Posted August 14, 2017

Typically, when a manufacturing operation, textiles or otherwise, closes, its employees stay in the community to find another job – often, at a local big box store or another service provider, if skilled jobs are scarce.

But here’s one you don’t hear about often: Two employees of Minnewawa, Inc. have moved to three different geographic regions of the country in order to remain in the U.S. label-making business following company closures.

For “30 or 40 years,” Jim Storrs said, he and his wife Shirley have followed this sector of the textile industry on a circuitous journey from Pennsylvania to Nebraska to Virginia to West Virginia and now to Tennessee. They’ve been with Minnewawa the last 10 years and, they say, they think they’ve finally found a home.

“You just get used to just doing something and you don’t want to do anything else,” he told me during a tour of the company. (Read feature story here.) “You get familiar with it. Plus, we’ve always loved what we do.”

In this particular textile segment, the world is small, and who you know often opens doors you may have never knew existed. That’s at times been the case with the Storrs, who joined Minnewawa after their previous supervisor at the company with which they worked in Nebraska called them in Virginia to see if they would be interested in taking jobs in the Tennessee Valley, in Knoxville. That supervisor was with Minnewawa at the time and probably knew he would be getting a terrific twofer with the Storrs.

The Storrs’ unique story started more than 30 years ago, when they met at a label production plant in Troy, Penn. They were soon married (now 32 years and counting), but the life they envisioned would soon change when their company was bought and the plant with which they worked was shuttered. They knew one of their competitors was located in Nebraska, so they made some calls and would soon pick up and move to the Midwest.

A few years later, the same company that had bought the plant in Pennsylvania bought the one in Nebraska and proceeded to close it. But they were offered positions at existing operations in Weston, Va. – “and here we go again,” said Shirley Storrs, cut-and-sew operator. Before long, operations at that plant were moved to West Virginia, and the Storrs, of course, followed.

“We didn’t like the conditions up there too well, so my former supervisor and I talked, and here we are now,” Jim Storrs said.

One good thing about moving is their skills and knowledge are transferrable. “When I started working here, we had some older machines, and I have been familiar with them since 1975,” Jim Storrs said. “We recently installed new machinery and that's helped out a lot with production, too.”  

Oh, and as he has been at other previous companies, Jim Storrs, the cut-and-sew supervisor, is technically his wife’s “boss” at work. “But that ends at the time clock,” he said with a smile.

Like many U.S. manufacturing employees, the Storrs said they appreciate American craftsmanship.

“When you talk about quality, we do a pretty darn good job here,” Jim Storrs said.

Shirley Storrs added: “We love what we do, we hold a sense of ownership in our work and have pride in made in America.”

American-made ‘movement’ taken literally by this couple