New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Supplying mattresses under pressure, through history
We don’t know whether Isadore Naboicheck knew Nathan Gilman way back in 1899, when the two Jewish entrepreneurs were making mattresses and bedding in Connecticut factories 34 miles apart.
And we don’t know whether the businesses they founded — The Gilman Brothers Co. and Gold Bond mattress — supplied hospitals in the flu pandemic of 1918. The answer to both questions, now lost to history, is most likely yes.
What we know is that in the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, well over a century later, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, operating those same two companies, came through big-time when the state of Connecticut needed emergency beds for hospital overflow.
Gold Bond, a large regional mattress-maker that’s been in Hartford since Naboicheck founded it in 1899, made 3,500 specially designed mattresses, covered in waterproof, green vinyl, and delivered them to the state this spring. Just a few weeks ago, recall, we were near panic as cases piled up and every hospital in the state crafted a plan for patients who wouldn’t fit in their wards.
In all, they went to 20 locations including Stamford Hospital and 600 at the Connecticut Convention Center, very near the location where Gold Bond started. A total of 504 are still set up at the Southern, Western and Central Connecticut State University campuses.
“We feel very good that first and foremost we could help ensure that those who are going through this horrific situation had the care they needed,” said Bob Naboicheck, grandson of the founder, whose 38-yearold son, Henry “Skip” Naboicheck is in the business.
The mattress shipments came in large orders of 500 or 1,000, Naboicheck said. “We were getting calls all the time, ‘We need them, we need them.’”
The price was under $100 for most of the mattressses. “We wanted to be very competitive and we weren’t going to be gouging like some have done with masks,” Bob Naboicheck said.
And it worked out well for Gold Bond, a large maker of futons, which sells mattresses through retailers and to hotels. With sales down by 60 percent at the start of what normally is the peak season for mattresses, the state’s orders kept the 62 factory employees working.
“We’re the only mattresss factory that was open in Connecticut,” Naboicheck said.
At the same time, down Route 2 in the Gilman section of Bozrah — a village with its own post office, named for the company — Gilman Brothers did not make beds. Its product is a styrene-backed foamboard, mostly used for retail displays and advertising.
The March numbers looked terrible. They brainstormed and came up with an idea: They would design and build temporary beds made of the rigid plastic product, with components that would slide and snap into place.
“We were laughed at,” said Bill VanHorn, the Gilman sales director. “I said ‘That’s OK, that’s who we are.’”
Indeed, over the years Gilman Brothers — still owned and operated by the family — had overcome a lot of challenges since Nathan Gilman founded the company in 1897 in New York and bought his supply factory on the Yantic River in Bozrah a few years later.
In the 1920s, when the river ran too dry for water power, Gilman formed an electric company and hired his sons to dig holes for utility poles. The family owned the company until 1995 and it still serves the area.
Gilman Brothers quickly made prototypes, set up an outsourced manufacturing supply chain and put out word the company was in the hospital overflow bed business.
Then at exactly 9:33 a.m. Central time on March 28, VanHorn, working from home in Texas, received a call from Lt. Col. Christopher Chabot, in charge of medical planning for the Connecticut National Guard.
“Do you have the beds in stock?”
No, VanHorn said, they’re not made yet. “We could move forward on it.”
“Can you give us 1,000 on Monday?”
Whoa. VanHorn scrambled. That night the boards went out to the manufacturers.
“The trucks started shipping out Monday,” VanHorn said.
That helped create work for many of the company’s 120 employees.
Capt. David Pytlik, spokesman at the Connecticut Military Department, remembers those tense moments when the Army National Guard and the state’s commodities task force saw rising patient numbers and rapidly sourced beds and other supplies.
“It was like watching an emerging tsunami wave charging toward you,” Pytlik said.
With COVID-19 numbers declining, the beds and mattresses are mostly in storage now, in a New Britain warehouse.
“If wave 2 is worse than the first wave, that stuff is ready to go,” Pytlik said. “I would much much rather explain why we built too much capacity than why we didn’t build what we needed.”
Today the two companies have expanded their emergency work. On the day this month when I visited Gold Bond, a shipment was heading out to a university hospital in Boston.
Not coincidentally, the three Gold Bond factory workers I photographed that day, all nearby local residents, had worked at the company for 22, 20 and 18 years. These are backbone community businesses that take seriously their roles as suppliers and employers in hard times. Bob Naboicheck is a former chairman of the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford.
Sales were good over the last few years for Gold
Bond — legally the Standard Mattress Co. but using the Gold Bond name — despite the slow economy in Connecticut, which accounts for less than 10 percent of revenue. Now, in the crisis, Naboicheck added, “We’re just trying to keep this 121 year old business alive.”
And going forward, Gold Bond will do it in part in a joint agreement Gilman Brothers, which is expanding its temporary bed business to serve the disaster relief industry.
“It’s a whole new market, there’s an individual with the Department of Commerce that has helped us,” VanHorn said, along with U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2. “We’re involved right now with a very large program with FEMA,” he added, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
So now they are in bed together. Sorry, had to say that. Again, we don’t know whether it’s the first time — in fact, Naboicheck said, his grandmother, from Connecticut, was a Gilman. Any relation? It’s lost to history.