Factory

In 1942, Julia Yoder, barely out of high school, took a bus to Baltimore from her home in the Pennsylvania mountains, rented a room at the YWCA and landed a job as a solderer at the Glenn L. Martin factory in Middle River. All within 24 hours. "It was not hard to get a job then," said Yoder, 77. "I made $36 a week and that was big money. And the Y was a treat - it had electricity and running water." Yoder, a Finksburg resident, reminisced at a Rosie reunion on Saturday at the Baltimore Museum of Industry.

The hulking structure is more than six decades old, and it's on a valuable parcel of land that's about to go on the auction block. But Baltimore County officials and community leaders see the old airplane factory now known as the Middle River Depot as an architectural jewel and a statement of the area's heritage, and they want it to survive the sale. The building, once the plant where Glenn L. Martin Co. manufactured the B-26 "Marauder" bomber during World War II, has been in recent decades a federal government repository for tons of pamphlets, manuals and records.

Jos. A. Bank Clothiers Inc., the last men's tailored clothing retailer in the country to produce its own apparel, said yesterday that it will sell its remaining manufacturing operation to an upstate New York garment maker.Bank has agreed to sell its sewing plant on West North Avenue and a cutting room on Brookhill Road in Northwest Baltimore to a subsidiary of M. S. Pietrafesa LP, the 76-year-old manufacturer of Polo by Ralph Lauren tailored clothing, Brooks Brothers suits and private label collections for Nordstrom.

As Herman Charles Engel Jr. walks through the Kirk-Stieff factory, there is an eerie silence. The formidable hammering machines stand mute, hundreds of tools and dies await reassignment while employees tend to final chores. It's like the lull after a memorable dinner party, a few people reliving the high points while they clear the table.The 76-year-old die maker stops to chat with Patricia Flanagan. She is polishing up the last order of mint julep tumblers, another Kirk-Stieff product that has helped smooth out life's rough edges.

STEVENSVILLE -- The sounds and smells at the Paul Reed Smith Guitars factory are similar to those of other manufacturing operations: The steely whir of automated machinery as drills and blades bite into wood; the scuffing sounds of workers hand-sanding wood to buttery smoothness; scents of sawdust, glue and lacquer lingering in the air. But amid the industrial clatter, there's live music. Near the electronics assembly area, an employee conducts the musical equivalent of a test drive, plucking the strings of a Paul Reed Smith guitar.

KRAGUJEVAC, Yugoslavia -- Remember the Yugo?Down at the Zastava Group factory, a skeleton work crew of fewer than 1,200 struggles to keep the cheap and cheerless little auto alive.In 1989, before Yugoslavia disintegrated and went to war, the factory churned out 200,000 of these cars.They broke down so often, they gave Yugoslav workmanship a bad reputation in the United States.This year, the workers will be lucky to produce 8,000.The story of the Yugo and the Zastava Group is the story of Yugoslavia's economy, shattered by war and 3 1/2 years of United Nations-imposed trade sanctions that were lifted only last winter.

MOSCOW -- The workers labor in a vast factory furnished with electrical saws and half-cut timber slabs that are part of a vanishing tradition, sanding wood to a smooth finish, drilling holes in what at first seem random shapes, then stretching long copper-and-steel wires, to finish the construction of one of Russia's cultural icons: a piano. In the country of Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov, the Lira plant here in the capital is the last factory mass-producing acoustic pianos in Russia.

Deadly industrial accidents in the developing world are tragically common, but the recent collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh that took the lives of more than 500 workers has captured the American public's attention, and no wonder. Knowingly or unknowingly, most Americans at some point have purchased clothing or other items made in Bangladesh, where factory workers labor under sweatshop conditions and employers keep manufacturing costs down by ignoring safety and building code violations.

Q: While cleaning out my parents' house, I discovered a pair of porcelain tulips in floral decorated pots marked with a blue crown above the letter "N." An accompanying note said they were made by the Capodimonte factory in Naples in the mid-18th century.A: There's a widespread misconception that the porcelain factory King Charles III of Naples operated at his Capodimonte Palace from 1743 to about 1759 used the "crowned N" mark, according to Letitia Roberts, ceramics expert at Sotheby's auction house in New York.

An abandoned garment-making plant near Green Mount Cemetery has become a lure to a band of adventurers who crave the thrill of its shadows and dank spaces. Calling themselves urban explorers, these uninvited, but tenacious visitors slip into to the century-old Lebow Brothers plant on Oliver Street, where once-expensive suits and topcoats still hang on racks - left by factory workers more than two decades ago. The explorers snap photographs and post them on the Internet, where they find a wide audience.