Vanishing Fleece

by Clara Parkes

  By the 1980s, business was booming. They were spinning 300,000 pounds of yarn per week, much of it destined for the carpet industry, but some for garments. On any given day, their yarns were in three, four, or more pages of the L.L.Bean catalog. Had my imaginary sweater business existed in the ’80s, this would have been my mill. Business was so good, they bought their competitor and swelled to five hundred employees.

  Just a few weeks after that fateful acquisition, DuPont announced it was moving away from Orlon, which had been Kraemer’s bread-and-butter fiber. Over the next year, Kraemer lost millions of dollars in revenue. Then NAFTA was enacted, and orders dried up as companies shifted production abroad. More and more customers and suppliers closed their doors as the industry continued to decline. Kraemer ultimately whittled staff down to forty. They sold off all their buildings and a good deal of their equipment, doing everything they could to stay afloat.

  It’s the same American story you hear over and over again, one of tragedy and (hopefully) resilience, with generations of family lore relegated to a framed photograph in a grandson’s bedroom. But the company did survive. Far leaner and more efficient, but still intact. Today, Kraemer spins an average of thirty thousand pounds of yarn per week. Small in comparison to the 1980s numbers, yes, but still significant. If you set out all the yarn Kraemer spins in a week, it would still circle the globe three times.

  Two brothers now work for the business, David (President) and Victor Schmidt (Corporate Secretary). A sister rents an office upstairs for her graphic design company. The whole building is rented from new owners, the brothers having sold it years ago. “We did what we had to do,” David told me more than once, “to still be here.”

  David is the Senior to David the Junior, his son, who works with him downstairs in the mill and goes by Dave at work to avoid confusion. At one point two other Davids worked for them, and the joke was, “If you can’t remember someone’s name around here, just call them David and there’s a sixty percent chance you’ll be right.”

  I’m here not only because of the mill’s compelling history but because it is one of the only worsted mills left that can still comb fibers. Most others buy combed top directly from Chargeurs in South Carolina, or send their wool to Chargeurs to be carded first. (I’d been told that their minimum was one thousand pounds and that they wouldn’t comb fibers that had been scoured elsewhere, so Chargeurs had been out of the running for this project.)

  My first two bale yarns had been spun woolen. Now I wanted to see if my wool could spin up into the kind of smooth, worsted-spun yarn that all the hand-dyers were using. They always relied on a dusting of silk to make their colors pop, so I needed someone who had access to silk and could add it to the mix. Kraemer checked all the boxes and was happy to take the job.

  David had originally gone to college to study music. His passion was piano. But the more he heard other people play—brilliant newcomers like Chick Corea—the more he questioned his skill. Perhaps sensing his doubts, David’s father asked if he wanted to come home and work at the mill instead. He said yes, and he’s been here ever since. David oversees everything that’s produced at the mill. As soon as his son Dave was out of diapers, he’d made the mill his home, too.

  “I was driving forklifts by the time I was twelve,” Dave told me. He went to college on a full scholarship as an environmental sciences major but quickly grew disillusioned with the outdated facts that the professor was teaching. He left and eventually joined his father at the mill. He also works as a volunteer firefighter. While machining a part in the Kraemer machine shop (that, too, was sold), he lost two-thirds of his middle finger. I was warned to watch for a wiggle in the remaining digit when he’s particularly angry about something. He’d been lucky. A friend lost his entire arm in a carding machine. Seeing my grimace, he added, “They’re so slow to shut off, they keep rotating even after the power goes.”

  Working upstairs as far from the actual mill as you can get without leaving the building is Victor, the younger brother. Victor manages all the staff and administrative operations from a dark, wood-paneled office I’m guessing belonged to his father, and his grandfather before that. It was filled with file cabinets. In the adjacent office, I met a woman who had come to work for the company when Victor was ten. “He used to sharpen all my pencils,” she said, shaking her head with a smile. “He’d hand me back erasers.”

