Bowling pin plant decision stunning, offers opportunity Jan. 15, 2008 We were stunned Monday morning with the news that the Brunswick Corporation had closed its Antigo facilities, putting 65 people out of work and impacting our community in ways that many people really haven’t thought much about.
The massive Brunswick organization and its Bowling and Billiards Division decided it didn’t want to make bowling pins any more, and closed its Antigo facility that has been around for nearly eight decades as the Vulcan Corporation, and eventually, Brunswick.
Employees will continue receiving their salaries and benefits for 60 days and the plant is already buttoned up and its future certainly unsure.
While losing 65 jobs and management positions in a community the size of Antigo is tragic, the impact is even greater. There are truckers without a place to make deliveries, there are timber and mill workers without a site to delivery their products and there are utilities with idled capacities.
Antigo has been very fortunate the past decade in attracting and retaining industries employment.
But certainly there have been some problems, including the downswing of Sartori Foods, but nothing quite so stunning as the sudden Brunswick shutdown.
The Vulcan Corporation came to Antigo from Crandon nearly 80 years ago to produce wooden shoe lasts. When wooden shoe lasts didn’t sell, bowling was hot and for decades millions of hard maple pins were produced.
But like shoe lasts, some of the attraction for bowling has chilled and despite the best efforts of the city of Antigo’s administration, the men, women and machines that produced the pins here are idled.
There are a few who will suggest that the Brunswick decision indicates a failure on the part of local officials in retaining and recruiting industry. In the next days and weeks we suggest there may be a minuscule cry to reverse the city’s path or perhaps simply take no direction at all.
That’s called stagnation—or even more drastically, recession—and it’s something we can ill afford at a time when more and more communities are battling to retain and attract an increasingly smaller pool of industries. We must continue to move forward. Now is not the time to be timid, or retreat from a path that we feel will ultimately bring increased growth and prosperity, perhaps very soon.
The Vulcan/Brunswick organization had a track record and tradition of steady employment an honor in Antigo, but now the sprawling facilities on Edison Street certainly will be for sale in a matter of days or weeks.
With the new drive and resolve for recruitment and retention of industry by the City of Antigo and Langlade County, we expect that there will soon be a new tradition growing from those buildings that have already served us so well.
|
|
|
