Arnan Finkelstein, May 15, 2014
Dublin Core
Title
Arnan Finkelstein, May 15, 2014
Description
Arnan Finkelstein talks about being born in Tel Aviv, Palestine (this is prior to the establishment of the State of Israel) and spending his young childhood there. In the early 1940s, during World War II, the Finkelstein family returned to the U.S. When they returned to the U.S., Arnan’s father manufactured women’s undergarments during the war. After the war, Arnan’s father returned to owning a knitting mill, which he did prior to living in Tel Aviv. Arnan entered the family business in 1961. At this time synthetic fabrics were being developed and the Finkelsteins were active in this. After Arnan’s father sold the business in the late 1960s, Arnan stayed involved in different textile enterprises until 1981.
Creator
Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
Publisher
Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives
Date
2014-05-15
Rights
Copyright remains with the interview subject and their heirs.
Format
video
Identifier
LVTNT-18
Oral History Item Type Metadata
Interviewer
Susan Clemens-Bruder
Interviewee
Arnan Finkelstein
Duration
01:33:04
OHMS Object
OHMS Object Text
5.4 May 15, 2014 Arnan Finkelstein, May 15, 2014 LVTNT-18 1:33:05 LVTNT Lehigh Valley Textile and Needlework Trades Muhlenberg College: Trexler Library Oral History Repository trexlerlibrarymuhlenberg Arnan Finkelstein Susan Clemens-Bruder Gail Eisenberg video/mp4 FinkelsteinArnan_20140515 1.0:|19(7)|36(10)|55(4)|78(12)|95(13)|112(14)|133(14)|156(3)|181(3)|206(5)|227(3)|248(7)|273(11)|288(14)|313(7)|334(15)|355(20)|372(6)|387(15)|408(4)|425(12)|448(9)|461(17)|480(13)|503(5)|526(11)|545(4)|566(11)|587(12)|606(5)|625(6)|638(8)|661(3)|672(10)|691(3)|718(2)|739(4)|758(4)|777(11)|806(2)|827(2)|850(2)|883(7)|904(11)|933(5)|952(9)|981(2)|1004(2)|1023(8)|1046(11)|1061(10)|1086(7)|1109(10)|1130(7)|1147(3)|1160(17)|1185(10)|1208(5)|1237(7)|1266(9)|1285(9)|1310(2)|1331(7)|1348(12)|1371(2)|1396(17)|1413(8)|1432(2)|1447(4)|1468(9)|1487(14)|1512(10)|1531(11)|1550(8)|1571(7)|1590(7)|1619(7)|1644(6)|1657(12)|1678(4)|1701(17)|1718(14)|1739(10)|1762(9)|1777(11)|1802(8)|1825(15)|1844(13)|1865(8)|1884(12)|1901(7)|1914(16)|1929(14)|1930(2) 0 https://youtu.be/-46-hKYxyg8 YouTube video 0 Introduction—Arnan Finkelstein SC: I am going to ask you a little bit about your family first. If you could start with yourself and then we will go backwards. What is your full name? Where were you born? All your information from when you were young.
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 ; AF: Name is Arnan Finkelstein. I was born in April of 1937 in Tel Aviv under the British mandate. My father was an American citizen at the time, and we came to the states in October of 1941. 0 54 Arnan's Parents, George & ; Mina Finkelstein AF: My father lived in Allentown between the late twenties and early thirties and worked at his family’s textile mill in Allentown, the Arcadia Knitting Mills. During that period, the Arcadia Knitting Mills was a very successful knitting facility. It had an exclusive right in the United States to do something that was just invented called rayon. They had the exclusive right in women’s underwear fabrics. So during the depression, the Arcadia Knitting Mills was basically running around the clock and it was a very, very successful plant. My father did very, very well, from what he told me, he was making like a thousand dollars a month during the depression, which was a staggering amount of money. Something happened in ’33 between he and his uncles. There was some kind of a disagreement ; I never got a full answer on it. But he decided to retire in 1933. He decided then to go looking for a wife and went back to Poland where he knew of my mother. 0 267 1941: Emigrating from Tel Aviv to the United States AF: I remember a little bit about Tel Aviv. I was four years old when we left Tel Aviv. The reason we left, there were several. First of all, Europe was already at war. Germany was in, Rommel was in North Africa and was advancing toward Egypt, and the American Consul General in Jerusalem basically told my father that he could no longer protect him as an American citizen. Then there was an additional part from what my father told me, was that Congress, there was a law passed in 1941 that required all naturalized citizens to come back to the States by the end of ’41 or lose their American citizenship. I don’t have independent confirmation ; I’m only going by what my father or my parents told me. The Italians bombed Tel Aviv in early ’41 or late ’40. They were actually supposed to bomb the oil refineries in Haifa, but they couldn’t find them so they dropped a few bombs on Tel Aviv. I remember spending some nights in bomb shelters in the whole house my father built in Tel Aviv. And then we left Tel Aviv in the spring of ’41 and took a 70-day trip around Africa to come to the states. 0 432 The Garment and Needle-Trade Industry During WWII AF: During the Second World War, he used his contacts – well, a couple of things. All of the big manufacturers were involved in the war effort. So there was nobody doing very much of anything for the domestic market. He used some of his previous contacts from the Arcadia days to be able to buy fabric. He had a little sewing plant in New Brunswick, which manufactured women’s undergarments. He had some of the big New York stores as buyers. I think Bloomingdales and Saks and some of the others because they could not get it anywhere else. That business essentially folded at the end of World War Two, when the traditional manufacturers came back on stream. 
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 ; SC: So silk was used for parachutes?
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 ; AF: Yeah and that was obviously a rare commodity. Rayon was the closest manmade equivalent. 0 588 Moving from Highland Park, NJ to Allentown, PA AF: My father had started a knitting mill in Highland Park I think around 1950. It was a struggle ; he did not succeed over the long run because he was just too far away from the dye houses. He was a contractor there, meaning he was given yarn, which he then knit into fabric. The fabric would be then sent to a dye house, which would dye the fabric and ship to locations depending on the owner of the fabric. So my father did what was called commission knitting, and he got 10-12 cents a pound, whatever the number was. But, because he was in Allentown, the dye houses would not pick up freight free in Allentown. He had to pay freight to ship the goods to Reading or to other places in Pennsylvania, which took all the profit out of the business, so eventually the business folded. So we moved to Allentown in 1954, right after I graduated high school. 0 703 Work Experiences and College Education at Lehigh University AF: Once I got working papers, which was around 1950, I actually went to work for my father in the mill in Highland Park during the summers and typically not during the school period. So I was in the knitting industry I guess since I was about 13 years old. And then, when we moved to Allentown I went to Lehigh, so that was a period of time that I was not actively involved in the plant. 
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 ; SC: What did you study at Lehigh?
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 ; AF: Engineering physics.
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 ; SC: Perfect.
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 ; AF: It was probably the worst four years of my life, but other than that it was fine. 0 902 The Armed Forces—Doing Failure Analysis for the U.S. Armed Forces AF: I went through ROTC at Lehigh, and I was commissioned a second lieutenant upon graduation. And then, that August I went into the Air Force at the Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City. I spent three years in the Air Force doing essentially failure analysis. We would get pieces and parts of airplanes and engines and components and try to figure out why they failed. And then at the same time, the University of Oklahoma was just about, maybe 20 minutes away. So off hours, I was able to, I figured I had about 2/3 of a master’s degree in metallurgical engineering. 
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 ; SC: Did you find that the failure work that you did was helpful in business at all?
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 ; AF: Well, I think that even though I don’t have fond memories of the education part of Lehigh, I think that the scientific approach that I received was… I came from a very different perspective than anyone else in the business and I think it made a difference for our success. 0 1276 Family History AF: So this is the family story, as I understand it. My father’s mother was one of eighteen children. 
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 ; GE: Excuse me, What was her name? Your father’s name was George . . . 
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 ; AF: My father’s name was George and his mother’s name… I’ll have to take a pass. The last name was Povembrovsky. There were eighteen. Several of my father’s uncles came to the States around the beginning of the twentieth century. There was Isadore, there was Sam, and there was David. Those are the three that I know. Oh, and there was an Eli, as well. Some of the family went to Norway. As a matter of fact there was a Gibstein family that went to Norway. There was also part that stayed in Palestine. Yaakov Agam, the artist, was my father’s first cousin. His mother and my father’s mother were sisters. His name originally was Yaakov Gibstein. So that was part of that family. And so in probably the early ‘20s my father came to the States, around 1922. From what he told me, he left Poland, his mother smoked a turkey for him so that it would be preserved. He left Poland and started his trek across Europe until he got to, I believe Hamburg or Antwerp or something like that, for the trip to the States. 0 1792 George and Mina Finkelstein's Level of Observance SC: One thing that I wanted to just talk a little bit about was, were they religious? Were they very observant in Poland and in the United States?
