Factory

NEW YORK -- Grumman Corp. said yesterday that it will sell its parts factory in Glen Arm and go ahead with plans to close its Salisbury aircraft cable plant, which employs nearly 250 workers, by the end of the year.The announcement came as the defense contractor announced a separate $85 million plan to lay off 500 workers and close several of its aircraft test and design facilities on Long Island.Grumman had announced that it would close the Salisbury plant last May but held out a slim prospect in November that it might reconsider the decision after it had reviewed the productivity of all its factories.

The little town of Malvern Link, England -- part of the larger town of Great Malvern actually -- just at the foot of the Malvern Hills in west central England, is a place of pilgrimage to members of a peculiar brotherhood.That is the brotherhood of Morgan drivers, whose devotion to the elegant but uncomfortable British sports car baffles most people, but unites the drivers in a sort of cult with Spartan values.Others might say they are masochists and should have their heads examined. No matter.

Howard Overman's new brooms always sweep clean.The owner of Maryland's last broom factory turns out 900 dirt expellers a week from a tiny, back-street East Baltimore workroom. It's hard to believe that every broom sold by the sprawling Rite Aid drug store chain has its origin in this three-man work bench of industry."The competition from Mexico has killed off just about all the Baltimore broom makers. I don't want to retire. I don't take much out of this business. It's the only job I've ever had," Overman said the other day as he stood at his stitching machine.

Time is at something of a standstill in Duncannon, Pa., a no-stoplight town tucked along a bend in the Susquehanna River about 80 miles north of Baltimore. Trains still rattle the windows of houses as they rumble through town, carrying freight through the Pennsylvania coal region. The Doyle Hotel in the center of town looks as if it hasn't been touched in years. But nowhere in Duncannon is time locked in more of a deep freeze than at the Old Sled Works, a former sled factory turned antiques shop at the north end of town.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- It was a story of hope: a Central American sweatshop transformed into a unionized, worker-run apparel factory thanks to nearly $600,000 in loans and donations, including help from retailers Gap and Land's End, and the AFL-CIO. Boosters traveled to U.S. college campuses and church basements, promoting the Just Garments plant in El Salvador as a company looking to do well by doing right by employees. Impoverished Salvadorans saw a chance to earn better wages and to have a say in their future.

WASHINGTON - Sales at U.S. wholesalers posted the largest gain in 19 months in January and inventories fell, a sign that further demand may have to be met by increased factory production. The 1.2 percent increase in sales after a 0.5 percent drop in December was the first since August and the biggest since June 2000, the Commerce Department reported yesterday. Stockpiles fell for an eighth consecutive month in January. The 0.2 percent decline after a drop of 0.5 percent in December brought the value of inventories to a two-year low of $287.

Giant Food Inc. has announced it will move into part of a long-abandoned kitchen-stove factory -- behind Snowden Square in east Columbia -- marking the end to an old dream of turning that area into a major manufacturing base for the planned town.The area -- the site of four huge factory buildings that were to have housed General Electric plants near Route 175 and Snowden River Parkway -- once was envisioned as a source of as many as 12,000 high-paying industrial jobs for the Columbia area.

WASHINGTON - An index of U.S. manufacturing unexpectedly rose in March for the second straight month, suggesting that factory weakness is a diminishing threat to the economy's record-long expansion. The National Association of Purchasing Management's factory index rose to 43.1 last month from 41.9 in February. In January, the index fell to 41.2, the lowest level in a decade, as manufacturers cut production to reduce overstocked inventories. March's index was also the first since December to be above 42.7, the level that NAPM says historically corresponds to conditions of a recession.

WORTHINGTON, Ohio -- They don't make things like they used to in Ohio, a state that has become a living museum of dead American factories. Drive around Ohio and you can see the effects of assembly-line wreckage in cities that used to boast of tires (Akron), glass (Toledo), cash registers (Dayton), steel (Cleveland and Youngstown). Even production of the toy icon Etch-A-Sketch, formerly in the small town of Bryan, has been shipped to the cheap-labor haven of China. Now communities all over the state play host to the relentless economic assault on General Motors, Ford, Daimler Chrysler and their parts suppliers.

"Factory jobs are the future of America's young," Patrick J. Buchanan declared at a recent gathering of Republican presidential candidates in New Hampshire. The statement was vintage Buchanan: simple, reassuring -- and deeply nostalgic. He longs for the 1950s America of his youth, when the factories boomed and "we did teach right from wrong," as he said during a visit to Los Angeles. His mom stayed home and cooked meals of fried chicken and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. It was "in many ways a better time," he writes in his 1990 autobiography, "Right From the Beginning."