A Rochester Democrat and Chronicle newspaper article Dated

The Gleasons
A Rochester Democrat and Chronicle newspaper article
Dated March 7, 1999
The Rochester Living Section C
Pages 1C, 6C, 7C entitled, “The Gleasons”
By Staff Writer
Mark Liu
This document uses the above mentioned article. The next three pages are photo copies
of the actual newspaper pages. For readability this is followed by a nine page reprint of
the actual text of “The Gleasons” story and then followed by pages of the photographs
that appeared in the newspaper article.
The Gleasons
Irish famine, American feast:
A saga of a family's travails and triumphs
BY STAFF WRITER
MARK LIU
According to family legend, the Gleasons used to put clumps of peat moss on their
dinner plates to practice cutting with a knife. In case they could ever afford meat.
And those were the good days. When the potato blight swept Ireland in the 1840s, entire
villages starved to death. Many more people died in the ensuing typhus epidemic, one of
the worst in history. The Irish clung to one hope for survival, emigration.
William Gleason was a survivor. In 1848, when he was 12, his widowed mother sold
what little she had so the family could leave County Tipperary for Canada.
Three years later, still struggling, they pinned their hopes on one of the era's biggest
boom towns: Rochester N.Y. The city was making history. Its flour mills were
feeding the nation. The Erie Canal had opened up major trade. Susan B Anthony and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton were planting the seeds of the women’s rights movement.
The Gleasons would soon make their own mark.
Today, it's easy to mistake the family's low-key image for modest influence.
The two-story Gleason Corp building at 1000 University Ave., with its beautiful
neoclassical facade, doesn’t shout its importance. It looks more like a museum than a
factory. Nor does the Gleason Foundation trumpet its many contributions to the
community but the truth belies the image.
“There's not an institution here that hasn't been touched through the company or the
foundation." says Thomas Mooney, president of the Greater Rochester Metro Chamber
of Commerce.
The Gleason story is one of a family coming together through desperate times, but also
coming apart during good limes. It's a story of a daughter who became famous by being
decades ahead of her time, and a great-grandson who turned the company around when
it was heading toward possible ruin.
Mostly, it’s a story of how a family persevered and changed and helped change, the
world.
Hard times, hard work
Tipperary, where William Gleason was born in 1836, was one of three Irish counties that
would be most devastated by the potato famine. His father left for Canada to make a
better life for his family. But before his family could join him, he died fighting in a
militia.
Mary Gleason and her two young sons had to move into a two-room cottage on her
brothers' land, with a small plot to farm and little else. When the blight came, even the
land became useless.
Mary had never been “further than her own feet or a donkey cart could carry her."
according to a family account. But at age 58, she and the boys embarked on a six-week
ordeal: passage on the ship Good Hope, bound for New York City, then on to Canada to
join relatives.
Their survival was far from assured. The year before, more than 75,000 Irish
had left for Canada; 20,000 died from typhus at sea or upon docking.
The last leg of the trip, from Oswego to Kingston, Canada, took the Gleasons across
Lake Ontario on a cold November night. They spent all night on deck, huddled under a
feather blanket for warmth. The boat had no cabins.
Three years later, the family crossed the lake again, in search of opportunity.
By the time the Gleasons arrived in Rochester, nearly half of the city's more than 7,500
families were headed by foreign-born citizens; of those, 45 percent were Irish. AntiIrish sentiment grew with the population, and most Irish immigrants were lucky to find
jobs as laborers.
At 15, his first year in Rochester, William Gleason started picking berries on a
farm where St. Mary's Hospital stands today, then apprenticed at a machine shop
and attended school at night. Soon he was supporting a wife and son as well. His
wife died just a few years ago.
He wanted to enlist during the Civil War, but his older brother, James, was already in
army service and someone had to support the family. In 1863, when James was running
a Union supply locomotive, Confederates placed debris on the tracks. The train derailed
and James was killed. He was 30.
William became the sole breadwinner. He remarried, then started his true life's work,
opening a machine-tool shop at Brown's Race in 1865. That year the Gleasons had a
daughter, Kate, who would one day change the course of the family business. The tool
shop was short-lived, and in 1872 William became a machinist for the Kidd Iron Works at
Brown's Race. But he soon made a remarkable invention: the bevel gear planer, which
would replace the inconsistent hand-cutting of gears for transmitting power
It was too cutting-edge for the Iron Works, which decided not to finance it. William's story
might have ended there, but he ignored the "experts" and financed it himself.
