By David Harry

Staff Writer 

Understanding Biddeford in the heyday of the mill era requires knowing what a soda jerk was.

For Saco resident John Anagnostis, pulling tap handles as a soda jerk, his father’s store helped keep him from working at Pepperell Mill.

For workers who came into the store from when it opened at 7 a.m. until it closed at midnight, the soda he served might have relieved a thirst caused by hot and dusty work.

Anagnostis was 11 when he began working at the Olympia Fruit Stand his father Efstratios “Sam” Anagnostis owned. Not thrilled by working in the summer, he said he complained once.

So father and son walked across the Saco River to where Sam Anagnostis worked before opening his store with three partners.

“The first thing that hit me was the clatter. Then there was all the lint flying around,” John Anagnostis recalled about visiting the looms at Pepperell Mill. He said he never complained about working at the store again.

Raymond Gaudette retired from Westpoint Stevens in 2000 having spent more than 40 years at Pepperell Mill and Westpoint Stevens. Unlike Anagnostis, he wanted to work at the mill because the $1.43 hourly wage and overtime were good for raising the family he and his wife Yvette were starting in the late 1950s.

“My friends told me that was where the money was,” Gaudette said, although his father, who worked as a stone mason and then a butcher, did not approve of his career choice.

Gaudette’s assessment of working environment matches what Anagnostis remembered from one trip.

Early on, Gaudette said he was a “doffer” who changed bobbins filled with spun thread in temperatures that could reach 120 degrees in the summer.

He was assigned 30 frames of bobbins to change, switching 10 at a time.

“We would have contests to see who could go fastest,” he said.

From spinning the thread to weaving the finished sheets and blankets, Pepperell Mills employed thousands of workers that supported businesses up and down Main Street and across the Saco River.

Some stayed for decades, their longevity lauded in a company magazine called The Pepperell Sheet that detailed news from company plants in Biddeford, Lewiston, Fall River, Mass.; Lindale, Ga.; and Opelika, Ala.

For about a decade beginning in the late 1930s, the tasks, lives and activities of mill workers were chronicled in the magazine. Pictures and features showed men playing on baseball and hockey teams. They wore ties when they bowled.

Women vied for the chance to become “Miss Pepperell,” with a $100 first prize or a chance to spend a weekend in Boston with their husband, mother or a female friend.

Some who began at the mill saw the work as a way to save money for a business of their own.

“Franco Americans opened stores on every corner,” Gaudette recalled.

Individual stores often catered to the Irish, Italian, English or Greek neighborhoods they were located, but at least one found ways to serve everyone who came through the door.

Cynthia Mantis bought a market on Alfred Street with her sister Stella Taliento in 1960. She said she was familiar with the operation – she grew up above the store with six siblings and purchased the store from her brothers.

Her father emigrated from Greece in 1904, and her mother arrived in 1929. She said her father and his brothers spoke French, and expanded their inventory to include food for the divergent ethnic groups in town.

Especially popular were the rye breads that arrived on Sundays as parishioners were leaving church.

“People came out of church and went crazy for the bread,” Mantis said. “We had bags lined up all along the counter.”

Hungry customers came from many churches, built with money contributed from mill workers.

“We paid for the church with nickels and dimes we made from the mills,” Anagnostis said about the creation of St. Demetrios, the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrating its centennial this year.

The church was established in a decade when faith hit a growth spurt in Biddeford. Increases in the Franco-American population led to the construction of St. Andre’s Church, the third Catholic church to serve Biddeford parishioners, said Paula Moses of St. Joseph’s Parish, which serves Biddeford and Saco.

Temple Etz Chaim opened its synagogue in 1907 to serve a Jewish community comprised of Poles, Lithuanians and Russians, according to temple historian Jennie Aranovitch.

While the congregation was not comprised of many mill workers, Aranovitch said Jewish immigants from Lithuania, Poland and Russia came to Biddeford to work as peddlers.

Their eventual prosperity led to 38 Jewish-owned businesses in Biddeford and Saco in 1950, Aranovitch said in her history of the congregation prepared for its centennial celebration.

Linked in a congregation that uses the Julian instead of Gregorian calendar, Anagnostis said he noticed the religious divergence at the holidays. 

“We would go back from winter vacation and may not have celebrated Christmas yet. And there was no Easter bunny,” Anagnostis said.

At work, worshippers formed a mixed working population.

“I can name 12 or 15 languages I heard there,” Gaudette said.

Anagnostis, 79, and Gaudette, 72, were raised in neighborhoods inhabited by immigrants and their children with common origins.

Gaudette was raised near Water Street in Biddeford.

“People would pitch horseshoes out back and play pinochle,” Gaudette said about his neighborhood. “We all congregated and talked politics.”

Anagnostis grew up on Storer Street in Saco. 

“I remember the odors in the summer – the fried lamb chops. The neighborhood just wafted of these very nice smells,” he said.

The bridge over the Saco River was a defining boundary.

Anagnostis said after classes at public school each day, he crossed the river to attend more classes at St. Demetrios.

“There was always a group of French kids at the bridge. We had some terrible fights and snowball fights,” he said.

Anagnostis left Saco to teach in Virginia and Massachusetts. Gaudette moved away from the river to a single-family home on Dupont Avenue 37 years ago.

By that time, Mantis and Gaudette could see changes coming to downtown Biddeford. Mills were closing in Sanford as Gaudette began working at Pepperell Mill in the late 1950s. A long layoff in 1970 led to a new job at Westpoint Stevens, where he mixed chemicals and dyes.

“We grew up in the store and we thought our children would grow up in the store,” Mantis said, but then larger chain stores began staying open to later hours.

In 1981 the Maine Department of Transportation took T Sisters Market through eminent domain proceedings as part of the redesign of downtown streets.

Sam Anagnostis sold his store, but offered it to his son first. John Anagnostis said he preferred to continue teaching.

“You just made a very wise choice,” he recalled his father telling him.

Staff writer David Harry can be reached at 282-4337, ext. 241