. I guess it was 1951, and I remember that because that's when the Philadelphia Whiz Kids [nickname of the Phillies team that year] played in the World Series and in those days when you had your wisdom teeth out, they took you to the hospital. And I'm in the hospital and George Somach was apparently in the room across from me. He had a heart attack, and he was in some plastic oxygen thing. They had this terrific invention, something new the hospital had, where they'd roll a TV in your room, you'd put a nickel in, and you could watch TV. It was wonderful, and I'm watching the baseball game. As a young kid, it was important, and I ran out of change. Mr. Somach, George, had a nurse in his room all the time. When I went in, she [the nurse] was on a coffee break, and I opened up the plastic because I panicked and I said, "Mr. Somach, I'm Marty Krasnov." He's in a daze, he didn't even know who I was. I said, "Sam Krasnov's son, I need some nickels, do you have any change? I'm watching TV. I need nickels." And he says "look in my pants. They're in the closet." So I go in, and I put my hand in his pocket. The nurse comes in, so now, they have my mother come to the hospital. He [George Somach] falls asleep. He doesn't know that he even told me to look in his pants. They're not going to wake him up and start inquiring from him, and I remember my mother taking me aside in the hospital, and saying "we don't have to tell your father about this." And I mentioned that story to George Somach's grandkids. One of them is a lawyer in town, and he didn't know. No one knew about this story, but anyway ; 16th Street was quite interesting because it was a great place to grow up. Just a wonderful area, there were all these row homes and, just from my perspective, even today, when we meet Alan Steinberg, whom you know. We were talking recently about it and it was just a terrific place. Everyone knew everyone else, the kids just enjoyed themselves. My next-door neighbor was Dr. Weiner, and we used to hide behind the trees when he came home from his dental practice. He had a very turbulent marriage, first marriage, and literally, pots and pans would come flying out the front door, and we'd be behind a tree or a car, watching this at 5:10 every day, and this is the background that I had. And then from there, right after my bar mitzvah, and I was one of the first ones at the new synagogue, at Beth El, that was bar mitzvahed. We had a little disruption during it because a dog came in and caused some fuss when I was up doing my thing. Rabbi Greenburg and Cantor Sherer, they were the officiators. So at age 13 right after we moved to Muhlenberg and Walnut Street and this was away from the rowhouse. We had a mulberry tree there and my sister had started college, she was home. My other sister was three years older so she was 16 or something and he [my father] remembered how to make wine. He thought he remembered how to make wine at his general store as a kid back in Unam, in Russia, and he put canvas under the mulberry tree and he had my sisters and I stamp with our feet. We thought this was kind of neat and I remember it was a real major happening because my sister Mitsi, I guess was going to a prom or something, and her feet were all purple and that didn't come out. It was just a big tado going on, to me it didn't mean anything. And then he mixed a little of this and a little of that and it tasted like mulberry juice. It didn't taste like wine. But we had a happy childhood-- we went to summer camps, and we had all the fine things that we could ever want. SC: So was the Surefit established in Philadelphia, then moved up here? MK: Yes, I understand they moved over a weekend, because they had some major union problems. I presume they moved to Bethlehem because it's a needle trades . . . being a female industry, and the Bethlehem Steel workers', their wives were good workers. And they moved to an old silk mill on Sand Island, and I think they bought it in 1940 or so or '39. I know I was told we moved here when I was 2 so it would've been 1940. I think they moved the company maybe a year before I was born, so that's how they ended up in Bethlehem. SC: Would you talk a little bit about your education? MK: Sure. I started out-- in fact, I was just telling this story to my cousin, the other night-- who was visiting from Cleveland. They were talking about their grandchildren in kindergarten and I had a vision of my first day in kindergarten, which was at the Swain School. In those days it was at the Masonic Temple, in the basement. They had a couple rooms for kindergarten. Mrs. Swain ran it and right next to it was a radio station because we used to always look through the glass and see the broadcasts there. I have this vision, that the first day, I went, living on 16th Street, which was close by the Masonic Temple, hiding under the bed, and my mother couldn't get to me and so she called Mrs. Swain. Mrs. Swain, Esther Swain, came to our house on 16th Street and negotiated with me to come out from under the bed and how wonderful the school is. I imagine she was successful. I don't have a recollection of crawling out. I just have a recollection seeing this strange woman and I, with an eye stare, I'm under the bed, and she's leaning under the bed. So then I went to grade school, all through junior high to Raub. So, living on 16th Street, I'd walk to school, and then when we moved to Muhlenberg and Walnut, I would take a bus to school. I went to Allen High, and then I went to Penn, University of Penn, Wharton School, so that was my education. My wife, who's not here, she, kind of a fun story about how I met her. I met her in El Paso, Texas, and she went to college for two years. I went to music school and we got married. So my education stopped. I graduated in 1960. I had foolishly, I had nothing to do in the summers so I took extra courses at Temple and Lehigh. When I was a senior, I only had maybe two classes and I began working for the company in New York and commuted back on Fridays, I arranged. So now I had a party weekend every week without having that depression Sunday night about going back to school on Monday. I graduated in 1960 with my class, and l still have some very close friends from Penn. GAIL EISENBERG: Can you give me the names of your parents and grandparents? MK: Sure. I'm gonna take these pictures out so you can look at them. I knew I was going to show these pictures to someone. I have them, and we have many more and you've seen pictures very similar to these. We'll start with my family, as children, my older sister, as you can tell, my sister, Roz, that is me, my older sister, Roz. She is living in New Jersey and she is seven years older than I, and my sister, Mitsi Goldenberg, living in Florida. Parents passed away, my father was 85. He died on my birthday in 1980 and my mother passed away in 1995 and she was 88. GE: What were their names? MK: Sam, Samuel and Fanny, with a Y. GE: So, it's Samuel Krasnov, and his father was Isidore? MK: Isidore, and my mother's father was Marcus, and I'm named after my mother's father GE: And what was your mother's maiden name? MK: Abramson. And this is when she was a little girl in Russia with her governess and brother. Both of those were born in Odessa. And this is her family in Russia. My Uncle Leon is on the left. GE: This is your mom's? MK: This is my mother's family and this is all her brothers. GE: So this little boy here? MK: That's my Uncle Sam, my Uncle Harry, my Uncle Leon here and my Uncle Eli. my grandfather Marcus, my grandmother Bertha, and my mother Fanny. So she looks like she's about two years old here and this picture then would be around 1910. When she was 8, that's when they left Russia, and the way they are dressed. and this picture of the governess and my mother. They were very affluent at the time, relatively speaking. GE: Your parents are Samuel and Fanny. your father's father was Isidore, what was his wife's name? MK: Rose. And that's this family here. And I don't know who all these other people are but, these two here, Isidore and Rose. The only grandparent I really knew was my grandmother Rose, who we called Bubbie [Yiddish for grandmother] , and she's the one who said " this sure fits", in Yiddish. GE: So Samuel's parents were Rose and Isidor, and with Fanny, her father was Marcus? MK: Yes, Marcus Abramson. GE: And Bertha. MK: And Bertha GE: And Marty, your siblings were Roz and Mitzi? MK: And that's it, and I'm the baby. And all three of us are living and in reasonably good health. GE: So Marty, we're just going to continue now and talk more about the business. You shared with us a little bit about the origins. If you want to share with us a little bit more, I don't know quite who is in the business, in your family? MK: The business was set up with basically . . . I don't know exactly when my grandfather died, but he wasn't really active in the business. He didn't speak the language. My father, and I guess his older brother, picked it up rather quickly, I'm not sure how quick. They both spoke with a little dialect, you know, that we're all used to hearing from that generation. So, basically, it was my Uncle Joe and my father, and, at the start of the business, my dad was the "inside manufacturing person" and my uncle was the sales and marketing person. My uncle lived in Philadelphia, and we lived here in Allentown at the time. My understanding, and I know, factually, they manufactured the slipcovers. In those days, they were able to use only woven fabrics because the furniture was not that diversified. Their market was, I guess, lower middle class, and that was the Goldblatts and the Lit Brothers and Gimbels, the department stores of that ilk They, eventually, as furniture became a little more diverse, they began a knitting mill. A lot of the slipcovers at that time were stretch fabrics and then they got in a big way in furniture throws, which you just threw fabric over the furniture with fringe and what have you, but that was later on. During the Second World War, because of the shortage of fabric and materials, they manufactured exclusively for the government. They had prime contracts for parachutes and pup tents because the product was bulky, like slipcovers, and they had the equipment that could handle larger type products. So they manufactured, as I said, parachutes and pup tents and, I guess, any canvas type products. It kept a lot of the employees out of the war because they were making strategic products for the military. And that, during the war, was when their main competitor opened up. The door opened for competition while they [Surefit] were doing all military work. A company called Comfy, out of Baltimore.The slipcover industry was not like the apparel industry with very niche type products and very small markets. So basically, it was just the two companies that eventually competed head-on against each other. GE: And so the two had the military contract throughout the war? MK: Surefit had. We were the only ones making slipcovers up until the end of the war and because the retail stores wanted slipcovers, somehow this Comfy was able to get fabrics or what have you. My dad's whole factory was dedicated to the war products so they couldn't flip back. They didn't have the capacity to do that. And there are a number of old-time employees who stayed with the company for many many years, and I was able to get a flavor of what they did during the war. They employed hundreds of people in this silk mill on Sand Island in Bethlehem. At one point in time, I knew when I was working and came into the business, we were the second largest manufacturer in Bethlehem. The first was Bethlehem Steel with 25 thousand and then it was Surefit, maybe with five, six hundred, seven hundred people at the time. The company, I recall, one of the big problems with Sand Island is that Sand Island is located between the Lehigh River and the Lehigh Canal. I loved it as a kid, going there on Saturdays, sitting in the office and shooting paperclips with a rubber band and the trains would go by and things were happening, both on the canal and the Lehigh River. Sand Island was right in between. I was a sophomore in high school or a senior in high school, and I know my father had given me his old company car that had a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it, but it was my car. This was great. And they had - I forget which hurricane it was - and they've had floods before there. This one was really bad and I drove my father and there was the hill-to-hill bridge. The only way to get to Sand Island was down a ramp where Fritch Fuel is. They eliminated that ramp now, and they built a bridge from the North Bethlehem side, but at that time, you could only go with this ramp, and I remember we parked at the bottom of the ramp and walked all the way to the factory. They had a system where, if there was a potential flooding, they had ten people that would come in, but we were there for three days, and they wanted to rescue us by helicopter, which I was all for. I could see myself climbing a ladder, you know, this is terrific, but there were too many telephone wires. So they finally got us by Red Cross boat, but they threw lines across the canal and that's how we got food and water. There were ten of us that were there for three days. For me, it was very exciting, I was in high school and this was not the average day, you know. But, obviously, it was very devastating and shortly after, a year or two after, 1956, so the flood was, I think, around '55. If you look at the history books, it was a terrible flood. My car that he gave me ended up in Easton. That's the thing that upset me the most, not the hundreds of thousands of dollars of inventory that they lost, it was my car that I had lost. SC: Hurricane Hazel. Because I was really little and I remember my parents going to their friends house and my brother was watching me to help them get water out of their basement. MK: Yes, it was a major one. I remember during the Korean War, they apparently had a Navy contract for bathrobes, because we had more bathrobes at home, Navy bathrobes. Anything that had a little hole or a tear, they couldn't put through production, so we ended up with all of these bathrobes. GE: Marty, want to share with us a little bit, what was the transition from wartime to peacetime like for your father's business? MK: Well I think they did rather well during the war because of the contracts they had with the government and it kept a lot of people out of the Army. Maybe some of them wouldn't have survived, I don't know. The other thing about the war and shortly after, well even prior to the period, when I came into the business, and I'm a young know-nothing who thought I knew everything, Wharton graduate and all of that stuff. I asked, we have too many relatives working here. I remember everyone, because they were mostly immigrants, they talked loud, and we had an intercom system. I felt a little embarrassed because everyone would hear shouting, even when we would go to my grandmother's house in Philadelphia every weekend. To me, as a kid, everyone was talking loudly. He hired a number of relatives. My attitude towards that was, you know, this is not a good thing because they're not necessarily the best qualified. Only later did I realize that he was doing a good thing and providing jobs. Many of them were hired during the Depression. After the war, he brought a number of relatives and others that survived the war, Holocaust survivors in, and provided jobs to them. So, at the time, I didn't appreciate what he was doing, and only later, as an adult, it sank in that it was a very noble thing, and expected, and it was a responsibility of his. Following the war, this would be in the late 40s and 50s I think, the business was successful. People had money. The thing about the slipcover business was, when times got bad, people had a tendency to, instead of buying furniture, they'd buy slipcovers. And then, when times were good, you have that large population that can't afford new furniture anyway, so they would maybe buy used furniture. There was a need for it, a market for it. The business flourished, but they had their ups and downs. GE: So it sounds, from what I'm hearing, that it was a little bit recession-proof. It didn't really go up during good times that strongly or down during bad times. It was pretty steady. MK: It was kind of steady. GE: Steady but growing. MK: Steady but growing. You know the ups and downs and what have you. My dad was very conservative. At that time, the major customers were the national chains like Sears, Montgomery Wards, and every major city had their homegrown department store and they sold to most of every city's homegrown department store. GE: And it sounds like it was nationwide. MK: Yes. GE: And that was both you and Comfy? Or were you more into certain regions? MK: Both. And some other little companies that started too. They were more lower end. I started in 1960 and at that time, the business was doing maybe $20 million. Which I guess, in today's dollars, would be pretty good, and we employed, I'd say five to six hundred people. After the flood of '55, he acquired a company called Laros. I don't know if that name strikes a bell. It was in Bethlehem. Major, major employer. Laros name is, I think he built the YMCA in Bethlehem . . . a very prominent individual, and their silk business kind of waned. So they sold out to Warnaco, the brassiere people. When they bought the company, bought the building, and it was about a 230-40 thousand square-foot building. Three stories. And we added on and eventually it ended up about 300 thousand square feet. GE: With Sand Island? Or instead of? MK: No, they kept the building on Sand Island. Eventually, the year 2000, the building was vacant, because we had already sold the business. But it was a building ; I brought in the Rouse company. The Musikfest was interested in buying the building and converting it. What they did now at Steelstacks, they were thinking of putting up a boardwalk, and I was in conversations. We brought the James Rouse company. They were the ones that did the Boston Faneuill Hall and Baltimore Harbor and the timing was wrong. But at the time, the building was this old silk mill with a thousand windows on both sides. It had to be boarded up, and we had fires every other day. Kids would go in, and we had an escaped convict living there for a month. It was just driving me crazy and then we called in the Amish. Someone said "get the Amish, they'll tear it down for you" because we thought the land would be nice to keep, on Sand Island. The problem with the Amish is you can't call them, they don't talk on the phone, but eventually, we finally got someone. We had asbestos in the building so that didn't pan out. I got so disgusted and it was just aggravating to me. I said the city was good to us all these years, I'm gonna give the building back to the city, which I did. And I know we were in California, about two months after I had given it to the city and they had the largest fire they ever had in Bethlehem. The building burnt down. And I'm sure, the powers to be, I'm not accusing anyone, but they instructed the fire department, "don't be too anxious to go down and put it out." When I owned it, I'd get calls all the time. That's just a side note about that Sand Island property, but they ended up with this property on River St.[?] One of the fun things, Laros, during the Second World War or Korean War, how they got into this, I don't know. They manufactured white corpuscles, synthetic white corpuscles, and they formed a company called Pahrmacan [?] which I think is still in business. I don't know what they do, but, up until 10 years ago they were. When they sold the building to us, the Pharmacan had a two story section in the building, not large, where they had this very sophisticated equipment that manufactured this. So the deal was, at the time, Warnaco would rent our River Street property, Sand Island property, for us, so they were really narrowing their operation down and they did that for a couple years, but this Pharmacam had to remain in our building for x number of years. Fun thing about that was they had an experimental lab, just a hut within our building, all glass. And you look in and you see all these people with white uniforms with masks and rabbits. Well when we'd bring customers to take a tour, which we often did because we had an interesting operation, they would say "what is that?" "Well that's our testing lab, we test all our fabrics. We give them to the rabbits." And they had to believe us, no one is going to make a joke and have all these people there with rabbits so we had a lot of fun with that and eventually they closed that down. GE: So you really started actively in the business about 1960? MK: 1960 and my brother in-laws, both brother in-laws, were in the business. And we also had my three cousins from my Uncle Joe. He had passed away in 1957 and the family, like a lot of situations, it wasn't a good fit. And we bought them out in 1963. Our family acquired their interest and it was at a time where, I think, there was a recession or something. We lost some key people because of the family, not a feud, but it was a problem that existed. GE: What did they end up doing? MK: One ended up teaching, one lived in Philadelphia, two of them