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 ; AF: My father probably was more observant than my mother. I think my mother was in a more cosmopolitan space. I know that my father belonged to a shul in Allentown. Not Agudas Achim… the other one. I think, I'm not sure. There were two synagogues on Second Street and there was one right down the street. 
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 ; GE: Was that orthodox?
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 ; AF: They were both very orthodox. 0 1885 Family History (cont'd) AF: From the information that my mother gave me, my father is in the picture, obviously, his father, my father’s two sisters, brother and his aunt Hannah and apparently her husband, as well.
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 ; GE: About what year is that and where is that?
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 ; AF: This would have been at the farm in Poland and it’s probably – 
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 ; GE: Before 1922.
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 ; AF: No, it’s gonna be in the ‘30s. 
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 ; GE: Oh so he came back?
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 ; AF: Yes he came back. What he was able to do in addition, he was able to get his sister Shoshanna and his brother Shlomo out of Poland into Palestine in the ‘30s. He had to give them one thousand British pounds so that they could come into Palestine and demonstrate that they were not going to be a ward of the State or whatever. For some reason, I don’t know what happened with his other sisters, but they perished. In 1938, my parents took me, the prize one year old, to show off back in Poland. So, they tried to get my mother’s brother out of Poland but he said this was going to blow over. So he also perished. 0 2207 1922-33: George Finkelstein and the Arcadia Knitting Mills AF: [M]y father when he came to the states went right to work in the factory in Brooklyn. He got off the boat, he had twenty-five cents in his pocket, and he goes to work in the factory.
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 ; GE: This is around 1922?
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 ; AF: Yes this is around 1922. He worked his way up, first a mechanic, he learned how to take the machines apart and put them back together again. Eventually, because he was blood, he was family, they gave him more and more – he clearly, I think earned it – but his uncles gave him more and more responsibility, including, I think they actually set up a plant in Cherbourg, Canada, in which he was involved. Then there was the big move to Allentown in 1928-1929 ; they built the building at the south end of the Eighth Street bridge in Allentown, the Arcadia Knitting Mills. It was a multistory building ; most recently it was converted into the Bridgeview Apartments. That plant manufactured . . . in its heyday manufactured rayon fabrics for women’s undergarments. 0 2425 1941: End of the Arcadia Knitting Mills AF: [M]y father left in 1933 - they continued on but in 1941 the government condemned the building and essentially gave it to Mack Truck, which was next door, so that Mack Truck could expand, and they started making trucks and whatever for the war. So the Arcadia Knitting Mills essentially ended. 
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 ; GE: So the uncles ended at that point?
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 ; AF: The uncles ended the textile business.
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 ; GE: Interesting. What brought them from Brooklyn to –? 
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 ; AF: My understanding is that they liked the fact that there was a very steady highly competent workforce in Allentown with a good work ethic. 0 2596 The '40s: George Finkelstein's Manufacturing Business in NJ GE: [T]ell us a little about your father’s history. When he came back from Palestine to the U.S, just kind of gave us a little bit of that history with the business. I know he was in New Jersey.
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 ; AF: In New Jersey, he had a little sewing plant, cutting, he had access to some rayon fabric. He was able, because the traditional manufacturers could no longer supply the big department stores ; my father was able to sell to the big department stores in New York and Philadelphia . . . women’s undergarments that he manufactured in New Brunswick. 0 2750 1954: George Finkelstein Becomes a Contractor in Allentown, PA AF: So he decided in 1954 to move back to Allentown, bought into a partnership with Sam Boxer. I think Sam’s brother decided to get out. I think it was Lou Boxer, he bought Lou Boxer’s portion of the business. They spent a year or two together and they decided to split. My father went on his own in, I think, probably 1956.
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 ; GE: And you came in at what time, what year?
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 ; AF: We moved to Allentown in 1954.
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 ; GE: You joined your father what year?
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 ; AF: After the Air Force in 1961 0 2985 1961: Arnan Finkelstein Joins the Family Business GE: So now why don’t you tell us about once you entered the business with your father?
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 ; AF: Well I had worked for him on and off from 1950 through high school and in college a little bit, but I joined my father in 1961. As I said, it was right at the beginning of the synthetic boom of stretch nylon. I think my father was one of the first people to try to knit stretch nylon. Stretch nylon was initially a product that was developed by a Swiss company called Helenka [?]. They had taken raw fibers of nylon, and had developed a process where they would send it through a heated tube and it would crimp the nylon so that essentially a foot of raw nylon going in may have been 3 inches going out. But, it was crimped and had stretch. It was used in leotards in the stocking industry. The original nylon stockings were made out of that type of fabric. My father had a friend who gave him twenty spools of yarn with just a little bit of yarn on it to try and run it on an interlock-knitting machine. He was able to do that and came out with a very nice fabric that was stretched in two ways. And then I’m sure other people were experimenting at the same time. Then it just skyrocketed from there. 0 3161 Cotton Versus Synthetics AF: All of a sudden, almost overnight, synthetics. The cotton is out. Knitting cotton was a very - it was a dirty process. What happened is, as you were knitting the cotton, some of the staple would come off as fuzz and there was fuzz all over the place. As a matter of fact, my father was allergic to it. He ended up taking some of the fuzz and they made a serum and injected him with it so he could actually tolerate it and be in the factory. But there was stuff hanging all over the place. As soon as synthetics came in it was clean, it was almost an unbelievable transformation. 
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 ; GE: What is interesting is you’re saying why this synthetic is so nice is the production got much better. How about at the end use? Isn’t it also a better product for the consumer?
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 ; AF: Well it was a very top-notch product at the time. When it compared to cotton, it was probably less expensive than cotton, but it performed, it washed, it kept its shape after many washes. It was an ideal fabric for children. 0 3448 The '60-70s: Evolution in Name, Products, and Business Practices GE: During what time frame would you say this lasted? From 1961 until when?
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 ; AF: ‘61 until it lasted into the early ‘70s. 
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 ; GE: So for a good ten years.
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 ; AF: We sold our business in 1968. In 1967, we built a dye house. We had the knitting mill on South Albert Street, in Allentown. And then my father bought…
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 ; GE: What was the name of your knitting mill?
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 ; AF: It started out as Allentown Knitting Mill. There was Lehigh Weaving Company because the building he bought had the name associated with it. Eventually Lehigh Knitting Mills became available, and someone else had the name, but gave it up. So we had those names. Then we had Syntex Dyeing and Finishing. My father purchased an old Sears warehouse on Union Boulevard and we converted that into a dye house. 0 3674 1968: George Finkelstein's Retirement and the Emergence of Unions GE: So then you sold it in ’68, and at that point, your family was then out of…
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 ; AF: Well, my father retired at that point, and I stayed on as president of the new manufacturing organization. My father had already expanded ; we had a knitting mill in Rocky Mountain, North Carolina. So we had the knitting mill in Allentown, the knitting mill in Rocky Mountain, North Carolina, and the dye house in Allentown. When we sold to Duplan, Duplan had purchased a company out in California that had a knitting mill. So I became responsible for that plant as well.
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 ; GE: What drove you to North Carolina?
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 ; AF: Help. Labor. 
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 ; GE: What was the difficulty with the labor here? Was it not as plentiful?
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 ; AF: I think there was the competition for knitters. The Fairtex was union. In order to compete, we had to keep up with union style wages. 0 3857 Employee Numbers, Wages, & ; Contracts GE: At this point, the family also had a plant down in North Carolina. In terms of employees, you said you had about 40?
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 ; AF: All together, at peak, I had about 400 people working for me.
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 ; GE: Is that already once you were bought out or before?
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 ; AF: Afterwards. 
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 ; GE: After you were bought out. 
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 ; AF: We expanded some after we were bought. We expanded the dye house and we expanded the knitting mill, so it was at peak. Probably before we sold it must have been somewhere in the 200-250. 0 4107 The '60s: Attempts at Merging the Manufacturing, Sales, & ; Retail Industries—"Stretch Knit" GE: My father had, right around the time that I joined, he had a friend in the textile industry that was a high power salesman in New York. Clarence Ross had the sales agency, my father had the manufacturing, and the two of them formed a 50-50 partnership to sell stretch nylon to the trade. That company was called Stretch Knit. 
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 ; GE: Stretch Knit is the one who is making it?
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 ; AF: Stretch Knit was the product that the sales agency was selling to the trade. It was the position of a middleman but it was a way of getting two separate companies owning a third to be able to service the industry. 
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 ; GE: You say by trade you mean the retailers?
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 ; AF: The manufacturers. 0 4266 1968: Selling to Duplan AF: I remember after meeting in New York I came back to my father and said we are never going to make a deal. That’s when we sold the business. So we had thought about going the private route.
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 ; GE: And then with Duplan your father retired?
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 ; AF: My father retired.
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 ; GE: You became the CEO it sounds like.
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 ; AF: The head of manufacturing. Eventually, a year or so later, Duplan bought the sales agency. So even though the sales agency continued to sell our product now owned by Duplan, there was some tension but eventually it worked out and was back under one roof. 
