Chapter Twenty-Six: Industry

Chapter Twenty-Six:

Industry

"Factories Flock to Collinwood

Factories worth $5,000,000 are being built in the triangle bounded by Ivanhoe rd, East 152d st, and the Nickel Plate tracks in Collinwood, and when they are completed employment will be given 5,000 men. The plants are those of Grant Motor Co., Reliance Electric Co., N.R. Snell Lumber Co., Connelly Boiler Co., and the Metal Products Co. The National Electric Lamp association of the General Electric Co. is to centralize its Ohio factories on the site along East 152nd st facing the Nickel Plate tracks. There are no empty homes in Collinwood, it is said; property values have jumped and there is no need of men being idle."

—The Collinwood Citizen, October 10, 1912

"We're going to have to make a hell of a lot of valves."

—William Knudsen to Frederick Crawford, 1940

In 1850, 4,780 people lived in Euclid and East Cleveland Townships combined. The grape fever had yet to occur; they raised wheat and grazed cows.

The next year Amasa Stone built the Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula Railroad across the lake plain; this would later be the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, and later the New York Central. Thirty years after that George Seney laid down the New York, Chicago & Saint Louis Railroad a half mile south, which would become known as the Nickel Plate.

These two roughly parallel railroads, with the LS&MS' massive switching yards and repair shops in Collinwood, created a corridor through the vineyards of the lake plain that was already noisy and dirty, for better or worse, with access to two major railroads and trucks via St. Clair and Euclid Avenue to the entire country.

Still, even up to 1900, fewer than 10,000 people lived in old Euclid Township. However, as the 20th century dawned, factories opened, small at first, in the area north of Euclid Avenue to the New York Central tracks. In Euclid and Collinwood, early makers of automotive and then aircraft components set up shops. Later there were famous earthmovers. During the Second World War, Euclid and Collinwood became major suppliers of the military. In the boom that came after the war, many of these companies diversified further, entering electronics and aerospace.

Industry caused an explosion in Euclid Township's population from 1900 to 1930, and, after a pause for the Great Depression, another lasting into the 1960s. The farming township, which had taken 100 years to reach 10,000, in its second hundred as an industrial one topped a quarter million. When it collapsed starting in the 1970s, the decline was nearly as steep.

Mechanic Hamilton Lindsay invented and patented an automatic loom for weaving metal strands to create a kind of cloth made out of fine wires which was used in the manufacture of paper. With just six employees he founded one of the earliest Euclid Township factories in 1903, the Lindsay Wire Weaving Co., located at East 140th Street and Aspinwall in Collinwood.

George Armington was a very smart engineer, educated at MIT and on the faculty at Western Reserve University. He founded the Armington Electric Hoist Co. in Wickliffe in 1889, and in 1900 the Cleveland Crane and Car Co. He consolidated his businesses into a single factory on Chardon Road in Euclid in 1910, and called the new venture Euclid Crane and Hoist. They were making crawler tractors by 1915, and formed a division making off-highway equipment in 1926. By 1928 they had added large capacity dump trucks to their product lines. In this early period of widespread farm mechanization, Euclid Crane and Hoist would frequently take horses and mules as trade-ins for new powered equipment. Armington's son Arthur joined the firm in 1915. Arthur took charge developing the company's lines of earthmovers. In 1931 he spun off Euclid Crane and Hoist's off-highway business into a new venture in an adjoining shop at 1368 Chardon. The new company under Arthur's leadership made heavy earthmovers and equipment for construction and mining, and was called the Euclid Road Machinery Co. Eventually Euclid Road's products would grow massive, mounted by staircases and several stories high. Known as "EUCS," Euclid Road's machines became famous, and were used on the largest construction projects throughout the world.

The Reliance Electric and Engineering Co. moved into facilities at 1088 Ivanhoe Road in Collinwood in 1911. It had been founded as part of the Lincoln Electric Manufacturing Co. by John Lincoln in Cleveland in 1895 to make electric motors. Lincoln went into partnership with his cousin, Peter Hitchcock, and when Hitchcock died in 1906 Lincoln sold his share of the business to Hitchcock's sons, Charles and Reuben, who moved it to Collinwood and renamed it Reliance.

Rollin White established the Cleveland Motor Plow Co. at 19300 Euclid Avenue in Euclid in 1916. White's father, Thomas White, had moved his sewing machine company to Cleveland from Massachusetts in 1866. His company had thrived and he left it to his sons. One of them, the aforementioned Rollin, invented a boiler used in early steam-powered automobiles. In 1906 Rollin and his brothers spun the auto business off into the White Co. with a factory in Cleveland in the Flats. Rollin left the family business in 1914, and in 1916 founded Cleveland Motor Plow in Euclid. The company made its own automobile, the Rollin, and when tractors became their primary focus, the name was changed in 1917 to the Cleveland Tractor Co.

The Glenn L. Martin Co., forerunner of today's Lockheed Martin—makers of World War II's P-38 and B-26, later the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, the F-16, and the F-117 Stealth fighter, plus a host of nuclear missiles, and a good chunk of the space program—operated out of Collinwood for a decade. One of the first defense aircraft producers in the country, Glenn Martin was lured to Ohio from California by investors in 1919 and established an aircraft plant at 16800 St. Clair, complete with its own airstrip. There they made some of the earliest bomber aircraft ever produced. Collinwood was part of Cleveland by then and the city did not consider them good neighbors: their planes crashed frequently around the neighborhood. That, and a desire to be closer to Washington with so much of their business in defense work, led Glenn Martin to move the company to Baltimore in 1929. They sold the St. Clair plant and many of their designs to Great Lakes Aircraft, which continued on in Collinwood with military work, but also made several sport planes.

