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Charlie Younkers & his celery-inspired design. Bigelow Stylists, 1950, Charlie Gentch, right.
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His board stood to his front and his desk to his
right. Each designer enjoyed a board and a desk
and a narrow floor-to-ceiling window to his/her
left. Nine designers formed an “L” shape along
two walls of the huge studio. Work tables sat
in the room’s middle. We all shared one phone
(installed on a wall). The boss placed me near an
inside wall, with no window.
Back then, we had no cellphones or
computers. Ideas for printed carpets for
restaurant floors or ideas for cut-and-loop
carpets for living room floors were drawn and
painted on paper with pencils, charcoal, and
tempera paint. Folk were covering up beautiful
hardwood floors with
carpet in the ’70s.
Sources say, “Tactile
and color stimulation
were key in the 1970s.
Wallpaper with loud
patterns and shag
carpet was common
— even in the kitchen
and bathroom! Plush
shag was available in
any color, from rust
orange to bright green
to brick red.”
Here are
descriptions of the
Bigelow designers I
joined in 1974:
At 5’9” tall, Eddie
weighed around 160,
wore his wavy hair
fairly short, and spoke
with an accent. His
father was Cuban; his mother, Polish, as I recall.
Not married and a self-proclaimed “ladies’
man,” Eddie had been a weight-lifter and was
in his early fifties. Soon after I arrived, Eddie
showed me a small box. He opened the lid with
his right hand and exposed most of a finger lying
on white cotton. Red paint was smudged on the
cotton around the top of the finger. The finger
began wiggling and Eddie laughed. One of his
left-hand fingers was stuffed through the back
of the box. I thought, “Quite juvenile.” Goldenhaired
Eddie reportedly kept a whiskey flask in
his desk.
Only two of us nine designers had degrees
in art. The rest were self-trained, and most were
good designers.
In front of Eddie, sat Charlie Younkers, a slim,
6-ft. tall Lithuanian, who grew up in Brooklyn
and never married. As a boy, he learned drawing
and painting by apprenticing with a NYC carpet
studio. “They had me mix paints at first,” he said.
He served in the WWII U.S. Navy and brought
his mother and handicapped sister to Greenville
to live with him in a Lewis Plaza apartment
when Bigelow offered to move him south. He
had never needed to drive a car in NYC, but he
learned to drive, bought an old gray Mercedes,
placed a St. Christopher medal on its dash, and
headed to Greenville.
Henry Chiariello, a WWII U.S. Army vet, sat
in front of Charlie. Henry, also a Catholic, had an
8th-grade education but was well-read and from
the NYC area. Henry’s ancestors hailed from
Northern Italy. “Chiariello” means “dark, young
man,” he told me. He and his wife, Josephine,
had five children,
and he designed
shower curtains
for his brother’s
business before
joining Bigelow.
He said, “I didn’t
get to go to art
school. The
oldest son in
our family — my
brother — got
to further his
education. My
brother would
come home and
teach me what he
learned.”
Beyond Henry
sat Ellen F., a
Jewish lady with
a son, daughter,
and mother who
had moved south with her. As a child, Ellen
was sent from Germany to England as WWII
set in. Her father died in a concentration camp.
Her mother survived the camps. When Ellen’s
mother once visited our studio and walked past
my desk, I noticed tattooed numbers on her left
arm—numbers inscribed by Nazis.
Next in our group sat Jim (I can’t remember
his last name). Near retirement age, he excelled
at designing high-low or cut-and-loop carpets.
Designer John B., very talented and a year
younger than I, worked as a potter after he
earned a college art degree. He hired on as a
carpet designer for a few years before returning
to pottery.
White-haired Charlie Zeitel, next in our row
of designers, was in his sixties and reminded me
of Norman Rockwell. He smoked a pipe while
designing and had worked in wallpaper design.
In NYC, if a designer tired of drawing wallpaper
designs, he could “go down the street” and get a
job designing carpet or some other product.
Designer Rudy Metzger, a balding, swarthy,
jolly German, had been an amateur gymnast
until he grew old and gained weight. I secretly
called him “Kris Kringle” because of his chuckle.
Rudy said his father had arrived America as
a stone carver to work on the Washington
Cathedral. When that work died out, his father
failed to find jobs of that sort, so he put away his
tools and served as a hotel manager for the rest
of his working days.
Our group had a New York aura, even an
international flavor, and I enjoyed working at
Bigelow.
I worked about a year before the company
announced a layoff. One designer was slated
to be cut. As the last designer hired, I would
have been laid off, but Eddie had drinking and
performance problems. I felt bad but knew the
company wanted him gone. Eddie walked.
Weeks later, after I had taken over Eddie’s
drawing board and desk and enjoyed a window
view, I heard a voice say, “Hello.” I looked to my
right and was surprised to see Eddie. He stood
in front of my desk and said, “How you doing?”
“Doing OK, Eddie. How about you?” I said.
“Doing fine,” he said.
I noticed a leather holster strapped to Eddie’s
right side. In that holster rested a .22 caliber
pistol. I didn’t refer to the weapon nor indicate I
noticed it. We conversed a bit and Eddie walked
to Charlie Younkers’ desk. They talked, and
Eddie moved on to Ellen’s desk. I then slowly
walked to George’s office (about 30 feet away).
George had seen Eddie arrive with the pistol
and had called the police. I looked out George’s
window, and there sat two policemen in a squad
car, waiting in the parking lot. George, a WWII
vet, had told them “just wait downstairs.” I
returned to my desk. Eddie visited with every
designer and slowly walked back past each of us
before heading down the hallway to the elevator.
He then drove home.
Henry Chiariello saw Eddie some weeks
later and asked, “Why did you bring that gun up
there?”
“I didn’t even know I had it on,” Eddie said.
Yeah, right. Eddie derived satisfaction
from intimidating us. I was surprised at how
psychologically unprepared we were. I have
often thought about that day. Should I have
tried to “take him down?” That had crossed my
mind while he visited us. But when I realized our
boss was having the police just wait outside, I
thought, “Just stay calm and maybe things will
work out.” If Eddie had used that pistol, the
police couldn’t have arrived on our third floor
before . . . well, you know what I mean. What
Eddie got by with in the 1970s isn’t likely to be
tolerated today.
When I retired from Gulistan Carpet in
Aberdeen, N.C., in Jan. 2013, I still thought Eddie
T. was the strangest–and scariest–person I had met
during my 37 years in carpet manufacturing.
L. Steve Crain lived in Southern Pines
(1989-2017) before he and his wife, Carol,
returned to live in the Taylors, S.C. area.
L. Steve Crain, Stylist at Bigelow—Sanford Carpet, 1970.
No. 132 The Pinehurst Gazette, Inc. p.37