Dec. 6
100 Years ago – 1924
Ad: “New Crop Nuts for the Holidays. It is so satisfying to buy your holiday nuts where you know that you are getting this year’s fresh, full-meated nuts. A complete assortment of all the most favored kinds awaits you here. For Your Fruit Cake. Walnuts – Almonds – Pecans – Citron – Orange Peel – Lemon Peel – Raisins – Currants – Brandy Extract. ‘The Store That Square Dealing Built.’ W.P. HODNETT CO. Phone 74 – Martinsville, Va.”
75 years ago – 1949
Lloyd’s Jewelers was advertising a 34-piece, service-for-eight, set of Wm Rogers Silverplate in the Memory pattern for $19.95, which you could finance at 50 cents a week.
1960
Supported by Anderson Memorial Presbyterian Church, Miss Mary Catherine Fultz of Martinsville was a teacher at the Kinjo Gakuin school in Nagoya, Japan.
50 years ago – 1974
Because of slowed business, local industries were announcing additional layoffs and extended holiday breaks. Sale Knitting Co., a Tultex division, had begun layoffs across departments in its 1,810-employee plant. That plant also would be closed for a week over the Christmas holidays. Reports from the Virginia Employment Commission stated that most of the 10 local Bassett Furniture Co. plants were closed for an indefinite amount of time in the previous week. The Fieldcrest towel mill in Fieldale, which had 1,300 employees, was closed for one week beginning Nov. 25 and one week in both September and October. Fieldcrest was working on a week-by-week basis, not long-term contracts. Workers at Southeast Container Corp., which supplied boxes for local industries, normally got two days off work over Christmas, but in 1974 they’d get a full week off, due to a lower demand for their products.
25 years ago - 1999
A state Rapid Response Team set up in Martinsville to help laid-off Tultex employees. Meanwhile, Bassett Walker’s vice president of human resources Carl Reynolds announced that Bassett Walker may be able to hire a couple of hundred of the 1,100 displaced Tultex workers.
Nearly 100 former Tultex Corp. employees were in the Virginia Employment Commission office by 8:30 a.m. to file for unemployment benefits. More than 1,100 Tultex employees locally had been laid off the week before.
— Information from museum records and the Henry Bulletin and the Martinsville Bulletin.