The Cleveland Automobile Co. began making cars at 17325 Euclid Avenue in Collinwood in 1919. A spin-off of the Chandler Motor Car Co., Cleveland Automobile was founded to expand markets by making a lower cost alternative to Chandler's own 6-cylinder auto. Cleveland Automobile produced the Cleveland, a 5-passenger touring car, by the tens of thousands, but Frederick Chandler's two auto businesses overall fared poorly in the early 1920s. He merged Chandler Motor Car and Cleveland Automobile in 1926, forming the Chandler-Cleveland Motors Corp., but finally sold out entirely to Detroit's Hupp Motor Car Corp. at the end of 1928.

Eaton Axle opened a factory at 739 East 140th Street in Collinwood in 1920. Joseph Eaton had partnered with Viggo Torbensen and his own brother-in-law, Henning Taube, to form the Torbensen Gear and Axle Co. in Bloomfield, New Jersey in 1911, makers of auto and truck parts. They moved it to Cleveland in 1915 and incorporated in Ohio as the Torbensen Axle Co. The company became part of the Republic Motor Truck Co. in 1918 and Joseph Eaton was either unhappy or saw further opportunity on his own and left to form Eaton Axle in Collinwood. Within two years he had taken control of Torbensen Axle and bought two spring manufacturers, changing the name to Eaton Axels and Spring. In the 1930s the company began making valves and pumps. By the time the Depression hit Eaton had grown to one of the largest auto parts makers in the country with factories in several states.

In 1921, Detroit's Fisher Body Co. opened a plant in Collinwood at East 140th and Coit Road to make components to supply Cleveland Automobile and Chandler Motor. They made 600 auto bodies a day, and provided work for 7,000 men by 1924, and were so successful that the mega-auto-making conglomerate General Motors bought them in 1926.

Steel foundry Ajax Manufacturing moved into a plant at 1441 Chardon Road in Euclid in 1925. Originally a Cleveland company founded in 1875, Ajax made steel products using cold drawing, a process that uses powerful machines to pull out lengths of steel at room temperature, and cold-heading, which shapes the pulled lengths of steel into various shapes and products, such as machine parts or fasteners.

Bailey Meter arrived in Collinwood in 1927 when it acquired the flow meter division of General Electric and moved into a factory at 1050 Ivanhoe Road. The company, makers of industrial control systems, was founded in Boston in 1916 by Ervin Bailey and came to Cleveland in 1919. Constantly expanding through the 1920s, General Electric became a major owner of Bailey in 1927.

Chase Metal was a Connecticut company making brass buttons for the military, as well as auto components. In 1929 the Kennecott Copper Corp. bought the Chase Metal Works and changed the name to Chase Brass & Copper. That same year they opened their first Midwestern plant, a big one, on Babbitt Road in Euclid. The Babbitt Road facility was known as the Sheet Mill. Copper sheets are used for roof flashing, gutters and downspouts. Chase also made Brass & Copper rods and tubes for a variety of uses.

Cleveland's American Multigraph Co. and Addressograph International of Illinois merged and consolidated their combined businesses at a huge mill at 1200 Babbitt Road in Euclid in 1932. In a pre-photocopying, pre-computer age, Addressograph-Multigraph manufactured office equipment for duplicating and labeling office documents and communications.

Addressograph-Multigraph was the last major factory to open in the old Euclid Township for ten years. The Great Depression collapsed the world economy, and the population spike industry brought to the areas of the old township dramatically slowed in the 1930s. In an attempt to revive the national economy the Franklin Roosevelt Administration implemented the New Deal, a series of federal government programs to alleviate the economic devastation and stimulate growth. In Euclid, the New Deal looked like the new city hall built from Euclid Bluestone on East 222nd Street by the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps camp on Highland Road building the Euclid Creek Metropark.

At the end of the 19th century an incandescent light maker from Chicago named Franklin Terry suggested that several smaller companies making lights and lighting components might better compete with the new but already dominant General Electric by sharing expenses and combining their research efforts. Terry pushed the idea among his colleagues for several years, and found some interest, but no one willing to commit, until a 1901 meeting with Burton Tremaine, a fellow manufacturer of incandescent lights from Fostoria, Ohio. Tremaine and his partner, J.B. Crouse, had recently been approached by General Electric regarding a merger. Tremaine suggested to Terry that they pursue the combination of the smaller companies, but with General Electric's financial backing. The boldness of the move came in that they would ask GE for money to finance the venture, but insist on maintaining complete control: GE would have ownership but no voice in the project. It took nerve, but GE, apparently seeing it as a way of acquiring ownership of several smaller competitors and perhaps even benefiting from their product research, agreed, and in May 1901, Terry and Tremaine plus three other men from Tremaine's Fostoria company combined several small manufacturers to form the National Electric Lamp Company. GE owned 75 percent of National Electric Lamp, with an option on the remaining 25. The ownership structure was kept a secret. Few at the constituent companies knew GE was involved at all, much less that it owned them.

Following National Electric Lamp's founding, Terry and Tremaine continued to recruit small lighting companies to join the organization. They used low pressure tactics, and once a company came on board they provided the new partners great independence in running their businesses as divisions of the company, mirroring the deal Terry and Tremaine themselves enjoyed with GE. Perhaps to encourage the sense of partnership rather than ownership, in 1906 the National Electric Lamp Company became known as the National Electric Lamp Association, adopting the acronym "NELA" for short. By 1910, 37 companies had joined.

