This trail also led me to conclude, firstly, that so many things remain quietly connected, and secondly, that history is the unceasing attempt to understand what it is that has happened alongside all that might have happened as well or instead.
Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob
Some natural endings, and I think here of rivers, spread out and slow down as they reach the flat landscapes marking their destination, merging into a larger river, lake, or ocean. This kind of ending affords time for reflection, preparation, and tranquility. The end of Nevamar and the National Plastics and Products Company in all its permutations wasn’t natural. It was dismantled piece by piece. The abandoned plant sites in Odenton and Hampton remain vacant today, except for the northern corner of Nevamar land that holds a luxury condominium complex for residents commuting to the Baltimore-Washington D.C. metropolis, a clear symbol of the town’s transformation from an agriculture center to a locus for manufacturing and ultimately to a suburban bedroom community.
How does an individual — and that person’s family — fit into this transformation when so many social, political, and economic factors converge, and when certain elements like venture capital and private equity can yield a disproportionate power over local communities? Part of my search for my father meant grappling with the organic molecules and processes of petrochemical engineering. Another part, necessary for me to imaginatively enter my father’s world, involved contending with the constantly shifting, enormously hungry, powerful, influential, fast-moving world of business that held innovative chemical engineers, inspired businessmen, and outright opportunists.
I also wanted to understand how the women in the family — my mother, my two sisters, and myself — fit within this world of which they were: what? Naïve, ignorant, oblivious, disinterested? All of these, perhaps. The industrial life of my father and the domestic life of my mother were largely unknown to one another. They existed in separate worlds. And yet, what I learned as I walked the old plant site, researched the local archives, and talked with a retired engineer from my father’s era, was that, despite the lack of overlap in shared experience, the shadow of industrial life fell heavily onto all the members of our family.
The story of Nevamar began in 1946, long before my father was shipped in by Exxon. The story continued for almost three decades after he left in 1975.
Odenton, Maryland, with its origins as a rural agricultural town, was not dissimilar to Belmont, New York, where my father grew up. It became a company town in 1941 but retained a small-town atmosphere when our family moved in 1972 to the area. Decades later, upon visiting as an adult, it still exuded a quiet backwater town feeling.
My father stepped into being the out-of-town manager instrumental in restructuring Exxon’s new acquisition. In the case of Nevamar, like that of many small-town manufacturing companies in the U.S., his job likely included selling off company assets. For someone who shared origins with and sympathetically allied himself with factory workers on the ground, this role must have devastated him.
I returned to Maryland to place myself in the landscape of this era of my father’s work life which coincided with a painful period of my growing up. I’d made an appointment with the Director of the Odenton Heritage Museum to comb the archives for clues to my father’s life at the plant. I never recall him talking about his day; I never overheard my parents discussing his work; we never visited the plant facilities as we’d done when I was little. As a teenager back then, I was, as well, self-absorbed. When my father began to drink heavily, his failing marriage seemed at the time to be the obvious reason. Only in retrospect and with my attempt as his daughter to penetrate his experience with Exxon, have I concluded that my father’s drinking had at least as much to do with Exxon as it did with his marital unhappiness. A career in Exxon meant putting the company first over family life and might also mean acting against one’s inner convictions.
Route 175 intersects Route 170 at the site of the former plastics plant. The plant changed hands from the National Plastics and Products Company in a cascade of purchases and sales. Townspeople called it simply “the plastics plant” and gave it a sense of permanence — even if illusory: to the manufacturing buildings with its central cafeteria; the reliable local workforce; the mission of manufacturing a range of products from petrochemicals.
On Telegraph Road I spied an overgrown grass drive that ended abruptly at a padlocked gate and chain-linked fence. I pulled in and got out of the car.
An expanse of abandoned pavement emerged through the gray misting rain marking the former plant site. Buddleia and goldenrod sprouted out of the cracked asphalt. Piles of bricks and concrete remnants rose a foot in height and marked the outline of the plant foundation. The rain fell steadily. It soaked into my sneakers and pooled along the pathways that connected the ghosts of these former buildings. Looming over the property was an old water tower and electric substation. In the distance beyond the fence were the white condominiums called Flats 170. For the bedroom community of residents who lived there, the manufacturing past of the town didn’t exist even though their homes stood on a vanished industrial landscape.
