In Stamford's historic Atlantic Square, amid modern store fronts and movie marquees, a granite slab marks the ground where, 305 years ago, "Twentynine men and their families . . . imbued with the spirit of the founders of New England . . . made a permanent and enduring settlement of landowners and freemen."
From the pioneer Connecticut outpost has grown an industrial city of 65,000. Near the commemorative tablet stands a World War II honor roll, with gold stars marking the name of many a newer seeker after liberty: Arruzza, Dubrovsky, Malizewski, Pezzimenti.
This week a labor dispute, already one of the most stubbornly protracted in the nation, still silenced the lathes of Stamford's biggest factory. Yale & Towne, a lock and hardware company founded in 1868 by two Yankee inventors, had been shut down since Nov. 7 by a strike of 2,500 union machinists, mostly of recent Italian and Polish extraction.
W. Gibson Carey Jr., Yale & Towne president, husband of Founder Henry R. Towne's granddaughter Eleanor, maintained that "a principle of American liberty" was involved. Union Leader Joseph Ficarro, an ex-druggist from The Bronx, insisted that the company had refused to "negotiate in the American way."
Both, in a spirit of New England stubbornness, refused to budge from prepared positions: the open shop v. "union security."
End of One Era. Yale & Towne had no union for three-quarters of a century. When the C.I.O. suddenly appeared on the scene, the company fought back in righteous outrage—and with methods which brought down the censure of a federal court. It abandoned production in one branch after a sitdown strike. It sponsored a company union which the International Association of Machinists roundly defeated in a 1942 plant election.
During the war the machinists, over company protests, secured a maintenance of membership clause from the War Labor Board. At war's end, Yale & Towne tried to drop the clause. The machinists struck —the company was out "to bust the union." Among the first to walk out were veterans of 50 years at Yale & Towne; they were trading an old story for a new idea.
The striking workmen, living in the gashouse neighborhood of Stamford's grubby South End, could look across an inlet to fashionable Shippan Point, where Plant Manager William Hoyt owns a house close by the Stamford Yacht Club. Even farther apart than these two worlds were the bare union headquarters above a local dime store and President Carey's ample office in New York's towering Chrysler Building.
Times had changed. Stamford no longer sheltered a society of native sons. Yale & Towne, with branches elsewhere in the U.S., Canada and England, no longer belonged exclusively to Stamford.
Start of a New. In the first 100 days of the strike, union and management representatives met only three times. The third session, over a month ago, broke up in five minutes. This week, after the intervention of Governor Raymond E. Baldwin, they will try a fourth. But a state fact-finding board gloomily reported: