Hometown Heroes: Decades

Kayla Dwyer/The Morning Call

A decades-old computerized cutting machine in the back of the facility is being used to cut many mask shapes at once.

April Gamiz/The Morning Call

Hometown Heroes - Employees of Lisa Enterprises hold up face masks they are making for hospitals amid the covid-19 pandemic. Lisa Enterprises is in the same building as same building of the former Mary Fashion Mfg Co. in Bath.

Kayla Dwyer/The Morning Call

Lisa Enterprises, which occupies the former factory of Mary Fashion in Bath, is using synthetic, non-woven materials to sew thousands of masks for healthcare workers.

Kayla Dwyer/The Morning Call

A photo from inside the Mary Fashion Manufacturing factory in Bath before it closed in 1994.

April Gamiz/The Morning Call

When a 51/2-year-old Fiorella Reginelli Mirabito stepped off a plane with her two parents, two suitcases and her little doll in 1968, she cried, because she could no longer understand the radio she carried.

Sponsored by her great uncle, they emigrated from Italy to work in a garment factory, one that would become as synonymous with the borough of Bath as Bethlehem Steel was to its namesake city.

Mary Fashion Manufacturing is the reason she's here, she says, in the little borough of which she's now mayor. It became one of Bath's largest employers, and a place for her and her cousins to grow up, run around, get yelled at, and work.

The garment business went through many iterations before shuttering in 1994, one of many casualties of a fading industry. A sister business founded in 1985, Lisa Enterprises, kept on, now occupying the former Mary Fashion building and remaining a family affair.

Its latest iteration, amid the coronavirus crisis, involved taking out some old equipment from the old days of garment-making by hand and single-needle machine. Now they’re fashioning face masks for hospitals.

"We’re professional pivoters," said Dante Fantozzi, Mirabito's cousin, the current owner of Lisa Enterprises and the son of one of Mary Fashion's founders, Al Fantozzi.

‘We couldn't do nothing’

In the Mulberry Street building's main 10,000-square-foot factory space, less than 10 workers plug away at spaced-apart sewing machines, elastic line tackers, stamping stations, and quality control checks.

That's only a handful more than worked there before, in what's now a chiefly product-development, prototype-making company for clientele like military or biochemical subcontractors.

Like other non-life-sustaining businesses, Lisa Enterprises shut down by state order in mid-March. But Fantozzi and a skeleton crew started prototyping an idea for a fitted mask that would resemble an N95, though it wouldn't rise to that level of filtration. The vision was to create something health care workers could grab if there were no N95 masks available, something that fit better than a typical fabric mask.

"We couldn't do nothing," he said. "We knew we had the skill set and the capability to do something."

After forming a relationship with Lehigh Valley Health Network and enlisting the help of a congressional representative, they took the mission to the governor's office and got a waiver to convert themselves to a mask-making shop.

And so a largely high-tech company transformed back into an iteration of its former self.

When the coronavirus pandemic shut everything down, Fantozzi had been in the middle of decommissioning the 30-year-old computerized cutting machines in the back of the facility in order to convert that section to a self-storage unit. Reversing course, he revved up one large machine, along with some older sewing machines covered with inches of dust.

He started bringing his main crew of a half-dozen workers back by mid-April and has since hired another half-dozen temporary workers, some part-time. Held up by delays in the supply chain, they shipped their first 1,000 masks to LVHN last week and are now producing masks at a rate of 1,000 a day.

The price for which they’re selling them to the hospital — less than a dollar a mask — only covers the cost of material and labor, meaning the company loses some money in the process.

Fantozzi bought enough material to make at least 100,000 masks, or up to 250,000 if he can order a little more of one of the synthetic fabrics.

"Until LVHN says they don't want them, we’ll keep making them and find somewhere to give them," he said.

Even the temporary help includes members and friends of his extended family, like Elda Hunsberger, who was one of the first to raise her hand when Mirabito spread the word.

"This is very relaxing, though," she said Friday, sewing the seams of one mask at a time, seamlessly into the next.

‘Everyone knows Mary's’

That's been the history of Lisa Enterprises, and Mary Fashion — one of evolution.

When Fantozzi's grandparents emigrated from Italy in the late 1940s, they first landed in New Jersey for a few months. Fantozzi's father worked in a candy factory, his uncle, Dino, in a bakery. Neither had any experience in sewing or tailoring when they opened up a small garment operation in a garage of Wunderler's Market in Bath, incorporating officially in 1952.

"They started in a garage and did that whole American dream thing," Fantozzi said.

Mary Fashion, named for Fantozzi's grandmother Maria, opened as a blouse mill, providing the labor for the apparel business with no more than a half dozen operators.

The business outgrew the garage, moving to a factory on Main Street in 1962 and to the Mulberry Street factory in 1974. Every day after school, the bus would drop Fantozzi off not at home, but at the factory. He and his sisters, and their cousins and many other school kids, worked summers there into adulthood.

"This was part of our lives as a kid," he said. "It was almost a rite of passage."

The kids would do kid jobs like buttoning blouses and putting them in bags, said Vincent Fantozzi, another cousin who now owns East Penn Self Storage. Garment-making was one of the most common forms of employment back then.

"It seemed when I was in school everyone's mom worked in the garment factory, everyone's dad worked in Bethlehem Steel," he said.

The Mary Fashion Manufacturing insignia still decorates the building now home to Lisa Enterprises, which Fantozzi's father named in 1985 after his daughter, Fantozzi's sister.

"Everyone knows Mary's," Dante Fantozzi explained. "In some ways, Lisa is our best-kept secret."

Dante Fantozzi stayed, even while getting a business degree at Moravian College. Vincent Fantozzi splintered off, founding his own garment company, Enzo Manufacturing in Northampton in 1981, which closed in 2004.

In its heyday in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Mary Fashion's Bath plant employed 350 operators, plus 100 sewers at an old factory building across the street, about 100 sewers at a satellite plant in Bethlehem and another 50 or so in Elizabethtown.

The mid-1960s was the peak of garment manufacturing jobs in Pennsylvania, numbering 185,000, according to the state Department of Labor & Industry.

While Mary Fashion stuck to sewing, Al Fantozzi founded Lisa Enterprises in the 1980s, to focus on the budding computer-aided design industry, providing services like pattern-making and computerized cutting.

Even in that time, Fantozzi said, there was still a garment factory on every street corner, it seemed. The tiny borough of Bath had at least four, he recalls.

Meanwhile, Mary Fashion shifted to private label services, providing packages for department stores like Macy's and J.C. Penney.

In 1988, this new era of computerized garment-making attracted a visit from Miss America 1989, Gretchen Carlson, who also made stops at Faberge in Northampton and Greif Companies and Bru-Mar, both of Allentown.

Mary Fashion closed down in 1994, along with many other textile mills following trade agreements that made the overseas labor market competitive.

Lisa Enterprises today, pre-COVID-19, is a product developer for textile clients, often military subcontractors. They make prototypes for testing, which are then sent to some other manufacturers to be made at scale.

The company has done some medical prototyping, but has never worked directly with clientele in the health care industry.

"This was all totally new to us," Fantozzi said.

The goal was simply to answer a need, he said. Even if the need changes — perhaps hospitals no longer need masks, but headbands instead — he’ll pivot.

"We’re pretty nimble, that's our thing," he said. "I’m making this thing up as I go along."

Morning Call reporter Kayla Dwyer can be reached at 610-820-6554 or at [email protected].

There are plenty of heroes emerging from the coronavirus outbreak and we want to hear about them. If you know of a Hometown Hero, let us know at mcall.com/heroes and we’ll be happy to let the world know about them.

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