Embattled Kingsbury was a success story
As published on page one of the Oct. 22, 2011 edition of The Keene Sentinel, and online.
It was all fun and games at the start.
But as the turn-of-the-century toy maker grew and evolved into a company that shipped customized manufacturing equipment around the world, it also became one of the pillars of Keene and its economic life.
Kingsbury Corp. today is a shadow of its former self. Back wages are owed to the skeleton crew of employees manning the tired-looking Laurel Street headquarters, and a question mark hangs over the company's future.
Kingsbury went into bankruptcy protection less than two weeks before a foreclosure auction scheduled for earlier this month, and the owner is working with creditors and clients, hoping to forge a plan to give it a new life in the 21st century.
It's too soon to tell if Kingsbury will continue as an independent business, or if it will be sold to a parent company or divided among creditors.
But throughout the city, people with personal ties to the company associate its name with days when everyone knew which freight train was pulling into Keene by the sound of its whistle, and a job at Kingsbury -- which once employed more than 1,000 -- was a lifetime guarantee of interesting, well-paying work.
Philip Hilliker, 75, retired from the company about 10 years ago after 40 years of work.
He said he'd felt guilty leaving another employer to join the Keene firm, but that boss was understanding.
"He said to me, 'Son, you've got a chance to get into Kingsbury, you take it.' "
From toys and gardening tools (see related story,) Kingsbury grew and evolved to produce huge, complex manufacturing equipment used in factories around the world to make everything from engine components for automobiles to military equipment used in World War II.
Machine tools were much in demand in the post-war years, when Hilliker and other Kingsbury retirees of his generation began their careers.
Some of the company's former employees still get together for breakfast in Keene every week, and seem to relish rattling off the long list of things made on Kingsbury's machines. A small sampling includes compressors for space suits, Singer sewing machine arms, light switches and motors for everything you can run with a motor.
But post-World War II, the company's biggest customers were in Detroit.
"If you drive a car, you've probably got a part that was made on a Kingsbury," said Michael Magee, who worked in assembly for 42 years. His career took him across the country and to Russia and China, assembling machines from thousands of component parts.
Kingsbury designed those machines to order, and retired engineer Bernie Woodard remembers a time when there were 60 people in the engineering department alone. When he started with the company they were working on drafting boards, and training was done in-house.
"They'd stick us when we were the young guys with one of the old guys, and next thing you know you turn around and you're one of the old guys," he said.
All the retirees take pride in challenges overcome, and tell complicated stories about solving mechanical problems impossible for an inexperienced outsider to follow.
"As individuals we were pretty sharp, but as teams we were unbeatable," said 72-year-old Harry Shaw.
And they were well compensated, too.
Generous profit sharing, overtime and bonuses on top of a decent wage meant raising a family without worrying about money, and occasionally paying cash for a new car.
Kingsbury's most recent troubles are tied to the recession, but the boom years had begun to wind down decades earlier.
The Kingsbury family transferred ownership of the company to the managers in the 1970s.
By the late 1980s, then-president James L. Koontz was interviewed for an article in the New York Times about struggles in the machine-tool industry caused by uncertainty about future technology and the long-term viability of American manufacturing.
Peter W. Szacik, 64, started working for the company in 1978, hoping for the same job security his father had enjoyed in his own 40-year Kingsbury career.
But it was not to be. Szacik was laid off from the company a total of three times, and called back twice.
"They tried to keep us there as long as they could, but there was nothing to build," he said, recalling his first layoff in the early 1980s.
But he speaks of his work at Kingsbury with affection and pride.
At 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning in October 2005, Szacik was part of a crew of employees out sandbagging the factory doors in what was ultimately a futile effort to ward off the flooding that caused devastation throughout the region.
There was just one door left to sandbag when the lower panels gave out and more than a foot of water came flooding onto the factory floor, Szacik recalled.
"It was up to my knees, and of course we had to wade through it to save what we could," he said.
Kingsbury was disqualified from federal flood relief funding because too few of its employees were low- to middle-income.
"The good news is that Kingsbury pays its employees very well," owner Iris A. Mitropolous told The Sentinel at the time.
Mitropolous, who lives in Massachusetts, purchased the company in 1998. She recently said she is committed to keeping Kingsbury operating and in Keene, in part out of her own feelings of responsibility to the employees, many of whom have not yet retired and are on furlough.
"Our industry always goes through cycles," she said in a September interview.
2009 was a "disaster" for the machine-tool industry, according to Steve Lesnewich, vice president of the American Machine Tool Distributors' Association. But the past two years have seen business in the industry increase more than 100 percent, he said.
Staying on the cutting edge of manufacturing technology is what will give U.S. toolmakers an edge over international competition, Lesnewich said.
"We can do it quicker, faster, more efficiently," he said. "As the parts get more and more complicated, places like China can't compete any more."
In 2007, Kingsbury also launched a contract manufacturing division, to expand its product line from machine tools and assembly machines to other large machines, Mitropolous said. The idea is that the company's facilities and expertise could be used to build a small number of large products, such as turbines for large wind power generators.
Last month, Utica Leasco, a company that holds a $1.3 million lien on Kingsbury's equipment, made arrangements to sell that equipment off in order to recoup the company's unpaid debt.
It progressed far enough that in mid-September auction house employees were in the Laurel Street building, reviewing the inventory and setting aside the smaller tools for sale.
But Kingsbury filed bankruptcy paperwork in Manchester on Sept. 30 and, shortly thereafter, had reached an agreement with Utica to stop the auction.
While the details are private, the arrangement involves the help of another lending company, Diamond Business Credit, which holds the lien on Kingsbury's intellectual property.
The bankruptcy court has granted permission for the company to stay open while in bankruptcy, and to pay a portion of wages owed to the company's 18 working employees.
Mitropolous wrote in a court affidavit that the company hopes to emerge from bankruptcy protection with its independence intact, but there is a buyer interested in the company and a sale is also a possibility.
A number of defense contractors and auto parts manufacturers are negotiating with Mitropolous for potential contracts worth a total of about $15 million, according to her court filings.
The Kingsbury veterans are guarded on the topic of their former boss. Some express admiration for Mitropolous -- "She's a great lady," Szacik said -- while most offer the observation that the company's troubles were caused by circumstances beyond her control.
"I hope she can pull it off," one former worker said. "It was a great place to work."
tagged with: bankruptcy, business, feature, history, Keene N.H., Kingsbury Corporation, manufacturing
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