What might have been a clue to GE's ownership, National Electric Lamp set up in Charles Brush's old factory at East 45th Street and Hough Avenue in Cleveland. The Brush Electric Company properties had become part of Thomson-Houston when Brush and his partners sold them their company in 1889, then GE's when Edison Electric merged with Thomson-Houston, creating General Electric in 1892.

NELA outgrew the East 45th space by 1910. Like most manufacturing areas, the neighborhood was filled with noise and smoke. Terry and Tremaine knew they needed a new facility and for some time they had been entertaining what was then a very novel idea.

They proposed to move their laboratories to a country location, out of the city, envisioning a setting like a college campus, attractive and peacefully bucolic, which they hoped would encourage research: "brain work" as they called it. In the early 21st century this is precisely the type of business campus used by top companies famous for innovation like Google and Apple, but at the time the notion was radical. Suburbs were much further, metaphorically speaking, from the cities in 1910. They lacked utilities and roads and services. Phones were newer and fewer. It was simply more difficult to communicate with someone outside of a city. People lived in cities to be close to other people and to find the things people need. These are challenges Apple and Google never faced. NELA's country campus may have been the first research park in the United States.

This suburban park idea was conceived directly in the midst of the revelation of General Electric's controlling interest in NELA, which came out in 1911 when an anti-trust law suit against incandescent lamp manufacturers made the nature of GE's ownership of NELA public. Many of NELA's division directors were upset to learn that, while they thought they had been competing with GE, they had in fact the whole time been working for them. By order of the court, GE began the process of buying the remaining NELA stock to clear up the issue of its murky ownership, and was not pleased with Terry and Tremaine's plans for a suburban research park already underway. GE thought it extravagant, and impractical, and argued that a facility far outside the city would be inaccessible to workers who normally relied on urban public transportation. But Terry and Tremaine countered that land out there was cheap, and that several small buildings in a remote suburb would cost less than a new building in Cleveland. The owners of the remaining 25 percent of NELA stock sealed it when they refused to cooperate with the sale of their shares to GE unless the company acquiesced to the research park idea. General Electric had to have those shares; the court had said so. Perhaps with a sigh, GE gave in, and site selection for the suburban park went forward.

Terry and Tremaine found a 92-acre site in one of Euclid Township's old vineyards in the young suburb of East Cleveland, just 15-years-old. It was perched on the edge of the Portage Escarpment on a bluff above Euclid Avenue at Noble Road, beside a wooded gorge of Nine Mile Creek. NELA hired architects Wallis and Goodwille of New York, who designed for it several dark red brick buildings with decorative flourishes in English Georgian style, all surrounding a central quadrangle. Ground was broken on the project on October 1, 1911. It would be called NELA Park.

When the buildings were ready for occupancy in the spring of 1913, a massive move from the old Brush factory at East 45th Street to the country park was effected in a single day. A caravan of 160 trucks and automobiles loaded with all the research personnel and equipment from the old plant trundled slowly out to East Cleveland and up the hill of the newly-laid Nela Avenue to the yet unlandscaped campus.

NELA Park, now officially home to General Electric's National Quality Lamp Division, housed the company's research laboratories, where they developed and tested new designs for lighting products. The campus also contained a school for training engineers in the latest discoveries in home and commercial lighting to aid their work for the company.

During World War I, NELA Park conducted work for the War Department's Chemical Warfare Service, developing gas masks. It also served as a camp for 250 soldiers, and during the influenza pandemic of 1918 the dining hall of one of its buildings became an emergency hospital for men stricken with the illness. Five died there. During the war, Terry's wife, Grace, began a collection of Great War objects, from helmets and gas masks to flags and insignia. It grew to thousands of artifacts and filled a substantial room of NELA Park's Engineering Building until she finally donated it to the Western Reserve Historical Society.

General Electric's presence in Euclid Township outside of NELA park increased during this time as well. GE opened its Pitney Glass Works, making light bulbs, on East 152nd Street in Collinwood in 1919. The company operated its Cleveland Weld Works from the same plant. GE also established their Cleveland Wire Works facility in Euclid.

The Lighting Institute, what became NELA Park's best-known building, was not completed until 1921. A bronze sculpture of the "Triumph of Light" first appeared atop the Institute in 1923. A 1 million gallon pool to provide a water supply to the campus' fire sprinkler system was installed in 1927. It would later be made less strictly practical and more decorative, and outfitted with a fountain shooting water illuminated with colored lights 70 feet high.

As a showcase of its prowess in the latest in electric lamp technology, in 1925 NELA Park began an annual Christmas display. In December of that year the campus was festooned with tens of thousands of colorful lights in various holiday themes, and opened to visitors who marveled at them as they motored slowly through NELA Park's winding roads. Ten thousand autos were estimated to have passed through the first year.

When the Depression struck, Collinwood was hit like everywhere else in the country. Great Lakes Aircraft in the old Glenn-Martin plant had failed to arouse continued interest with the military, and was out of the airplane business by 1935. Hupp had made automobile bodies in the old Chandler-Cleveland plant, but by 1940 it had been so beat down that it abandoned the auto business entirely. There was labor unrest as well. A 1936 strike at GM's Fisher Body plant in Collinwood spread into General Motors' Flint, Michigan, plant. The action ultimately forced GM to recognize the United Auto Workers in early 1937.

However, not all the news from Euclid Township in the 1930s was dire. Eaton's diversified line of products ensured continued demand, and the company weathered the downturn. Lindsay Wire Weaving actually did well and expanded during the period. With public works projects a mainstay of New Deal spending, Euclid's earth moving industries fared better than most. Euclid Road Machinery survived and even moved forward during the Depression, and Euclid's machines were used on heavy construction projects like the Hoover Dam. Cleveland Tractor found a market for its products with the Civilian Conservation Corps, busily constructing the Cleveland Metroparks, as well as hundreds of other park projects in Cuyahoga County and around the nation. In fact, Euclid's Cleveland Tractor actually thrived during the Depression, employing 1,500 workers and shattering sales records. But that wasn't even close to what was coming.