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 ; GE: And how long did you stay as…?
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 ; AF: I had a five-year contract with Duplan that I guess after 3 and a half years, we agreed to disagree. 0 4397 The '70s: Decline of the Textile and Needle-Trade Industry AF: I stepped out in May of 1972. And then the business, and I don’t think there is a cause or a relationship, but the overall business started not long thereafter to decline. It declined in my view because not only were people like Duplan buying knitters, but the big weaving companies were buying knitting mills as well. Weavers had the Cohen mills, the Burlington’s, people that were making sheets and towels and shirt fabrics and stuff like that. They had a mindset of you set up a loom and three years later you change it. So they were at very long run productions, very low margins. Knitting mills were very versatile. We had a hundred knitting machines in Allentown, within a few days ; I could pretty much change every one of them to something else. Because of its versatility and because of its smallness, there was a very high margin product as well. I think that weaver became very jealous of the high profit margins of the knitting mills. But when they bought the knitting mills, they started to impose their mindset. So before polyester became a dirty word, it was a very high performing product. 0 4732 1978-81: Working for Stretchini's Dyeing Company AF: In 1978, one of the people I knew from Stretchini, they approached me to help a company that he was involved with to run the dye house. So they bought the dye house in Allentown, our old dye house.
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 ; GE: Stretchini.
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 ; AF: Not Stretchini. It was a company out of Pottsville that bought the plant in Allentown and I helped run that. I think I joined them in ’78.
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 ; GE: And how long did you do that?
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 ; AF: I think it was around ’78 to ’81. And again I guess I wasn’t cut out to be in the corporate world. I basically was the head of the plant in Allentown, but there was a lot of interference from people that really didn’t know what they were talking about. 0 4868 Evolution of the Jewish Community—Impact of the Textile and Needle-Trade Industry AF: Well I met a few Jewish kids the summer that I moved to Allentown. It was softball in the summer, maybe a little basketball during the winter months. But, as far as my involvement, my parents belonged to Beth El and my mother and father were regular goers. We would go Friday night quite often. My mother became president of the sisterhood. In fact, Marlene and I met at Beth El.
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 ; GE: So Marlene grew up in this area?
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 ; AF: No. She had an aunt that moved here - whose husband owned Dobnoff’s - the women’s dress store on Hamilton Street. The aunt lived next door to a friend of my mother’s who saw her picture and her next-door neighbor made the Shiddach, the connection. So we met, I was in the Air Force, I was home on leave and Marlene finished finals. 0 5158 Reasons for Jewish Involvement in the Textile and Needle-Trade Industry GE: How do you think your family, especially your uncles, because they were really the first, how do you think they got involved in the needle trade industry? Why in the needle trade industry? 
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 ; AF: I don’t know.
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 ; GE: Why do you think that there definitely was a Jewish propensity in the needle trade industry compared to some other industries? Any thoughts?
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 ; AF: I think it is typical. There is a vacuum that somebody doesn’t want to fill and a vacuum that somebody does want to fill. 0 5249 Arnan's Creative Inspirations and Values SC: So now my first question is what has made you feel the most creative or the most satisfied in your life or maybe that has given you a sense of artistry in your life in the broadest sense?
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 ; AF: I think I had a good time fooling around with the designs of the knitting machines, or the fabric rather. We’d come up with different combinations of yarn and different colors to see if we could make something interesting. That was a fun time. In addition to nylon, there were two types of polyester we were using. One you could not dye at all and the other one could be dyed, so you could end up getting three colors. So that was a fun thing to play around with and for me personally, I think photography has become a place where I get my creative jollies taken care of. 0 5391 Arnan and Marlene's Involvement in the Jewish and Allentown Communities AF: We were very active in Beth El. Marlene was on sisterhood and I was executive vice president. I had been asked to become president of Beth El. But we got involved, we were in I guess the epicenter of the politics that occurred about 35 years ago. It had to do with our daughter’s bat-mitzvah. We had a situation, I mean she was a day school alum ; she went to Camp Ramah, very competent in Hebrew and the prayers and whatever. We wanted her bat-mitzvah where she could maximize her involvement, and Beth El at the time looked to minimize the involvement of the kids. So we kind of parted ways and we were instrumental in starting Am Haskalah at the time. During that period of time we were very actively involved. I was at the Jewish committee, one time I was on four boards. I was president of the Federation for a while ; ’78-’80 I think. I was involved with the day school, with the center, with Beth El. 0 MovingImage Arnan Finkelstein talks about being born in Tel Aviv, Palestine (this is prior to the establishment of the State of Israel) and spending his young childhood there. In the early 1940s, during World War II, the Finkelstein family returned to the U.S. When they returned to the U.S., Arnan’s father manufactured women’s undergarments during the war. After the war, Arnan’s father returned to owning a knitting mill, which he did prior to living in Tel Aviv. Arnan entered the family business in 1961. At this time synthetic fabrics were being developed and the Finkelsteins were active in this. After Arnan’s father sold the business in the late 1960s, Arnan stayed involved in different textile enterprises until 1981. Interview with Arnan Finkelstein, May 15, 2014 SUSAN CLEMENS-BRUDER: I am going to ask you a little bit about your family first. If you could start with yourself and then we will go backwards. What is your full name? Where were you born? All your information from when you were young. ARNAN FINKELSTEIN: Name is Arnan Finkelstein. I was born in April of 1937 in Tel Aviv under the British mandate. My father was an American citizen at the time, and we came to the states in October of 1941. SC: Why were you in Tel Aviv at that point? AF: It starts with my parents' decision. My father lived in Allentown between the late twenties and early thirties and worked at his family's textile mill in Allentown, the Arcadia Knitting Mills. During that period, the Arcadia Knitting Mills was a very successful knitting facility. It had an exclusive right in the United States to do something that was just invented called rayon. They had the exclusive right in women's underwear fabrics. So during the depression, the Arcadia Knitting Mills was basically running around the clock and it was a very, very successful plant. My father did very, very well, from what he told me, he was making like a thousand dollars a month during the depression, which was a staggering amount of money. Something happened in '33 between he and his uncles. There was some kind of a disagreement ; I never got a full answer on it. But he decided to retire in 1933. He decided then to go looking for a wife and went back to Poland where he knew of my mother. There was about a six-year difference in age. He knew of her and started courting her. I think she turned him down once or twice and eventually did accept his proposal. He was a U.S. citizen by that time so as a result of that, he gave her the choice of either moving to the States or moving to Palestine, where he had been on several occasions in an attempt to make arrangements for his grandmother's burial in Jerusalem. So my mother apparently chose Palestine and Tel Aviv, in the early-mid thirties was a brand new city. It was roughly thirty years old. It was gleaming white. It was designed architecturally there was the Bauhaus and a lot of then-contemporary design. In fact, I think Tel Aviv is on the UN registry of architecture, mainly because of the Bauhaus influence. It was a very, very good life. GAIL EISNEBERG: What were the names of your mother and father? AF: My father was George Finkelstein and my mother was Mina, M-I-N-A, her maiden name was Zupnitsky. She was from Augustow, Poland. SC: Could you spell that? AF: I'll try. A-U-G-U-S-T-O-V. [official spelling is with a "w" at the end, not "v"] SC: Oh, I meant your mother's name. AF: Well, there is how I spell it and I see the correspondence how she spells it. Z-U-P-N-I-T-S-K-Y would be the way it would be transliterated into English. In Polish there were C's and J's and all sorts of other things in there. SC: Can you can talk a little bit about when you were a child, as far back as you know. And then we'll place you back in the family in the business. AF: I remember a little bit about Tel Aviv. I was four years old when we left Tel Aviv. The reason we left, there were several. First of all, Europe was already at war. Germany was in, Rommel was in North Africa and was advancing toward Egypt, and the American Consul General in Jerusalem basically told my father that he could no longer protect him as an American citizen. Then there was an additional part from what my father told me, was that Congress, there was a law passed in 1941 that required all naturalized citizens to come back to the States by the end of '41 or lose their American citizenship. I don't have independent confirmation ; I'm only going by what my father or my parents told me. The Italians bombed Tel Aviv in early '41 or late '40. They were actually supposed to bomb the oil refineries in Haifa, but they couldn't find them so they dropped a few bombs on Tel Aviv. I remember spending some nights in bomb shelters in the whole house my father built in Tel Aviv. And then we left Tel Aviv in the spring of '41 and took a 70-day trip around Africa to come to the states. SC: That was the safest way? AF: That was the only way. The Mediterranean was at war, the British and the Germans and Italians were, you know, it was an active warzone. Even as we crossed the South Atlantic, in probably the fall of 1941, I have recollection of spending nights in the lifeboats because they were afraid that they would be torpedoed or attacked by German raiders at any time. SC: Wow. So you arrived in the United States, and where did you grow up? AR: I grew up primarily, by 