Lessons From a Factory Line

In my last blog, I featured writing by local historian Jeff Gorton, including information about Fulton’s Birds Eye factory. Though today it is known as K & N Foods, USA, and it specializes in processing chicken, those of us who grew up in Fulton in the latter half of the last century well remember when it was a frozen food factory. Much like how Fultonians knew it was going to rain when they smelled Nestlé chocolate in the air, those who walked to school or work could tell what vegetable the plant was processing at its Phillips Street location. I was not a fan of brussel sprouts day.

Despite my displeasure with certain vegetable odors, I worked at Birds Eye while I was in college. After my sophomore year, I’d had a change of heart regarding my career goals and took a semester off to figure myself out. My parents let me stay at home while I rethought my future, but I knew I wasn’t on vacation. I needed a job. When I heard they were hiring at Birds Eye, a five minute walk from my house, I put in my application, hoping to be offered a job on the packaging lines.

Birds Eye’s personnel office noticed I’d already earned a two-year degree, so they offered me a position of weighing trucks delivering produce to the plant. I considered myself lucky; I wouldn’t have to come in contact with those horrid-smelling brussel sprouts and I got to apply my math skills in the real world. Three months later, my college plans back on course, my work at Birds Eye ended without once getting a peek at those processing lines. It was only through the Fulton Library’s Memoir Project that I got to learn about them.

In 2014, the Project was looking for stories about successful Fulton businesses and Birds Eye was certainly in that category. In our search to find people willing to write a memoir about their work in one of Fulton’s many industries, we found Vance Marriner. Though Vance is a research analyst and a part-time faculty member at SUNY Oswego, I know him as a fellow writer. He and I have participated in a number of classes and programs over the years, and when I asked if he’d share his literary talents with the Memoir Project, he readily agreed.

Vance’s memoir focused on his father, Howard Marriner, who was a manager at the Birds Eye plant. But he also wrote about the year he turned sixteen, in 1984, and it was time for him to get his first job. As might be expected, Vance ended up working at Birds Eye, but just because his father was plant manager didn’t mean he was going to get a cushy office job. Here’s how Vance described his entry into the working world:

“I spent that summer as one of the legion of seasonal “casual” workers that swelled the plant’s workforce during the busy months. Technically, my father got me the job, but frankly, no string-pulling was necessary. During peak season in those days, Birds Eye hired almost any person who was willing to work.

“On my first day, I was issued a yellow helmet, a hairnet, a pair of earplugs, and employee badge # 1647. I was then placed on the “inspection line.” Inspection consisted of standing (never sitting!) along with maybe ten or so other people at a conveyor belt and watching beans go by. We were tasked with picking out anything that wasn’t a bean. That might be a branch or a leaf, or it might be a bug or a snake. Sometimes you weren’t quite sure what you pulled out of there, only that it probably wasn’t edible. The job was as boring and generally awful as it sounds, and all the worse as it was often a ten-hour workday, broken up only by lunch and a pair of 15-minute breaks. On the plus side, we were being paid a princely $3.40 per hour.”

Vance worked at Birds Eye for a few summers and eventually got to move beyond the inspection line, advancing to, as he described it, “more glamorous jobs like placing boxes into metal trays, stacking cases onto pallets and loading steaming hot trays of spinach onto a cart. My father later admitted that he made sure that I got assigned the most humble jobs in the place, partially to avoid any suspicion of favoritism, but mostly because he wanted to toughen me up and teach me some life lessons about what hard work was all about.”

Vance’s father’s plan must have worked.  As Vance tells it, over thirty years have passed since he spent his summer job working at Birds Eye. Like many people, he’s never forgotten what it was like to work on a factory line, but also what it did for him as a youngster growing up to be a man. He captured that feeling in a way we can all appreciate:

“The memories of walking home from the plant after a long shift, legs aching, soaking wet from both sweat and steam vapor, clothes stained and stinking of green beans, and faced with more of the same the next day are as vivid as if they had happened yesterday. And that scene has flashed in my mind any time I’ve been tempted to complain about a hard day at one of my subsequent desk jobs…”

Thanks, Vance, for sharing a memory that many in Fulton have had – some for a summer, some for a few years, and some for life.

History Was His Passion

After spending the last several years writing about local history, I’ve started getting calls from people in our community who are also interested in our past, some who have devoted their lives to preserving Fulton memories. Jeff Gorton was one of those people. Though Jeff was probably best remembered as a teacher and school administrator when he passed away in January of 2016, he also spent much of his life collecting local history memorabilia. A few years ago, I got a firsthand look at his passion for the past.

