Lost New England #5: Foster Grant
Foster Grant (1920–1986)
This company I am about to talk about started it all in Leominster. They were the world leading manufacturer of sunglasses in the world and in terms of notoriety. It involved everyone from Mia Farrow, Anita Ekberg, Robert Goulet, Woody Allen, and even OJ Simpson. When you think of the prime of plastics in American manufacturing this is the company that comes to mind. The 1986 Foster Grant catalog pictured 164 different pairs of sunglasses, all of them priced at $20 and under, and had pumped out on average 40 million pairs a year making them the largest sunglasses company in the world.
Who’s that behind those Foster Grants? Much has already been written about this famous company, but it was started by a man named Sam Foster a former employee of Dupont also based in Leominster on Hamilton Street in 1920. These are the kind of names that were New England institutions.
Foster Grant when they first started primarily sold ladies’ hair accessories, but they quickly found their niche. Cheap sunglasses. That may sound mundane now, but you have to understand that nothing like that had ever been accomplished or invented before. They were the first company in the world to invent the plastic sunglasses we know and love today. After all, even sunglasses made out of real glass used a polarized polymer film.
“Back a few years kids would get out of high school and find a wife, a local job at Foster Grant and that was security. You could rise within the shop to foreman or machinist or a place in the office, or learn the plastics business and buy a couple of molds of your own.” — Frank Mazzarella (Leominster resident)
I worked at E B Kingman Plastics from 1957–1962 running a molding machine. I supported myself and two children. When I started there, I walked to and from work from Houghton Court. Sometimes I was able to ride a bus. After I moved to Main Street, I drove to work. — Mary Gillies
Foster Grant was the largest plastics manufacturer in New England at the time, and their Leominster sunglasses and Manchester nylon factory was equipped with a state-of-the-art exercise center, cafeteria, entertainment center, and daycare center for the employee’s families. They were one of the first companies to bring plastic injection machines over from Germany where the founder reengineered them for sunglasses, and attracted the best designers and engineers around New England. They were the third-largest producer of polystyrene in the United States, manufacturing upwards of 200 million pounds of polymers each year. Their products which primarily sold at Walgreens and Woolworths, made them the most popular brand for almost a century and were made right here in Massachusetts for 66 years. They also produced the plastics that went into coffee cups, typewriter cases, boats, children’s toys, ice buckets, and instrument cases.
Working in cellulose acetate was a tedious, costly process. Also flammable. After a series of major fires across the country, Woolworths banned plastic celluloid products from stores. Foster Grant saw the need for a new, faster, more economical way of readying plastics for consumer use.
“In 1930, my father Samuel, Foster, Jr. who founded the company, heard about a new machine for injection molding of plastics which had been developed in Germany. Mr. Foster said. “It was a manual, air-operated machine, barely out of the laboratory stage of development and impractical from a commercial viewpoint. We took a chance and brought it to the United States. Foster Grant technicians worked long and hard to make it commercially adaptable, permitting us to become the first American company to adopt injection molding.” — Fitchburg Sentinal (August 15h, 1966)
Many Americans today forget that sunglasses once did not exist. Before WWII, most considered sunglasses an affection indulged in mainly by movie stars. There were few frames and colors to choose from, little styling, and high retail prices. However, military during the war discovered the value of sunglasses, and Foster Grand became a major supplier to the Armed Forces of sunglasses and other eye protective devices.
By World War II the company had the largest collection of molds. At the time the Leominster factory had 127 machines and housed around 1000 workers at their peak making them the largest factory in Leominster. A career at Foster Grant could be expected to last a lifetime. It was what you could call cradle-to-grave job security out of high school, and retirement with pensions which is almost completely unheard of today. Good work, short hours, and great benefits including profit sharing. Generations of families worked here, and it represented a substantial part of the New England community.
During the Korean War, Mr. Foster found that the big producers offered him polystyrene, but weren’t anxious to sell him the mono-styrene or styrene monomer from which it is made. His answer was Foster Grant’s own mono styrene plant in Baton Rouge, LA. In order to be commercially feasible the plant had to have an annual capacity of about 50 million pounds.