But for a certain proportion of old-timers, I learned later, the past is remembered. Former Nevamar employees still show up for their annual reunions.
Roger White was waiting for me in his car when I pulled up to the Heritage Museum. He opened his car door and got out to greet me: courteous, pale, stooped, wearing brown trousers and a navy waterproof jacket. His hair was brown and thinning, his chin tremulous. A small bristle of mustache seemed to escape below his nose. His eyes were red rimmed and almost hidden behind black glasses.
For thirty-four years, White commuted to Washington D.C. to curate the Smithsonian’s Carriages and Cars Department. He held a graduate degree in the history of technology and economics from the University of Delaware. His other love was railroads. That was what drew him to Odenton, with its museum and its history as a railroad and manufacturing town.
White led me around to the front entrance of the museum. Nine tall windows were boarded up to conserve heat and deter vandals. The Masonic Lodge emblem decorated the casing over the front door. This symbol, a vestige of the trades — stonemasons, surveyors, architects, mechanics, even gardeners — spread its compass points above a ruled measuring square and framed the letter G which stands both for geometry, regarded by Freemasons as the noblest of sciences, and God, who Masons call the great architect of the universe.
The front door was stuck. We turned around and walked back to the rear of the building. White opened the back door and ushered me in. The room smelled of the distinct mustiness of the past. Plastic folding tables were arranged in a horseshoe for group meetings. We took off our wet jackets and hung them on the metal chairs. White’s checked shirt puckered damply over his chest. He led me upstairs to the archives.
White was an avid scholar of local history and railway systems. In World War I, he told me, three railroads converged in town: the Washington Baltimore & Annapolis (WB&A) railroad, the Pennsylvania railroad, and the Annapolis railroad. Railroad owners convinced the government that this railroad crossing made the perfect location for an army base and soon Camp Meade was built. With its easy access to railroads, harbors, and the country’s capitol, it became an important economic link between the town, the national government, and the U.S. Armed Forces. This relationship persisted even after the railroads went bankrupt.
It was this relationship, White explained, that led the Winer family who had founded Baltimore’s National Plastics and Products Corporation (NPPC) to move their Baltimore operations to what they called the “raw countryside” of Arundel County and Odenton. In 1941, NPPC set up shop in the abandoned WB&A railroad car repair shops.
White unlocked the narrow aluminum door to the archive storage room. Metal shelving lined the walls filled with archival boxes. In the entrance, a glass showcase cabinet displayed a single brick from Nevamar’s entrance; a square foot of laminate Nevamar tile; a bit of Saran, the yellow waterproof material made from petroleum and brine that cushioned the soles of World War II soldiers’ boots. White expressed an apologetic pride: “We gather the crumbs,” he told me. “We don’t have room for the full objects.”
After the tour, White stationed me at a desk, gave me a pair of white archivist’s gloves to wear, insisted I use only pencil to take notes, and brought me box after box of archival documents. All morning I lifted piece after piece of archival material out of its box, growing increasingly listless as if I’d been infected by a strange fatigue wafting air-born up my nostrils from the film of dust coating each document. Unbeknownst to me, he saved the big Nevamar box for the afternoon. Realizing this only later, I imagined that White delayed giving me the one box he knew would be of particular interest to me to ensure that I gave my attention and respect — even my love — to each item equally, thus honoring not merely the sliver of history pertaining to a particular plant manager from the 1970s but showing devotion to the larger past.
Neat blue cursive script recorded sales in green ledgers, company newsletters, magazines, company brochures, and the occasional typed letter were unearthed one by one. I found nothing that on first pass gained me entrance into the emotional life inside these manufacturing plants. Perhaps my journalist friend was correct when she advised me: “You are on a rescue mission. You want to look for any survivors who worked at these plants who can flesh out your father’s experience.”