worked in New York, but one commuted from Philadelphia. He ended up teaching in Philly and he died at an early age. He was on drugs, I don't know. My other cousin, I'm not quite sure what he ended up doing, and my third one, who I knew more about, because he lived in Allentown. His name was George Krasnov. He went into the knitting business and then I think he brought his kids in and, like all of the textile knitting businesses, they went by the way, you know. Interesting, Surefit is a very viable company today. GE: When did your father retire? MK: He never retired. He died at age 85. That was it. Like many of the fathers of people you interviewed. Only this generation retires early. GE: So he, you, and your two brothers in-law? MK: Yes. GE: And who stayed in charge of the operation and who took over more of the sales and marketing? MK: My oldest sister's husband was in New York. We always had national sales managers and that was the structure. My sister Mitzi's husband was more in production and I was in the finance part. And, that was how it was after we acquired the other family's interest. Now, from that time on, in more recent years, the company diversified in other products and had a very nice growth rate. GE: Want to tell us about that? MK: We were a little concerned about the slipcover industry and the furniture covering industry because we also went into furniture throws. As the market expanded, with the K-Marts of the world, they couldn't handle the slipcovers, per say, but they could handle furniture throws. We were producing, I remember, ten thousand throws a day. GE: And what is a throw, versus a slipcover? MK: A slipcover is a fitted slipcover, with the cushions. GE: And it kind of has that elastic edge, right? MK: Well, they're a little different today. But the way we did it, we did it with mostly knitted stretch slipcovers. After the department stores started going by the wayside, we began selling more and more to the catalog people-- slipcovers per se, the fitted slipcovers. Each had individual cushions, they were solids or printed, and they stretched, and we fit x number of styles of furniture. We couldn't fit all of the styles. So, we sold to Spiegel, Sears, Montgomery Ward, and Penneys had their own catalogs. Any catalog in the country, at a time, this is pre-internet. And Sears catalogs and Montgomery Ward catalogs, these were huge things. Then it evolved where we would basically, it was a great way to present the product, and we would present it in room scenes. So you'd show a living room with our slipcovers and then with draperies and toss pillows, but we were the largest resource for Spiegels for toss pillows. We had maybe 10-12 pages of slipcovers and every page had toss pillows on it that matched the slipcovers and people would just buy toss pillows and draperies, like window treatments. We were selling a whole coordinated room, so that's when that business started taking off, in a bigger way, even though we were losing the department store business. In place of that, came the discounters. All of a sudden, the discounters started showing up, the Zayres, Korvettes the Kings, and we sold them all. And that's how we sold the furniture throws. A throw is 60 by 90 for a chair, sofas, 70 by 140, so we had different sizes, four sizes of a furniture throw. We laminated it with foam so they wouldn't slip and you put either a ruffle or a fringe around them. It was a simple bulky product. As I said, I remember because I'd see these things coming down the chute every second. I said "My God, everyone's buying one of these things every second." So the business began to grow and, as the discounters grew, that became a major factor. We acquired a little competitor that had a . . . from Beatrice Foods that sold certain discounters on consignments that we were able to have service people now go in and count the inventory. We controlled it and we got bigger margins. Then, around the early 70s, we could see that some of these major catalogs and department stores started going out of business. The Wanamakers, the Gimbels, and we were doing slipcovers with them as well, but not to the extent that we were doing it with Sears and Montgomery Ward. We had the opportunity and we decided we should diversify so we bought a company that was manufacturing bedspreads in Japan and it was a very niche market. We couldn't compete with the big mills, the Burlington or J.P. Stevens, with selling bedspreads and that was even pre-comforters. They owned the space and what have you in the stores. So we found this niche market where they call it outline quilting where the stitching is done around the design, so it brought it out and they called that outline. And they used big, long-arm sewing machines and we acquired a very small company in Japan, and we operated in Japan for maybe 2 or 3 years. Then it was tough because it was not into a price point that meant anything and so we moved it to Korea. We had a little more success there because the labor rates were much much lower and all our fabric came from Japan so we were able to function. But, as it became popular, we realized that long term, if we're gonna make a business out of this, we've got to move it closer to the country. First of all, it costs too much money sending people over all the time. It's a bulky product so we had to ship by container which would take two months. We sold, for example, Sears a Diane Furstenberg design and it was the best selling bedspread they had, and we couldn't meet the deliveries. Then the next year we had too much because of the requirement. It was too difficult. We were like "we've got to get this thing closer, we've got to go to a real low labor market because the labor involved is very expensive", so we said, "ok we'll change. We'll buy all our fabrics here in this country now", and we changed the whole operation. We went to Haiti and that was really a forte I had. I enjoyed doing that, going to a country and having no idea. Korea was already set up. I wasn't too involved in that, but Haiti I was. The problem with Haiti is that we had to get our polyester batting from Puerto Rico because you couldn't ship it from the states because it was too expensive. And Puerto Rico was a big brassiere industry and that's where they used all this polyester. Well the guy that owned the only factory ended up with a hernia, and he was in the hospital for a couple weeks, and he closed the factory, so this is not good. So we closed Haiti and, at the time, we were able to go into Mexico on the border at Juarez, Mexico. I basically set that up and researched it and got the whole thing going and, as I said, it was pretty good at that time. That's when everything started growing in our bedspread business and, eventually we ended up with 600 employees in Mexico, manufacturing outline quilted products. We were the first ones to do all of these kinds of Americana quilts where you put all of those pieces together. Anything that could be labor intensive. At one point, I get a call from 60 Minutes and they want to interview me. They were doing a whole thing on the twin plants in Mexico, the assembly