1942, we were living in New Brunswick, New Jersey. And then, in '48 we moved to Highland Park, New Jersey, which was right across the river from New Brunswick. So through high school I was in Highland Park. SC: Was your dad involved, when you were a child, in any of the garment or knitting industry? AR: During the Second World War, he used his contacts -- well, a couple of things. All of the big manufacturers were involved in the war effort. So there was nobody doing very much of anything for the domestic market. He used some of his previous contacts from the Arcadia days to be able to buy fabric. He had a little sewing plant in New Brunswick, which manufactured women's undergarments. He had some of the big New York stores as buyers. I think Bloomingdales and Saks and some of the others because they could not get it anywhere else. That business essentially folded at the end of World War Two, when the traditional manufacturers came back on stream. SC: So silk was used for parachutes? AF: Yeah and that was obviously a rare commodity. Rayon was the closest manmade equivalent. GE: Did they have a patent on rayon? AF: That patent was with a company in England, called Clourtaulds, which was the company that held the rayon. Arcadia Knitting Mills had the exclusive right in the U.S. in women's undergarments, for use in women's undergarments. SC: This is a little off topic, but did you hear that the success in nylon and rayon really pushed out the silk mills in Allentown, little by little? AF: Nylon doesn't come in until much later. I understand that rayon had a significant role in that, yes. SC: Yes, that was the cutting edge. Your uncles were really smart. AF: Yes, they were really active, they had 1200 knitting machines in Allentown running around the clock, manufacturing the fabric. My father, from what he said, the plant was originally in Brooklyn, and it was moved to Allentown in 1929. Apparently, he was responsible for building the building in South 8th Street and then he was the production manager during that period of time. SC: Before he decided to leave? AF: Before he decided to leave, yes. SC: So you went to school in New Jersey? AF: I went through high school in Highland Park. SC: When did you come to Allentown? AF: My father had started a knitting mill in Highland Park I think around 1950. It was a struggle ; he did not succeed over the long run because he was just too far away from the dye houses. He was a contractor there, meaning he was given yarn, which he then knit into fabric. The fabric would be then sent to a dye house, which would dye the fabric and ship to locations depending on the owner of the fabric. So my father did what was called commission knitting, and he got 10-12 cents a pound, whatever the number was. But, because he was in Allentown, the dye houses would not pick up freight free in Allentown. He had to pay freight to ship the goods to Reading or to other places in Pennsylvania, which took all the profit out of the business, so eventually the business folded. So we moved to Allentown in 1954, right after I graduated high school, and my father bought into a partnership with Sam Boxer, almost an identical knitting mill that he had in Highland Park, but it was located in Allentown and meant that the dye houses in Reading made a daily run to pick up the fabric and so there was no additional cost. SC: Is that the B-O-X-E-R? AF: B-O-X-E-R. SC: If you could talk a little bit about where you worked your entire life, from a paperboy or whatever, all the way through to your business. AF: Once I got working papers, which was around 1950, I actually went to work for my father in the mill in Highland Park during the summers and typically not during the school period. So I was in the knitting industry I guess since I was about 13 years old. And then, when we moved to Allentown I went to Lehigh, so that was a period of time that I was not actively involved in the plant. SC: What did you study at Lehigh? AF: Engineering physics. SC: Perfect. AF: It was probably the worst four years of my life, but other than that it was fine. SC: Was that because of Lehigh being-- Lehigh? AF: Well, first of all, my parents when they moved to Allentown were basically busted. The only money they had was from selling the house that they had in Highland Park, which went into buying the partnership. I think it was like $7,000 or something like that. I remember that previous Passover, my parents had to borrow money for that. It was a very difficult period of time in the very beginning. So Lehigh-- I commuted. When I was in high school, I had applied to Rutgers because we lived in Highland Park and money was tight so I was going to be commuting. And then we moved to Allentown and that summer I was studying for the SATs in order to be able to get into Lehigh, and we lived in the Tremont Apartments. My parents, my sister and I were in a two-bedroom apartment. Until 1957 we were in that apartment and it was a tough school environment because of Lehigh. Even more so than now, there was no grade inflation. Of my freshman class, barely over half graduated on time. I was lucky enough to be in that part that graduated on time. It was a grind, 8 o'clock classes, six days a week. It was not fun. SC: All male? AF: All male except for a couple of women teachers. SC: Did you commute there? AF: I did. My parents got me a car, and I commuted every day. SC: Better to have a car and commute than to live at Lehigh and be without a car. AF: Well, my parents tell me, and I don't remember, that they had offered me the opportunity of living on campus and I don't remember having that choice, but it's possible. SC: So, then after you graduated from Lehigh, where did you work? AF: I went through ROTC at Lehigh, and I was commissioned a second lieutenant upon graduation. And then, that August I went into the Air Force at the Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City. I spent three years in the Air Force doing essentially failure analysis. We would get pieces and parts of airplanes and engines and components and try to figure out why they failed. And then at the same time, the University of Oklahoma was just about, maybe 20 minutes away. So off hours, I was able to, I figured I had about 2/3 of a master's degree in metallurgical engineering. SC: Did you find that the failure work that you did was helpful in business at all? AF: Well, I think that even though I don't have fond memories of the education part of Lehigh, I think that the scientific approach that I received was-- I came from a very different perspective than anyone else in the business and I think it made a difference for our success. SC: After the service, did you go overseas at all? AF: No. Not part of the service. I was in between Korea, before Berlin. I went overseas but it was not part of my work. I did go to Bermuda for an airplane inspection trip. But other than that, I did my work in Oklahoma City and went up to Boeing Aircraft in Seattle on a couple of occasions. SC: That's nice. AF: It was fun. I got a chance to do some fun things, good things in the Air Force. SC: After the Air Force, then what did you do? AF: I left the service in August of '61, but I was working on a project as part of my master's program. So I stayed on until November, until my father kind of made me an offer that I couldn't refuse. By that time, he had separated from Boxer ; had his own plant in South 12th Street in the Vultee industrial area. I just happened to see my last pay from the Air Force ; I was making like $5,700 a year. My father offered me $200 a week to join him in the business. GE: $200 a week. AF: A week. I'm sorry, $200 a week to join him in the business. So that was a lot of money and I certainly was familiar. I had worked in the summers for him, in youth facility so certainly I was quite familiar with what was involved. So I joined him in November/December of 1961. SC: In doing so, did you ever look back at where you might have gone, at all, or was this something that . . . ? AF: The first time I went to Boeing, I was a spanking new second lieutenant with one really shiny gold bar on each shoulder. I went to Seattle because the lad, who was a civilian, and I were going to inspect Curt Lemay's aircraft for a potential defect that was found in the B47. The KC-135, which was a forerunner of the 707 Boeing Jetliner, was just beginning to enter service, and they were concerned that some of the issues that were affecting the B47 might affect the 707 KC-135. So, Curt Lemay's aircraft was the most flown aircraft in the Air Force Fleet. So the Air Force decided, or Boeing decided this is the plane they wanted inspected. So I went out to Seattle and Moses Lake at their Tufts facility to examine his aircraft. SC: Did you ever look back on what you might have done? AF: We're in Boeing, before I got there, I was treated like royalty. People were opening doors, yes sir, no sir. And then they took me into a room where if I had gone to work for Boeing, I would have been. It was a room that went as far as the eye could see. And there were desks. And there were four desks that were butted together and in the center of the space of four desks was a single telephone on a revolving spindle that the four engineers shared. And I said, "Oh my God." So that was my first inkling that maybe my career path wasn't the one that would have been the best. And I had some other contact with jet engine manufacturers like Pratt & ; Whitney and General Electric. The corporate world got to be less and less appealing. SC: Can we move back now and talk as far back about your family as you know, and put you into some context coming from Poland? AF: Okay. So this is the family story, as I understand it. My father's mother was one of eighteen children. GE: Excuse me, What was her name? Your father's name was George . . . AF: My father's name was George and his mother's name-- I'll have to take a pass. The last name was Povembrovsky. There were eighteen. Several of my father's uncles came to the States around the beginning of the twentieth century. There was Isadore, there was Sam, and there was David. Those are the three that I know. Oh, and there was an Eli, as well. Some of the family went to Norway. As a matter of fact there was a Gibstein family that went to Norway. There was also part that stayed in Palestine. Yaakov Agam, the artist, was my father's first cousin. His mother and my father's mother were sisters. His name originally was Yaakov Gibstein. So that was part of that family. And so in probably the early '20s my father came to the States, around 1922. From what he told me, he left Poland, his mother smoked a turkey for him so that it would be preserved. He left Poland and started his trek across Europe until he got to, I believe Hamburg or Antwerp or something like that, for the trip to the States. GE: And the community they lived in in Poland, what was the name? AF: I believe it was Grodno, G-R-O-D-N-O, something like that. It was a farm that the Finkelstein (pronouncing it as Finkelshtein), as they pronounced it then, clan, there were several-- my grandfather, my father's father, several of his brothers and sisters I guess, were on the land. Apparently it was