Saying goodbye to an old friend
It’s tough to say goodbye to an old friend.
Over time, companies and employers become like old friends to towns and regions.
The Dixie Cup plant in Forks Township is one of those.
Its current owner, Georgia-Pacific, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, announced last month that the plant will close by the end of the year.
This is Dixie Cup’s 100th anniversary in the Lehigh Valley. In 1921, company president and co-founder Hugh Moore, who later become one of Easton’s greatest philanthropists and leaders, moved his young company from the crowded streets of New York City to the farmland of Northampton County.
He placed a giant replica of the company’s main product, a paper cup, on the roof of the concrete and steel plant off 25th Street in Wilson Borough.
Lehigh Valley history was born. When the new plant in Forks was built in the early 1980s and production moved there, a new cup replica was built there to let everybody know that Dixie Cups were made here — in the Lehigh Valley.
The rooftop cup in Wilson remained on the old plant, which has been vacant for decades except for some limited warehousing use. New plans for a residential apartment redevelopment prominently feature the cup.
Dixie Cup initially was called Health Kup. The product boomed during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. Health officials sought better hygiene and sanitation in an era when tuberculosis and other contagious diseases were common.
Demand created the need for expansion. New York’s loss was the Lehigh Valley’s gain.
Ironically, a century later, the next pandemic reversed the region’s fortunes. Georgia-Pacific officials said the plant is closing because of reduced sales last year, as the pandemic closed places like amusement parks, movie theaters, festivals and professional offices, large customers of paper products.
Production will be consolidated in Lexington, Kentucky.
This time, the Lehigh Valley’s loss is Kentucky’s gain.
Some industry analysts said Georgia-Pacific was likely exploring cost-reducing consolidations even before the pandemic.
Whatever the reason, the remaining 190 workers will be the last to make Dixie products here. Their jobs will be gone by the end of 2021, and so will a proud regional tradition. My family is part of that tradition. My grandfather, Joseph Chuck, my mother’s father, spent much of his work life at Dixie. He was a machinist. He fixed the machines that made the cups.
“Pop-pop Joe,” as we called him, was born in 1922 to immigrant parents. He never made it to high school. He went to work during the Depression to support his widowed mother, who spoke little English.
He was smart and good with his hands and landed in a munitions plant in Bethlehem making pumps for the war effort during World War II. In the 1950s, he went to Dixie Cup, where he remained until retiring in 1986.
He was proud of where he worked and what they made.
As a kid, we never left his house without Dixie products, sleeves of bathroom cups, paper plates and, on good days, the famous Dixie ice cream cups that sometimes had the likenesses of baseball players on the backs of the lids.
A summer highlight was the annual Dixie Cup picnic at Bushkill Park in Forks. I don’t know if it was sponsored by the company or the workers’ union, but it was a kid’s dream.
Under the wooden pavilions, there were all-you-couldeat hot dogs and sauerkraut, open taps of birch beer, and endless brown bags of peanuts. My sister and I would spend the day on the bumper cars, in the Fun House and riding the famous Whip, the Wild Mouse, and the old-time carousel. Pop-pop Joe would save his change all year so we could play as much skee-ball in the arcade as our arms could handle.
Most of all, I remember him with his co-workers, hundreds of them and their families. They enjoyed each other and where they worked. As a machinist, he was popular with the operators, who needed him to fix their machines. Some would bribe him with homemade food and desserts.
Those workers were Dixie Cup. As I’m sure the last 190 workers are today. I feel badly for them being the ones who will be closing the doors.
Hugh Moore sought in the 1920s what manufacturers in costly and crowded urban centers still seek in the Lehigh Valley 100 years later: space to grow, quick access to large markets and a talented manufacturing workforce.
During the last decade, the region has had many more gains than losses. There are now 700 manufacturers in the Lehigh Valley, generating more than $7 billion in annual economic output, and employing 33,400 workers.
Ten manufacturers located or expanded here in 2020 despite the pandemic-challenged economy. Two new manufacturers have already expressed interest in the Dixie Cup site, which won’t be available until next year.
Manufacturing workers are in demand.
Manufacturing is the Lehigh Valley’s second-largest sector, accounting for more than 16% of our economy. In comparison, manufacturing is 12.5% of the U.S. economy.
But no company lasts forever. And every loss is painful.
Just like grandfathers, and long summer days as a kid in amusement parks, it’s tough to say goodbye to an old friend.
She is known on campus as Patient Zero, the unidentified student who returned to the University of Michigan after winter break carrying an unwanted stowaway from her trip to England — a highly contagious variant of the coronavirus first detected in Britain.
Quickly the case became a cluster, with at least 23 confirmations of the B.1.1.7 variant, concentrated in the Wolverines’ athletic program. Late last month, the university instructed students to stay in their rooms as much as possible and paused campus sports, disrupting a winning basketball season and any hope that the spring semester might be less chaotic than the fall.
“I’ve started wearing two masks,” said Alyssa Frizzo, a junior, who described the variant as a haunting presence on the Ann Arbor campus. “I think a lot of people have.”
With nearly a year of coronavirus experience behind them, leaders at Michigan and other U.S. universities ushered in the new term pledging not to repeat the errors of last year, when infection rates soared on campuses and in the surrounding communities. A New York Times effort has recorded more than 397,000 cases and at least 90 deaths connected to campuses since the pandemic began.
But although most schools have pledged to increase testing as a way of spotting outbreaks early, it is an expensive proposition when many are struggling financially, and not all are testing students as often as recommended by public health experts.