operations and I said, "all the major companies, Philips, General Motors, Ford, none of them use their own names. In Mexico, they use a different name, but they were employing thousands and thousands of people. Why don't you interview them?" They wanted to come into our facility. It was a girl with an English accent on the phone and she said, "well we'd really like to interview you about it" and I said, "It's not all bad. This Mexico opportunity that a lot of American companies are taking advantage of, if it wasn't in Mexico, it would be in Asia. The law is that you can assemble US products, and you don't pay duty when they come back. You only pay duty on the added value which is the labor." I said, "As an example, we were in Asia, and in Asia, we had to use all foreign fabrics and what have you. Now, we're in Mexico, we're using all US fabrics. We're employing people because we have to cut the fabric in the United States." You can't cut in Mexico, and I said "We're employing many, many more people here in this country because we're in Mexico and other vendors are benefitting as well." "Well that's an interesting viewpoint", she says, "Can we interview you?" I said "excuse me, I've got to take another call and think" and I look out my window and from my window, at our factory. I could see 4-5 miles of Bethlehem Steel and I said this is not gonna be a good idea. It's a no win, so I declined. It was my chance to be on 60 Minutes. But the business flourished. Then we eventually went into women's apparel because we were making our knitting when the lycra pants became very popular with the women's fashion. We had a knitting operation because of our stretchy fabrics that we made. We started selling that fabric, lycra fabric, and then we said, because of Mexico, we might as well manufacture the whole product. Through the period, the business grew steady and it was pretty sound. We had such a diversity of products and a diversity of customers. Our largest customer when we sold it in 1990 was J.C. Penney, that represented 6% of our business, so we had a lot of good attributes to it. And the reason we sold the company, much of it was through my initiating the processes. Both brothers in law were 10 years older than I. I was 50 at the time, they were 60. I had 2 nephews in the business, and my children were young, and my sister Mitzi just had girls. We didn't have any direction that the family would go. I remember the problems we had with my uncle's son, and I said, you know, we're having a pretty good run. There's a time. When the first generation comes up with the idea, and they're the ones that struggle through it, and they're uneducated. So they get it to a point and then the second generation comes in and they're educated. They still have some values because they remember growing up in a row house and what have you. And they move it to the next level. The third generation could start running into problems because now you're not dealing with brothers and sisters, you're dealing with cousins. I went through a number of family succession seminars, and I had that implanted that someday--my dad had already passed away, and my mother had Alzheimer's so we didn't want her to know. So in 1990, we contacted Bear-Stearns, an investment banking company in New York that is no longer here. We met with them and worked out values. Our main thought was basically to try to bring in a foreign buyer. Number one, we thought we'd get more money. Number two was we could keep it a secret as long as we could from our customers and employees of the company that it was being offered for sale. Certainly for our employees, we didn't want them to know. Everyone was doing well. And they liked what they saw, after we established a value so there was no real conflict of interest. They had formed a leveraged buyout group. They had bought the first one that was a real success that was [??]. And they liked what they saw with us, a nice growth, diversity of product, and customers, so they made an offering, and we sold it to them, and I had a five-year contract. This was 1990 and, right prior to the selling, the country went into a pretty deep recession, and I didn't like the way they [the new owners] reacted to it. They were making decisions that were short-sighted. You know, you would struggle through it, but they would get rid of this and do that and I was very upset about it. And I said to them, this isn't for me. It was easy to say because we had money in the bank and I realized what I wanted to realize. My two brothers in-law stayed on for maybe another six months and it became unpleasant. They got rid of employees, and we had a lot of guilt with it. I did, I had a lot of guilt, and I thought it was just best to part ways. So I had very little contact. I still don't have any contact. Most of the people are gone, it's been 26 years. Bear-Stearns got caught up in that bubble. The company was sold two or three times, but I understand they're doing decently, and now the internet has been a big help to them. If you Google "Surefit", you'll see their website and it's quite impressive. They still sell to Target and Wal-Mart. They did get in a lot of trouble because of those two accounts, which represented well over 50% of their business at one time, and when they started manufacturing everything in China, they kept their warehouse. They moved out of our building a couple of years after we sold it. I was still here in town and I ended up with 22 tenants and, because it was an ancient building and these were not quality tenants, a couple were, I said "what do I need this for?" so I sold the building. We gave away the Sand Island property to the city. Interesting story was at the beginning of my rental process, all of a sudden, I became a realtor. The Women's Junior League, I guess it is, came to me and said, we had very few tenants in the building, so they said, "We're bringing a dinosaur exhibit into the area and we would like to rent, but we don't have any money to pay you. The reason we like your space is because you have this two-story room and it's perfect for the main dinosaur." So I negotiated with the Women's Junior League and, what they agreed to do was, through their volunteers, they were going to put up partitions and do this and do that, which would enhance the value afterwards. We broke up some of the spaces after they left that we could now lease. So it worked out fine. They were there for 6 months. It was in conjunction with Lehigh University. They had all kinds of computer stuff. I don't know if any of you went to that dinosaur exhibit. They had 100,000 children go through from all over and it was a big thing in the area. It attracted other people and everyone was in that building. I sold the building in 2000, and we started spending our winters in California. So after this whole story, I have been fortunate to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And my story is very similar, I'm sure, to many people you interviewed, in terms of the families and the backgrounds and how they ended up here. GE: So a couple of questions about the business. When you were in