deeded to my father's grandfather for services rendered to Czar Nicholas. We don't know what those services were. It was Nicholas the First, not the Second. So that is the time frame where the land in Poland, or it was Russia, wherever it was at the time, was deeded to the Finkelstein family. SC: Which was unusual. AF: Which was very unusual. SC: So they were farmers. Do you know any other occupations that people had? Were they all on the land? AF: I know that my father, my mother's father, before he was prevented from doing so, was a-- I don't know the term, but he was allowed to buy forestland, or at least lease forestland and to cut the trees down for timber. Like logging. He obviously didn't have a chain saw or whatever, but I know that some of the better timber he sold to the shipyards in Gdansk, or Danzig as it was, for masted sail ships. GE: His last name? AF: Z-U-P-N-I-T-S-K-Y is how I would spell it. GE: And do you know what her father's name is? AF: Sholom SC: So, he could sell that. AF: He cut down the trees ; sell the very finest for masts and the rest would go for heating or paper. And then he was prevented. At some point the Polish government said that Jews were no longer allowed to do that. SC: Would they have been living in what was considered the Jewish Pale? AF: I don't think so. My mother grew up in Augustow. She went to school in Warsaw High School, and then she actually went to the University of Warsaw. GE: Wow, so they were really in central Poland, not Eastern? AF: Yes. She never graduated. I think the offer my father made her for whatever reason ; she left Poland a semester before graduating. But she spoke eight languages at one time. She spoke German, Polish, French, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. We found a recipe book of hers after she passed away, that started out in Polish and then went into French and then ended up in Hebrew. GE: So it sounds like her family was on the more affluent side? AF: To begin with. GE: Until they took away his businesses? AF: Right. My mother had to pay her own way to go to gymnasium, the high school. She would work as a nanny, she worked as a tutor. So she basically had to support herself through high school and college. SC: So your father's family and your mother's family, they did have connections before you went back to Poland? AF: I don't know that they did. My father was a "Am Ha-Aretz," a man of the land. He was not cultured and not cultivated. He was very street smart. During the First World War he told stories of how the farm was on the moveable border between Germany and Poland and Russia. He told about how he hated the Poles. He never learned Polish. Life under German in World War One was by far better than under the Poles or the Russians. Life under German control -- GE: Even in World War Two? AF: World War One. They were basically left to be autonomous. He also remembers, he told stories of how he smuggled people across in a hay wagon across the border from Poland into Germany. So he was that kind of-- he was probably no good-nick at some point, but he learned very hard, had to fight his way to school several times a week to get to school. SC: Very smart, just maybe not as book smart. AF: He was very, very street smart. My mother was very, very cultured, smart. SC: So do you know anything else about their lives? Any of the family, or anybody that was in a trade like tailoring or garments? I'm trying to make a link. AF: No, I don't. I don't at all. I know that my father eventually helped his father buy out all of the other Finkelsteins from the land, but I don't know what they ended up going into. GE: And that was still in Poland? AF: That was still in Poland, in probably the early '30s. SC: One thing that I wanted to just talk a little bit about was, were they religious? Were they very observant in Poland and in the United States? AF: My father probably was more observant than my mother. I think my mother was in a more cosmopolitan space. I know that my father belonged to a shul in Allentown. Not Agudas Achim-- the other one. I think, I'm not sure. There were two synagogues on Second Street and there was one right down the street. GE: Was that orthodox? AF: They were both very orthodox. They were both very orthodox. He belonged to one of them. I know that he wouldn't cross the street to go to the other one. I don't know what level of observant. Although I know that when we moved back to the states, in New Brunswick, we belonged to an orthodox synagogue in New Brunswick until we moved to Highland Park, where we joined a conservative congregation. Which was pretty right wing conservative back in those days. *Looking at a picture* AF: This is my mother's family . . . From the information that my mother gave me, my father is in the picture, obviously, his father, my father's two sisters, brother and his aunt Hannah and apparently her husband, as well. GE: About what year is that and where is that? AF: This would have been at the farm in Poland and it's probably -- GE: Before 1922. AF: No, it's gonna be in the '30s. GE: Oh so he came back? AF: Yes he came back. What he was able to do in addition, he was able to get his sister Shoshanna and his brother Shlomo out of Poland into Palestine in the '30s. He had to give them one thousand British pounds so that they could come into Palestine and demonstrate that they were not going to be a ward of the State or whatever. For some reason, I don't know what happened with his other sisters, but they perished. In 1938, my parents took me, the prize one year old, to show off back in Poland. So, they tried to get my mother's brother out of Poland but he said this was going to blow over. So he also perished. SC: So you were there a year before, in '38, a year before the Nazi Soviet pact. So is there anything else with family that you can think of that we haven't asked. I asked how observant they were. How about their relationship with the community? I think you talked about it. AF: My father was very bad as I indicated. He had nothing but enmity for the Poles, and I'm sure it was returned as well. That was not a good situation. My mother grew up ; they had a piano in the house. She learned how to play piano. It was a very different environment. I think, I guess it was in Bialystok ; she had very fond memories of spending time at the lakes with her cousins and friends and whatever. On one level she spoke of a very idealic life in Poland. On the other hand, she left, and I'm not sure exactly what prompted her to not finish university, to rethink her rejection of my father's overtures and to . . .. I really don't know what happened there, but she obviously made the right decision in the long run for herself and us. GE: Did your mother talk about her friends and cousins? Were they all Jewish? In other words, was she just part of the nice . . . AF: I think they were all Jewish. GE: So you don't know about her relationship with the broader Polish community? AF: No, not at all. SC: I have a couple other questions at the end to ask you. GE: Is that a family tree? AF: This is a family tree. It's limited. It was done for our daughter Alana's bat-mitzvah. It goes back quite a few years. GE: Maybe afterwards we can just make a copy of that? AF: Sure. GE: So now we just want to find out a little bit more to understand better about the business. If you want to share with us, how the business originated? I think you had said it with your uncles. If you would just share with us how it originated, what was the specific business, who were their suppliers, who were their customers, what were they making? Those kinds of things. AF: My knowledge of this is fairly sketchy. What I do know is that my father when he came to the states went right to work in the factory in Brooklyn. He got off the boat, he had twenty-five cents in his pocket, and he goes to work in the factory. GE: This is around 1922? AF: Yes this is around 1922. He worked his way up, first a mechanic, he learned how to take the machines apart and put them back together again. Eventually, because he was blood, he was family, they gave him more and more -- he clearly, I think earned it -- but his uncles gave him more and more responsibility, including, I think they actually set up a plant in Cherbourg, Canada, in which he was involved. Then there was the big move to Allentown in 1928-1929 ; they built the building at the south end of the Eighth Street bridge in Allentown, the Arcadia Knitting Mills. It was a multistory building ; most recently it was converted into the Bridgeview Apartments. That plant manufactured . . . in its heyday manufactured rayon fabrics for women's undergarments. GE: Tell us a little bit about the process. In other words, what were their raw materials, what did they sell? AF: The raw material was rayon that was delivered on spools. Whether it was manufactured in England where it was invented, or whether Courtaulds had built a plant in the states, I don't know. They were getting regular shipments of rayon. They had, from what I understand, 1200 tricot machines, which is a kind of knitting machine. They also had a dye house in Allentown, which after the fabric was knit into rolls, they would be dyed to a particular color and then shipped to either converters or someone else who would cut the fabric into garments. Arcadia was only involved in the manufacture and dying of the fabric. GE: So they were both manufacturers and they were the dyers? AF: Right. GE: And I think you had said that they were the only manufacturer of rayon? AF: They had for some period an exclusive right to rayon for use in women's undergarment fabric for quite some time, especially during the early and mid thirties. GE: Of women's undergarments, do you know let's say rayon made up what percentage? AF: I don't know. GE: Otherwise, what was it made of? Cotton? AF: It was cotton, I think if it was very upscale it would have been silk. Rayon was a silk-like product, synthetic and much more readily available than silk. GE: And much cheaper. AF: Much cheaper. GE: So this probably had the majority of the market. AF: I think it must have, considering how busy they were during a particularly trying time in the United States ; they must have been doing a very large portion of the business. And they continued on until - my father left in 1933 - they continued on but in 1941 the government condemned the building and essentially gave it to Mack Truck, which was next door, so that Mack Truck could expand, and they started making trucks and whatever for the war. So the Arcadia Knitting Mills essentially ended. GE: So the uncles ended at that point? AF: The uncles ended the textile business. GE: Interesting. What brought them from Brooklyn to --? AF: My understanding is that they liked the fact that there was a very steady highly competent workforce in Allentown with a good work ethic. As a matter of fact, in preparation for this, I tried to do a little research, but the Morning Call archives only go to '84. I don't know whether their . . . whatever. But I did find an obituary of someone who worked at the Arcadia Knitting Mills as a knitter who passed away at 94, some years ago. GE: With that labor force, it was a plentiful, good work