MY FATHER JAKE

MY FATHER JAKE
Irwin Garfinkle, 9/13/2006
In the dress manufacturing business in the 1930’s, a cutter was the most important worker in the line. Charlie Shipley was a very good cutter. Charlie and my father formed the G & S Dress Manufacturing Company. Charlie was the inside man controlling the manufacturing, while my father, Jake, was the outside man contacting the customers. They were a good team.
At first they were “contractors”. They got the overflow requirements of a manufacturer. Later, they became manufacturers in their own right. How they managed to do that is interesting.

According to my father, a manufacturer might give Jake and Charlie an order for, say, 500 dresses and would supply the material and the patterns. The material came in rolls, which would be rolled out on long tables in layers that were about a foot deep. Charlie would then lay out the patterns on the top of the material, and using a big circular knife (it looked like a big circular saw without teeth) would cut through all the material. Then the seamstresses would assemble the material into dresses.
Now I mentioned that Charlie was a very good cutter. He was so good, that he could cut 550 dresses from the material supplied for 500 dresses (I may be exaggerating). The excess dresses would not go to the manufacturer, but into G & S inventory that Jake would sell to retail stores. In addition to doing “good” cutting, they also did a little finagling. When the order called for sizes 8 to 16 (for example), Charlie would cut them for sizes 6 to 14, again providing excess dresses for the G & S inventory. With the extra money accumulated from the sale of the G & S inventory, Charlie and Jake were able to become legitimate manufacturers.
At the height of the business, which thrived through the depression of the 1930’s, they were located on the 11th floor of 75 Kneeland Street in Boston. They had about 40 or 50 sewing machines, a “presser”, who was second in importance to the cutter, an accountant and a number of salesmen. My father was very proud of having one particular salesman, who was a Harvard graduate. Think of it, my father, an immigrant with only a cheder education, and who spoke with a heavy Yiddish accent, employed an accountant, and a Harvard graduate.
I might add, for better or worse, that my father did not feel guilty about the ethics of good cutting or the finagling that made it possible for Charlie and him to become manufacturers. However, after their G & S experiences, the manufacturers changed their mode of contractor operations. They sent the fabric to the contractors precut, so that the days of finagling were over. Of course, Jake and Charlie we manufacturers by then, and approved the new methods.
My father was 21 when he came to America alone; he had no money; he could not speak, read or write English; he had only a Cheder (religious school) education. Of course, he was not illiterate; he could read and write in Yiddish. Yet, he sent his two sons to college. It’s amazing how he and so many of those late 19th and early 20th century Jewish immigrants from Russia, not only managed to survive, but actually thrived in this strange new wonderful land of freedom and opportunity where the streets were paved in gold (and blood and sweat ).