Unto the Sons (40 page)

In 1888, six years after the partners had built their first factory along Ambler’s railroad tracks (the factories were of a utilitarian design and were completed years before the residences), Ambler’s population had quadrupled and the village had incorporated itself into a borough, selecting civil officials as its administrators—but administrators nonetheless dependent upon the goodwill and support of Dr. Mattison, who now presided over the borough’s bank, and its water, gas, and electric companies.

When the doctor decided to raise the rates he charged the borough for providing the electricity for its shops, its private residences, and its streetlamps, he was at first challenged by the burgess and other politicians, many of whom declared that the doctor could not be as arbitrary with them as with his company’s employees and construction crews. The doctor responded by turning off all the switches that were connected to the borough’s electrical circuits. That night, the streets were dark, and they remained so for several evenings—except when the doctor was traveling about in his carriage, and had left instructions that the streetlights should be put on. Dr. Mattison did not make himself available to debate this issue with the borough officials; as far as he was concerned, there was nothing to debate. He owned the power system, and he determined the cost of its use. Having no option, the borough soon agreed to his rate increase.

Dr. Mattison arrived at his second-floor offices each workday no later than seven a.m., which was when he expected his hundreds of employees and construction crews to be busy on the job. It was he who had ordered that the whistle atop the main factory begin sounding at five forty-five a.m., rasping persistently and loudly enough to rouse the most drowsy of
the workmen in the distant boardinghouses and shacks, and the factory employees, foremen, and executives now residing in the newly completed houses up the hill. Hundreds of other employees for whom housing was not yet available arrived from the outlying areas each morning by train or wagon, being spared the grating sound that offended almost everyone who heard it—particularly the borough citizens who did not work for the company but who nonetheless were awakened, as Dr. Mattison thought everyone should be, at five forty-five a.m. When Dr. Mattison’s secretary arrived one morning at a few minutes after seven, because of a train delay, and cheerfully commented, “Well, better late than never,” he looked up from his desk and snapped, “Better never late!”

While Dr. Mattison had a subtle sense of humor, it was rarely evident in the office; nor did he smile often. But there was much that brought him quiet pleasure as he studied the monthly and annual progress reports of his diversified company. The Keasbey & Mattison pharmaceutical division, which had followed him to Ambler and continued to supply apothecaries throughout the nation and overseas, was earning millions in annual profits—and, after the turn of the century, it was even surpassed by the firm’s asbestos division. The national demand for asbestos products had increased to such a point that in 1906 the doctor had to buy a one-hundred-twenty-acre asbestos mine in Quebec to obtain enough of the mineral to meet the requirements of the factories in Ambler.

The variety of fireproof and heat-condensing items manufactured in Ambler included a large percentage of the insulation material used within railroad locomotives and steam-powered plants around the nation; thousands of nonflammable curtains hanging in numerous American homes, auditoriums, and theaters (including the world’s largest stage curtain, at the Hippodrome in New York); and the doctor’s popular brand of asbestos brake lining for America’s growing number of faster automobiles, which quickly burned out the leather lining used in the first cars that had top speeds of twelve or fifteen miles per hour.

But the largest profits were coming from Keasbey & Mattison’s asbestos-cement roof shingles. After experimental examples of this mixture had been used in making shingles for the roofs of the first fifty buildings in the Gothic community—in time, all four hundred buildings would have such roofs—Dr. Mattison mailed out advertisements throughout the construction industry heralding his product as the most durable and safest roof covering in the entire land. Asbestos-cement shingles were lighter than slate shingles and yet virtually indestructible when compared with the easily breakable slate; they were also obviously safer than combustible
wood shingles, as well as longer lasting. He reported that his chemists and construction engineers, conducting experiments throughout the nation, discovered that asbestos shingles were ideal in places such as Texas and Oklahoma because, unlike slate, they would not break during hailstorms, and in frigid areas such as Michigan and Minnesota, where the snow would not stick to the shingles’ highly polished surface. They were equally desirable along coastal areas, he claimed, where they never required painting and where fog, rain, and frequent dampness would actually improve their appearance and add strength to their texture.

