Marcal Blaze Reminiscent of Famous Sponge Rubber Products Fire 44 Years Ago in Shelton

The spectacular eight-alarm fire at the 45,000 sq. ft, Marcal paper plant in Elmwood Park, NJ, Wednesday night illuminated not just the sky but also memories of a similar conflagration 44 years ago. 

Gilda and I had just gone to bed about half an hour before midnight on Saturday, March 1, 1975, when the phone rang in our Seymour, Conn., apartment. We were living in the small town about 13 miles northwest of New Haven because I was a reporter for The New Haven Register. My initial beat had been the towns of Seymour and Derby. After a year, I was reassigned to cover another town in the economically depressed Lower Naugatuck Valley: Shelton (side note: in my new beat I succeeded Dan Collins, husband of Gail Collins—yes, that Gail Collins). 

My bureau chief, Don Anderson, called asking what I was doing in bed while downtown Shelton was in danger of being wiped off the map, consumed by fire. From nearby Ansonia Don had been rocked out of bed by an explosion several miles away in Shelton. 

I hastily dressed and sped south in my Chevy Vega. The sky became redder the nearer I approached Shelton. The largest structure dominating the downtown, the 475,000-square-foot Sponge Rubber Products Plant 4 perched along the Housatonic River was ablaze. Hundreds of volunteer and paid firemen from dozens of fire departments in southern Connecticut were attempting not so much to extinguish the inferno in freezing weather but rather to keep it from spreading to Main Street. 

Stretched out along 2-1/2 blocks, the plant had once been owned by the B.F. Goodrich company. Foam mattresses were it main product. Declining sales promoted Goodrich to sell the plant to Charles Moeller, an Ohio businessman who renamed it the Sponge Rubber Products Company. 

The fire had broken out shortly after 11:30 pm. As I talked with the police chief the reason it had spread so quickly and devastatingly became known. It was deliberately set. Arson. 

More astounding, the suspects were said to be members of the Weather Underground. They had tied up the night watchmen, strategically distributed 500 pounds of dynamite and 24 55-gallon drums of gasoline throughout the plant, and told the watchmen who they left unharmed in a nearby woods they were Weathermen. 

It didn’t make sense. Of all places, why would a radical group target the Sponge Rubber plant in Shelton in what turned out to be the most costly case of arson in the nation’s history?

Well, it turned out the Weathermen were not responsible. Moeller had a spiritual guru, the Rev. David N. Bubar of Memphis, Tenn., a Baptist minister and self-proclaimed psychic, who sought to relieve him of the financial mistake he made in buying the factory in 1974. Bubar recruited men from Ohio. They rented a Ryder truck to convey their explosive materiel. It was through the Ryder rental that they were nabbed. 

Moeller, as well, was charged but found not guilty. The others were convicted. 

Watching a fire can be exhilarating. But for a reporter, more emotional may well be the followup interviews with workers who no longer had jobs and whose prospects in Shelton and the other river towns of the Lower Naugatuck Valley were dim at best. Some 4,000 workers lost their jobs.

Several months after the fire I was promoted to bureau chief of West Haven, Bethany, Orange and Woodbridge. We moved to New Haven. Within two years I had taken a job in New York City. We moved to White Plains. 

Shelton slowly, ever so slowly, recovered. It converted the plant site “into open, public space with a veterans memorial, a pavilion, an annual farmers market and a riverwalk” (https://www.ctpost.com/news/amp/40-years-ago-fire-marked-turning-point-for-6106842.php). With the completion of a multi-lane Route 8 Shelton became a hub of clean, light manufacturing and an affordable bedroom community to Fairfield County Fortune 500 company executives. 

A little more than a year after moving to New York and writing for Chain Store Age I was assigned an article on a new trend in supermarkets—generic products. To understand the economics of these non branded alternatives I talked with a marketing executive from a then-family owned paper goods company: Marcal. 

Marcal was sold to an investment firm several years ago. The workers who saw their livelihood flame out Wednesday night face the same tough future as those who witnessed arson most foul 44 years ago. 

