Old & New

In Stamford's historic Atlantic Square, amid modern store fronts and movie marquees, a granite slab marks the ground where, 305 years ago, "Twentynine men and their families . . . imbued with the spirit of the founders of New England . . . made a permanent and enduring settlement of landowners and freemen."

From the pioneer Connecticut outpost has grown an industrial city of 65,000. Near the commemorative tablet stands a World War II honor roll, with gold stars marking the name of many a newer seeker after liberty: Arruzza, Dubrovsky, Malizewski, Pezzimenti.

This week a labor dispute, already one of the most stubbornly protracted in the nation, still silenced the lathes of Stamford's biggest factory. Yale & Towne, a lock and hardware company founded in 1868 by two Yankee inventors, had been shut down since Nov. 7 by a strike of 2,500 union machinists, mostly of recent Italian and Polish extraction.

W. Gibson Carey Jr., Yale & Towne president, husband of Founder Henry R. Towne's granddaughter Eleanor, maintained that "a principle of American liberty" was involved. Union Leader Joseph Ficarro, an ex-druggist from The Bronx, insisted that the company had refused to "negotiate in the American way."

Both, in a spirit of New England stubbornness, refused to budge from prepared positions: the open shop v. "union security."

End of One Era. Yale & Towne had no union for three-quarters of a century. When the C.I.O. suddenly appeared on the scene, the company fought back in righteous outrage--and with methods which brought down the censure of a federal court. It abandoned production in one branch after a sitdown strike. It sponsored a company union which the International Association of Machinists roundly defeated in a 1942 plant election.

During the war the machinists, over company protests, secured a maintenance of membership clause from the War Labor Board. At war's end, Yale & Towne tried to drop the clause. The machinists struck --the company was out "to bust the union." Among the first to walk out were veterans of 50 years at Yale & Towne; they were trading an old story for a new idea.

The striking workmen, living in the gashouse neighborhood of Stamford's grubby South End, could look across an inlet to fashionable Shippan Point, where Plant Manager William Hoyt owns a house close by the Stamford Yacht Club. Even farther apart than these two worlds were the bare union headquarters above a local dime store and President Carey's ample office in New York's towering Chrysler Building.

Times had changed. Stamford no longer sheltered a society of native sons. Yale & Towne, with branches elsewhere in the U.S., Canada and England, no longer belonged exclusively to Stamford.

Start of a New. In the first 100 days of the strike, union and management representatives met only three times. The third session, over a month ago, broke up in five minutes. This week, after the intervention of Governor Raymond E. Baldwin, they will try a fourth. But a state fact-finding board gloomily reported:

"Union spokesmen have consistently offered to submit the dispute to any arbitration board and abide by the decision. . . . The company . . . will not arbitrate the terms of an agreement. . . . Since the inception of the strike, their relationship has progressively worsened."

The Stamford Advocate, older than either company or union, conscious of both tradition and change, issued a front-page call to landowner and freeman alike:

"The strike . . . spells bitter privation and want for the families of three thousand of our workers. And it deprives the Company of today's profits and the customers of tomorrow. It slows down the business of the whole community. And it fans the flames of class antagonism and makes enemies out of old friends. ... In the name of Stamford, we call upon [labor and management] to measure up to their grave responsibility."

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