Archives take time to ferment. I thanked White and came home with screenshots of articles and pamphlets. I read through them and began to cobble together a tortuous, convoluted, dense history involving matters of finance, private equity, changing names of companies, the names of influential men, and a series of leveraged buyouts. It was slow and painstaking reading. I wrote down the names of potential survivors whom I could contact.
I pondered the origins of the trademark name “Nevamar.” It seemed strange to me that advertising copyists would pitch the name Nevamar, and even more surprising that the National Plastics and Products Company would grab it in 1946 for their line of laminated products produced by new high-pressure plastic-based laminating technology. My immediate association to the name was the melancholic, nostalgic, and mournful poem by Poe called “The Raven”.
Edgar Allen Poe claims, in his 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” that the word “nevermore” gave birth to his poem “The Raven.” Only when we have deduced a poem’s climax and conclusion, Poe asserts, can we commence the writing process. Most writing teachers advise the exact opposite, but Poe gives as evidence the poem’s haunting refrain that progresses from the general to the personal whilst carrying increasing overtones of loss and anguish.
“Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything can be attempted with the pen,” Poe insists.
Like Poe, I knew the end of the story of Nevamar even as I dug into its beginnings. I knew that Nevamar closed in 2003 which resulted in 346 employees losing their jobs. Thus, I imbued the trademark name with my foreknowledge of the company’s demise and eventual disappearance.
More likely, the name “Nevamar” was originally intended not as a poetic association but rather as a play on the words never mar to conjure for 1950s housewives the spotless kitchens decorated with easy-to-clean laminated products on countertops, cupboard veneers, and tabletops. Laminates constituted Nevamar’s primary products, although the plant also manufactured filaments from polymers like polyolefin and nylon used for paintbrush bristles, dolls’ hair, textiles, and even hula-hoops during the worldwide craze for that product that began in 1958.
I learned that during the World War II era, the demand for oil exploded and with it a corresponding exponential rise in supply met initially by the U.S. Plastics — the new generation of products derived from oil manufacturing — skyrocketed. The original National Plastics and Products Corporation (NPPC) with its ties to the Armed Forces had met the needs of soldiers in wartime. The company grew and the town benefited. By the 1950s, when the plant employed over a thousand people and had three shifts working around the clock, its laminated products and synthetic filaments switched over to consumer goods. The company’s success drew several other plastics plants to the area.
In 1961, with twenty million dollars in annual sales, the Winer family sold its business and the Nevamar trademark in a fifty-fifty joint venture to Enjay Chemical Company, a division of Humble Oil Refining (a Standard Oil of New Jersey subsidiary) and J.P. Stevens, a textile producer. Purportedly, Enjay acquired NPPC for its extruded fiber technology.
Enjay bought out J.P. Stevens four years later and sold the lucrative fiber arm of the business. When Exxon restructured in 1973, Enjay became Exxon Chemical Company and the local plant of Nevamar became a division of Exxon.
My father entered the scene during this period. He was one in a series of managers shipped in by Exxon that served on a rotating two-year basis. He arrived during a downturn in production when Nevamar was losing ground as a major force in the laminate market. It was struggling to break even.
A group of astute Nevamar executives who had survived the various changeovers in ownership foresaw that Nevamar was doomed: it was the last remaining business of the former NPPC. Exxon, they predicted, whose top-down strategy was selling off the plant’s products, would eventually sell Nevamar too. They hatched a plan to deter Exxon from selling their company in its entirety. My guess is that my father would have liked their “roll up your sleeves and solve the problem” attitude and been impressed by their solution: shifting production to high-end designer laminates for the commercial market. The group argued that this redirection in manufacturing played to the company’s strengths of premier product design and loyal skilled workforce. The group convinced Exxon management to give the plan a try. Fossil, Fresco, Finish Glaze, Slate — laminates with dimensional finishes — resulted. Patterns that mimicked natural materials followed, like Butcher Block, Registered Cane, Classic Cane, Natural Cork, and Blue Denim, catering to the swing of the consumer pendulum and its thirst for natural and textured looking interiors.