Mexico, that's where the assembly was taking place and you said you had about 500 people? MK: Yes. GE: Back here in Bethlehem, how many people were still here? MK: We still had about 400-500 people here. GE: And they were just doing everything but assembling? MK: Well they were assembling slipcovers. We were still manufacturing furniture throws and slipcovers in Bethlehem. GE: This was the other pieces? What was being assembled in Mexico? MK: The bed coverings. The outline quilting. We had that niche and that whole niche was very labor intensive. So that was our only way we could sell a product because we were one of the first ones to go into outline quilting and the stores, you had a flower and you just bring the quilt around it. And you see that today. Now it's a lot of automatic equipment that does that. They program it, but at that time, it was all very extensive labor. GE: So when you were doing that, Burlington and J.P. Stevens were not doing that, correct? MK: Correct. It was not an important market to them. They couldn't compete with U.S. labor, and I don't think they were anxious to go offshores in those days. They had unions and what have you but we had a union here too, a textile union. In Mexico, well, we actually ended up with a union in Mexico. The wage rates made it possible for us to get into that business. We didn't take jobs away. We actually created jobs because of this. We had a large warehouse in El Paso, Texas. Because my wife was from El Paso, it made it kind of, not easy, but I was familiar with both sides of the border at that time. SureFit had closed that many, many years ago, but that was actually during the recession. That was one of the things that they began to minimize, but today, I'd be concerned about driving into Juarez. I had no qualms about it when we were there, but it's not a pleasant place to be today. SC: What was the address of the building in Bethlehem? MK: Its East, Broad, and Wood streets. And we still have a company called Broad and Wood Realty because, when we sold the building, we did a tax-free exchange, and we kept the entity, and we owned property because of that and some other company buildings. We owned property in Florida and Pittsburgh. Commercial property. SC: And the other question was, which labor union would it have been? MK: The United Textile Workers of America. It was a smaller union, and we always had a pretty good relationship with them. We had strikes, I remember we've had strikes, but nothing really long-lasting. GE: Just so I understand, you started out with Slipcovers, then you very much did the throws, the quilting became a niche that you were producing in Mexico, then you were also doing the throw pillows and curtains, right? MK: Yeah, we always did that. Now what had happened, as our bed covering business grew, it was around that time where Sears went out of the catalog business. They gave up a five billion dollar business overnight. Five billion is what they were doing in their catalog. The Sears catalog was an icon. Montgomery Wards went belly up, so we ended up with, in terms of catalogs, and again, this is all pre-internet days. If the internet would have been existing then, in fact, I had started my own catalog. When we saw that we were losing Sears and Wards, I put together a "Slipcovers of America" catalog and we'd advertised in House Beautiful and what have you. It was growing at the time we sold the company, and we did room scenes as well, but we didn't have enough substance in it. I wasn't willing, knowing we were going to sell the company, to really invest a lot of money in advertising and bringing in customers. So that thing eventually dwindled through Behr Sterns' as well. In any event, yes, we did, up until the time we sold, and after we sold, in Bethlehem, they still manufactured slipcovers, draperies, decorative pillows, and furniture throws. GE: Now tell me a little bit about how the sales force worked. It sounds like one of your brothers in law headed that part. MK: Yeah, we had our main sales office. The showroom was on 34th Street, between Madison and 5th Avenue. That's the later years, when I was there. We had offices on 26th Street when I first started, but that goes back. They were very attractive showrooms, and we displayed a lot of the bed coverings and furniture throws because the catalog people didn't need showrooms. We had a showroom in Chicago for a number of years, and we had a showroom in California for a number of years. We had a warehouse in California. We had, initially, full time sales people, but then that became a very expensive thing, and we had a few full-time sales people that catered to the major accounts, but then we gravitated towards sales reps to handle other lines, as well. It was a difficult product to sell, very difficult. During this time, we have a little side-story. We also did a lot of work with foam because of the furniture throws and we had products that used foam to some extent. How we got involved with it, I don't know, but it's interesting. We end up signing a contract with Jane Fonda on her exercise mats. She put out the video, if you recall her video, which was the most popular video ever sold because it made sense. It was the first one that people had to use every day. It's not like how to cook something or a recipe and you use it once. This one, you watch the video every day. What was the name of her video? GE: It was a workout video. MK: Yeah, Jane Fonda's workout. Well we signed this contract for the events, and I saw on your little thing that you wanted a side-story, so I'll give you one. Karl [Home] Video was the one who really put her in business. He was the one who came up with the idea of taking her exercise thing and distributing it. They came to us, after we signed a contract, and they said, "We will give you exclusive rights to her video for the department stores". Well, many department stores didn't have sporting good departments and our salesmen would go nuts. Who do you sell this to? That never really took off but we had exclusive rights to her thing. I met her once and the one who did all her work was a bathing suit company out of Long Island, and the son got infatuated with her. Same immigrant father and the whole bit but the son got lost in this Hollywood bit, and they were Penneys largest supplier of bathing suits and, two years later, they were out of business. They hired Theoni Aldredge [?], a Broadway costume designer and she was the designer for hers, which was way overpriced. We did the mat and it was just simple different colored stripes, a workout logo, and a nice packaging, and we didn't know who to sell it to. She got a royalty, and we sold it to a few sporting goods chains and what have you. But, I remember, when she was doing all the PR leading up to the big event at the Shubert Theatre, where they brought in, (the bathing suit son brought in) the chorus line, the actual original Chorus Line people and they each wore her outfits and what have you. I remember we were sitting behind his father, who didn't look very happy about this because they footed the bill. So we did the mats for maybe 