ethic. How about in terms of their salaries, compared to New York salaries? AF: I don't know, I can't answer that. GE: Was it unionized? AF: I don't think so. GE: They sold to cutters? AF: They sold to utters or manufacturers of the garment. It depends on how vertically integrated they were. GE: Okay. After your uncles left Arcadia in 1941, then really Arcadia ceased to exist? Is that correct? AF: That's my understanding. GE: Were your uncles ever again in the business? AF: I think they were quite wealthy and they moved out to California and got involved in other things. GE: Okay. SC: Have you seen the Allentown 225th book? I know it's mentioned in there. I'll copy the page. AF: I'd like to see it. GE: Of Arcadia? SC: Yeah. It's mentioned. GE: Was that one of the first knitting mills in this area? AF: If it wasn't one of the first, it was certainly the largest. GE: Okay. So then you were saying that your father -- tell us a little about your father's history. When he came back from Palestine to the U.S, just kind of gave us a little bit of that history with the business. I know he was in New Jersey. AF: In New Jersey, he had a little sewing plant, cutting, he had access to some rayon fabric. He was able, because the traditional manufacturers could no longer supply the big department stores ; my father was able to sell to the big department stores in New York and Philadelphia . . . women's undergarments that he manufactured in New Brunswick. GE: So now he was a manufacturer, not the knitter, and not the big fabric maker. AF: Right. GE: And do you want to just share with us why the large manufacturers were not--during the war? AF: During the war, the large manufacturers obviously turned into making uniforms and parachutes and all sorts of other things. And so they were out of the supply of domestic products. GE: Right. So it gave an opportunity for small-- AF: Yes. My father and a few women in a storefront making garments. During the war he did nicely, relatively well. GE: Right. After the war-- AF: After that war, that business completely evaporated. The traditional manufacturers came back into the mainstream. He tried a few different things without much success. He considered taking the family back to Israel, by this time. But that was even a tougher road to do I think in '49 and 1950 and so. Then he decided to try his hand again in the knitting mill and he bought some knitting machines and set up a small factory in Highland Park, New Jersey. GE: What made him move from there to Allentown? AF: The plant in Highland Park failed because they were too far away from the dye house area, which was typically in Reading, and he had to pay freight to ship the unfinished fabric to the dye house and that basically took away all profits. GE: So that took away all profits. AF: There was no profit. So he decided in 1954 to move back to Allentown, bought into a partnership with Sam Boxer. I think Sam's brother decided to get out. I think it was Lou Boxer, he bought Lou Boxer's portion of the business. They spent a year or two together and they decided to split. My father went on his own in, I think, probably 1956. GE: And you came in at what time, what year? AF: We moved to Allentown in 1954. GE: You joined your father what year? AF: After the Air Force in 1961. GE: Okay about 5 years later. So during those 5 years, your father was-- AF: A contract knitter knitting other people's yarn into fabric. At that time it was almost exclusively cotton. GE: So it was no longer the rayon? AF: No. No longer rayon. GE: The cotton was ultimately being made into what kinds of products? AF: The machines he had at the time were called interlock machines. The fabric went into polo shirts and . . . I mean, it was a very fine fabric. It's still being used today. Many of your better golf shirts are knit in the interlock machine out of 100% cotton or poly-cotton. That still is the standard for golf shirts, that material. GE: Who were some of your father's major customers? AF: I can't tell you that. I don't know. These were names that wouldn't have meant anything. GE: Okay. They're not necessarily brands that we know. AF: No. They were typically people who bought the yarn and had it knit up, and then would go out and try and sell the fabric to end users or cutters or whatever. They typically are called converters. All the business was done over the telephone or a handshake at most. There were thousands of dollars of goods transferred without ever a contract. GE: So when your father was doing this, were there many other knitting mills in the area here? AF: In New Brunswick, there were none that I'm aware of. In Allentown, there were a few. The Krasnov family was involved, Surefit was doing things like this on a larger scale, and there was another Krasnov that was doing it on some scale. But not a lot. GE: There was enough business that the 3, or 4, or 5 knitters who existed, there were enough customers? AF: Yeah. I mean, Boxer went off on his own. There were others that went . . . In 1961 before the synthetic boom, there were a few. After the synthetic boom started, which started just about the time when I joined my father in 1961, it became an entirely different thing in Allentown. GE: Okay. We'll hear about that in just a minute. SC: May I ask, how is Krasnov spelled? AF: I think K-R-A-S-N-O-V. GE: So now why don't you tell us about once you entered the business with your father? AF: Well I had worked for him on and off from 1950 through high school and in college a little bit, but I joined my father in 1961. As I said, it was right at the beginning of the synthetic boom of stretch nylon. I think my father was one of the first people to try to knit stretch nylon. Stretch nylon was initially a product that was developed by a Swiss company called Helenka [?]. They had taken raw fibers of nylon, and had developed a process where they would send it through a heated tube and it would crimp the nylon so that essentially a foot of raw nylon going in may have been 3 inches going out. But, it was crimped and had stretch. It was used in leotards in the stocking industry. The original nylon stockings were made out of that type of fabric. My father had a friend who gave him twenty spools of yarn with just a little bit of yarn on it to try and run it on an interlock-knitting machine. He was able to do that and came out with a very nice fabric that was stretched in two ways. And then I'm sure other people were experimenting at the same time. Then it just skyrocketed from there. GE: I thought DuPont. AF: DuPont had invented nylon, but Helenka in Switzerland developed the process for crimping the nylon. GE: Interesting. So DuPont developed the nylon and then they did this particular . . . AF: Post processing GE: . . . . post process that made it possible to become a fabric. AF: Yes. The typical nylon that DuPont made was you could make a rope out of it. GE: I thought even the parachutes. AF: Yes. Like sheet type fabrics, woven fabrics, not knitted into anything. SC: Better living through chemistry. AF: Better living through chemistry. That was Chemstrand, though. They they had their own nylon later on. GE: So this is around the very early 1960s, your father is learning how to-- AF: All of a sudden, almost overnight, synthetics. The cotton is out. Knitting cotton was a very - it was a dirty process. What happened is, as you were knitting the cotton, some of the staple would come off as fuzz and there was fuzz all over the place. As a matter of fact, my father was allergic to it. He ended up taking some of the fuzz and they made a serum and injected him with it so he could actually tolerate it and be in the factory. But there was stuff hanging all over the place. As soon as synthetics came in it was clean, it was almost an unbelievable transformation. GE: What is interesting is you're saying why this synthetic is so nice is the production got much better. How about at the end use? Isn't it also a better product for the consumer? AF: Well it was a very top-notch product at the time. When it compared to cotton, it was probably less expensive than cotton, but it performed, it washed, it kept its shape after many washes. It was an ideal fabric for children. One of my father's big customers was a company called Stretchini, which eventually sold to Bobby Brooks, that manufactured children's garments. We would knit, they would have it dyed and then they would cut it up into leotards and tops and they were advertising very heavily in the New York Times magazine section. Every week, Stretchini was just a very big name in children's garments, swimsuits. The fabric for the warm-up jackets and pants for the 1964 and 1968 Olympic team was made out of our fabric that we donated and gave to Wilson, which cut it up into garments. So, it performed very well. In fact, I may still have that jacket. So this was the pants that either the '64 or '68 Olympic team wore as their warm-up. I don't think I can get into them anymore. GE: Did this become the norm for all clothes or did you have any kind of proprietary rights to this? AF: No. What happened is as we were succeeding in '61 and on, the Boxer family was succeeding also. They had a plant not far from ours but they were right near where Good Shepherd is now. The Berman family with Fairtex had a big plant, which was right alongside Emmaus Avenue and 309. They had a big facility there. Between these three plants, between our plant and Fairtex and the Boxer plant, I would say that a very large percentage of the stretch nylon fabric was being produced right here in Allentown. GE: You say a very large percentage ; do you mean a large percentage that served the whole country? AF: Yes. We were serving the New York market, but the New York market was the market. GE: Among the three of you, it was enough business? It wasn't terribly competitive? AF: We competed for people by that time. We would compete for knitters. GE: For the workers? AF: For the workers, yes. GE: Okay so the constraint was more the workers, not how much you could make? AF: Yes the workers and the mechanics. There was enough for all of us. The big issue back then was how to make it. GE: So it was really a production constraint, not at all a market or selling one. SC: Would you say again where the Boxer's were located? AF: They were located right near the Good Shepherd facility in South Allentown. GE: During what time frame would you say this lasted? From 1961 until when? AF: '61 until it lasted into the early '70s. GE: So for a good ten years. AF: We sold our business in 1968. In 1967, we built a dye house. We had the knitting mill on South Albert Street, in Allentown. And then my father bought-- GE: What was the name of your knitting mill? AF: It started out as Allentown Knitting Mill. There was Lehigh Weaving Company because the building he bought had the name associated with it. Eventually Lehigh Knitting Mills became available, and someone else had the name, but gave it up. So we had those names. Then we had Syntex Dyeing and Finishing. My father purchased an old Sears warehouse on Union Boulevard and we converted that into a dye house. GE: From '61 to '71, did you also have dyeing? AF: The dyeing came in in about '67. GE: Because