The Kensington History Project. Can History Become the Future?
by Torben Jenk

"People are endlessly fascinated by tangible evidence of the past. I never realized how much they would respond to recent oral history," said Carol Ward, a librarian at the Fishtown branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, after recording personal memories at Stetson Hat Night on May 24, 2001. The event, co-sponsored with the Kensington History Project, brought together former employees of the John B. Stetson Hat Company, one of Kensington's best-known industrial giants. Stetson Hat employed over five thousand people during its peak production years-using sixteen million animal pelts in 1925 alone. The stories of these former employees and their children bring the twentieth-century history of Kensington to life, while sparking an interest in other stories of this neighborhood that dates from before William Penn's arrival in 1681.

The Kensington History Project started as an intergenerational service-learning project, in which local middle- and high-school students interviewed senior citizens for the book Kensington History-Stories and Memories, published in 1996. Three contributors to that book, Ken Milano, Rich Remer, and Torben Jenks, decided to keep researching the history of Kensington. "When someone writes about it as it actually was, instead of a flip caricature, what more natural response is there than pride and affection?" asks Remer. Kensington's industrial past, which began not long after 1681, gave the neighborhood its physical structure, its social geography, and its cultural identity. The departure of industry from the region, therefore, took away much more than just jobs. As recent decades have brought new residents and introduced new cultural and racial groups to the mix, contemporary struggles against poverty, racism, and decline have overshadowed the legitimate pride that Kensington can and should take in its history. KHP is committed to recovering the knowledge of the past, restoring it to the people who lived it then and sharing with those who are just arriving today. The stories of the earlier labors of Kensington people and their resilience in the face of hardship have the power to unite the community, nurturing that "affection" to which Remer refers. And collecting oral histories has been part of that process.

At Stetson Hat Night, Mildred Schaeflein recorded memories of her father, who worked at Stetson for "fifty years and three months, becoming vice-president of the union, president of the Beneficial Association which tried to solve the new hat treatment which was making employees ill, and he sang in the quartet." Mike Korsnak topped that tenure with "fifty two years and nine months, retiring in 1963." He shared his four-year apprenticeship papers, co-signed by his mother, several photos, and even Stetson medallions with the interested audience. Palma Berenato's father, James "Lefty," started working at Stetson "when he was only twelve and retired after fifty four years." Palma remembered how seasonal the work was, often only six months a year, but the family was grateful for that employment during the Depression "when many hit the soup lines."

Many of the participants at Stetson Hat Night, who grew up through the Depression and other lean times, were reluctant at first to bring up their memories, but once the introductory history was shared and questions answered, their stories start flowing and they could be very funny indeed. Bob O'Neill, who worked in the parcel-post department of Stetson, reported that the department occasionally found mice making nests in the storage boxes. He also recalled hearing a rattle from inside the box of "a $200 hat ordered by Bob Hope." O'Neil opened the box to check and released a flying roach the size of a praying mantis. "Good thing, too," he recounted, "we had to repackage that."

Imperfect hats gave the shipping department some regular fun, according to O'Neill. "Aside from the normal 'felt' hat and 'straw' hat," he explained, "Stetson's manufactured a plethora of other hats, many of which were specialty hats (derby, pixie, medieval, et al.). All hats with gross defects were stored until a trailer load was accumulated. Then the defective hats were stacked about waist high and transported to the shipping section to be loaded onto a specially designated trailer to be shipped to Robert Bruce Company in New York (what they did with them . . . God only knows!). Robert Bruce paid for the hats by the pound, not by the piece. The loaded trailer never left the loading dock until after 5p.m. However, the hats began arriving much earlier in the day from their various manufacturing departments. As each stack arrived, the 4th floor employees-numbering about 30 to 40-would search through the piles looking to find the most ridiculous hat they could find. Then they would wear that hat for the remainder of the day as they performed their regular duties. Needless to point out, on 'Robert Bruce' day, the entire shipping department was a sight to behold."

Herbert Goodfriend, who worked at Stetson's from 1947 to 1965, did some part of his work in "every department, front office, board room, lunch room, balcony, storage area, ribbon department, payroll department. I was a sewing machine repairman, wherever there was a sewing machine, I was there . . . and I took care of the clocks," including the Stetson Clock Tower, an eight-story triangular neighborhood landmark near Fourth and Montgomery Streets. The clock was destroyed by fire in 1980, nine years after the plant itself shut down. It was another clock, actually, that cost Goodfriend his job at Stetson. One day, he recalled, "my boss said to me 'I want you to report to Marble Hall to Mr. Marshall's office.' I went over to Mr. Marshall's secretary. She gave me the passkey to the board room. I had to wind the grandfather clock once a week. It was now part of my job. I did that a couple of weeks. There was one time I was winding the grandfather clock and the pendulum fell right to the bottom. I left. An hour later Mr. Marshall called and said 'What happened to my clock? How did you do that?' I replied 'I'm not the clock man, I am a sewing machine repairman.' So he said to me 'Instead of going left, go right.' In other words, outside the building. I was fired." The crowd at Fishtown Library roared with laughter at this, and Goodfriend followed up with "and by the way, a 'Ten Gallon hat' only holds seven and a half gallons!"