The plans to keep the virus under control at Michigan, which had more than 2,500 confirmed cases by the end of the fall semester, included increased testing, offering more courses online, limiting dorm rooms to one occupant and establishing a policy of no tolerance for rules violations. Yet already more than 1,000 new virus cases have been announced by the school since Jan. 1.
Other universities across the country have also encountered obstacles to a smooth spring, ranging from the unexpected challenge of emerging variants — also detected at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Miami, Tulane University and the University of California, Berkeley in recent days — to the
more common problem of recalcitrant students.
At Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, students returning after winter break were required to be tested upon arrival, and then asked to avoid social interactions while awaiting results. But some had other ideas.
“We identified a cluster of positive COVID-19 cases linked to students who did not follow the arrival shelter-in-place rules,” a campuswide email reported Jan. 23, blaming two student organizations for violating protocols. “More than 100 students are now in quarantine.”
Tulane in New Orleans, which is testing students at least twice a week, said it had placed 18 students and six Greek organizations
on interim suspension after they violated social distancing rules in the first weeks of classes.
The foundation of most university plans for the spring semester is built on ramped-up testing to quickly identify infected students before they display symptoms, then place them in isolation to prevent the virus from spreading. The testing push has grown since July, when a study by researchers including A. David Paltiel, a professor of public health policy and management at the Yale School of Medicine, recommended that college students be tested twice a week to better detect asymptomatic infections.
The American College Health Association later embraced the idea, issuing guidelines in
December.
“For the spring, we specifically recommend that all students are tested on arrival and twice a week thereafter if possible,” said Gerri Taylor, a student health expert who serves as co-chair of the organization’s COVID-19 task force.
Taylor said her organization did not know what percentage of schools had adopted the recommendations, and a survey of colleges across the country revealed a variety of requirements, ranging from only voluntary testing to mandatory testing twice a week.
Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, an industry group, estimates that testing has cost U.S. colleges and universities an average of $9 million per institution, part of $120 billion in total expenses and lost revenue stemming from the pandemic. Some schools have already had to cut programs, lay off staff and even close for good as costs mount.
Federal stimulus funds have helped offset some of the testing expenses, and President Joe Biden’s proposed stimulus plan includes an additional $35 billion for higher education. But even the least-expensive tests — which have ranged from $6 at the University of California, Davis, to $25 for a consortium of schools partnering with the Broad Institute in New England — can become costly when applied aggressively at a large campus.
The more expensive PCR swab tests used to diagnose the coronavirus typically cost $50 or more apiece from commercial suppliers, though some schools have lowered the price by developing their own tests or partnering with a nonprofit lab.
Michigan requires only one test per week for students, but even with fewer of them on campus this spring, it has tripled its testing since the fall semester to 15,000 tests per week from about 5,000. The school has also increased the use of the more expensive PCR tests because their results can be used for genomic sequencing to identify variants, said Emily Toth Martin, an associate professor of epidemiology who devised the campus testing program.
Martin said that the first case of the variant at Michigan was identified because both the state health authorities and the university had geared up to increase genomic testing, particularly for people who had traveled to hot spots. By the end of last week, more than 600 genomic sequencing tests had been carried out in an effort to locate variants, she said.
“This is a variant that moves 50% faster than anything we had to deal with last semester,” she said.
As of Feb. 5, the university had identified nine new cases of the variant since the previous week, according to Susan Ringler-Cerniglia, a spokeswoman for the Washtenaw County Health Department. “The good news, if there is any, is that it’s still associated with the campus community, and we haven’t had any cases in the broader community.”
Ringler-Cerniglia said that the first-identified carrier of the variant at Michigan — Patient Zero — “did everything right.” After testing positive in early January, she advised health authorities that she had been in England during winter break, leading to additional testing that isolated the variant.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court is sending a message to states that want to continue to carry out the death penalty: Inmates must be allowed to have a spiritual adviser by their side as they are executed.
The high court around midnight Thursday declined to let Alabama proceed with the lethal injection of Willie B. Smith III. Smith had objected to Alabama’s policy that his pastor would have had to observe his execution from an adjacent room rather than the death chamber itself.
The order from the high court follows two years in which inmates saw some rare success in bringing challenges based on the issue of chaplains in the death chamber. This time, liberal and conservative members of the court normally in disagreement over death penalty issues found common ground not on the death penalty itself but on the issue of religious freedom and how the death penalty is carried out.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of three justices who said they would have let Smith’s execution go forward, said Alabama’s policy applies equally to all inmates and serves a state interest in ensuring safety and security. But he said it was apparent that his colleagues who disagreed were providing a path for states to follow.
States that want to avoid months or years of litigation over the presence of spiritual advisers “should figure out a way to allow spiritual advisors into the execution room, as other States and the Federal Government have done,” he wrote in a dissent joined by Chief Justice John Roberts. Justice Clarence Thomas also would have allowed the execution of Smith, who was sentenced to die for the 1991 murder of 22-year-old Sharma Ruth Johnson in Birmingham.
Alabama had up until 2019 allowed a Christian prison chaplain employed by the state to be physically present in the execution chamber if requested by the inmate, but the state changed its policy in response to two earlier Supreme Court cases.
For most of the modern history of the U.S. death penalty since the 1970s, spiritual advisers have not been present in execution chambers, said Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
The court’s order in Smith’s case contained only statements from Kavanaugh and Justice Elena Kagan.
“Willie Smith is sentenced to death, and his last wish is to have his pastor with him as he dies,” Kagan wrote for herself and liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer, as well as conservative Amy Coney Barrett. “Alabama has not carried its burden of showing that the exclusion of all clergy members from the execution chamber is necessary to ensure prison security.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Samuel Alito did not make public their views, but at least one or perhaps both of them must have voted with their liberal colleagues to keep Smith’s execution on hold.