there was an earlier time when you did have dyeing. AF: At the Arcadia. GE: Okay. AF: But we started dyeing our fabrics in '67. Then we sold the business in '68 to Duplan Corp, which was a New York Stock Exchange listed company. GE: So it was a large one? AF: Pretentions of being large. GE: So it was publicly traded. AF: Yes. SC: Is that D-U-P-- AF: D-U-P-L-A-N. They were actually one of the suppliers of the nylon yarn. So, they had . . . GE: So they were vertically integrated. AF: They were vertically integrated during this period. There was a time of the conglomeration GE: Okay and even where you took on the dyes, which would again be vertically integrating, did you do that to have better control? AF: Clearly quality. We felt that in order to compete more successfully, we needed to have a product that we knew from beginning to end. SC: Were the double knits at that time, the really heavy double knits? AF: We went from the interlocking to double knits and then we also had single knits too. There were single knits with lighter weight like top fabric. Some of the, even today, some of the less expensive knit shirts will be a single knit fabric as opposed to the interlock which is a form of double knit. GE: Generally, your fabric would not be distinguished from Boxer's fabric? AF: Typically not. We would try to come up with different styles, we would try to come up with color combinations that were more seasonal. Our sales agency would twice a year would come up with a color palette, and we would do fabric for samples, and that's what the salesmen used to go out and sell. GE: And your salesmen, they were selling to manufacturers? AF: Manufacturers of the garments, yes. GE: I assume the manufacturers of the garments were the ones driving what color it should be? AF: Yes. Absolutely. GE: So then you sold it in '68, and at that point, your family was then out of-- AF: Well, my father retired at that point, and I stayed on as president of the new manufacturing organization. My father had already expanded ; we had a knitting mill in Rocky Mountain, North Carolina. So we had the knitting mill in Allentown, the knitting mill in Rocky Mountain, North Carolina, and the dye house in Allentown. When we sold to Duplan, Duplan had purchased a company out in California that had a knitting mill. So I became responsible for that plant as well. GE: What drove you to North Carolina? AF: Help. Labor. GE: What was the difficulty with the labor here? Was it not as plentiful? AF: I think there was the competition for knitters. The Fairtex was union. In order to compete, we had to keep up with union style wages. GE: But you were not union? AF: We were not union at the time. I think Fairtex, the Fairtex plant was much larger because it was all under one roof. So they had several hundred people working there. The knitting mill in Allentown was 30-40 people. Our knitting mill. The dye house we had several hundred people working at the dye house. I think the International Textile Workers were in Fairtex. And then they made several attempts to unionize our plant. The first few were unsuccessful. The last one was successful. Part of the problem was that under the new union rules, over-time occurred on the weekends, no matter how many hours you worked during the week. So we were finding that people were working four days during the week, taking off a day, then working Saturday and getting over-time. It would mess up our production cycles. So to give us a bit of a buffer, in terms of dealing with our needs, being able to fulfill our needs, my father just decided to get a plant started in Rocky Mountain. GE: So I'm trying to remember exactly where we were. At this point, the family also had a plant down in North Carolina. In terms of employees, you said you had about 40? AF: All together, at peak, I had about 400 people working for me. GE: Is that already once you were bought out or before? AF: Afterwards. GE: After you were bought out. AF: We expanded some after we were bought. We expanded the dye house and we expanded the knitting mill, so it was at peak. Probably before we sold it must have been somewhere in the 200-250. GE: You had said that the breakdown was most of it was dye and much smaller was the knitting is that correct? AF: No. We were basically matching our dye house to what we could produce. GE: Right but how about in terms of employees? AF: Employees, there were many more people in the dye house. GE: It was more labor intensive? AF: Much more labor intensive. One knitter could tend three, four, five, six machines depending on the style. In the dye house you needed multiple people to keep things going on one machine. GE: So the dying was very labor intensive. SC: That was in Rocky Mountain that you had 400 people? AF: No. There were a total of 400. We had probably about 20 in Rocky Mountain. It depends on if we were running, we very often ran three shifts. GE: How would you characterize the relationship employees have with management? With yourself as well as the management staff? AF: I think in spite of the fact that some people would take a look at unionization and that this represented some kind of difficulty. I don't think it did. I think it was just the way that things were going at the time. I thought we generally had a pretty good relationship. I'm sure there were issues but I think we paid pretty fairly. As a matter of fact, whereas I said earlier that I think Fairtex asked the union to try to organize us. I got back at them a little bit some time later in the second contract that we only had 30-40 people that were unionized. Fairtex had several hundred. I had mentioned that we had difficulty with people not working their full workweek but coming in for overtime and getting the overtime. In the second contract that I signed after the first two or three years, I got a concession. I paid more for an hourly wage because we could do it. But I got a concession from the union that overtime would only begin after forty hours. So, that really helped us a great deal. What happened was that Fairtex had to now match what we were giving, on an hourly, and one of the Berman brothers called me up screaming at me saying what I did to them. GE: Do you want to just tell us a little bit, you had said I think around '67-'68 that Duplan-- AF: Duplan, '68. During '67, early part of '68-- let me go back a little bit. My father had, right around the time that I joined, he had a friend in the textile industry that was a high power salesman in New York. Clarence Ross had the sales agency, my father had the manufacturing, and the two of them formed a 50-50 partnership to sell stretch nylon to the trade. That company was called Stretch Knit. GE: Stretch Knit is the one who is making it? AF: Stretch Knit was the product that the sales agency was selling to the trade. It was the position of a middleman but it was a way of getting two separate companies owning a third to be able to service the industry. GE: You say by trade you mean the retailers? AF: The manufacturers. GE: So this was still before the garment. AF: Before the garments. This was selling it to people that would turn it into garments. It was a part of the business that I saw as the future. My father, there were really big egos involved in this. All along there was a thought that we were kind of working toward merging the three companies into one and potentially going public on our own. That wasn't particularly the right period for doing things like that. Through '67, early '68, there was a lot of negotiation between the local parties to see if we could come up with a merger. The biggest problem was the sales agency basically had no assets. They had a couple paintings on the wall and some office furniture. We had a lot of iron. We had a lot of very expensive types of equipment. So trying to find the balance as to how to value the new company was a problem. I kept thinking that it could work out. I thought we had a deal and then that deal fell apart. We were at the same time being courted by Duplan to sell the business. I remember after meeting in New York I came back to my father and said we are never going to make a deal. That's when we sold the business. So we had thought about going the private route. GE: And then with Duplan your father retired? AF: My father retired. GE: You became the CEO it sounds like. AF: The head of manufacturing. Eventually, a year or so later, Duplan bought the sales agency. So even though the sales agency continued to sell our product now owned by Duplan, there was some tension but eventually it worked out and was back under one roof. GE: And how long did you stay as--? AF: I had a five-year contract with Duplan that I guess after 3 and a half years, we agreed to disagree. Things were changing. I remember clearly one of the sales pitches and getting us to be bought out, we don't want the iron, we don't want the machines. We want the people that are making it happen. And then, pretty much as soon as they buy us, the corporate people take over and we have to hire a controller and we have to have monthly reports. All of a sudden, as smart as we were before we were bought, now we are dumb and don't know what we are talking about. They try to get policy wonks to come in and change things. GE: So the whole management style. AF: The whole management style changed and that kind of confirmed to me the decision I made to go in with my father, not to go in with the big corporations. Clearly, I was not a corporate type. GE: You stepped out it sounds like. AF: I stepped out in May of 1972. And then the business, and I don't think there is a cause or a relationship, but the overall business started not long thereafter to decline. It declined in my view because not only were people like Duplan buying knitters, but the big weaving companies were buying knitting mills as well. Weavers had the Cohen mills, the Burlington's, people that were making sheets and towels and shirt fabrics and stuff like that. They had a mindset of you set up a loom and three years later you change it. So they were at very long run productions, very low margins. Knitting mills were very versatile. We had a hundred knitting machines in Allentown, within a few days ; I could pretty much change every one of them to something else. Because of its versatility and because of its smallness, there was a very high margin product as well. I think that weaver became very jealous of the high profit margins of the knitting mills. But when they bought the knitting mills, they started to impose their mindset. So before polyester became a dirty word, it was a very high performing product. I kind of remember these numbers. We used to deliver fabrics typically that were 12 to 13 ounces per square yard. Which doesn't mean anything by itself, but it's a substantial product. A year or two later, when the weavers were competing in bulk because that's the only thing that they knew, the fabric was now down to 10-10 ½ ounces per square yard and it stopped performing completely. So overnight that business completely busted. The machine that I had mentioned that we bought from England ; at one point we would pay $50,000 a machine for those machines. After I left, about a year or two after I left, I was offered by a machinery salesman that I could buy four machines for $37,000. GE: Okay so therefore nobody was buying? AF: Nobody was buying. Overnight the business-- I think it was just a change in mentality and the way that it affected the quality of the fabric. GE: So just so that I understand, so you're saying that in the '60s, these synthetics came in and they just took off, but then in the '70s it started to reverse? AF: Yes. GE: Your hypothesis is that happened because the Weavers really cheapened or diminished the quality? AF: That's my take. It may not be all of that. It was not foreign competition because the knitting machines were very high cost. GE: It was a high barrier to entry. AF: It was very expensive. GE: They cheapened it. I'm not sure I fully understand that. AF: They lightened it. SC: It wasn't durable. AF: It wasn't nearly as durable, as useful as a product. It's like taking the garment like I showed you with the double knit, where you had a nice substantial feel, and then making it a single knit. It just didn't perform anymore. GE: The knitters are making the fabric, what are the weavers making? AF: The weavers are also making the fabric, but they are making commodity fabrics. GE: Tell me what you mean by that. AF: Sheets. You don't make sheets a hundred yards at a time. You make sheets a thousand or a million yards at a time. GE: So they're the ones doing the big ones. AF: Right. GE: And the knitters were the ones who were doing more custom and small? SC: So you had 45-60 inch fabric being knit in long tubes as opposed to -- AF: Yeah. For us a 10,000-yard order is a significant order. 