The Y Files

Years ago, I spent a summer working at the Brown Street Mill in North Adams, Massachusetts, a gritty little city in the Berkshire Hills. Once upon a time, North Adams was a vibrant, industrial center and a magnet for immigrants with last names like mine. The Sprague Electric Company, the city's major employer, operated bustling factories on Marshall and Brown Streets. Winter and summer, day and night, shift-workers stubbed out their cigarettes and filed through Sprauge's iron gates.

Across the street from a church and down the street from a bar, the Marshall Street complex buzzed with physicists, chemists, electrical engineers, and skilled laborers. They rubbed shoulders, both figuratively and literally, with unskilled workers like my grandparents, who assembled electrical components, gas masks, and parts for the first atomic bomb. By the mid-1960s, the Sprague Electric Company employed over 4,000 men and women in a city of 18,000 souls.

During Sprague's glory days, most everyone worked at Marshall Street at some point in their lives. My grandfather, an avid outdoorsman who called the brick factory "my prison", worked the second or third shift while his wife, my grandmother, worked the first. Parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all built electronic components for an hourly wage. While scientists at Sprague's research and development center studied the nature of semiconductors, NASA used Sprague-built components in the Gemini program.

Sadly, the heyday of Sprague Electric was relatively short-lived. After the Marshall Street plant closed in 1985, some operations were moved to a small, sheet-metal building in a drab industrial park on the outskirts of town. The fate of the Brown Street Mill remained uncertain, but a new owner kept hope alive. Commonwealth Sprague Capacitor, Inc., a successor company to Sprague Electric, continued to build passive electronic components such as metallized and non-metallized film and paper capacitors. Product offerings also included silicon controlled rectifiers (SCRs) and motor controllers.

Around the time that Governor Michael Dukakis was done telling the world about "The Massachusetts Miracle", I took my turn working for what was left of the Sprague Electric Company. Home from college for the summer, I jumped at the chance to earn an extra 30 cents an hour by leaving my job at a local school supply business. My first day at the Brown Street Mill gave me a glimpse into the gritty world of my forbears.

Part 2 of this industrial folk-tale is now on CR4. You can read Part 3 and Part 4, too.

Resources:

http://www.powerpulse.net/mfgr_display.php?mfgr_id=416

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Adams,_Massachusetts

http://www.vishay.com/company/history/

http://electronic-components.globalspec.com/ProductFinder/Electrical_Electronic_Components/Electronic_Components_Passives

http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=NATB&p_theme=natb&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=10E581B95D33B158&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM

http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/3186

Steve Melito - The Y Files