The strategy worked to delay but not stop Exxon’s sale. In 1978, Exxon decided to sell Nevamar. My father had moved on by then. Although he left in 1975, what happened to the plant after his departure nevertheless deepened my understanding of the quandary and pressures he experienced when working in Odenton. To tell the full story of Nevamar, which I will now relate to its conclusion, means examining a microcosm of the story of U.S. industrial decline and with it an illumination of the demoralization that fell upon men like my father.
I imagine that while my father admired these dedicated and innovative local managers, he felt squeezed between them and the oil superpower to which he’d devoted his energy and ambition. His role had been, up until now, to build manufacturing plants, not dismantle them. His departure, made for personal reasons, allowed him to escape an excruciating bind.
When Exxon put the company up for sale in 1978, these engineers made a bid for the company. They approached Goldman Sachs for financial backing. Goldman Sachs turned them down. A new investment group, the Chagrin Valley Corporation (CVC), accepted their proposal and offered Exxon $12 million. Exxon said yes. The company changed hands once again.
The price of getting financial backing with private equity, from my perspective, is that the latter must take its profit within several years. Two leveraged buyouts followed in quick succession: CVC to Evergreen and Evergreen to Clayton and Dublier, Inc.
When that last private equity firm was ready to cash out, the local managers decided they’d rather sell the company outright than broker another leveraged buyout. They sold the company to the International Paper Company for $141 million in 1990.
In an interview in the business magazine Warfield, the CEO of Nevamar estimated that he and other key employees got a return on their investment of better than 100 to 1. He expressed pride for sustaining the company business over twelve years and securing Nevamar’s place in the laminate industry as an innovator.
But the CEO couldn’t or didn’t want to foresee the subsequent history of the plant. He emphasized the company’s achievements and the financial gain of a small group of employees. He hoped that International Paper would be good for Nevamar and the local community. International Paper promptly exited the laminate field and sold its entire Decorative Products Division, along with Nevamar, to the private equity firm of Kohlberg and Company. One year later, Kohlberg closed the Odenton plant, sold the non-laminate assets, and consolidated the high-pressure laminate production to a sister plant in Hampton, South Carolina. Hampton County officials had hustled to put together an incentive package of wage concessions, property tax reductions, and electric company rebates to induce the new management to keep the plant open. Maryland couldn’t outbid South Carolina’s offer.
This small South Carolina town’s victory was short-lived. Kohlberg sold the South Carolina plant to Panolam which in turn closed it and moved production to Auburn, Maine. Auburn city officials celebrated their win of the Panolam bid.
Archie Harshaw was a retired process engineer who’d worked next door to Nevamar during my father’s time. He was quoted in a newspaper article that reported on the closing of the Odenton plant. I found his address and phone number and called him. He answered right away. He was personable, kind, and easy-going. He made the conversation feel as if we were sitting together in his kitchen over a cup of coffee.
It was he who informed me that Nevamar, in all its permutations, was called simply “the plastics plant” by townspeople. “It was a great place to work. Good people worked there and were like family. Those were well paying jobs and people didn’t have to pay for Blue Cross Blue Shield. The company took care of its employees and gave them benefits. It held Christmas parties. Most people who worked for Nevamar had a lot of Nevamar kitchen cabinets in their homes.
Harshaw went on: “Plant operations were a hands-on operation. There were no computers at that time. If it was made, it was made hands on. A lot of pride went into making those products.”
I told Harshaw the story I’d put together of the history of the plant and asked if I’d got it right.
“It’s pretty accurate,” he said.
I’d explained to Harshaw that my father was a chemical engineer who’d worked at Nevamar and that I was interested in learning more about his life at the plant. Harshaw had worked at Vectra, a plastics plant next door, and didn’t know my father. Harshaw was able, nevertheless, to describe the esteem that a chemical engineer commanded then: “Chemical engineers could name their own ticket. They drew top dollar. Those were hard courses they took in college. Those guys were smart.”
