When I was growing up in Little Falls in the 1960s, the best jobs were at Snyder's on West Main Street or at the Remington Arms Co. factory in nearby Ilion. The work was highly skilled and the pay provided a solid middle-class life.
The products made in Ilion and Little Falls stood the test of time. I had a Snyder bicycle that took me anywhere I wanted to go. One of my father's proudest possessions was a Remington Springfield .30-06 bolt action rifle. The .30-06 was a standard U.S. infantry weapon in World War I and remained a reliable deer rifle a half century later.
The Snyder factory closed decades ago. But Remington Arms is humming with activity. It's the only major manufacturing company left in an upstate region strewn with abandoned factories. The work at Remington is still highly skilled, much sought after and still pays well.
There is something else you need to know: the workers in Ilion now build the Bushmaster .223 assault rifle, the gun used to kill the children and teachers of Newtown.
Understanding the different fates of these two companies is a window into what has gone wrong with America.
The story of the Snyder Manufacturing Co. is the simpler one. Homer P. Snyder went to Little Falls from Amsterdam early in the 20th century and set out to meet the growing demand for bicycles. In both world wars, Snyder switched to defense production. But when peace came, it returned to making fine bicycles. In the face of much cheaper imports, made mostly in Taiwan, Homer's grandson Bill sold out in the early 1970s. Before long, the bicycle factory was only a memory.
The Remington story began in 1816, when Eliphalet Remington forged his own flintlock musket and, according to legend, won a local shooting contest. Neighbors admired its accuracy, ordered their own guns, and after a few years Eliphalet built his first factory along the Erie Canal in Ilion. During the Civil War and the two world wars, Remington supplied a large proportion of the small arms used by the U.S. Army. Remington also made a variety of sporting rifles and shotguns, as well as typewriters and safety razors. Thanks to steady military contracts, it never experienced the kind of foreign competition that destroyed countless other factories in the Mohawk Valley.
Remington, along with its sister company Bushmaster, is now owned by the giant Freedom Group of arms manufacturers which in turn is owned by the $60 billion Cerberus Capital Management. It isn't certain that the gun used in the Newtown massacre was made at the Ilion factory, but owning the company that made the .223 Bushmaster — no matter how profitable — proved to be an embarrassment for Cerberus, especially when the California Teachers Union pension fund, which has $750 million invested with the firm, expressed its outrage at any connection with the killings.
Within hours of hearing from the California union, Cerberus put Freedom Group up for sale. Buyers won't be lacking for these lucrative companies. Remington has been a flexible, innovative operation, easily weathering the current economic downturn, thanks to government and private demand.
Staying competitive has required expensive research and continual retooling in order to keep winning military contracts, such as the $180 million long-term award last April for small arms and rifles. It only made good economic sense to use that research to pitch modified versions of the same weapons to the civilian market — particularly since the National Rifle Association and other ardent supporters of the Second Amendment provided what amounted to free advertising. The Bushmaster .223, which has been flying off the gun store shelves since Newtown at prices as high as $2,500 in the wake of the push for stricter gun control laws, is a tribute to that business model.
But you won't find any Snyder bicycles at Dick's or Walmart. You might have to go all the way to the Smithsonian to find one of those two-wheelers from Little Falls.
How did it happen, I wonder, that we became a country where it is economically impossible to build the simple bikes that brought such pleasure to children but we can make the weapon used to steal their lives?
One of the teachers who survived at Newtown was a childhood friend of my daughter. I want to know whom to blame for the unspeakable crime that she witnessed. Yet the more deeply I search, the more I realize how closely that tragedy is tied to the success, not the failure, of our free-market system.
Michael Cooney lives in Valatie. He is the author of four historical novels about figures from the Capital Region. His blog is at http:// upstateearth.blogspot.com.