The Education of a Reporter and Teachers' Salaries

When I began my journalism career at The New Haven Register back in 1972, my immediate boss, Don Anderson, a gruff, cigar-chomping-but-never-smoking old-line bureau chief with a crusty exterior but a soft heart, instilled in me several principles. First and foremost, no matter what a source tells you, there’s always a story to be found and retold in the paper. I learned that the hard way on my first assignment. 

I was to find out why a multi-unit housing development in Derby, Conn., had not been completed. After telling Don several times there was nothing to report, he suggested two alternatives. Either I could go back out and find the real story behind the delay in construction or I could pack up my desk and never come back. As if to emphasize he was not kidding about the latter option, he picked up my heavy Royal manual typewriter and flung it across the newsroom. Hardly anyone stopped what they were doing. Apparently he had done that before. 

He wasn’t finished with my “training.” He appeared ready to heave me out a third floor window. I wisely deferred to his experienced take on the respectability and credibility of developers following through on their real estate promises. I soon discovered the Derby project had been mothballed so the developer could pour more of his resources into a different project in nearby Oxford. 

Another of Don’s biases expressed itself in his disdain for teacher union contracts. Like too many of the residents of the Lower Naugatuck Valley—the mill towns of Ansonia, Derby, Seymour and Shelton—Don thought teachers were overpaid considering they “worked” just 180 days a year and then only from around 8 am to 3 pm, with two months off during the summer and assorted national and religious holidays the rest of the year. 

Perhaps he was relating their salaries to the paltry compensation The Register paid its reportorial staff. I don’t know what Don made, but two years later, when I became the bureau chief of West Haven, Bethany, Orange and Woodbridge, I earned just $200 a week. I was one of seven bureau chiefs on a staff of 100 reporters. Even in early 1970s incomes, Register salaries were low. You no doubt can understand why the Newspaper Guild won a unionization ballot in 1974. Our salaries were immediately frozen pending a contract agreement. More than two years later, some six months after I left The Register, a contract settlement raised a bureau chief's salary to close to $400 a week. 

I was reminded of Don’s antipathy toward teachers by the passing of a respected high school teacher described in my previous blog post and by a Facebook posting by a recent Meredith Menden about the value the public receives from educators. I’ve reprinted it for your edification (full disclosure—my sister Lee’s a retired elementary school teacher and brought Meredith’s commentary to my attention):

Teachers’ hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work nine or ten months a year! It’s time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do—babysit!

We can get that for less than minimum wage.

That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and planning—that equals 6-1/2 hours).

So each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now, how many students do they teach in a day...maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585 a day.

However, remember, they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.

LET’S SEE ...

That’s $585 X 180 = $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).

What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master’s degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6-1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.

Wait a minute—there’s something wrong here! There sure is!

The average teacher’s salary (nationwide) is $50,000.

$50,000/180 days = $277.77 per day / 30 students = $9.25 / 6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student—a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!)

WHAT A DEAL!!!!

Down Memory Lane

I was less than enthusiastic about what Gilda was set to do. I couldn't stop her from knocking on the front door of the home we lived in 38 years ago in Seymour, Conn. I'm glad she did. She is so much braver than I when it comes to nostalgia tours and necessary, potentially embarrassing, intrusions if one truly wants to go back in time and place.

With our lucky 11:11 date buttressing our plan, Gilda and I set out last Friday to retrace our early roots together, our first four years of married life when I was a cub reporter and then a bureau chief for the New Haven Register and Gilda was a nursing student at the University of Bridgeport and then a newborn intensive care nurse at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

We drove up Route 8 from Bridgeport to Shelton, my second year beat assignment and scene of the largest industrial arson in U.S. history. We had just gone to bed Saturday night, March 1, 1975, in our Seymour apartment when my boss, Don Anderson, called from nearby Ansonia to ask what I was doing home when half of downtown Shelton was ablaze. I quickly rushed to the fire and stayed there most of the night as the Sponge Rubber Products Company plant (formerly owned by B.F. Goodrich) burned down. Authorities quickly determined it was a case of arson and who did it. But the already depressed economy of the Lower Naugatuck Valley towns of Shelton, Seymour, Ansonia and Derby took a hit as 1,200 jobs were lost. Today, the site of the factory is a park along the Housatonic River.