Whether all this was true or not, the doctor proved to be as adept at selling shingles as he had been with his internationally popular Bromo Caffeine: fifteen million shingles were shipped out of Ambler during the first year that his shingle factory was fully operational, and they soon were on the roofs of houses, schools, churches, and other buildings across the country: on the Pabst brewery in Milwaukee; on the dairy barns of William Rockefeller’s farmlands in New York State; on the stables of the Miller Brothers’ ranch in Oklahoma; and on the residence of the celebrated Egyptologist Theodore M. Davis in Rhode Island.

By the early 1900s, Dr. Richard V. Mattison was perhaps the most listened- to physician in the country who did not practice medicine—which did not mean that he wished the public to forget that he held an M.D. degree. The reminder accompanied his name on all his mail circulars, his newspaper advertising, his business cards; and it was affixed behind the initials (“R.V.M., M.D.”) imprinted on his silver cuff links, on the gold cover of his watch, above the pockets of certain shirts, on the side doors of his carriage, and later on the large red electric automobile that he had specially designed with a high glass enclosure and an asbestos-cloth roof.

Tall as he was, Dr. Mattison could sit in the back wearing a top hat without touching the car’s velvet ceiling; and as he was driven between the office and his mansion, he would often tip his hat to the workers he saw along the roadside or up on the scaffolding, and they would remove their caps and wave back. In warm weather, when the glass top was removed, he would call out to them, “Good day, gentlemen,” and they would reply, sometimes in the only English they knew, “Good day, Dr. Mattison.” Among the socially elite of Philadelphia, to which the doctor now tangentially belonged, as a boxholder at the opera and a devotee of horticulture, he was seen as a somewhat eccentric representative of the Gay Nineties, a bit pompous but too successful to ignore; to the Italians
in Ambler, he was an awesome figure out of an earlier age—an age that Gaetano Talese and the others understood, even if they had gladly left it behind in the old country. They did not judge him with the harshness of most non-Italians in Ambler; and to the young Gaetano, who never failed to nod his greetings toward his white-bearded boss in the red car, Dr. Mattison represented America. He was big, bold, aloof, and successful.

Gaetano was also aware of his human side—how he had personally attended to one of the apprentices who had broken a leg in a fall from a scaffold, and had escorted the youth by train to a Philadelphia hospital; how he had paid the expenses back to Italy for another young man who wanted to spend time with his mother after the death of his father; and how the doctor himself had tearfully and publicly mourned the death of his own daughter—who died of typhoid fever at the age of four, and in whose memory the doctor had built, across from his seventy-two-acre private estate, a Gothic Episcopal church, which was consecrated in 1901.

Dr. Mattison had initially hired an architect named Samuel Franklin to design the gray stone church on a three-acre plot, but the doctor was impossible to please. Nothing seemed good enough for his daughter now dead. Finally he released the architect and redesigned the entire structure himself, making it larger and more ornate. He specified that high pointed turrets should jut out along the lower ridges of the red terra-cotta tile roof, which was topped by a one-hundred-foot tower that would reflect the glow of several small hidden rooftop spotlights—which would burn with more intensity whenever the organist in the church pressed his feet upon the pedals. Electrical wiring connected the roof lights and the organist’s pedals. The three-chamber Haskell organ with sixteen-foot pipes was in turn powered by water pressure pumped up from the church floor through a four-inch-thick pipe that was fed by the water system of the doctor’s mansion a half-mile away. The church’s main altar was carved from a single piece of marble; the sanctuary was encircled by five opalescent windows depicting scenes from the Bible; and the high-domed roof, inlaid with carved oak, was complemented by elaborately carved columns and beams extending the length of the church. All the woodwork was done by carvers and carpenters working under the doctor’s new foreman, a crusty Pennsylvanian named Leidy Heckler, while the stonework continued to be done by Maniscalco’s Italians.

