In this concluding column on the former Penn Dixie Cement Company, Mrs. Kathy Unger, of Nazareth, shares her memories as a secretary at the plant. Kathy is quite the historian and has donated rare photographs and artifacts to the Atlas Cement Company Memorial Museum.

When I interviewed Kathy, she recalled, “I went to work at the Penn Dixie after graduation from high school in 1958. I was hired as a gal Friday, which meant I would learn many jobs so I could fill in for secretaries’ vacations, illnesses and maternity leave. We typed out letters on manual Underwood or Royal typewriters, using carbon paper to produce multiple copies. The carbon usually got on our clothes, and the paper stuck together in humid weather. When making a typo, we had to erase all the copies, as many as 10 to 11 copies. There was no Wite-Out.”

Kathy recollected, “We dreaded contract time when we had to type new contracts for 10 Penn Dixie plants. Pages and pages of text with many carbon copies. We had a wet process Verifax machine, which was messy and smelly; I had to wash it every day. In the attic was an old mimeograph machine, which had a cranked ink drum using stencils to produce large numbers of forms. The engineering department had an Ozalid machine, which was an ammonia process used to reproduce blueprints. This also had a unique odor.

“We had a unique way of getting correspondence between two floors of our office building — a mail elevator,” she continued. “It was a wire basket attached to a rope, which pulled up or down between floors carrying invoices and Teletype messages.

“There was no air conditioning in those days, only floor fans, and the windows were wide open,” Kathy added. “There were no temporary services to call on if there was an extra workload. We just pitched in and got the job done. No one ever said, ‘That’s not my job.’

“We used hand-operated calculators and accounts payable, and receivables were entered by hand in large ledgers. During our lunch break, we played pinochle games,” Kathy said. “We held Christmas parties in the basement of the office. The company held an annual safety picnic for all employees and their spouses, provided there was no lost time to accidents that year. We looked forward to the summer picnics because it was one of the few times we got to see the VIPs from the corporate offices in New York. At the time, the office staff was made up of mostly people from Nazareth and Bath. It was like a happy family. People carpooled from Nazareth. Many employees had relatives working for the company.

“As I drive by the former Penn Dixie property on Route 248, I remember where I learned the basics of secretarial duties, wondering what happened to the company, which I thought would go on forever. How could a corporation with 10 plants and various sales offices cease to exist?

“It was the greatest place to learn the office procedures I would need for future assignments,” she recalled. “The friends and relationships I formed during my 19 years at Penn Dixie will always be cherished.”

This company, one of the largest in the Valley and in the world, closed its last plant — Plant 4 in Nazareth — in 1979. We thank Kathy for sharing her memories with my readers. I thank Larry Oberly for processing the photographs in this series.

See you in two weeks!