Nazi Germany invaded Poland on the first of September 1939, beginning the Second World War. Americans read the news with interest and sadness, but few not directly affected by the conflict worried. Reflecting popular sentiment to remain out of any future European wars following disappointment and disillusionment after World War I, Congress had passed a series of neutrality acts in the mid-1930s. But, after the outbreak of war and the fall of Poland, President Roosevelt was able to convince the Congress to amend the acts and allow Britain and France to buy weapons from the United States. American lawmakers remained eager, however, to ensure the country not become involved in the war, so the law allowed the belligerents to buy materials from the U.S., but not on credit, which might never be paid back if they lost, and forbade American ships to transport them and so risk being attacked, possibly drawing the U.S. in to the war. This so-called "cash and carry" arrangement helped Britain and France, but also proved to be the beginning of the economic recovery that World War II would bring to the United States. British and French orders for military goods brought work to many American mills which had been closed for a decade. In 1939 and early 1940 many Americans had work where they hadn't for years. So, initially, and from a certain perspective, war seemed like good news.

Little happened in Western Europe for several months after the defeat of Poland. But the lull of the so-called Phony War was shattered in May 1940 by the Nazi invasion of France. German forces, using their new Blitzkrieg tactics—highly mobile rapid advance closely supported by air power—stunned the Western Allies and delivered France to Hitler in a matter of weeks. The British army dispatched to the Continent barely escaped destruction at Dunkirk.

The disaster in France caused a near panic at high levels of the American government. It's difficult to conceive of today in a world where the American military is the dominant armed force on the planet, but in the spring of 1940, Hitler seemed an imminent, terrifying threat, and the United States was completely unequipped to defend itself against him. A rapid, emergency program of national armament was needed, immediately.

With France still in the midst of collapse, President Roosevelt summoned William Knudsen to Washington. Knudsen had been no less than chairman of General Motors, Fisher Body's parent and at that time the largest company in the United States. Undeservedly obscure now, particularly after his war service, Knudsen was well-known in America during the war, and on the business pages before it. In their initial meeting, the president asked Knudsen to lend his personal influence, his connections in big business, and his intimate knowledge of mass industrial processes to help coordinate the development of a desperately needed national defense project.

The American military had demobilized following the First World War. After a quick study of the nation's war preparations, Knudsen discovered that, where contingencies for war production existed at all, they were utterly inadequate, and demonstrated no knowledge of how modern industry functioned, or what was required to turn out products on the huge scales needed.

Knudsen agreed to lead the effort, joining the National Defense Advisory Commission—and then its successor organizations, the Office of Production Management and the War Production Board—becoming one of the so-called Dollar-a-Year Men, an ad hoc group of business leaders tasked with advising the president on war production and overseeing America's manufacture of armaments for national defense. The men, all quite personally wealthy anyway, served with no pay, only a symbolic token salary of one dollar a year, hence the name. To overcome resistance from any military officials who tried to impede him, Knudsen was made a three-star general, a rank equivalent to that of Leslie Groves, the man who oversaw the effort to develop the atomic bomb.

Knudsen took the job over the strong objections of his family and many business colleagues; he had to leave his position at GM to do it. But he did so for reasons of gratitude and patriotism. A Danish immigrant who had worked his way up in the auto industry from the shop floor at Ford to the leadership of GM, Knudsen had risen from the very bottom to the top of his field by 1940, and felt he owed something back to America, the country which had facilitated his success. Knudsen's is a remarkable story, and for a man of his importance in the nation's survival and history, shockingly few books have been written about him.

He estimated 18 months would be needed to bring the full weight of American industry to bear on the challenge of arming in time to hold off Hitler. With absolutely no formal legal authority, Knudsen began the task of, essentially, simply persuading the enormously powerful leaders of America's largest corporations to convert their production capacities to war. It wasn't easy. Knudsen was working for Roosevelt and many of the tycoons with whom he dealt were suspicious if not overtly hostile to the president, his support of organized labor and the policies of his New Deal. But Knudsen was effective, and commanded a great deal of personal respect. He assessed problems quickly, and from his business career knew which companies had which factories that could produce which items needed. He called and met with their owners individually and collectively, until the program was in place.

One of Knudsen's calls went to Cleveland manufacturer Frederick Crawford, the president of Thompson Products. The company was begun in 1901 as Cleveland Cap Screw. "Cap screw" is an old-timey word for bolt, and bolts originally were made by machining down a piece of metal the size of the bolt head. This process wasted a lot of metal. One of the company welders, Charles Thompson, came up with a way to electrically weld the bolt heads onto the shafts, saving a great deal of material and thus the company a great deal of money. He soon was able to apply the technology to making valves for automobile engines. Thompson rose in the company, and with his new technology Cleveland Cap Screw became Electric Welding Products in 1905. When Charles Thompson took it over in 1916, he changed the name again, to Steel Products. By the 1920s almost every car made in America had Thompson's welded valves under the hood. In 1926 the company took Charles Thompson's name, becoming Thompson Products. They branched out further into aviation, and sponsored air races to promote planes powered by their products. Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis flew with Thompson valves on its historic trans-Atlantic flight.

