Caring Entrepreneurs Keep Sidney Growing

2-26-10

When Hatfield Failed, Future Bendix Filled Gap

By JIM KEVLIN : SIDNEY

The March 3, 1951, edition of the Saturday Evening Post – then the largest circulation magazine in the country – electrified Sidney.
The headline was, “The Village We Can’t Do Without,” and it was about this community of 2,500 souls at the junction of the Susquehanna and Unadilla Creek.
“It was filled with page after page of color photographs of Sidney at that time,” said Chuck D’Imperio, a Sidney Hall of Fame inductee and author of “My Town Is A Cathedral,” a boyhood memoir from the 1950s and ‘60s.
Sidney’s reputation as indispensable didn’t just happen.  It resulted from local people caring about their hometown and investing in it for the good of all.
Take Winfield Sherwood, an officer in the Hatfield Automobile Co., which took over the Cortland Car & Carriage Co. plant in 1917, and, for a while, competed with Detroit.
When Hatfield closed in 1924, Winfield Sherwood, at his own expense, went forth to find a replacement, and he recruited the Scintilla Magneto Co., a Swiss concern that had relocated to New York City after World War I.
Scintilla’s key players – General Manager George Steiner, Chief Engineer Walter Spengler and Ad Manager Thomas Fagan – took up where Sherwood left off.
D’Imperio credited them for “tens of thousands of jobs and paychecks and cars and college educations over many, many many years.  I can’t imagine what Sidney would be like without the factories.”
In 1929, Bendix Aviation Corp. bought Scintilla, survived the Depression and, with World War II creating a huge demand for aircraft magnetos, launched Sidney into its glory days.
(Oneonta’s Tony Mongillo, a radio man on aircraft carriers during World War II, remembers the brass labels on fighters’ magnetos in the South Pacific:  “Made In Sidney, N.Y.”  Just the other day, Concetta Mirabito remembered Tony, who briefly worked at Bendix in 1942 before joining the Navy.)
“Trains were running from all over the area into Sidney,” said D’Imperio, “dropping employees off, picking them up at night.  The bowling alley never locked its doors.  Sidney really, really boomed.”
Sidney’s entrepreneurial spirit goes back well before Hatfield to the 1770s and the Rev. William Johnston, who established a mission where the airport is today.
The convergence of the Susquehanna and Unadilla made it an ideal spot for traders, who did business with the Oneidas and Iroquois who had traversed the area for centuries.
When Oneonta became a rail center, Sidney – railroad trestles formed a nationally famous giant horseshoe around the village – benefited as well, shipping milk, butter and cheese to New York City.
The French Cheese Co. – later Phoenix Cheese – was established in 1901, the only French-run plant in the U.S. making Brie and Camembert.  There was a silk mill, and a cigar factory.
By the time the Saturday Evening Post article appeared, Keith Clark Inc., which became the nation’s largest calendar maker – it was At-A-Glance and is now Mead Westvaco – had established its first local plant.
In the 1960s, Unadilla Silo Co. moved its Uni-Lam division – stress-tested lumber rafters and arches – to the industrial park at the village’s east end, (today home to 8-9 businesses.)
“It was a big time in Sidney,” said D’Imperio, who was a teen-ager then.  “Downtown thriving; every store front full.  It was a shopping magnet, just like Oneonta is today.”
Community leaders like Tom Mirabito Sr., mayor during the 1950s, got things done, including the expansion of the village to encompass the airport and industrial park.
Chuck’s father Don had bought his downtown Imperio’s Market from Myron J. Kipp, a benevolent businessman the son labeled “the Lion of Sidney.”  In those days, when the local companies needed added investment, people like Kipp contributed and rounded up the rest from others.
The Hospital – that was Sidney hospital’s official name, “The Hospital” – was thriving.  (After closing for a year, it was recently reopened by Bassett Healthcare.)
About that time – as in the rest of Upstate New York – factories started downsizing “and Sidney started to land on hard times,” he continued.
The Flood of 2006 – a 100-year flood – “just devastated it.  Half of Sidney was under water at one time four years ago,” said D’Imperio.
Since the economic downturn hit soon after, Mead Westvaco has laid off 100 workers and Amphenol 200.
But there are signs of a rebound, with Rite Aid building a new pharmacy on the main corner downtown, right across from the library, which is newly renovated with insurance money from the flood.