3-4 years with Jane Fonda. When she started out with the PR, she started in Burdines in Miami, and they cancelled her appearance because of all the problems with the veterans, and she went to Atlanta and they cancelled that. As she made her way up the East coast, word spread and they didn't want to have anything to do with her. Now she is going to have an appearance at Bloomingdales or Saks in New York, and she was interviewed the night before and she says, "Look, I'm tired of this, I've paid my dues" or whatever her rationale was and she said "I'm showing up. I'm gonna be there". Little did anyone know, but they called her and said, "You're not coming. You come and all your merchandise is going out." They couldn't afford to do anything with it, so the whole thing was not a successful project from every aspect. And that's just a side note. We didn't expect to make a lot of money, I guess, but someone in our organization said "Hey this is an opportunity." They knew someone and that was it. One of our sales managers who lived in Chicago by the name of Gordon Toland was very friendly with Hillary Clinton's father. Hillary Clinton's father worked in Scranton Lake [?[ and then they moved to Chicago. He became a sales rep for the airline upholstery industry, and our sales manager, of course they're kind of in the same industries, were neighbors. I remember being at a barbeque there and they invited the neighbors, but I don't have a clear picture of Hillary being there or anything. But, years later, they were very close friends, and they were always invited to Clinton's Governor's home in Arkansas. Years later, President-Elect Clinton was in Santa Barbara, California, and, I guess, the Tolands were out there with the Rodhams. There's a picture my sister has of her, my brother-in-law, Hillary and Bill, standing behind a sofa. Hillary's mother is sitting on the sofa with her feet up, drinking a beer out of a bottle, and the father is sitting next to her. So I presume our sales manager took this picture because he wasn't in it. And, I'm not a Hillary fan because of that. GE: Interesting. Marty, on a totally different note, tell us a little bit about your civic involvement and your community involvement. MK: Well, I've been on a lot of committees over the years. When I was young, I co-chaired the Campaign Federation for the campaign with Arnold Finkelstein. I was on the Federation board for many, many years. I remember us starting the George Feldman Achievement Award. Some of the things were very moving. Of course, it was during some of the wars. I remember the Wilkes-Barre flood, and they had a special meeting where about two dozen men went to the Jewish Community Center in the boardroom and they raised, within 10 minutes, $100,000 to send to the Wilkes-Barre Jewish Community Center. Things like that were very touching. We had a parlor meeting in our home. We had a shag rug that I remember. One of the older guys who had a cigar, and we didn't know until after they all left, but he put the cigar out in our shag rug. My wife was beside herself. But, we participated in that. That's how I got to know Ivan[Schonfeld] real well. We went on a mission with him in 1990, right after we sold our business, I remember. There were ten of us. We went to Hungary and brought a planeload of Russian immigrants into Israel. They had a video, like you are doing. This woman accompanied the mission, with the idea they're going to show this, which they did, to a full meeting at the center. And, no one really paid much attention while she was videoing this whole, ten-day mission from Hungary to Israel. And I was the one that carried her tripod, and I felt a little responsible. They were all guys except for Elaine Lerner, she was there. You know Elaine Lerner? GE: I know the name. MK: She was just wonderful. We were in the Old City, and I was dying for an ice cream. We were in the Armenian section and I see this ice cream store, and Ivan's on his megaphone, "We're going to the Knesset, get on the bus, everyone on the bus!" and I said, "Elaine, I'm dying for some ice cream." She says "I'll deal with Ivan. You go in and get yourself an ice cream cone." So I come out and the streets are all these cobbled streets, and I trip, and the cone falls down. And I remember her, she was patting me on the back like my mother saying "It's alright Marty. We'll get you another ice cream cone later." But that's how I got to know Ivan real well, and he was great because he was the director of the Federation for many years. Other involvement in the Jewish communities and mostly the Jewish institutions. I was on the board there, but later on, I cut everything off and became very inactive. I kind of paid my dues and, of course, we're in California now, six months a year. Hobbies, I play golf, I'm living a nice life. GE: We no longer have much of a thriving textile industry in this community. How do you think the Jewish community has been affected by that? MK: I think the needle trades was the big industry. Maybe the second, they owned a lot of retail stores, Hess Brothers' and boutique type things. The medical industry has replaced the needle trades industry, but I think its effect is that a few things have changed. The area is spread out and there's too many other activities for children growing up. They don't mingle as much. We were in a concentrated thing. Everyone knew everyone. It's spread out today. I guess there's advantages and disadvantages to that. I know the institutions are all hurting money-wise because it was a different ballgame then. The people that had the money were the manufacturers and they contributed willingly. Professionals have a tendency of not doing that. A lot of them are new to the area. I guess it's good and bad. I think it's put a strain on a lot of the institutions, from the synagogues to the Jewish Community Center.There were a lot of big egos from people who owned manufacturing. And the egos translated into their own institutions because they were the major contributor. I think things have to change. The concept of a campus of institutions makes sense where, in my mind, I'm not really into the numbers today but, just on the surface, I think it would be nice to have the Jewish Community Center and the day school certainly should be combined in some way or another. More of that consolidation. Times are changing. That generation has died off and is dying off. You've got to service the needs and today it's open. One of the questions, did I ever have any real anti-semitism growing up as a child? I don't recall. Maybe because we were isolated but in high school, I don't remember any incidents that bothered me or were lasting or made an impression. I'm sure there was a lot. I know we lived on 16th Street and sold our house, unbeknownst to us to Thompson [?]