Frederick Crawford joined the firm in 1916 as a young Harvard grad when it was Steel Products. He was vice president of the company by 1929, and when Thompson died in 1933 Crawford succeeded him as president. By then Thompson Products was a national leader in the manufacture of automotive and aviation components and parts. Crawford led the company through the Depression. One advantage for an auto parts maker during the 1930s, when few could afford new cars (and later during the war when no new cars were produced), was demand for the spare parts Thompson made to keep the cars people did have on the road.

Another item made by Thompson Products in demand with the military was a new type of aircraft engine valve cooled by liquid sodium. In late 1940, Knudsen invited Frederick Crawford to Washington. The president had called for the manufacture of 50,000 planes, and each individual one needed scores, if not hundreds, of aviation valves. And that initial number, already astronomical, orders of magnitude more than what was currently being produced, would only go higher. This was way beyond anything Thompson's little plant on Clarkwood Road in Cleveland could hope to handle. Knudsen knew that, and it was the same story with hundreds of other defense manufactures he was recruiting across the country.

The answer was the Defense Plant Corporation, a newly created branch of the New Deal Reconstruction Finance Corporation, established in August 1940. Its purpose was to coordinate and finance the acquisition—building from scratch, if necessary—of factories and other facilities needed to produce the billions of individual items needed to assemble the machines necessary for war. Through its five years of existence, the Defense Plant Corporation would spend over $9 billion—more than four times the price of General Groves' atom bomb—on 2,300 projects in 46 states. Knudsen told Crawford that if Thompson Products would staff and run it, the federal government, through the Defense Plant Corporation, would pay for the construction of a brand new factory to complete the orders for the desperately needed valves, plus most of the machinery to fill it. Thompson would have very little start up expense, a guaranteed return, part ownership, and first option on the purchase of the new state of the art facility at the end of the war, which they could also simply walk away from if they chose. There was really no way to lose on the deal.

Crawford and his men created a subsidiary corporation for the project, the Thompson Aircraft Products Company, or TAPCO, in January 1941. In just a few weeks they had selected a site, an abandoned vineyard on the lake plain north of Euclid Avenue in Euclid. With $18 million from the federal government, they broke ground on the 565,000 square foot plant on April 14, 1941. TAPCO turned out its first sodium-cooled aviation valve on December 2, with parts of the new factory still under construction and open to the weather. Five days later the U.S. was in the war.

For Knudsen's predicted 18 months, industrial war capacity expanded painfully slowly. But once the pieces were in place, just as he had said it would, defense production exploded in 1942, then utterly left the planet in 1943. A flood of government orders and financing caused a spasm of construction of facilities in Euclid and Collinwood to fill defense orders. An expansion equal to the initial construction cost was already underway on the TAPCO plant even as the original one was still being built.

Fisher Body became deeply involved with the production of the army's new super-long-range bomber, the B-29, as well as Sherman tanks. Fisher built a new plant at 20001 Euclid Avenue in Euclid to make landing gear, while the existing Collinwood plant produced parts for tanks and guns. Fisher Body counted 14,000 employees during World War II.

The government also financed the construction of a second plant for Chase Brass & Copper to join its Sheet Mill on East 260th Street in Euclid. The new Tube Mill, or the Upson Plant, as some local oldsters still called East 260, employed workers making brass artillery shells and cases. Addressograph-Multigraph initiated a $750,000 expansion for war work, as the punch-presses they used to make the small metal plates for stamping addresses on envelopes before the war gave them particular acumen in the manufacture of millions of army dog tags. They also made fuses for artillery shells. Reliance Electric built two new plants on East 152nd Street in Collinwood. They made motors for the navy, as well as for army tanks. Bailey Meter made a variety of control components for navy ships during the war, employing 1,000 people.

Cleveland Graphite Bronze made so many ball bearings during World War II that they had to build a new plant, at 17000 St. Clair Avenue in Collinwood. The Cleveland company founded in 1919 took its name from its signature product, self-lubricating ball bearings with the lubricating graphite baked right in to the metal. Primarily used by the auto industry, Cleveland Graphite Bronze's ball bearings became a vital component in the manufacture of aircraft. Demand exploded during the war, providing work for 7,000 employees and necessitating the construction of the new Collinwood facility.

Euclid Road Machinery's business tripled, but rather than being converted to weapons production, the War Production Board enlisted Euclid's machines just as they were for use in constructing military installations. Euclid Road equipment built many airfields and army and Marine bases in World War II.

With a housing shortage hindering efforts to staff the war factories, Euclid residents coordinated communicating needs and availability of housing in the city, from entire homes to single rooms. Five hundred new houses were built at East 200th Street, a project called the Euclid Homes. Another 800 were built on Babbitt Road, a development called Lake Shore Village. The campgrounds at Euclid Beach Park were used as makeshift housing for defense workers in Collinwood's factories. Trailers were soon added. A lakefront mobile home park dating to the war still exists on the old Euclid Beach Park campgrounds today.

Women filled the Euclid and Collinwood plants. With unprecedented numbers of men volunteering and being drafted into the military, this aspect of World War II production is well known. In Euclid, a group called "Women Power" matched women seeking work with open positions in the local plants filling defense orders. They also collected protective gloves for the women workers, and coordinated day care for their children. Euclid residents joined in drives to collect hosiery, scrap metals, old clothes, tin cans, grease, and newspapers to support the war effort. They also gathered playing cards, board games, puzzles and books for the USO. Euclid organized a "Write to Russia" campaign to send encouraging letters promoting friendship with allies in the Soviet Union. A cheery bit of understatement from their organization in regards to the horror of World War II for civilians in the western Soviet Union included: "Vegetable garden seeds to be sent to scorched-earth areas of Russia are needed."

