Bob M. on Oneida Ltd. quality
One thing about Oneida is our quality of our product was exceptional. There wasn't anyone that could meet our quality standards. We were the top dogs.

Geoff N. on pay cuts for Oneida Ltd. executives
What happened in the bank scare, this short depression in 1921. My grandfather [P.B. Noyes] got up, maybe in this room and walked around and said, "Okay, we're Executives, The Board of Directors. We're all cutting ours [salary ] 50%. We're going to cut our salaries 50%. Everybody else: nope. Everybody else won't take less. The guy that is buffing a spoon is going to take the least cut. Okay, done." Then they decided after things got better in the '20s, they have an HCL, "High Cost of Living" bonus right in there. Everybody got an HCL except the Executives. That was the socialism. My grandfather kept saying that, "We're always going to run this thing for the employees."

Jim C. on meeting Pete Noyes, President of Oneida Ltd.
I have a great story about when I met [CEO] Pete Noyes. When I was 18 years old, he walked through the factory and handed out cigars to the men for Christmas and chocolates to the ladies. And here I am in the machine, 18 years old, and he went to hand me a cigar. And I said, "I want the chocolate." I didn't get to see him again because I only worked summers. So 4 years after that, 4 years years down the road, I'm in that same machine. I'm in the same machine. And it's Christmas time again. And he walks up. Now, I haven't seen this guy in 4 years. He looks at me and goes, "You want the chocolate!" And when he walked away, I had a new respect for what he remembered. Now, I don't know if I was that easy to pick out, but he remembered that I didn't need a cigar. I was a runner. But he remembered that night. I just stood up and said, "wow," that's what guy he was.

Don A. on working at the CAC
Then I was offered the choice of two jobs. One was Night Superintendent, and the other was the CAC [Community Associated Clubs]. Probably the night superintendent would have given me more opportunities as far as managing, but the CAC is something I really liked. So I chose what I liked. It was a very interesting job. I loved it. Dealt with everybody. I was in charge of the Retirement Club. All the different events were mine. Clubhouse, softball, Lewis Point, Family Days, the craft shows, the bowling alley, you name it, anything that had to do with recreation. I loved the job. And basically, I was there until I retired. We did our family days. I did the Kids' Fishing Derby and the Adult Fishing Derby. Of course, many bowling leagues. We ran the golf leagues, not the golf course, but we did the leagues. That was part of my duty. A Monday night league, a Tuesday night league, Wednesday daytime league. We had a retirement league on Thursday. Thursday night were women's league, and then we had couples' league on the weekend. We had maybe up to almost 10 leagues. It was busy. Bowling was in the bowling season. Summer, we had up to 16 team softball leagues that we ran over in the old Robertson Park by the retirement home. We had those leagues. We ran those for several years. We actually had a league for the night shift that would run during the day. Anything that people were interested in, we tried to follow. We tried to make it happen for them.

Al G. on the family atmosphere of Sherrill
And then people used to ask me, "What's Oneida [Limited] like?" And I chauffeured. I said, "If there's a death in the family, if there's a marriage, anything that the community would be involved in or know about, you had people there to help you. You had gifts, you had food, you had money, you had anything you wanted because it was one family town." I feel so fortunate to be able to live in Sherrill, be a part of Sherrill, and do the things I did in Sherrill, and you work at a company like a Oneida. I had my ups and downs, but I had more really ups.

Janet C. on Oneida's teaspoon promotion
Back in the day, Oneida Limited advertised in brides magazines for brides to send in a quarter--later, it was 50 cents--to get a sample teaspoon, a real-life teaspoon, so they could decide what their pattern was going to be when they got married. And all day long, we processed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of envelopes with quarters and dollars and letters. We preserved their names and sent the spoons back to them. And we kept their addresses. I would imagine that Oneida Limited sold those mailing lists to others. We had to photocopy those coupons for that reason. I don't remember how long I was there. Eventually, they did away with the coupon redemption, but you would be amazed how people send money through the mail. They stuck it in gum, they wrapped it in a Band-Aid. I can't think of everything, but it was a blast. And people ordered 1 teaspoon or they could get all of the samples for $3 or $4. We sent them all to them. It went over to General Mills over in the factory, and that's what those ladies did, was just stuff those spoons in an envelope and send them. I'm sure that it was a boon to the company because I'm sure they got a lot of business from these brides, they ended up ordering a whole set of whatever their favorite pattern was.

Matt R. on valuing workers
The legacy that I felt, and it was more of a cultural thing, when I started in 1991, there might have been people that were working since the '50s, and those people learned from people that were there in the '20s and '30s, is nobody was more important than anyone else. In fact, it was actually the opposite. Most of the management in the factory, when you were working in the factory and you were producing good product and you did a really good job, you made really good money. Oneida paid their hourly workers actually better than the first-line supervision. We have in our company today, Sherrill Manufacturing, one of our Director of Operations, Jose Alvarez, he told me the story that when he was offered a job in supervision, we're talking back in the early '80s, that he came home and told his wife, "I've got really good news, I got good news and bad news. The good news is I've been tapped to be a supervisor, the bad news is I've got to take a $3 an hour pay cut to do it." So they valued the people that did the work very highly. If you look at the CEO's salary versus the wages in the factory, the multiple was not like it was in other companies. They were fairly well paid, but nothing like they were in other corporations in the rest of the United States. I think that's a vestige of the [original Oneida] Community where everybody's important.