. His father owned the deli and ran the deli at the old JCC. He worked for Bethlehem Steel, and he worked for my dad for a couple years. He worked for Bethlehem Steel in the 30s, and he was a member of the Communist party, which was not unusual. Then the FBI got him as an undercover to stay in the party and, when I was in high school, they had the hearings in Washington. The father now had a little sandwich shop next to our high school. We always used to go there for lunch. The newspaper came out, I forget his first name but his last name was Thompson and he was called in to testify in Washington. That's the only anti-semitism was in this window, "Down with the Jews", and it was two weeks until he went to Washington to testify and, during that two-week period, he was not allowed to expose who he was, and the only one, we heard later, I'm sure he told his wife, was Rabbi Greenburg. He had to let someone know that he was doing this for the FBI. During the testimony, we found out our house on 16th Street was sold to a veteran who had a repair shop for radios and TV. Well maybe not TV then, but radios. And he was head of the Communist Party of Eastern Pennsylvania and, where we used to play ping pong in our basement, they used to have all these big meetings going on with the Communist Party. This was all going on during the height of the Cold War. There was a certain feeling that we were going to be bombed. So our house was used for Communist meetings. GE: And the last question I'm going to ask before Sue asks you the final couple of questions, why do you think Jews were overrepresented in the needle-trade industry? This was an industry where they were really overrepresented. MK: Well, I guess there was a number of reasons. I think they started out like my father, in their own homes, because it was easy to get a sewing machine. They came from Europe. They made their own clothes, so they had some inclination, you know, about that. They certainly couldn't get jobs in banks. Most of them were uneducated anyway. They didn't go to college, many didn't even finish high school. They started these companies, but it was easy to get into. You buy a couple of sewing machines, and you go into it. In the New York area, of course, in the needle trades, there were so many Jewish women involved with that because they learned it from their mothers and, as I said, it didn't take much to buy 3 or 4 sewing machines and many of them, like my father and his father, they started peddling on the streets. They didn't have any options, in terms of employment. They didn't speak the language. That was another thing. So, why not other things to get involved? They did. It's not like all of them got into the needle trades, but it was an easy entry. GE: Thank you. These are our last couple of questions. SC: So, the last two questions are, what has made you feel the most creative in your life? MK: Well I think I inherited some of that from my father. When I retired and moved to California, I decided that, other than golf, I had to be a little productive and use my head. So we have a, I don't know if you've ever heard of the Osher program. Osher was an individual, and if you look it up, google Osher, they run senior citizen classes at universities. They have a terrific program in the desert because of so many retirees, and we were connected with Cal State of San Bernardino. I always managed to take courses there. One class I decided to take was creative writing. I knew I had a little talent, based on emails and letters I write. So I took this course in creative writing, and basically, the course had maybe 30 people in it.We met once a week for eight weeks and she gave us, sometimes, topics. Other times, just freelance and you go and write and you email it to the instructor, and she'd review all of them and she'd read three or four of them in the class. It seemed like every week she'd be reading one of mine. And I'm not a good writer, but the stories were bizarre and some of them were very touching. And I did come in-- the Palm Springs Writers' Guild has a contest-- and they sent my story in and I got honorable mention, which would be the last thing in the world I ever thought I would get. I started writing all of these stories. Then, afterwards, the class formed our own writing group,, and we had a mentor that published and she liked our small group. We only had four people in our group, and we'd meet every week and basically, during four-five months, we'd do this all the time, and we wrote. So that's when I realized that maybe I was a little creative, and I enjoyed it. And my wife thinks some of the stories are very good. Not necessarily well written. She helped me on some of them. This is cute, before I leave there's a restaurant that is terrific for breakfast and lunch where we live in the desert, Louise's, and I go there one day. It's lunchtime and I run in by myself and a friend of mine is sitting on a chair in front of the restaurant, reading a book. "What are you doing, John?" He said, "Well, I already ate, I'm waiting for the car dealer to call. When they're finished, then they're gonna pick me up." Then I said, "Keep me company, we'll go inside." So we go inside the restaurant and I said, "We'll go sit at the counter so we can eat fast, and I'll take you to the dealer." So we sit at the counter. They hadn't cleared his dishes because he had just finished and all of his dirty dishes are at one end of the counter. And in the interim, a woman sits down next to his dirty dishes. I sit next to the woman, and he's sitting next to me. He sees the empty dishes so he goes over and his glass still had half a glass of iced tea and he brings it back. The woman sees what's happening, and she gives me one of these things and her eyes are wide open and she said, "Can you believe that? Did you see that? Can you believe that?" I said. "Well, I've known him for many years. He doesn't buy his own drinks." Then, the waitress comes and he orders a refill. She gives me another one of these and says, "I can't wait to tell my friends, this is incredible." Well it ends and, we're one of the few people that still get Reader's Digest, 100 words or less, and I write this story. Fitting it in under 100 words, that was tough, and I thought this was really neat, and I submitted it. I couldn't fit in the refill. That really bothered me. I was sure I was gonna win $100 from this and other people read it and they said, "This is terrific". I never heard from Reader's Digest. It's their loss. So I have some creativity. SC: And this is very short. What do you value most in life? MK: Well, I value humor, obviously family and what have you. But I value humor and I kind of gravitate to the deprived. I'm a Republican, leaning to the right on financial and way to the left on social. That kind of describes me. But, I appreciate, particularly in the later years, my parents, the struggles they went through, and that provided for a good life to me and my family. You could value a lot of the good things, and you could become very verbal, but basically, I like good humor and I like nice people, and I'm tolerant, too. People have different viewpoints. So what? Let it be. I'm kind of like laid back. And that's my story. SC: Thank you very much. Copyright for this interview is held by Muhlenberg College. video This oral history is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). 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