Arcade Company & Father Remembered

Merry Christmas

Sun Nov 01, 2009

by Bill Vossler

"He came from another foundry where he had to walk two miles to work on roads that weren't plowed, so that was how we came to Freeport. He started at the bottom at Arcade and worked his way up. His job at the Arcade factory was to see that the men did their work right. He would walk through the factory and see if the molds were right. I remember one time somebody ordered the wrong sand (for the sand-casting molds) and he was very upset at that. He thought somebody was probably trying to save a few pennies."

Another time he was frustrated because he said the workers didn't know the melting points of the metals they were smelting.

She said her father didn't talk much about his work, but she was familiar with the factory because she had to take meals down to him when he worked late, about a half-hour trip on foot, shorter on her bicycle.

"I often rode down there on my bicycle, especially if he'd be working late for overtime. Mother would send me down there with a luncheon meat sandwich, or cold potato salad or something like that. You'd go down Columbia Street, go under the trestle for the Illinois Central Railroad, and the Arcade factory was right there."

His foreman's job meant he was a jack-of-all-trades at the factory. He got up about 4 a.m., made breakfast of ham and eggs ("You could smell it frying"), and get to the factory by 4:30 a.m. to open up.

"He had to shovel the coal to get the fire started because they didn't have oil burners like thy do now. He had to go to the forge to get the furnace going so they could melt the cast iron. It came in big ingots maybe the length of my arm to my elbow, and had a mark in the middle so it could somehow be broken there. So if they were going to pour a miniature tractor, then they would break it and not have to heat the whole thing. I remember Dad would sometimes come home and say, 'We poured today.'" He worked until 7:30 p.m., each day, later if he wanted to get more done, every weekday, and until noon on Saturdays. [Subscribe to Toy Farmer and read the rest of this article.]