As both an extravagance and an air-raid hazard, the holiday lighting display at NELA Park was discontinued during the war. The Euclid Official City Directory—normally a rather bland government-produced document advertising local businesses and extolling the benefits of Euclid, Ohio, as a place to live and work—in 1942 contained a fascinating section advising citizens on how to prepare for and cope with the possibility of enemy air-raids, including specifics on dealing with incendiary, high-explosive and fragmentation bombs, as well as aerial mines and chemical agents. Regarding pets during air attack, the City of Euclid had this chilling advice: "DOGS—Keep your dog with you. Children often forget their own fears at a dog's whimperings and fear. CATS—Put your cat in a separate room. Cats go berserk. CANARIES—A canary is extremely sensitive to gas attacks. If canary topples over, put on gas mask."

!!!

Many feared that when the war ended the nation's economy would return to depression. Defense orders had already slowed by 1944, even as B-29s built by GM in Cleveland had only just begun pounding Japan. But by 1945, it was clear the war had been won, and how it would end was only a matter of when and how many more had to die.

There was a drop in the national gross domestic product beginning in 1945, bottoming out in 1946 and 1947, as for-profit industries switched production from war goods back to consumer products. Further inefficiencies were caused by the displacement of workers, the women, and the retraining of new ones, the returning men. But the immediate post-war hiccup was followed in the United States by an unprecedented period of economic growth and global dominance which would last for 25 years.

Women were pressured to leave the positions they filled during the war. Men back from overseas took those jobs. They married. Together, they left the cities on the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways and bought millions of suburban houses made of wood, brick, glass, cement and metal. They bought hundreds of things to fill each of those millions of houses—from refrigerators and televisions to lawnmowers and barbecues—and each one of those millions of things had thousands of parts. They bought cars to get them from the houses to the jobs on the interstates and back again, and each car had thousands of parts. They had millions upon millions of children, and needed hundreds of things for each of those children, and each one of those things had thousands of parts. They built thousands of schools made of wood, brick, glass, cement and metal to educate those children, and needed thousands of things to fill each of those schools, and each one of those things had thousands of parts. After the war Americans wanted... everything. The other industrial nations of the world lay in ruins and needed... everything. The one place that could make all that stuff was the United States. No one could compete. The more people bought, the more demand they created; the more demand, the more jobs; the more jobs, the more money people had to spend; the more people had to spend, the more they bought. And so it went, through the 1960s.

Thompson Products had become Greater Cleveland's largest employer by the end of the war, with 21,000 employees. Crawford took the option on the TAPCO plant. The facility at 23555 Euclid Avenue became Thompson Products' world headquarters. They continued developing their aviation line, making parts for the new jet engines. They entered the ballistic missiles business by investing in the California Ramo-Wooldridge Corp., developers of much of the hardware of America's early space program, in 1953. The companies merged in 1958, becoming Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge. That name was shortened to TRW in 1965, because, some said, executives grew tired of writing the full name out in hotel registers. TRW went on to build the descent engines for the Apollo lunar module spacecraft, parts for Pioneer 10 and the Viking Mars landers, in addition to many satellites. They still made car parts, introducing rack-and-pinion steering to England in 1967, and air bags in the 1980s. And all the while lots and lots of nuclear missiles.

Lindsay Wire weaving had 300 employees and sales of $5 million by 1951, with its products by then being adapted for use in electronics and communications. They built a new plant in Mentor in 1957, and a research laboratory in Cleveland in 1962.

When peace returned, Euclid Road Machinery, never having converted its operations during the war, had no delay in production or expense to convert back to peacetime products, as many other American companies did. Construction equipment was in high demand in a world devastated by war and a country about to embark on a suburban housing boom and building a national system of interstates. They had 400 employees in 1945, a number which nearly quadrupled by 1950. They built a new plant at East 222nd Street and St. Clair in Euclid in 1946, with 1,600 employees making fully half of the off-highway dump trucks in the country. They doubled the square-footage on the new factory in 1950, then doubled it again in 1951, also buying an existing factory and 35 acres of land on the north side of St. Clair which had belonged to the E.W. Bliss Co., manufacturers of machine tools, plus opened a plant in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1951 Euclid produced the largest dump truck ever made to that point, the LLD-50: "50" for 50 tons. Their success attracted buyers, and Euclid Road Machinery was bought by Fisher Body's parent General Motors for $20 million in 1953.

In 1951 Reliance broke ground on a new plant at 24703 Euclid Avenue in Euclid. They merged with several Ohio and Indiana companies through the course of the 1950s and 1960s.

Hupp moved its headquarters from Detroit to Cleveland after the war and Hupp did good business in freezers, air-conditioners and soda machines. They built a plant at 1135 Ivanhoe Road in Collinwood making the air-conditioning equipment.

Joseph Eaton died in 1949, but his company continued stronger than ever. Eaton introduced power steering and car air-conditioning in the 1950s before merging with Yale and Towne, Inc. in 1963.

Fisher Body's payroll shrank from 14,000 to 4,000 immediately after the war. But they converted back to civilian production and continued to make auto bodies for Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick and Oldsmobile.

Babcock and Wilcox—an early supplier of steam boilers to Charles F. Brush, Senior's Brush Electric Co., and later nuclear reactors—bought Bailey Meter in 1953.

Chase Brass & Copper exercised their option and bought the Upson Tube Mill on East 260th Street in Euclid from the government in 1946. Its parent company moved their headquarters to Cleveland from Connecticut in 1962.

Down Babbitt Road, Addressograph-Multigraph grew to an international firm after the war, with 27 subsidiaries, and sales in 1967 reaching $400 million.