  The building’s main entrance opens into a bright, spacious yarn shop that was a gift from David and Victor’s grandfather to his wife, an avid knitter. To your left, the administrative offices, Victor’s realm. To your right, at the opposite end of the store, is a door leading to a large windowed room they call “the lab.” This is the Davids’ domain, and it houses a small-scale card, pin drafter, and spinning frame they use to work up production samples for customers.

  Open shelves hold years of yarn samples that they’ve spun for people. A sink, microwave, and jars of dye help customers envision the finished product, although Kraemer no longer offers dye services. Their proximity to the legendary Philadelphia dyer G. J. Littlewood & Sons puts them at a geographic advantage over the few other remaining mills in this country.

  In the far corner of the lab, a staircase leads down into a catacomb of basement corridors. When navigated correctly, you end up in a massive mill space that begins in the rear of the building and then continues—through a jagged hole that looks like they just hit it with a wrecking ball and went about their business—into a vast cinder-block building. There was no insulation, no air-conditioning, and the midday heat was overwhelming. But it was impossible to tear myself away from these machines. I was spellbound watching them work, watching people manipulate the gears, feed fibers through rollers and onto conveyor belts, move tall canisters of fiber from one station to the next.

  David led me to the cards, which looked nothing like the massive circus calliope of cylinders I’d seen at Bartlett and Blackberry Ridge. All I could see here was a huge green metal box that looked more like a transformer at a power station than any sort of textiles gadget. The only clue that this had anything to do with yarn was the conveyor belt of fibers marching into the machine and several streams of fibers squirting out nearby, like a woolly soft-serve ice cream dispenser. Each stream dropped into a separate canister, the carded fiber looping around and around, layer upon layer, until each canister was full to overflowing.

  Canisters are the clue as to what kind of mill you’re in. If you see a tall canister with swirls of soft-serve fiber in it, you’re looking at a worsted or semiworsted mill. If you see the long spool with individual strips of roving, like we did at Bartlett and Blackberry Ridge, you’re looking at a woolen setup. Kraemer had several cards busily chugging away on a huge lot of green fiber when I arrived. Some canisters were already topped off with fiber and looked like key lime soft-serve cones that had begun to melt.

  From the cards, the canisters are dragged to the machines that are most crucial to worsted spinning: the pin drafters and combs. Think of wool like hair. The woolen system works best with short curly hair, as in the fine crimpy wools shorter than three inches (7.5 cm). You give it a few quick passes with a soft bristle brush before gathering it all into a fluffy, jumbled ponytail of yarn. The worsted system, on the other hand, needs longer hair, or wools longer than three inches (7.5 cm). You still give it a good brushing, but then you go back over it with a comb and slowly work every fiber into submission. If spinning systems had personalities, I like to compare the two to Gilda Radner (woolen) and Jane Curtin (worsted).

  The Warner & Swasey Servo pin drafter is actually part of a three-step system the Davids call “the finishers.” The mission here is to make the fibers as parallel and uniform as possible by pulling them through a series of metal pins and an auto-leveler that mechanically adjusts thick and thin areas. They’ll run fibers from multiple canisters together to further blend and unify what comes out the other end. While the woolen system used a good amount of oil to help the fibers hold together,
here they only needed a little bit of oil to lubricate the fibers and control static. Once run through the finishers, the resulting fiber is called “sliver,” pronounced “sly-ver.”

  Most of what Kraemer spins has already been combed into top and needs only one pass through the finishers. But if you were to present them with a wool they’d never used before, as I was, they’d have to run it through the combs, too. “Otherwise, it’s a horrible yarn,” said Dave.

  Some other mills still have pin drafters, but Kraemer is, to my knowledge, the last commercial-scale contract mill in the United States with its own combs. These amplify the tidying and aligning of the finishers, with actual metal “combs” that rake through sections of sliver at lightning speed and remove short, neppy, and irregular bits.

