[Hammarlund] Mars Hill Photo Collection

Tue Jul 24 12:09:46 EDT 2007

I briefly (two weeks) worked at an assembly plant for electronics in
1960...the outfit in Manitowoc, Wisconsin which made the Lakeshore
Phasemaster II SSB transmitter, a pioneering piece of ham SSB
equipment. By the time I worked there it was out of production. This
was to be a summer job while I was in college. I then left there when
another factory in my town offered me double the money to work at
their place. A Lakeshore Electronics, I did some final equipment
testing. After their sideline of ham radio died out...their two
engineers went to Gonset...they built timing devices and small
subassemblies for other electronics firms. The factory I went to was a
hydraulics fittings manufacturer (think power steering hose
assemblies...they made millions of these.)  The Lakeshore plant
assembly lines looked just like the Hammarlund photos but on a smaller
scale. Like Hammarlund, women only did assembly.

What is amazing about the Hammarlund photos are how they show the
social mores of the time...and I presume the area. For one, there is
no diversity among the employees. I do believe that the areas around
Asheville, in the foothills, do not have sizeable minority populations.
(Mars Hill is just North of Asheville,) Things seem to be strictly
divided into "men's work" and "women's work." Virtually all the
assembly is being done by women. The men are doing plating, tool and
die work and of course management. Note that all the women are wearing
dresses. Looking at the vehicles in the lot and the radios being
assembled, I would guess these photos are from the early 1960's. The
HQ-100, the first of the cast panel Hammarlunds was introduced in late
1956 (I had one of the first ones, ordered for Christmas 1956, but I didn't
get it until January 1957. I was 14 ) and the others introduced later.
The transmitter shown, I believe came out when I was in college which
would have been 1960-64. Like the factories I worked in, assembly was
decidedly the province of women. In my job which was as a machinist
helper (load brass stock into a turret lathe, rake out the metal chips
from the oil bath for recycling), no man went into assembly unless he
was disabled, no woman ever went into the real production of parts
areas. In the front office, woman only did clerical work [Today that
company has a woman CEO.]  Since the factory I worked in was fairly
heavy manufacturing and was in an intrinsically dirty environment,
most female workers did wear slacks or jeans. I guess for something
less physically demanding, skirts and dresses were considered the norm.

I would suspect that in North Carolina in the 60's, the idea of a
union was virtually unthinkable. The Wisconsin factory I worked in was
also not union...somewhat unusual in our town which was otherwise
heavily unionized (shipbuilding, aluminum foundries etc.)  Management
was always warning the women that if the plant went union, and there
were union organizing drives each summer I worked there, all the women
would have to be fired. This was of course ludicrous, the women were
far more productive in assembly than any guy would ever be. Whenever
there was to be a union vote, the company would hire a lot of women
and tell them that if the place became a union shop they too would be
out of a job.  Forty-seven years later, the place is still non-union,
although I hear when I visit my hometown now, the pitch is that all
the jobs would be shipped to Mexico. A fairly real threat as the
second largest industry in this town (aluminum pots and pans) did in
fact close and go to Mexico. I, as a summer-only employee, was
ineligible to vote in the union elections. I did manage to work both
sides though. A manager once saw me writing on a management handout
on the election, and was about to fire me on the spot. Since I was an
English major, I pointed out to him that he had sloppy grammar, poor
spelling, split infinitives, ended sentences with prepositions and had
very faulty logic in the arguments and I was correcting these
mistakes. He then hired me on an hourly basis, apart from my regular
job, to take their drafts on the subject home and rewrite them in
proper English. He paid me more for this than for my real job. Little
did he know that I was also doing exactly the same thing, for pay,
from the three unions trying to organize the place. Actually, since my
father was a union steward at a shipbuilding yard in town, my
sympathies were with the union side, but management didn't know that.
I made enough money in the summers doing these jobs that I totally
paid my own way through the University of Wisconsin. I was working
covertly for both sides. This was sort of ironic as my post college
career was as a civilian Intelligence Officer (sometimes covert)
although I didn't know what my career would be it at the time. I was
actually training to be an English and French teacher which I never
did. Working at these places was a real incentive to finish college
and get out of town. Only 15% of my fellow high school graduates even
entered college, much less finished it.

These photos are  gems. Now I must get this old HQ-145 I have working.

Jon Teske, W3JT (ex-K9CAH, W3DRV, KG4TJ)
Olney, MD

At 10:16 PM 7/23/2007, you wrote:
>Quite to my surprise I found an excellent collection of original 
>Hammarlund photos on the web tonight.  There are a total of 53 high 
>resolution black and white scans available for viewing at:
>
>http://tinyurl.com/2gnamh
>
>(delete any asterisks that something seems to put in these links!)
>
>The source is the University of North Carolina- Asheville, and in 
>addition to rare plant and assembly line photos, there are 
>commercial photos of various ham and CB radios.   Note there are 
>three pages and various viewer options.
>
>Like the commercial says:  "Priceless!"
>
>73 Bob W9RAN
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