The Kensington History Project is as interested in today's Kensington as in its great industrial past. Ken Milano, in particular, through his work teaching English, came to know members of Kensington's growing Albanian immigrant community. To capture the details of their experience, while creating a broader understanding of the factors which have long encouraged immigration to the area, Ken organized a "Getting to Know Your Albanian Neighbors" evening, which brought together over eighty people including his Albanian friends, neighbors, and others who have an interest in the community. One participant, Avzi Çipuri provided simultaneous translation during the evening, helping gather and share the stories of both life-long Fishtown residents and recent immigrants. Andrew Rubis, a historian of Albanian culture and reader at St. John Chrysostom Orthodox Church at 17th and Vine Streets, got things started. Emphasizing that "people leave their homelands only as a last resort and under extraordinary circumstances," Rubis carried the audience back through two millennia of Albanian history, explaining the wars and border conflicts which have continued to disrupt life in Albania and encourage emigration. Rubis explained that the symbol of the double-headed eagle was adopted after the Albanians were brought into the Roman Empire, and represents both the two capitals of Constantinople and Rome and the ability to look east and west simultaneously. Albanians indeed migrated in both directions, some east across the Adriatic, where they became known as the Arberesh of Italy, and some west to, among other destinations, the United States.

The first wave arrived in the United States after 1890 and tended to settle on opposite banks of the Schuylkill River in Manayunk and Belmont Hills. A second wave, around 1913, settled in Kensington and started the church of St. Peter and St. Paul at Hancock and Oxford Streets. This group included Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Roman Catholics. This wave ended in 1939 when Italy occupied Albania, and did not resume until after the breakup of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Locally, Albanians who came in the early twentieth century are remembered for their restaurants on Girard, Frankford, and Kensington avenues and for the baseball teams these immigrants sponsored and played in, including Berat and Farren. Farren won the city-wide hardball championship in 1948.

One story in particular captured much of Albanian experience. Adam Zar (née Teme), had emigrated in 1916 at the age of twenty-two from an ethnic Albanian enclave in Greece. He started work as a busboy in Fishtown, working his way up to become restaurant manager. He became a citizen in 1929 and in 1934, with the money he had saved, he returned to his homeland to marry. His bride, Mine, did not want to move to America so they stayed in Europe, ran their olive-oil factories, and raised five children. For three years during WWII, Adam worked in a forced labor camp run by the Greeks. In 1945, he approached Allied soldiers for help, but they could offer none. When Albania's Communist government came to power in 1945, Adam and his family were trapped.

Just before Adam died in 1968, he gave Mine his American passport and naturalization papers to keep for the day when democracy came to Albania. The Communist government fell in 1991, and in March 1992 the United States opened a consulate in Albania, encouraging anyone with American papers to come forward. Mine presented Adam's papers; by June they had been verified and the family was free to emigrate. The descendants of Adam and Mine in Philadelphia now number 70, including 27 great-grandchildren. Of the 70, 61 are U.S. citizens, the original five who emigrated together, 42 who arrived with green cards and became naturalized citizens, and 14 born here. All but one family live in Fishtown. Fifteen families own their own homes, including 66-year old Abedin who lives in a small three-story rowhouse on Frankford Avenue with his mother, 91-year old Mine. Mine continues to safeguard the passport and naturalization papers that Adam left to her.

The long-term residents of the neighborhood offered an appreciative welcome to their Albanian neighbors. Donna Cooper complimented Albanian families for their tendency to spend time outdoors, parent and children together, thereby making the streets safer. Cooper also applauded the renovation of three houses on the 1300 block of Marlborough Street by Albanian families. Carol Smythe, a teacher at the Moffet Elementary School, and Carol Ward, the Fishtown librarian, both appreciated the ambition and excellent performance of Albanian students. "Getting to Know Your Albanian Neighbors" was a great success, and as central to the vision that animates the Kensington History Project's as Stetson Hat Night.

It is interesting to note that many of these oral histories have outlived the substantial buildings in which they took place. Almost nothing remains of the twenty-five buildings that comprised the Stetson complex. Many were demolished during WWII to salvage the steel; others have been lost to arson and demolition. Nor are the ethnic restaurants in the same places anymore. On a recent boat trip on the Delaware River, two former seamen expressed sadness seeing the ships that they served on sitting unused. Though the ships are formally called "the mothball fleet," the sailors joked bitterly that their ships stood "ready for the knackers yard . . . like I am." The parts of KHP's work that are drawn from books, manuscripts, photos and maps can only set the context for the life stories of the neighbors, often giving the stories a bittersweet quality, as a reminder of a more youthful time and of its decay and passing. But history enlivened by the participants can draw out these contradictions. Listening to, learning from, and sharing these stories brings humor and honor to the contributions of the many people who have shaped Kensington through the twentieth century.

This article first appeared in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania's "Pennsylvania Legacies, Volume 2, Number 2, November 2002."