The "just out" Historians schedule for the week is posted scroll down 

Sportsmen’s Shows and Susie

Sunday, March 5, 2023

The fabric used to bind “Smoke” was canvas, produced at Mohawk during the war.  The war machine did not need carpets.  From 1941 to 1945, Mohawk and Bigelow Sanford, the city's other major carpet mill, converted production to the manufacture of canvas, tarpaulins and blankets.

Reginald Harris and Smoke

By Bob Cudmore

   Two years after the soldiers came home from World War II, Mohawk Carpet Mills in Amsterdam published a small picture book called “Smoke: The Story of a Fight.”

   The unusual title linked the smoke of hearth fires and factories on the home front, "the servant of man," with the smoke of warfare, "the master."

   “Smoke” was dedicated to the 1200 men and women of Mohawk "who answered the call to duty" and "the thirty-three who will never return."  Loy Baxter designed the book.  The author was Reginald Harris.

   The fabric used to bind “Smoke” was canvas, produced at Mohawk during the war.  The war machine did not need carpets.  From 1941 to 1945, Mohawk and Bigelow Sanford, the city's other major carpet mill, converted production to the manufacture of canvas, tarpaulins and blankets.

   Millions of yards of cotton duck were made for tents, tarpaulins and turret covers.  Amsterdamians also produced more than five million blankets for the war effort.

   "Men lived in blankets," wrote Harris, "Men waited in blankets. Men fought in blankets. Men died in blankets."

   In “Smoke,” Harris described local volunteer and salvage efforts, "Mohawk people gave up their leisure hours to roll bandages, collect clothing for war torn countries and raise thousands of dollars for relief."

   Harris also lauded blood, bond and salvage drives on the home front, "It got so you didn't dare put your evening paper down for fear of losing it to the salvage drive."

   In a printed insert, Mohawk president Howard Shuttleworth expressed pride in company workers "who gave unselfishly of their time and who spent long hours at their machines that we might fulfill the demands of the War Department for our wartime products."

   The machine shop and foundry at the carpet mills also turned out a control stick support for the Navy Hellcat airplane and machinery used in radar, landing craft and tanks.

   Mohawk employed a record 5,500 workers during the war at its lower mill in the East End and upper mill on Lyons Street, the factory complex devastated by arson fires in 1992 and 1994.

   A native of Kidderminster, England, “Smoke” author Reginald Harris came to Amsterdam as an infant.  He was an executive at Mohawk Carpets and after the war became administrative assistant to company president Herbert Shuttleworth II,

   Harris actually was best known for his musical ability.  He earned a music degree at Syracuse University.  Proficient in playing piano and organ he was choir director for many years at St. Ann’s Episcopal Church.  He brought together male and female singing groups during the 1940s to form the Mohawk Mills Chorus. 

   The songsters appeared on NBC television in 1949 singing Christmas tunes with Roberta Quinlan on her Mohawk Showroom program.  The next day the chorus recorded an album at the RCA Victor studio in Manhattan.

   It took six hours to record the album, according to chorus member Ralph Cook of Amsterdam.  The group had gone to New York in three Pullman cars and Cook recalled the carpeting in the Pullmans was from the looms of Mohawk.

   In that era, chorus members Genevieve Warner and Albert Sochin Da Costa went on to perform professionally with the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

   Harris died unexpectedly at age 55 in 1960.  The Recorder eulogized him as “a citizen of culture and good taste, he possessed an abiding love of good music.”

   The chorus was subsidized by the carpet mill during Harris’s lifetime but when Mohawk left Amsterdam the singing organization sought other funding and since 1962 has been called the Mohawk Valley Chorus.  Membership has expanded well beyond the Amsterdam area.

The 2023 Historians Podcast Go Fund Me in March.

Online at The Historians Podcast, organized by Bob Cudmore  or the U.S. Mail Bob Cudmore 125 Horstman Drive, Scotia, NY 12302.

Monday, March 6, 2023-Story behind the story-Reginald Harris and “Smoke.”

Tuesday, March 7, 2023-From the Archives of Focus on History from the Daily Gazette—Amsterdam Sportsmen’s Shows

Wednesday, March 8, 2023-From the Archives, Episode 455-Buddy Levy author of Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic (1913) Voyage of the Karluk.  Levy, who lives in Idaho, is a go-to author for Arctic history.

Thursday, March 9, 2023-From the Archives of Focus on History from the Daily Gazette-If you knew Susie

Friday, March 10. 2023-Episode 465-Denise Doring VanBuren is president of the Beacon New York Historical Society and author of two books and editor of a third book about Beacon’s history.  Dia Beacon, a modern art museum revived formerly industrial Beacon starting in 2003.

Mohawk Valley Weekend Weather, Sunday, March 5, 2023

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