“We felt we could start with a 12-million-pound annual production. We succeeded so well that we kept on expanding the plant until today we produce more than 200 million pounds per year, making it one of the biggest mono-stryene plants in the country.” — Fitchburg Sentinal (Aug 15h, 1966)
The company’s peak was arguably in the mid to late 60s, with reported earnings in that year of $1.2 million in 1966 dollars, and these were jobs that were directly benefiting the New England economy. It seemed as if Foster Grant would never stop expanding and growing in size. Immediately after these wars, Foster Grant started a revolution in the sunglass industry. It established retail prices which brought the luxury of sunglasses within the reach of the mass consumer. The company introduced new frame colors, new plastic materials, additional lens colors, new packaging, and colorful floor and counter displays. Sales boomed, with more than a million pairs in a single child’s style sold in a single year.
Combs made of nylon, polystyrene, and polypropylene were second only to sunglasses among Foster Grant’s consumer products. Foster Grant anticipates 1966 production over 40 million pairs of sunglasses, representing some 30 percent of the total unit online of the American market and about 25 percent of the estimated $150 million retail volume. — Fitchburg Sentinal (Aug 16h, 1966)
Each pair of sunglasses to be sold across America was pumped out of one single Leominster building on 289 North Main Street, and later on the 209,000 sq foot plant on 320 Hamilton Street which was the company’s designated sunglasses factory, that was constructed in 1966 after they moved to a newer building away. During an era where sunglasses were built by hand by one of the thousands of workers that lived in the surrounding homes and apartments adjacent to the site.
Foster Grant had a history of unionized labor while being proactive on wage increases, and benefits, and offered homes for its employees. Here are some examples of text showcasing its labor history.
“The sanitary sewer is being installed off Hamilton street where the Foster Grant plans to erect a group of single houses for their employees.” — Fitchburg Sentinel (Mar 12, 1937)
“A two-day strike of 550 employees of the New England Novelty Company, cellulose novelty manufacturers, at Leominster, Mass, ended with promises of 10 percent increases. In the same city the Foster Grant company, also novelty manufacturers, announced a 5 to 12 percent jump for 600 workers.” — North Adams Transcript (Mar 26th, 1937)
“A meeting of representatives of the Moulders Union and officials of the Foster Grant Co. is scheduled for this afternoon. According to union officials in an attempt to settle the strike which has been in progress at the plant for the last few days.” — Fitchburg Sentinel (Oct 1st, 1940)
However, the glory days of this company would not last heading into the 1980s, mostly due to the two factors of automation and foreign trade.
“For the challenging 1970s, we anticipate a decade of dramatic growth in both industrial markets for chemicals and resins and consumer markets for sunglasses and other consumer products. We are confident that Foster Grant will successfully participate in and contribute to this growth.” — Joseph C. Foster (1970 Statement)
After Sam Foster passed away in 1969, his son Joseph took over the company in 1970. He immediately sold the family business to Ashland Oil based out of Ohio. Richard Nixon was elected President, and our country had just opened up trade with Red China and later Mexico. It may have been a decade of dramatic growth, but not for the American worker. By 1978, 80% of sunglasses were produced overseas, which resulted in the original family selling the Foster Grant company to multiple venture capitalists over that decade. The company’s future would not be certain and everyone in the neighborhood knew the inevitable was about to occur.
“The trouble is that Foster Grant is moving to Mexico. Foreign competition has hurt the plastics industry, and in Leominster, even the machine shops that supplied it with molds have been auctioning off their machinery.” — Boston Globe (Aug 3rd, 1986)
By the mid 1980s Foster Grant made the decision facing raised property taxes, environmental fines, and loss in sales to sell their company to Yesterday Adlinger, an investment banking firm out of New York which two months into acquisition had announced the complete and total closure of the Foster Grant factory out of Leominster for the first time in 66 years.
This resulted in the hundreds of remaining workers getting laid off in 1986 and machines auctioned off, as the company fell into bankruptcy.
“Since we have to move, it makes sense for us to move some operations closer to our sources of supply said Edward Russel, Vice President of Human Resources.” — Boston Globe (Apr 12th, 1986)
This had a huge effect on the class of recent graduates in the area as reported in local Massachusetts newspapers, having lost their new careers.
“After government-sponsored retraining, the 29 year old high school graduate went from rote work molding and packaging sunglasses to an eight month training program in word processing, computers, and other office skills. She worked at Foster Grant about 10 months before being laid off in February 1986.” — North Adams Transcript (Jan 13, 1987)
“I miss the beach at Speck Pond that the employees got enjoy. Back when good companies offered real benefits beyond a 401k and maybe some insurance.
I spent a huge chunk of my childhood there.” — Christie Misquez (Former Leominster Resident)
This was already a major hit to the community, already experiencing the loss of another major plastic company a decade earlier, and would follow two other major plastic companies leaving Leominster in the next five years. The legacy left by the plastic plants of Leominster was felt with a mixed emotion and memories from the residents who lived around the original plant. In 1990, a mother of an autistic child contended that she had uncovered an alarming pattern of autism in children born to parents who grew up in a section of Leominster. The State Department initially said that blaming Foster Grant was jumping to conclusions, but began to take more serious look as more reports of autism were uncovered. State studies showed that petroleum wastes, heavy metals and other volatile organic compounds on the site had leaked into groundwater there. 14 cases of autistic children were uncovered in which one or both parents grew up in the neighborhood adjacent to the plant. Although there was never any proof found, it grew into a lawsuit of concerned residents as a big push to clean up the factory and declare it a Superfund site.
According to a theory held by Altobelli and many others in Leominster, once the center of a thriving plastics industry, the parents could have suffered reproductive damage from air pollution that led to autism or Pervasive Developmental Disorder in later generations. Altobelli began working on suggestions by Dr. Grady as to the possible causes of autism only later concluded that proximity to the Foster Grant site was a possible connecting link. — North Adams Transcript (Jul 23rd, 1990)
“Avis Ciccone kept an unusual diary from 1964 to 1986. Her entires all focus on her next door neighbor, a plastic plant. For all those years Ciccone painstakingly documented the times when the plant spewed white polyvinyl chloride powder onto her home, belched fumes into her living room and when sirens sounded in the middle of the night, signaling an accidental release of chemicals into the environment.” — North Adams Transcript (May 28, 1991)
Foster Grant site was labeled as a “non priority” as a Superfund site, based on evidence that trace elements of hazardous waste found in soil and groundwater were contained at the site. The state at the time had 4,000 suspected and confirmed hazardous waste sites. It would not be accurate or fair to blame simply one industry when all industries were like this. However, it does paint an accurate picture of how businesses once operated in America before environmental laws. Hoescht Celenese bought Foster Grant in the late 1980s and took responsibility for cleaning up the site.
Today the second factory site of Foster Grant on Hamilton Street reopened under new company ownership Fosta-Tek Optics, who describe themselves on their website as a worldwide leader in the design and manufacturer of high-quality polymer components for optics and lenses. They state they are the rare small U.S. manufacturer that is having success despite the recent economic headwinds and global sourcing opportunities. They currently employ 80 non-unionized workers in contrast. Out of respect for the current business owners, I won’t share the numerous employee reviews. To be fair this is not a personal attack or remark on the business, but it‘s highlighting a common story where legacy manufacturing unions were broken up. They bear no relation to the original Foster family or company.
The original plant on North Main Street is now a shopping mall called Water Tower Plaza. The original celluloid plant on 28 Manning Avenue is now a restaurant. Foster Grant still makes sunglasses today but with no factories in the United States. Furthermore, many of the jobs this industry once supplied building sunglasses and combs have been replaced by automation which was a common occurrence. Leominster in recent decades has become a predominant commuter town for higher-paying jobs closer to Boston in the high-tech and health insurance field. It may no longer be the manufacturing hub of the Central Mass economy, but its story and what led to its demise deserves to be remembered and told to future generations.
inquiries please write to benwilliamsmusic@aol.com