Cleveland Graphite Bronze continued to expand in the post-war era, buying out two competitors in 1949. In 1952 they expanded into electronics by buying Charles F. Brush, Junior's Brush Development Corp., changing their name to Clevite in the process. They increased emphasis on their electronics business and won important defense contracts. In 1967 Clevite opened another plant, this one in Euclid, at 18901 Euclid Avenue, to fill its burgeoning Vietnam and Cold War defense orders.

With roots in Reliance Electric, the Lincoln Electric Co. first appeared in Euclid in 1951, with a large plant at 22801 St. Clair. John Lincoln had co-founded Reliance with Peter Hitchcock in 1905, and began his own firm after selling his interest in Reliance to Hitchcock's sons. Lincoln began making electric motors as Reliance had, but soon became involved in industrial welding, a process that became important in the mass production of ships in the Second World War.

NELA Park turned the holiday lights back on for Christmas 1949. The next year, 400,000 visitors viewed the display. A record.

The 1970 census counted 284,450 residents in the cities and neighborhoods which had once made up the old Euclid Township. But right about that time the Japanese and German auto industries had recovered sufficiently to begin competing seriously again with American manufacturers, whose products since the war had grown larger and larger, while their operational quality overall had diminished. Oil, which for decades had been extremely cheap and upon which post-war American civilization rested, suddenly became significantly more expensive as OPEC, a consortium of oil exporting nations, successfully drove up the price of their strategic resource. To the ire of the auto industry and unions, Americans responded by buying increasing numbers of more reliable and fuel-efficient foreign-made cars. So much of Euclid Township's manufacturing had from its very origins been deeply intertwined with automobiles. When demand for American cars fell, it sent tremors through Euclid's and Collinwood's associated industries. And just as the consumer culture had spiraled upward after World War II, its decline spiraled down. In the former Euclid Township the convulsion took the form of bankruptcies, mergers, consolidations and takeovers.

Where other Euclid Township companies were thriving in the post-war boom, Euclid's Cleveland Tractor, then a subsidiary of Oliver Corp. of Chicago, struggled, despite a resurgence of military orders during the Korean War. Oliver had renamed the company Cletrac in 1959. White Motor Corp., not exactly its parent but a business with which Cletrac shared a good deal of DNA, bought the company in 1961, and moved operations to Iowa.

In 1967 Hupp was split into divisions which were sold to White Consolidated Industries and White Motor. An anti-trust suit forced General Motors to sell off Euclid Road Machinery in 1968. White bought the Euclid Road division, and reorganized it as Euclid Inc. Over the years White had also gobbled up Chandler, but by 1970, White had been badly mismanaged and was riddled with debt. That year the company hired William Knudsen's son, Semon "Bunkie" Knudsen, after he had been fired from Ford. Bunkie sold White's assets, including Euclid Inc. to Daimler-Benz in 1977, and fired employees, but none of it could save White. Bunkie retired and White filed for bankruptcy in 1980. Daimler later sold Euclid Inc. to construction equipment manufacturers the Clark Michigan Co. in 1984. It later sold Hupp to Blaw-Knox of Pittsburgh, which sold it to a holding company in 1990. Hupp went bankrupt by the end of 1991. White itself was finally sold to Volvo and defunct by 1985. Clark Michigan sold Euclid Inc.'s East 222nd and St. Clair plant to Lincoln Electric. In 1994 Euclid Inc. was sold once again, to the Japanese firm Hitachi, which liquidated the name in 2003, and moved all of its operations in North America to Guelph, Ontario, Canada, in 2005.

Clevite merged with Gould, a battery maker, in 1969, and the combined companies made weapons for the navy in the Euclid Avenue plant under the name of Ocean Systems. During the 1970s, electronics for the military became their primary focus, and they sold off their original ball bearing operations. They were the Cleveland area's largest military contractor by the mid-1980s. The Clevite division of Gould was sold to the Reading Railroad in 1981 and the railroad merged it with Imperial Brass, creating Imperial Clevite. The decline of auto industry orders, coupled with labor troubles, led Reading Railroad to close Clevite's original Collinwood plant in 1985. Gould was bought in 1987 by the Japanese Nippon Mining and Metals company for $1 billion. Nippon took Gould out of the defense business by selling Ocean Systems to Westinghouse, and pushed Gould toward copper components for the burgeoning computer industry. The price of copper went bust, however, and the Japanese managers split up Gould in 1993, sending divisions to Eastlake and Valley View.

In 1970, General Motors moved Fisher Body's auto body construction work to Detroit, closing the Collinwood plant. In 1982, the company moved to liquidate Fisher Body altogether and so to close the remaining plant in Euclid, but workers there agreed to concessions to keep their jobs, and GM renamed Fisher Body the Inland Division. Inland made sunshades, door panels and seat covers, and in 1986 won a contract to make seats and cushions for boats from Sea Ray. After this brief reprieve, GM again moved to close the former Fisher Body, then Inland, over a two-year process. Fisher Body/Inland's Euclid plant went idle for good in 1993.

A strike at the Chase Brass & Copper Tube Mill on East 260th Street in Euclid caused it to shut down in 1973 and it never reopened. In 1975, the mill was torn down, and two years later Euclid Square Mall opened on the site. Chase Brass' Sheet Mill on Babbitt Road was sold in 1988, and the company retained only about 40 employees in the Cleveland area, all of whom had been moved to other locations in Ohio and North Carolina by 1990.

Bailey left Euclid Township when it opened a new building in Wickliffe, where it consolidated its Cleveland-area operations, closing the Collinwood plant in 1973. It became Bailey Controls in 1978, Elsag-Bailey in 1989, then ABB in 1998.

