The following is an edited transcript of a video about the Green Mountain Glove Company produced by Valley News staff photographer James M. Patterson and web editor Maggie Cassidy. Watch it at the top of this page, or click here.
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“It was fascinating that there were so many pieces to this glove when I first learned,” Evangeline Pierce says. She’s sowing thumb seams on a pile of workman’s gloves in the large workroom of Green Mountain Glove in Randolph. “This one’s got one, two, three four. This has got four, five, at least five.”
Pierce, who lives in Randolph, guesses she has worked at the glove company for “over 40 years, without looking,” she says, laughing.
“Young Kurt’s father hired me here,” Pierce says, referring to the elder Kurt Haupt. “Then I worked here, oh, I don’t know how many years. And then I got done for a while, but then I came back when young Kurt (junior) and his father took it over. Been here ever since.”
Over the years, Pierce says, the roles have evolved.
“Back when young Kurt was younger, I babysitted him,” she says. “And now I’m working for him!”
The man called “Young Kurt” sits in his office a few doors away from the workroom.
“My name’s Kurt Haupt,” he says, “and I guess I own the Green Mountain Glove Company.
“I do some cutting, trimming, pairing gloves up, steaming. Just a little of everything.
“I like to hide out a lot,” he says, chuckling.
Haupt’s grandfather was hired by the glove company, “and it eventually folded so that the bank hired my grandfather to continue running the business.
“My dad and I acquired it in ‘84. We manufacture lineman’s work and protector gloves, primarily.”
A lineman works on utility lines.
Heidi Haupt, Kurt’s daughter, describes herself as the fourth generation of the Haupt family at the business.
“It’s not really any — it’s just kind of, it’s the glove company you know?” she says. “It’s not anything special to us, I guess. Just an everyday thing.
“For me sometimes, it’s also like the emotional ties you have in the family business, because my grandfather and my grandmother were over here and me and my grandfather practically lived over here. So, it’s a lot of memories of him, waltzing around, whistling and that kind of thing.
Kurt Haupt remembers when he first started as a youngster, there were 20 people at the business, compared to the handful that work there regularly now.
“A lot of the smaller utilities have been purchased by big companies, bigger companies,” he says. “I guess they have their own suppliers.”
But Pierce says Green Mountain Glove’s standards set them ahead of the competition.
“Well one thing is their product is — they’re not slap-happy about it. They make sure it’s up in number one shape and … when it goes out of here that it’s number one quality.
“I think it’s too bad that this one is so slow, I mean after all the years. It’s the overseas stuff is what’s doing it.
“Hopefully they hang on,” she says, thinking for a moment, and then she adds with a laugh: “As long as I hang on!”
“Well, I don’t know,” Kurt Haupt says, back in his office. “We’re gonna hang on as long as possible. Keep plugging away. Eventually, maybe something will come up.”