10,000 yards is what they would bang out over a weekend. GE: Interesting. And then they started going down already. Now we are in the '70s. How long did they last, that business? AF: I think somewhere around '75, give or take. The Duplan went bankrupt and for several years the dye house and the plant in Allentown went into receivership or whatever. In 1978, one of the people I knew from Stretchini, they approached me to help a company that he was involved with to run the dye house. So they bought the dye house in Allentown, our old dye house. GE: Stretchini. AF: Not Stretchini. It was a company out of Pottsville that bought the plant in Allentown and I helped run that. I think I joined them in '78. GE: And how long did you do that? AF: I think it was around '78 to '81. And again I guess I wasn't cut out to be in the corporate world. I basically was the head of the plant in Allentown, but there was a lot of interference from people that really didn't know what they were talking about. SC: Did you know the Delins in Pottsville? AF: No. GE: Arnold Delin, I think that was very much with the sewers. SC: Yeah it was different. GE: So after you were done with that, any other connections? AF: That ended my textile connection. GE: Alright. Terrific. So I was just going to ask you, you grew up in the Allentown area, want to share with us a little bit about-- well you didn't grow up here, how old were you? AF: 17. GE: Okay so tell us a little bit about the Jewish community in Allentown that you saw as a younger person, how do you think it was affected by the textile industry being very dominant in the Jewish community? AF: Well I met a few Jewish kids the summer that I moved to Allentown. It was softball in the summer, maybe a little basketball during the winter months. But, as far as my involvement, my parents belonged to Beth El and my mother and father were regular goers. We would go Friday night quite often. My mother became president of the sisterhood. In fact, Marlene and I met at Beth El. GE: So Marlene grew up in this area? AF: No. She had an aunt that moved here - whose husband owned Dobnoff's - the women's dress store on Hamilton Street. The aunt lived next door to a friend of my mother's who saw her picture and her next-door neighbor made the Shiddach, the connection. So we met, I was in the Air Force, I was home on leave and Marlene finished finals. She was at Hunter College, and she reluctantly came out and even more reluctantly went to temple Friday night and that's where we met. We were supposed to have a date the following night, but we were not supposed to meet Friday night. GE: So as you got a little bit older, this kind of industry and its dominance here, what kind of impact do you think it had on the Jewish community here? AF: I think it made for a lot of wealthy people. There were only a few of us in manufacturing, but a lot of people in the sewing. After we were married, I was involved with the Federation, and I had a chance to meet and to know some of the people that were in the textile industry. It was a Camelot period. It was a golden age. GE: How long would [you] say that Camelot period went, from when to when? If you had put a starting point and ending point? AF: I think there was a lot of stuff going on before the synthetic business started and there was some stuff going on afterwards. I think that period of time between the early '60s and the mid '70s, I may be a little fuzzy on those dates but it is essentially those dates that really was a golden age. GE: Right, in Allentown's Jewish community. How do you see it now? AF: It's a very different, much more professional community. Back then it was all manufacturers, it was scrap, it was rags, it was whatever. Now it is professional. GE: Do you think it's as cohesive, as involved and affluent? AF: I think that it is probably, I would say that it is more cohesive now, less affluent. For example, the money that was raised by Federation between '67 and '73, I mean it was a lot of money. That's when I was into it. I got involved in the mid-'60s. I know that there was a lot of money raised before that as Israel was being founded. There was a lot of money raised. If you look at what a million dollars was in let's say the '73 campaign, the Yom Kippur War campaign. I was the campaign chairman, we doubled that year, obviously because everybody was cleaning out their bank accounts. We raised over $2 million. If you look at what $2 million then is compared to what it is now. GE: It's worth five times as much. AF: At least that. Campaign today is very nice but it doesn't have the kind of money that people gave like Murray Goodman and the Kobrovskys, and others of that stature were giving huge amounts of money. SC: Was that '67 or '68? GE: '73. SC: Okay. GE: How do you think your family, especially your uncles, because they were really the first, how do you think they got involved in the needle trade industry? Why in the needle trade industry? AF: I don't know. GE: Why do you think that there definitely was a Jewish propensity in the needle trade industry compared to some other industries? Any thoughts? AF: I think it is typical. There is a vacuum that somebody doesn't want to fill and a vacuum that somebody does want to fill. I read this interesting article, it's not about textile but it's about lawyers in New York who thought that doing mergers and acquisitions was beneath them. So the Jewish lawyers in New York became the M& ; A specialists and as the stock market boomed, the M& ; A boomed and all of the white shoe firms that decided doing M& ; A was beneath them and not dignified were out in the cold and the Jewish firms grabbed on everything and succeeded. My guess is it's something like that. Again, I think there were areas that were closed. So you're looking for areas that are open. GE: Okay I think we pretty much covered everything. SC: So now my first question is what has made you feel the most creative or the most satisfied in your life or maybe that has given you a sense of artistry in your life in the broadest sense? AF: I think I had a good time fooling around with the designs of the knitting machines, or the fabric rather. We'd come up with different combinations of yarn and different colors to see if we could make something interesting. That was a fun time. In addition to nylon, there were two types of polyester we were using. One you could not dye at all and the other one could be dyed, so you could end up getting three colors. So that was a fun thing to play around with and for me personally, I think photography has become a place where I get my creative jollies taken care of. SC: And how about, what do you value most in life? AF: I think the stuff today is really all about being a husband and a grandfather. That's become, there's no way that I could have a job today because I am too busy being a professional grandfather. We have six granddaughters and three daughters. It's a full-time job. In fact, we are going after this, we're not babysitting because they are 15 and 12, but we are taking them out for dinner because their parents aren't around tonight so we're taking them out to dinner.. GE: You know we actually didn't get into that at all. How would you say that you and your family are connected both to the Jewish community and to the wider community, presently? AF: Jewish community has been an interesting challenge. That's a subject for another interview. We were very active in Beth El. Marlene was on sisterhood and I was executive vice president. I had been asked to become president of Beth El. But we got involved, we were in I guess the epicenter of the politics that occurred about 35 years ago. It had to do with our daughter's bat-mitzvah. We had a situation, I mean she was a day school alum ; she went to Camp Ramah, very competent in Hebrew and the prayers and whatever. We wanted her bat-mitzvah where she could maximize her involvement, and Beth El at the time looked to minimize the involvement of the kids. So we kind of parted ways and we were instrumental in starting Am Haskalah at the time. During that period of time we were very actively involved. I was at the Jewish committee, one time I was on four boards. I was president of the Federation for a while ; '78-'80 I think. I was involved with the day school, with the center, with Beth El. Now it's nothing. GE: How about your involvement with the wider community? And then we'll speak to Marlene. AF: Organizationally not really. I was involved with the Allentown Fair Housing Commission years ago when it first started. I was involved, but that was pretty much it. Was there something else-- oh yes, it was not a formal involvement but my father had purchased some property in downtown Allentown. When he passed away I pretty much was running the real estate. So The Caring Place is the building that we used to own, and I pretty much gave them a free ride for a year because they couldn't possibly pay me. So, I mean Mary and I had a very nice relationship. So that was not a direct involvement but at least it was a gift of whatever. SC: And it still goes on. AF: Yes, it still goes on. It had its troubles but the gift goes on. And it's great, I love what the potential is for what she has done down there. 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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Muhlenberg College Special Collections and College Archives , “Arnan Finkelstein, May 15, 2014,” Muhlenberg College Oral History Collections, accessed September 21, 2024, https://textile.digitalarchives.muhlenberg.edu/items/show/29.