In 2014, Jeff contacted me about writing a story for the Fulton Library’s Memoir Project. Since his knowledge of Fulton history covered many areas, he invited then-Library Director Betty Mauté and me to his home to discuss which topic he should focus on for his memoir. Walking into Jeff’s home was like walking back in time.

Most of the Gorton home’s common living area was devoted to displays of local history. In his kitchen, den and living room were cans, bottles and cardboard packages from local food industries, such as Nestlé and Sealright. Moving from room to room felt like we were on a museum tour. Each display had a story, and behind each story was something Jeff learned about his hometown – and himself. That’s when we hit on an idea Jeff could write about.

As we talked, Jeff expressed his strong feeling that the many Fulton businesses and industries he’d had the opportunity to work with helped him develop a strong work ethic. For example, here’s an excerpt from Jeff’s memoir describing his first job, delivering newspapers:

“When I retired, I saw on my Social Security profile that I starting paying into the system when I was 11 years old. This was for my first job in the city of Fulton, peddling papers for The Fulton Patriot. I had one of the longest routes for delivering The Patriot in the city of Fulton. My route started at the V where Utica Street meets Emery Street, then went out Emery, around the Fulton Housing Project, over to Broadway past the cemetery and back down Seventh Street to the V at Utica and Emery.”

Jeff’s next job was with The Syracuse Herald-Journal, and his responsibilities included both delivering papers and working in its Fulton office, further developing skills that, as Jeff noted, “I would use later in life: interacting with people, accounting and administration techniques. I’d be remiss not mentioning my first boss, Oney Stoddard, who ran the Fulton franchise of The Herald. He was a man short in stature, but had a very big heart. His office was up a long flight of stairs between the Avon Theatre and Foster’s soda spot…”

When our meeting with Jeff had ended, he offered me a document he’d written about the history of some Fulton businesses. I readily accepted a copy and learned a lot about the factories and stores I had only ever heard about. I still refer to this document when I’m writing about a certain industry in town.

I was especially eager to learn about one of those businesses because it was right in my childhood neighborhood: Birds Eye Foods. From Jeff, I learned the food processing plant on Phillips Street didn’t start its history with the Birds Eye name. In his writing, he took us back to the plant’s origins, and along with describing how the plant got its start, Jeff also gave us a little lesson in food preservation:

 “The process whereby food was heated and sealed in cans to preserve it evolved in the early nineteenth century. By 1888, advances in technology led to the formation of the Fort Stanwix Canning Company in Rome, New York. It was dedicated to providing high-quality canned vegetables and its product was shipped throughout the country by rail, commanding top-dollar in the marketplace.

 “Just after the turn of the twentieth century, the company was looking for a location to place a new factory for the processing of peas, corn, beets and spinach. Fulton proved ideal for their purposes since it already possessed the required power and transportation networks, in addition to close proximity to farmland suitable for crops of the target vegetables. One of the primary reasons why the company’s product was considered the best was that it went rapidly from field to can while still fresh.”

Jeff went on to explain how the Fort Stanwix Company chose the eleven-acre site on Phillips Street for its new plant, where it would preserve and package food for over a century. Through the years, the factory was operated by different companies, and in the late 1920s, Jeff noted that a major change took place in the food industry. It would also alter how the Fulton canning factory did business. Here’s how Jeff explained the change:

“While trading and trapping in arctic Labrador, a man named Clarence Birdseye discovered that fresh-caught fish quickly freeze in the sub-zero temperature. These could then be thawed and cooked months later, still maintaining a fresh taste. After much experimentation, Birdseye developed the Belt Freezer that duplicated the natural process he saw at work in the far North. [He found that] quick-freezing didn’t destroy the nutrients the way that a slow freeze or heating did. This would soon revolutionize the processed food business.

“General Foods Company bought the rights to his system and developed in-store cooling equipment and insulated railcars to make marketing of the product possible. Anxious to get the new idea on the market, General Foods purchased the Fulton plant in 1943, reequipped it to support the quick-freeze process and began selling vegetables under the ‘Birds Eye’ label.”

I’m so fortunate to have worked with Jeff on his memoir and to have read his summary of Fulton businesses. In fact, learning about how Birds Eye evolved in Fulton led me to track down another local writer who knew the insides of that factory firsthand. In my next blog, we’ll get to hear his story.

One of Fulton's Most Beloved Volunteers

In the five years that the Fulton Library has been sponsoring its Memoir Project, I’ve had the opportunity to learn about many former and current Fulton residents who’ve gone the extra mile to support our community. As people share memories, some names keep coming up, and based on the number of times Nunzi Fichera has been mentioned, I would say he is one of our city’s most fondly-remembered Fultonians.