Driving over the aptly named Bridge Street, we made out way into downtown Derby. Thirty-nine years ago, as I drove through Derby for the first time during my job hunting travels, I thought it looked like Dresden after World War II, with dark, hulking, dilapidated buildings blotting out the sun. Hours later, when the co-managing editor of the New Haven Register, Murray Farber, offered me a job, he said the assignment would be covering Seymour and Derby. I inwardly cringed at the prospect of revisiting Derby on a daily basis but quickly accepted the $150 a week position ($773 in today’s values).

Derby’s downtown is brighter today. Gone are the turn of the 20th century buildings along the riverfront. Though still not vibrant, the area is less depressing. Deeper into the city, along Elizabeth Street, Griffin Hospital, where Gilda did some of her nursing school training, where they clung to the tradition of wearing uniform hats and pins, where the nursing stations were at the far end of each corridor and the head nurses ruled with iron fists, the hospital still stands and is now affiliated with the Yale School of Medicine.

Also on Elizabeth Street is the now shuttered Dworkin Chevrolet where we bought our first car, a Vega, in 1973. A few blocks closer to the downtown the temple we attended, Beth Israel, has been turned into a New Life Community Church, the only outward sign of its previous calling being the Hebrew words etched into the façade near the roof: “The world stands on three things: justice, truth and peace." It was in Beth Israel that we sat with other congregants Yom Kippur morning 1973 wondering about and praying for the fate of Israel after the surprise attacks by Syria and Egypt.

The women of Beth Israel always were amazed Gilda had met and married a Jewish man at college. She’d gently respond that with 95% of Brooklyn College’s 30,000 student population being Jewish it would have been hard not to find a mate from the “chosen” religion.

As we drove north toward Ansonia, we passed the restaurant where we’d treat ourselves to a meal away from home, the McDonald’s on Division Street straddling the border with Derby. Spector Furniture in Ansonia is still open for business. We bought our first TV there, a Magnavox, plus a desk we still have, now consigned to our garage. Around the corner, the Register’s bureau office is long closed. It was in that office I first heard the phrase “to Jew someone down.” It was not a saying common to the Brooklyn shtetl I grew up in.

Before visiting our first home, we entered downtown Seymour, dominated by a post office two to three times the size required for a town of 13,000. As related by local historians, the town benefited from a bureaucratic mistake. Seems the post office the head of the congressional oversight committee had earmarked for his hometown of Seymour, Ind., had mistakenly been erected in Seymour, Conn.

The locals are trying to remake downtown Seymour into an artsy community, with antique and curio shops. They need more restaurants, though the one we lunched in, Jimmie’s Place, was a classic throwback saloon with lobster roll, French fries and cole slaw for $8.99, a hard to beat price.

The house we lived in had been divided into a two-family dwelling. We had three rooms on the first floor: a big country kitchen where Gilda learned to cook, a living room and a bedroom with bright red walls when we first moved in but quickly painted over to reflect Gilda’s more refined sensibilities. Upstairs, our landlord’s daughter and son-in-law lived.

As I stood at the bottom of the porch steps, Gilda knocked on the door. The twenty-something woman who opened the door cheerfully let us in. Her big dog, and really big husband, gave her the confidence we weren’t going to harm her. Their family had bought the house from the previous owner and converted it back to a one family home. Our bedroom was now an office. The kitchen had been expanded and updated. They seemed happy there.

As we drove to and through New Haven where we lived for two years in a subdivided Tudor mansion off Forest Road (Gilda’ couldn’t gain access to that apartment unit), we reflected on how far we had come during the last 39 years. More on that, perhaps, another day.