Harshaw recalled supervising young engineers fresh out of college. “I instructed them: look guys, if you are afraid to get your hands dirty, to get down there — with the dirt, with the troops, then leave now.” Harshaw’s war metaphor and hands-on admonition was my father all over again: putting things bluntly while linking the oil industry to a soldier’s job of protecting the country, disdaining a desk job, and valuing foremost operations on site.
I thanked Harshaw for his time. “For sure,” he told me. “When my wife comes home this afternoon, she’ll take one look at me and say, ‘You’ve got that glare and stare. Who from the plant have you been talking to now?’”
We laughed. This too was my father: keeping his memories filled with nostalgia alive along with his Esso hard hat, Esso tape measure, the ball of fertilizer sealed in Plexiglass that sat on his desk as a paperweight.
“I think I have a piece of Nevamar down in my basement,” Harshaw concluded. “Who knows, your dad might have touched it himself.”
Harshaw’s packet arrived in certified mail. It contained Enjay magazines and photographs of the Nevamar plant and its demolition. He wrote: “This picture shows the main entrance to the entire plant site back in the early 60s. Behind the glass door was the rotunda and up on the wall is the mural. Also, but of most importance [my italics] is where your dad may have had his office up on the second floor.”
I was touched by Harshaw’s sensitivity to my daughterly emotions and his compassion for my search. He exemplified an engineer who exuded not just plastics and fibers, but humanity and caring. He noted, in a letter preserved in a plastic three-holed sleeve, “I enjoyed going through all this material. It brought back many, many happy times.” He signed off writing, “If you have any questions call me, but be prepared for me to be reminiscent. Take good care, Archie.”
Just west of my home in Massachusetts, the city of Leominster lies nestled in the Nashua River Valley. A faded billboard announced, “Leominster: Pioneer Plastic City!” I hadn’t noticed this sign until I returned from Odenton with plastics on my mind. Plastics manufacturing, or the remnants of it, now seemed to appear everywhere. I learned that when the Massachusetts Turnpike and Fitchburg Railroad arrived, Leominster developed into a manufacturing city with plastics at its center: combs, sunglasses, toys, Tupperware, and even the pink flamingo lawn ornament. In the late 1900s, just as in Odenton, manufacturers left for cheaper alternatives. Leominster’s plastics museum closed in 2006 and its billboard was replaced with a newer version that erased its plastic heritage.
When in 1975 my father left Maryland of his own initiative, asking Exxon for a transfer to New Jersey, he demonstrated a courage that I only now could understand. He also felt dismay, guilt and a heavy resignation. One just didn’t do that in those days; one didn’t make demands of a multinational corporation like Exxon. He wouldn’t have made this request except for the fact that he was desperate to save his marriage. My mother had offered him these terms: move back to her hometown in New Jersey to be close to her sister or divorce.
My father was transferred, and we moved to New Jersey. My mother tried a while longer to make the marriage work but in 1978 my parents divorced. My father remarried a woman ready for adventure. When he received his next assignment from Exxon — Project Executive of Esso Chemical Canada’s new petrochemical plant in Sarnia, Ontario, a job building a plant from the ground up, a job that my father loved best — he and his new wife seized the opportunity. Like Poe, knowing the end of the story and that this assignment turned out to be my father’s last means I can’t feel celebratory for this brief flaring of my father’s energy and expertise but rather find myself feeling remorseful and sad that this resurgence within two years came to an abrupt halt. These feelings exist even though massive petrochemical plant development in Canada is not, to my adult sensibility, a good thing. Life in business, I have learned, means contending with the fact that corporations operate on principles that have nothing to do with the concern for the trajectory of any one individual employee.
Image: provided by the author.
- Nevermore - April 26, 2024
- Going Back to Denmark: Landscape and Memory - April 29, 2017
Great essay, Cathy!
Your descriptions of your father’s work life is very insightful and thought provoking.
Thank you for giving us a taste of his life in the oil business which I find very interesting.
Wonderful essay, Cathy! And so great to read you on these pages!!