A stitch in time
Exhibit honors Grieco, Southwick manufacturers & their workers

By Chris Young
MethuenLife Writer

Methuen’s Mario Consoli was a 22-year-old Italian immigrant on June 29, 1952, when he worked his first day pressing vests at Grieco Brothers Clothing Company on Canal Street, Lawrence.
“I had a hard time getting a job at Grieco’s, but when I got there, I said to myself, this is my job for life,” he said.
It was a good company to work for, offering the opportunity to make a decent living in a fair, competitive environment.
“When you worked piecework, you were free. You had a quota to meet. The boss doesn’t care as long as you meet the quota and the quality was good,” said Consoli, who has lived in Methuen’s Pleasant Valley section for 26 years.
He retired from Grieco Brothers (then Southwick Clothing Co.) in 1995, after 43 years. He had long since been president of the Amalgamated Clothing Union and was working in the inspection room, checking for flaws in the finished product, still doing piecework.
“It was hard to get in when I started, but most people stayed there until they retired,” he explained.
Grieco Brothers, founded in 1929 by two Italian immigrants, Nicholas and Vito Grieco, was a positive force in Lawrence for 79 years until it moved to Haverhill last spring after being purchased by Retail Brand Alliance.
A Lawrence History Center exhibit – “Made in America, the Story of Southwick/Union Crossing: People, Place & Product” – explores the history of Grieco-Southwick and the company’s contribution to the area. The exhibit will be at the Lawrence Heritage State Park through Aug. 30 (see box).
Within the next few years, the former Grieco Brothers plant on Island Street will be transformed into Union Crossing, a $75 million development of affordable housing, a day-care center, retail shops and high-tech companies.
Grieco Brothers was always known for its high-end men’s suits worn by the most stylish of dressers, among them, President John F. Kennedy, actors Fred Astaire and Clark Gable, newsman Walter Cronkite and Vice President Joe Biden.
By the 1970s, the company made 700 suits a day, employed almost 700 people, most of them Italian, Consoli said. Today, the company employs less than 300 workers in its modern Haverhill plant.
“It was like the old country in the factory when I started. Everybody spoke Italian, even Mr. Grieco. Nicholas was the (business) brains; Vito was the designer,” Consoli said.
Mario became union steward early in his employment: “I loved the unions (at Grieco, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America). I used to go to all meetings. I was influenced by my mother. She worked for Wood Mill during the strike of 1912 and I heard all her stories.”
Consoli’s parents came to Lawrence from Catania, Sicily in the early 1900s to work in the mills. They met and married in this country, but went home to Italy, only to return to Lawrence in the 1950s.
Consoli was very proud of his union job. His daughter, Linda Domingo, who worked in Grieco’s personnel department from 1982 to 1986, remembers how shocked she was to see her father in his role as union president.
“At home, my father was a very gentle man, but at work he was no-nonsense. He held firm with the management and the workers. He did what was right. They called him ‘Little Caesar.’”
Benefits were generally good for Grieco workers, but in 1991, Consoli, as head of the union, led the workers to a strike that lasted six weeks.
Business had gone overseas, conditions were poor and the company proposed a 10 percent cut in wages. The union held out for a 4 percent reduction.
The strike had been going on for six weeks when then-Mayor Kevin Sullivan jumped in to save the city.
“He called everyone together in his office: the owners, the union, lawyers, the head of the union in Boston,” Consoli said. “The company agreed to a 4 percent cut and we went back to work.”
Linda Domingo, who now works at the state Department of Transitional Assistance, said that in the 1980s, most of the workers spoke Italian, yet got along with other employees from other countries.
“They spoke ‘broken’ to each other. They knew a few words of each other’s language and used hand gestures. One time a few of us calculated that 33 different ethnic groups worked there.”
She observed that most people were happy to have a job at Grieco Brothers which was one of many clothing companies in the city, including William Barry and Polo.
“People would say, ‘The company gave us an opportunity to help our kids have it better than we did,’ ” she said.
Grieco Brothers was even more of a family affair for Theresa Bellia Sergi, who also lives in Methuen’s Pleasant Valley section.
Her mother and father, Concetta and Francisco Bellia of Methuen, worked there from the time they arrived in this country in the 1960s. Her aunt, Nancy Bellia, did also.
Theresa and her brother, Sam Bellia, still work for Southwick in Haverhill. Her husband, Salvatore, retired from Southwick three years ago.
Theresa, who came to this country from Italy when she was 13, attended Holy Rosary School and graduated from St. Mary High. She worked part-time at Grieco while in high school and joined the work force on the sewing machines full-time when she graduated in 1971.
“I love it, but then it’s the only job I know,” she said.
Methuen resident Kathy Flynn has volunteered at Lawrence History Center since she retired in 2006 as director of guidance and testing at Whittier Regional Technical High School. She helped Grieco exhibit curators, Leah and Claire Russell, assemble the exhibit, choosing exhibit objects and developing the story line. All of the sewing machines, the pressers, mannequins and photographs in the exhibit, were donated by Southwick Clothing, when they moved to new quarters in Haverhill, she said.
Flynn also interviewed many former and current Grieco workers as well as company officials.
“Grieco was an enlightened company in many respects,” she said. “They introduced English as a Second Language into the plant in 1988, with graduations and cake to celebrate the occasion. And that year, Congress awarded them the Congressional Excellence Award for providing child care right in the factory.”
Although a Southwick suit is mass produced, there is still a lot of skill and precision involved in making it, Flynn said: “The manufacture of a Southwick coat still requires as many as 141 operations before an item is complete.”
Many of the jobs that workers performed by hand in his day, are now mechanized, Consoli said, pointing out the jobs lost to technology.
“It took 37 people to make a buttonhole in the old days. Now they have a machine that one girl can operate that makes them all. Today, the computer not only does the marking (of the suit pattern), it does the cutting."