Nunzi was the son of Joseph and Angelina Fichera, who had a muck farm just outside the city of Fulton, and he worked on that farm from his youngest days. Among Nunzi’s duties were regular trips to the Syracuse Farmers Market. His sister, Mary Stancampiano, told me that when her brother was in high school, he’d work the Market most weekdays. “Nunzi would get up about three a.m., get ready and head out,” Mary explained. “As soon as he sold everything, he would head directly to school. To make it in time for his first class, I would bring his books to school and meet him in his homeroom.”

Nunzi took the strong work ethic he learned as a youngster and turned it into a successful career as a real estate broker. First working for Quinn’s Real Estate, a Fulton agency, he eventually ended up with his own office on East Broadway. It was while working for Quinn’s that Nunzi began his other “career,” one that never earned him money, but endeared him to so many Fultonians. When Quinn’s Real Estate agreed to sponsor one of our city’s youth basketball teams, Nunzi stepped up to become the team’s coach.

Hundreds of Fultonians have great memories of Nunzi’s supportive style of coaching. Back when longtime Fulton sports supporter Don Smith was a youngster, in the 1940s and ‘50s, the only way to play organized basketball was to be selected for the high school team. But thanks to the dedicated volunteer work of adults like Nunzi, Don was able to participate in an alternative intramural program. Here’s how Don remembered that experience:

“Of all the things I ever accomplished, playing on a successful basketball team was probably my happiest. Ricky Castorina coached us our freshman year and Nunzi was our coach after that. In our junior year, Nunzi’s coaching took our team to a JV tournament. There were seven teams, including the top high school teams and the top intramural team – and we had the top intramural team.”

The pride of being on a successful basketball team was something many of the youth Nunzi coached got to experience, including those involved with the Catholic Basketball League. On Sunday afternoons, parish teams from around Oswego County would compete against each other at Oswego Catholic High’s St. Francis Hall. Those who participated in those games say they can still hear the roar of the crowds that filled the Hall.

Jerry Schremp, who ended up coaching thousands of children through Fulton’s Knee-Hi basketball program, got his start with the sport through Nunzi’s Catholic League coaching. Jerry played for Holy Family as a guard and when he was a sixth grader, he was lucky enough to make Nunzi’s 7th and 8th grade team. “Nunzi would pile 10 or 12 kids in his car to take us to our games,” Jerry remembered. “Afterwards, he would take the whole team down to Foster’s for ice cream. There were a lot of good memories from Nunzi.”

Marty Gillard, another Holy Family basketball player, would agree. “Nunzi got the most out of everybody,” Marty said. “We beat teams all the time that we shouldn’t have, but we did. After I became an adult and started coaching, I used to visit him at his office. He had pictures of his teams up – I can’t tell you how many there were – but Nunzi could name every kid in order.”

Mike Pollock was one of those kids who benefited from Nunzi’s guidance. Mike met him early in life when Nunzi sold the Pollock family a house. The Pollocks were communicants at Holy Family Church and Mike remembers Nunzi helping to run the church’s very popular bazaar: “Everything about Nunzi was community and family. He loved his church and he loved the sports programs for the kids. The time he donated was just unbelievable.”

Mike first got to experience Nunzi’s coaching through our city’s CYO, which had a popular basketball program. Over the many years that Nunzi coached, as Mike noted, “he was like a father to a lot of us. My father died when I was pretty young and Nunzi took me under his wing.  I started playing when I was in 6th grade. It was really a 7th and 8th grade league, but Nunzi let me play. There were the Sunday games and then two days a week we practiced at the War Memorial.”

Nunzi devoted his life to our community and youth sports. Even when he was caring for his aging mother on a small farm near Curtis Street, he stayed as involved with sports as he could. After his death, in 1993, people may have thought his passion for helping youth would have ended, but that’s not what happened. Angelo Caltabiano, of the Fulton Kiwanis Club, explains:

“After Nunzi passed, he left money to be used for Fulton youth basketball programs. Each March, in cooperation with The Fulton Savings Bank, who issues the money prizes, a free throw shooting contest is conducted. Any child can participate and Fulton Knee-Hi Basketball coordinates and conducts the preliminary rounds. Because Nunzi was a member of Kiwanis, current Kiwanis members volunteer to help with the final round of this contest.”

How fortunate we are to have had Nunzi Fichera in Fulton. Of all his contributions to our community, this one, told by Mike Pollock, really struck a chord in me: “Nunzi was always good about giving common sense to people. ‘Try to do the right thing’ was his motto. It wasn’t really about basketball; it was about teaching you to do what’s right. That’s what Nunzi always did.”

Photo: Nunzi Fichera, back row, left, who taught basketball and other valuable life lessons to many Fulton youth.

Nunzi Fichera, back row, left, a longtime Fulton volunteer with his 1968-69 Holy Family Church basketball team.