Paula N. on multiple generations working for the company
And I just got to say that my parents, my husband's parents, my husband and myself all worked at Oneida, and we're proud to do it. You would talk to somebody in a store or somewhere, and they'd say, "Well, where do you work?" "Oh, I work at Oneida Limited." And then they would say, "Oh, it's great to work there. The people are good to you. There's many benefits to a lot of jobs. You would love it." So then it would make you want to go and check it out and be a part of this family, especially when Pete Noyes and Bill Matthews were the CEOs, they treated you like you're family.

Tim C. on the local doctor
Old doctor Prowda was the was the doctor over in Sherrill. And, Oneida Limited had what they called the "Jitney" which would take things back and forth between the sales office and the factory. You know, paperwork or whatever. You know, a sample that somebody wanted to look at. Another part of the Jitney's job, the driver, was to pick up retirees and take them to their doctor's appointments. If they couldn't [or] didn't have a way to get there, [or] could no longer drive. Somebody had to go and have an appointment with Doctor Prowda, you know, be able to be a retired employee and, they couldn't drive anymore or they couldn't walk to the place. If they needed a ride, they would get them a ride. And, of course, the Oneida Community's visiting nurses. She would go around, make sure everybody was whatever, change their bandages, getting their insulin shots, if they needed a walker or crutches or a hospital bed. This was taken care of by the corporation.

Don A. on closing the factory
One of the worst days of my career there was the final day when they told the Factory, and this was right in the middle of the day, they told the Factory, "Shut down, everybody go home." And I had to go through the factory to make sure everybody was gone, me and myself and a couple of my men. And to see a coffee cup sitting there half full, maybe a portable radio still going, it was like a ghost town. It was probably the saddest day of my life there to see where people had to just get up and go. One of the other things that I hated about doing at the end was when people got let go, for instance, the Sales Office, they were letting a bunch go. I had to go sit in the cafeteria with one of my men on call in case they needed help. These were people that were my friends, and I saw people coming out crying. It was sad. Not a fun part of the job.

Janet C. on the end of Oneida Ltd.
I remember it was right after Labor Day when they announced that we were going to be done. I don't remember the time frame, but I sat on my bench in Brocade and I cried, real tears. It was so sad to think that we were all going to be out of a job after so many years and so much blood, sweat, and tears that we gave them. There was a minor reprieve for us for us Brocaders. They came on the PA and said that when Sherrill Manufacturing bought, they were going to keep the warehouse, and Brocade was part of the warehouse. And I was in Brocade, so I thought, I got a reprieve. I'm still going to be working for Oneida. And I used to go to the P&C [grocery store] at my other job, and I used to see all my friends that were going to lose their job and feel real bad for them because they were going to [lose their jobs].... And I was going to get to stay. And then a couple of weeks later, they came on the PA again and said, "Brocade's going too." And so all of a sudden, I was going to lose my job, too. We came to work, and we did what we had to do, and we were very sad. And they got rid of us a few at a time. To us, high service got to stay the longest. And I can remember the last day. We stayed. We worked until the end of the shift at 3:30, pushing out as much silverware as we could onto the floor to get shipped. When we punched out for the last time and we drove out the gate, I'm thinking, "Wow, when I come back, I'm not coming back. I'm not punching in. I don't have a job." And it was like, except for losing my parents and my favorite horse, it was the most traumatic thing that ever happened to me. I had 32 years in, and where am I going? I had I had no skills except for horses. I went to high school and took all of the college entrance stuff. I didn't have any skills [such] as secretarial. I'd been injured in a horse accident, so now I walk with a limp and I had gray hair. Who the heck is going to hire me? It was real hard surviving after that. And the signs coming in and out of Sherrill with the teapot said, "Welcome to the Silver City" were no more. And it's, "Welcome to Sherrill" now. But the teapot's gone....We're not the Silver City anymore.

Matt R. on founding Sherrill Manufacturing
So that's when I came up with this cockamamie scheme to buy the factory, and I called Greg Owens, who I met in Mexico, by the way. We were neighbors down in Toluca [Mexico]. Yeah, we were neighbors. We used to play basketball together and tennis, and we'd go on trips and barbecues and watch football because all the expats down in Mexico, football to them was soccer. American football is what we would watch. So I called Greg up one day, and I knew that he was working for some steel business, and he was doing okay, but bouncing around. And I said, "Greg, just hear me out." And I went through a list of things that make this factory competitive and some of the legacy things that were an issue. And I said, "Why don't we just start with a blank sheet of paper? You've got a little sales and marketing experience. I got a little operations experience. We both have some experience." He did work for Oneida for a little while in the factory in Mexico. And that's when we came up with the idea to create Sherrill Manufacturing. And it's been 16 years. Now, I think the only people that can screw it up is us. We have a good business model. We're an Internet company. We try to treat our employees the same way that Oneida treated their employees in the heyday. I know everyone in the factory by name. I talk to them all the time. "And how are the kids doing? And your mom's sick. What's going on?" We live in the community in which everyone else we work with lives in. And I think, "knock on wood," every time I say that I think we figured it out. Hopefully, we're never going to be what Oneida Limited used to be. I don't think you're going to see 2,500 people making flatware in Sherrill. But every day when I come to work, I think of the tens of thousands of people, the many thousands of people that walk through the same doors I walk through on a daily basis and gave me the opportunity, kept the factory around long enough that we could keep it going.