New technologies in papermaking affected Lindsay Wire Weaving, with their traditional wire meshes being replaced increasingly by plastic. The company established a new factory in Mississippi in the early 1970s to keep up with the trend. The Collinwood factory continued making only metal cloth and when demand for this old product dropped too low it was retired. Lindsay Wire Weaving was sold to a Rhode Island company in 1978.

Advances in office technology, particularly the advent of personal computers, ultimately doomed Addressograph-Multigraph. The company moved headquarters from Babbitt Road in Euclid to Los Angeles in 1978, changing the name to AM International a year later. But nothing was going to stop the personal computing revolution by then, and AM went bankrupt in 1982. The old Addressograph-Multigraph plant on Babbitt Road closed later that same year.

After surviving recession in the early 1980s, Reliance went private in 1986, but offered public stock again in 1992. In 1995 they moved headquarters to Mayfield Heights. Rockwell International acquired Reliance in 1994 in a hostile takeover for $1.6 billion, folding it in to their Automation Power Systems division. Rockwell moved Reliance's headquarters from Mayfield Heights to Greenville, South Carolina, in 1998, although the division still employs nearly 2,000 workers in greater Cleveland.

Defense contractor Northrup Grumman bought TRW for nearly $8 billion in 2002. They spun off the auto parts business, which still makes car parts as TRW Automotive in Warrensville Heights and Valley View. TRW's defense sections were absorbed by Northrup, which is headquartered in Los Angeles.

Frederick Crawford retired from Thompson after putting in motion the merger with Ramo-Wooldridge. A wealthy man with a large collection of classic cars recalling his company's oldest and most persistent product lines, he left his collection to the Western Reserve Historical Society, in what is now the Crawford Auto Museum.

William Knudsen resigned from the army less than a month after the surrender of Germany, and by the time the war ended he was past the mandatory retirement age for General Motors. The effort he made to arm the country for war had told on his health. He died in early 1948.

Not everything has gone.

NELA Park today remains the headquarters of General Electric's Lighting Division. It's one of the enduring bright spots in East Cleveland, literally and figuratively. The campus was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, and NELA Park continues to present the holiday lighting display every year, although, in a symptom of problems in East Cleveland and the broader economy, stopped allowing visitors into the grounds in 1970, instead setting displays inside the locked fences along Noble Road. Terry and Tremaine Drives can both be found on the east end of Euclid near Hillandale Park.

Eaton, Yale and Towne became Eaton Corp. in 1971. When demand for American cars declined in the 1970s, so did demand for the parts Eaton made for those cars. The company diversified into electronics, and sold off some of its factories producing components for its old specialties in the automotive market. By the 1980s, their electronics sales surpassed sales of their automotive products, though they do still make and sell a large number of auto and truck components. In 1981 they were awarded a major contract to supply electronic countermeasures for the B-1 bomber. In 2002 Eaton had $7.2 billion in sales and over 50,000 employees worldwide. Eaton remains in business, headquartered in the Eaton Center, a 28-story skyscraper in Downtown Cleveland. Eaton's Aerospace Group and Fuel & Motion Control Systems Division operate in the former TAPCO plant, still standing at 23555 Euclid Avenue. Now called the Heritage Business Park, the 1.6 million square foot TAPCO factory is now an office facility and home to branches of dozens of companies as well as Eaton and a campus of Cuyahoga Community College. Torbensen Drive will be found off Euclid Avenue near London Road in Collinwood.

Lincoln Electric also endured some hard times in the 1980s, but survived, and even expanded by late in the decade. By the 1990s, Lincoln had become involved in Germany, China, Indonesia, Turkey and South Africa. They remain experts and innovators in the process, education and science of industrial welding.

Ajax Manufacturing was purchased by Park-Ohio Industries in 1996 then merged with Forging Developments International Inc. in 1998, becoming Ajax Technologies. The company is still making things from steel on Chardon Road in Euclid.

Still...

Euclid and Collinwood and the surrounding former township have never recovered from their peaks of growth and prosperity in the 20th century, and they don't seem likely to any time soon, at least not from manufacturing. Of course, this is the story of the broader United States in the late 20th century, beginning the 21st. Detroit is the famous example of the rise of the nation's mighty industry, victory in World War II, and boom after, and the hole it left when it declined. But one needn't go to Detroit to find that story. It's over on Babbitt Road, and down on East 152nd Street.

The information in Chapter Twenty-Six is drawn from the following sources:

Euclid Historical Society files:

"'Euclid' history of the company—'Euclid Road Machinery'"

"World War II"

Dyer, Davis. TRW: Pioneering Technology and Innovation Since 1900. ‎Harvard Business Review Press, 1998.

Euclid News-Journal. Euclid in 1942, Official City Directory and Historical Facts. Euclid News-Journal, 1942.

Herman, Arthur. Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II. Random House, 2013.

Smil, Vaclav. Made in the U.S.A. The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing. MIT Press, 2013.

Townsend, Hollis L. A History of NELA Park, 1911-1957. R.F. Plummer Co., 1960.

Voorhees, Leonard B. Euclid, Ohio 1797-1947, A Record of the Birth and Growth of an Industrial Community. Euclid Historical Society, 1947. Revised 1971.

Walton, Francis. Miracle of World War II: How American Industry Made Victory Possible. Macmillan, 1956.

Plat Book of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Volume 2. G.M. Hopkins Company, 1942.

Company websites:

chasebrass.com

eaton.com

euclid-hitachi.com

gelighting.com

lincolnelectric.com

reliance.com

trw.com

Encyclopedia of Cleveland History website:

case.edu/ech

U.S. Census