  The combing machine, a beautiful Schlumberger imported from France in 1988, is Dave’s domain. He proudly demonstrated it to me, explaining the mechanisms, removing the protective cover, and cranking the combs and brushes by hand so I could get a clearer, slower look. He told me you can still buy new combing machines, but he prefers these older ones. They have more gears and settings he can hack to do whatever he wants. The new ones are far more specialized and consequently can do fewer things, making them harder to tweak.

  “Of course there’s an art and a science to all of this,” Dave said. “Some settings can do two things on different days.”

  All I knew was that I was losing a lot of fiber in the combing process—nearly half of what I’d sent in. Not only is time money in textiles, but so is wool. That’s the other reason I had them add silk to the mix: to make up for some of that fiber loss. I was secretly worried there wouldn’t be enough yarn for all of my Explorers. And wouldn’t that be unfortunate.

  The spinning portion of operations looked nearly identical to what I’d seen at Blackberry Ridge, only on a bigger scale. We passed three massive green spinning frames that stood proud but empty, patiently waiting for their next job. “These came from Ireland,” David said, running his hand along the metal casing. “My grandfather custom-ordered them from Mackie in the 1960s. They broke the mold after they made these.” He gave the machine an affectionate pat.

  In the 1960s, Mackie, which began as a manufacturer of flax-processing machinery before shifting to military production during both wars, would have just begun making its synthetic spinning equipment. Brand-new, these would have been as state-of-the-art as you could get. “We had eight,” David added. They had to sell off the other five.

  Farther on we reached more spinning frames, these made by Saco-Lowell and sporting 240 bobbins on each side. The bobbins were perfectly spaced in a line that appeared to stretch forever, like the Rockettes in formation, preparing to kick. Despite less equipment, it was still easy to imagine how this place cranked out what it did in the 1980s.

  The spinning frames were fed by hundreds of slivers running through a maze of PVC pipes overhead and to their respective canisters on the other side of the walkway. Once on the frame, the sliver is pulled through two draft roller sections before it receives twist that’s been formed by a traveler sliding around the base of the bobbin at thousands of revolutions per minute.

  Walking past a massive cone-winding setup, David stopped to introduce me to a woman tending the machines. “She’s worked here for thirty years,” he said. She smiled. “Her sister and mother worked here. Her father did, too.” Quietly to me he added, “He just died.” He gave her a pat on the back and we kept going.

  On my second day, Victor intercepted me at the door. “How’s it going down there?” he asked. “Is it going okay?” He’d been eager to show me the town that was so important to his family, and I was eager to hear his story, so off we went. We left his aging, chocolate-brown cocker spaniel, Mocha, curled up asleep on a chair in his office, one of the only rooms in the mill with any form of air-conditioning. It wasn’t even 9 a.m. and the late-May heat was already oppressive.

  He drove me around what used to be the entire mill property. “That place now stores cardboard boxes,” he said as he pointed to one building. “That’s rented by people who make bathing suits, I think,” pointing to another. Bit by bit, like an English estate after the war, everything had been sold.

  Just that morning I’d passed a funeral home bearing their family name. “Yeah, if you go back.” He waved his hand. “I forget how we’re related.” We passed an ominous building in the architectural style of an 1800s orphanage that turned out to have been exactly that, also run by a distant relative. Nearing an intersection, he pointed out a building that used to be a bank and was owned by another Kraemer. “I have a dollar bill with his signature on it!”

  Yesterday David told me that even when he was in college studying music, he knew he wanted to come back and work at the mill. I was curious if Victor felt the same.

  “Oh no!” he said. “I never, ever wanted to work for the mill.” He’d studied primary school education in college but quit after just a few weeks of practice teaching. He then went to restaurant and hospitality management school, eventually landing a job managing a chain of restaurants. He loved the work, but the pay was abysmal. This was the 1980s, when business was booming back at the mill.

  One day his father said, “Why don’t you come on home?”

  He decided to give it a try, “much to my brother’s . . .” His voice trailed off. “My brother and I are very different.”

  We continued driving uphill, winding through wooded neighborhoods he’d apparently never seen. “Oh, this is pretty,” he said, glancing at a park.