Each day, wagonloads of rock would arrive from the quarry, and Gaetano would wave from his scaffold in the cloisters down to some of the laborers in Bosio’s gang, grateful that he was no longer among them. Gaetano did notice, however, midway through the construction, that several
black men now worked in the quarry. He knew from the talk in the boardinghouse that there was beginning to be a shortage of Italians because Carmine Lobianco had stopped bringing in new men from Naples, preferring to concentrate on his business interests in Philadelphia. Gaetano had never seen a black man before, and he had yet to speak to one, but one evening he had paused along the road to listen to the black workers singing as they pushed into town, on a huge, flat eight-wheeled wagon, a white clapboard church that had stood ten miles away, where the men had been laying railroad tracks. About thirty black men now lived in shacks on the south side of Ambler, a section that Dr. Mattison had designated for them; and before bringing their wives and children into the area they were relocating their old Baptist church, to be placed atop a wooden foundation in Ambler built by Leidy Heckler’s carpenters.

As Gaetano would in time clearly see, Dr. Mattison believed in racial segregation and in establishing a kind of caste system within his residential community. He had selected certain areas of Ambler where housing could be built for black and Italian families—two groups that he saw as having potentially a stable place in his community as employees of Keasbey & Mattison’s asbestos factories after the construction work had been completed. While he would not permit blacks and Italians to rent houses on the same blocks, both groups would inhabit the residential area closest to the factories and on the opposite side of the tracks from where the doctor’s other employees and their families would reside. Cordial as Dr. Mattison was to the Italian construction crews, he would not accept them as neighbors should they accept factory jobs and bring up families in Ambler. Nor would the doctor accept most of his other non-Italian white employees as his close neighbors. Everyone who settled in Ambler would be socially stratified; status would be identified by the size of home each employee was permitted to rent, and by its distance from the community’s main residence. This residence, of course, was Dr. Mattison’s turreted mansion, majestically situated at the top of a hill and protected behind stone walls patrolled day and night by guards and watchdogs.

Near the bottom of the hill, yet sufficiently elevated to overlook the flatlands across the tracks that had been designated for the blacks and the Italians, would live the most common non-Italian factory workers, dwelling within rows of sturdy but smallish stone residences that had a minimum of ornamentation and no space between them. On the higher streets in the direction of Mattison’s estate was the residential area for the Keasbey & Mattison foremen and managers. Here stood rows of sizable two-story houses separated by enough space for small lawns on the sides,
and with more ornamentation than on the workers’ houses but noticeably less (no finials, no turrets) than on the spacious three-story houses set aside for higher management employees and within view of the church that memorialized the doctor’s daughter.

Across the road to the right of the church, along Lindenwold Terrace, which extended outside the westerly wall of Dr. Mattison’s private domain—a domain in which he would soon have his towering Gothic residence remodeled to resemble a castle—were the eight mansions upon which Maniscalco’s men had been permitted to be their most creative, and which the doctor planned to rent only to top executives, senior chemists, and other individuals he happened to favor. The rent charged for these mansions, as well as for the plainer residences downhill, was perhaps half of what would have been charged for similar-sized residences elsewhere in the far countryside of Philadelphia.

By charging low rents the doctor increased his subordinates’ dependence while at the same time making them willing to receive salaries below the prevailing pay scales of other towns and cities.

The homes in Mattison’s community received their water, heating fuel, and electricity from the utility companies he owned; and if employees failed to keep up with their rents and utility fees, or did not repay loans from his bank, they would soon discover that portions of their weekly salaries were withheld and applied toward their restitution. While the doctor seemed businesslike in the extreme in his relationship to his subordinates, he had one custom that, on the surface, appeared to contradict this.

From the first days of his community, he always made available to the residents, free of charge, wagonloads of flowers and small plants that had been grown in his gardens and greenhouses. At the end of each week his wagon drivers would place wooden boxes of plants, and bundles of flowers wrapped in newspaper, along the curbs of the gently sloping streets down to, and beyond, the railroad tracks. Sometimes Dr. Mattison himself could be seen watching from his red car as the people hastened out of their homes to help themselves to the assorted samples of his horticulture. If he was waiting for some sign of gratitude, he did not reveal it. He merely sat in the back of the car, behind his uniformed Swedish driver, watching from a distance beyond acknowledgment as the men and women carried away the flowers and plants, which, unknown to them, had already been on display in vases and porcelain pots within his forty-room mansion and were now only a few days away from withering and dying.