wednesday afternoon, manatawny manor in east coventry township, chester county, hosted a special mother-and-son poetry reading featuring resident lena rothermel. jerry rothermel, one of her sons, sat beside her during the reading, and for several decades in their lives, they both worked at tung-sol in boyertown making or helping in one way or another with production of headlights.
thank you to susan gettler for some of the photography during the reading.
born in 1925, lena is originally from woodchoppertown in earl township, berks county. here is a long excerpt of her poem.
*
in the 1940s, before my belly grew, swelling with the cells
of my children, and then again in 1950, i worked alongside
many neighboring women at tung-sol in boyertown. i took
the job because my husband only had one day of foundry
work each week. a newspaper
clipping from september 9, 1963,
notes a plant tour for the reading
chapter of the american society
of tool and manufacturing engineers. one line in it reads,
production at the plant is now in excess of 14,000,000 lamps
per year. well before that ink met its paper, i started in what
they called re-wash. they had a machine which aluminized
the reflectors of the headlights which we constructed. we used
electricity to expand the silvery aluminum inside. then
they moved me onto the fog light line. with new inventory,
the lenses and reflectors came in separately. you put them
together. when i worked in glass and inspections, if anybody
had problems, they called me over. i determined if glass ought
to be rejected, if imperfections, small chips or weak sections,
meant we’d toss them out. i learned so much equipment—
brazer, mount, peg, and lens preheat machines. that brazer
machine let you mount wires to put in the filaments. i became
a backup operator. i knew all of the jobs. my son jerry walked
by me now and then during his shift. mothers could keep an
eye on their sons and vice versa, if they both worked there.
at one point, about 600 people were employed in the building
across six days, three shifts. if you saw a bulb burned out
while driving, you thought, that wasn’t one of our lights...
*
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