  “Didn’t you grow up here?” I asked.

  “Sure, but I haven’t lived here in a long time,” he answered. He lives in Bethlehem, four miles away.

  We detoured to see the Martin Guitar world headquarters, perhaps the only international corporation still based in Nazareth. Once made by hand, the guitars are now manufactured on an assembly line.

  From there, we drove back into town, stopping at the small brick building that was the first Martin Guitar headquarters. Now its downstairs houses the Chamber of Commerce. Correction: one of Nazareth’s chambers of commerce. Apparently this town has two dueling chambers of commerce, a spin-off having been formed after this, the original one, had done such a disappointing job of saving Main Street.

  “They’ve been looking for you!” Eleanor exclaimed when we returned. Eleanor is the mother figure of the group, an intermediary between upstairs and downstairs, brother and brother. Her husband wants her to retire, and the Schmidts desperately want her to stay. She works in the yarn side of the business as a gifted knitter, designer, and teacher. “I love being here,” she said.

  David did a good job of concealing any annoyance at my having been kidnapped for the morning. “We have yarn for you!” he said with a smile, handing me two white skeins.

  Now is as good a time as any to come clean: Kraemer was spinning two yarns for me. When I bought the bale and wrote my wool mentor Elsa for advice, she casually mentioned that she, too, had an extra bale that was more than she needed. Two bales, in fact, of exquisite Cormo wool from a ranch in Montana. Emboldened by the positive public response to my bale project and flush with a little leftover cash from my crowdfunded “student loan,” I told Elsa yes before I’d even learned how to make yarn out of Eugene’s bale. Now Kraemer was spinning two yarns for me: one with Eugene’s Merino, the other with Elsa’s Cormo. Not too long after Elsa, a British farmer made me another offer I couldn’t refuse, and within a few months I was the proud owner of a literal ton of wool. It’s a slippery slope, my friends, this yarn making.

  At any rate, they’d just opened my Cormo bale, run it through an opener similar to what the previous two mills had, and carded the fibers. They ran them through the finishers in the hopes that we’d have a good enough yarn not to need combing, since I was wary after losing so much wool in the bale yarn. For this one, they’d spun four plies and twisted them together into the skein David was proudly holding.

  But the fibers I’d boug
ht turned out to be a bit shorter and finer than their equipment liked to handle. “Maybe it’s lamb’s wool?” David offered. I’d never even thought to ask Elsa and wouldn’t have understood the consequences even if she had said it was lamb’s wool. But apparently I’d gotten the somewhat shorter end of the sheep.

  They’d been hoping to be able to spin it right then, but the fiber would indeed need to be combed. The sample yarn was shaggy and irregular. I gave David the bad news. He nodded, probably knowing I’d say so, and down we went, back into the bright open mill. We found Dave and gave him our report. He nodded to another man standing nearby, and together they began dragging the canisters over to the combing machine.

  As we walked back upstairs, David asked, “I hope you like Indian food?” Nazareth was full of surprises. The previous day, Victor had brought us sandwiches from a Wawa convenience store. We all ate together around a long table in the yarn shop upstairs. For dessert, we each got a cookie in its own paper sleeve. It was like elementary school, only there was no place to take a nap.

  Today, at that same table, we feasted on some of the best take-out Indian food I’d ever had. We continued the conversation from where we’d left off the day before, talking more about the family business and yarn, about how their grandfather had built the yarn store as a gift to their grandmother, and how Eleanor was soon heading to Africa with a church group. Knowing their story, how important this business was to the family and how hard they’d worked to keep it going, I felt almost embarrassed by their generosity. I should have been the one bringing them lunch.

  Dave had returned upstairs and was about to fill up his plate when his father interrupted. “As long as there’s yarn to be spun, you shouldn’t be up here eating.” He nodded, put his plate back, and returned downstairs. Yesterday, he’d missed his kids’ first trip to the zoo. Today, he’d end up eating a pint of strawberries while working through lunch.