Web posted
Saturday, March 1, 2008
50 years of making mattresses
By FOSS FARRAR
Traveler Staff Writer
reporter@arkcity.net
It seemed like the start of a typical work week to Ken Harader one Monday in 1974 when he arrived at A.C. Mattress Company.
Harader met with his boss and the company founder, Bill Thomas, to discuss the day's work plans.
Thomas then got up from his desk chair, walked to the front door of the office, collapsed, and lost consciousness.
He died at the local hospital later that day.
"I called the ambulance, and they came down and run him up to the hospital," Harader said Thursday. "That was a shock."
Harader already was a long-time employee and Thomas' right-hand man when his boss collapsed that day.
He began work at the mattress company in the summer of 1958 when he was 12 years old. That summer he learned to work at a sewing machine, stitching together mattress covers.
He made 35 cents for sewing up each mattress cover.
"I'd do two a day and want to quit; that was very little money but seemed like plenty to me then," he said.
In 1958, Harader didn't dream that he would stay with the mattress company for 50 years and become its owner.
"I don't know if this is what I wanted to do, but that's what happened," he said. "I probably spent a few years working at other jobs, but I always came back here."
The business remained basically the same manufacturing operation from 1923 when Thomas opened it until his death in February 1974. But it changed starting about a year later, when Harader bought the business.
Harader decided to stop the company's manufacturing operation and turn the business into a specialty retail shop. The manufacturing was completely shut down by sometime in the 1980s, he said.
"The longer I did things by hand the harder it got," Harader said. "You couldn't make any money on hand work."
Today, A.C. Mattress is strictly a retail operation run by Harader as a one-man shop.
Business is good because the company carries a full line of mattresses, offers competitive prices and free delivery to customers in Arkansas City and neighboring towns, he said.
But during the years that Thomas ran the company it remained basically the same old-fashioned, low-tech operation.
"It was all hand-made stuff then," Harader said. "There was no machinery in this place like other manufacturers had."
On Thursday at the shop, Harader pointed to the front of the room where Thomas used to sit at his desk. From there, he could look out a window at the South Summit Street traffic. Behind him, his young employees worked at their sewing machines and at a machine called a "cotton picker," at the east end of the narrow manufacturing wing.
The cotton-picker was used to shred cotton for mattress stuffing, he explained. It loosened the cotton and blew it inside the mattress frame.
At the north side of the company building was a barn used for storage. Mattress deliveries were -- and still are -- made out of there.
Harader still has clear memories of his first summer working at the factory.
He said he would try to leave each day after sewing together a few mattress covers. At first, he got away with doing that, he said, because there were other neighborhood kids working there also.
The Harader family lived only a few blocks from the company location at 1104 S. Summit St.
But by the end of that summer, Thomas had encouraged Ken and his other young employees to work full days.
"We were making cotton mattresses for Chilocco," he said. "We probably made 150 mattresses that summer."
At that time, Chilocco Indian School, several miles south of Arkansas City, had a large enrollment of Native American students.
The next fall Harder returned to school but kept working at the mattress company in the late afternoons. He did quit for a few months that winter while he was on the 7th grade basketball team, he recalled.
"One season I played and then just didn't,"he said. "I decided to work instead."
The years passed, and Harader continued to work at the mattress company. In 1963, he graduated from Arkansas City High School. The next year, he started junior college but later quit and started working full-time.
In 1966, Harader got married, just about a month after the A.C. Mattress building was gutted in a fire. It was rebuilt.
Meanwhile, the company founder kept working well beyond retirement age. Eventually Harader asked Thomas when planned to retire so he could purchase the business.
But Thomas seemed to put off the idea of retiring. He stuck to his routine of walking three blocks from his home to the office each day.
Thomas' brother, Glenn Thomas, also joined in the operation for period after he had retired from another business, Harader recalled.
Bill Thomas, a World War I veteran whose family came to Arkansas City from Iowa, was 78 when he died.
His daughter, Judi Thomas, said Thursday that her grandfather, George Thomas, actually arranged for Bill Thomas to start the business in Ark City.
George Thomas bought a small mattress company in Ark City one day in 1923. He brought his son Bill up from Oklahoma the next day to take over the business, Judi Thomas said.
Bill Thomas had run a butcher shop in Oklahoma, she said.
"They had one day to learn about the mattress business as the owner left town the next day," she said.
George Thomas then moved on to other business concerns, but his son stayed in Ark City and ran the mattress factory, Judi Thomas said.
Harader said Bill Thomas was pretty easy going, but he could be gruff at times.
"He was especially tough on supply salesmen who were trying to sell him springs and mattress covers," he said. "He'd get them to lower their prices."
Today's mattresses aren't nearly as durable as those made by hand, Harader said.
"Yesterday evening, I delivered a mattress for a new bed to a woman's house and saw a mattress set that I made in 1969," he said. "It's still good 40 years later."
Below: Ken Harader marks his 50th year as a worker for A.C. Mattress Company this year. He started work there in 1958 at age 12. In 1975, the year after the company's founder died, he bought the business.
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