The patent was granted in 1874. The first bevel gear planer operated continuously for the
next 45 years. Henry Ford would request it for his museum in Michigan, where it stands
today.
In 1875, Gleason bought out the company that refused to produce his invention. But
building new machines was expensive, and he still had to rely on tool making to eke out
an existence.
He had worked for decades to support his family. Now he would rely on his family to
make his business prosper.
Kate saves the day
The Gleasons had escaped famine and a typhus epidemic by coming to America. But in
1877, William's son from his first marriage, Tom, contracted typhus and died.
It was more than a personal tragedy. Tom had been William’s shop assistant, and there
was no money to hire another. Daughter Kate was only 11; the boys James and Andrew,
were younger. William lamented lo his wife. "If only Kate had been a boy”
“Seven little words that changed the course of history for the Gleason family,”
observed the Jan Gleason, wife of William's great grandson, in a talk about Kate last
year.
Kate overheard her father's remark and showed up the next day at the shop to work.
William had to consider this strangest of ideas. Hire an 11-year-old? And a girl?
But he'd always been an independent thinker. He sent his children to public instead of
Catholic school. After disapproving church officials seated him in the back row, he
never set fool in the Catholic church again.
Soon Kate was the shop's bookkeeper. Neighbors were shocked, but Kate wasn't. Her
mother had befriended Susan B. Anthony and other suffragists, and their ideas were
rubbing off on Kate.
Eager to help the family business, Kate became the first woman in the engineering
program at Cornell University. But at the end of her freshman year, she received a letter
from her father asking her to come home.
Business was bad "Some times it seems to paralyze me." he wrote "You have not any
conception of the feeling that it has produced in me …I am ashamed to tell of it."
Disappointed, Kate returned to work for her father — and vowed to do better than the
men she had to leave behind at Cornell.
At 22, she went on her first sales trip, to Ohio — alone.
"William had been very reluctant to let her go on that trip because he was afraid that she
would be laughed at," Jan Gleason noted.
But Kate had unusual charm and a knack for self-promotion. Susan R Anthony had told
her that "any advertising is good." Whether it’s praise or blame, never stop being talked
about.
Her first sales call was on a man “not used to girls, so I managed to make a ‘crush’ on
him quite early in the morning,” Kate wrote to her brother. She got the order that
afternoon.
By then, America's oil industry was clamoring for Gleason machines. The business was
thriving. But in 1889 it went up in smoke; a fire burned Gleason Works to the ground.
William, past 50 but as tenacious as ever, saw the fire as a chance to start over with
better machine designs. The family worked furiously to keep customers and fill orders
while they rebuilt.
When an economic panic hit the country in 1893, Kate was ailing and. had been advised
to take time off from work, Instead, she booked passage on a steamer — the only
woman on board — and set off in a sales trip to Europe, where foreign orders could help
save the company She was only 27.
This "global marketing" put Kate many decades ahead of her time. She returned from
Europe with orders from England, Scotland, France and Germany. Eventually,
Gleason's foreign sales would grow to three-fourths of its business.
Fame and its discontents
Kate was becoming famous. She knew Thomas Edison and George Eastman. Henry
Ford became a customer and a friend. As automobiles became popular, Gleason Works
became indispensable.
Yet while the company was achieving big things, people were confusing them with the
achievements of their best salesman — a woman.
Kate's brother James studied at Cornell and invented numerous machines for the
company, but she got the credit for it "out there." where legends arc made. It was good
for business, but not for sibling rivalry.
William had been gradually turning the business over to his children (except Eleanor,
the youngest, who never worked for the company). But James and Andrew lacked flair;
staid, introverted, all business, they had little in common with Kate, who used to put
novels in a prayer book to read on the sly.
Tensions grew along with sales until one day in 1913, Andrew announced that either she
had to go or he would. Kate, knowing she was better suited than her brother for life
outside Gleason Works, resigned.
William died nine years later. His little shop had grown to an industrial company of 600
employees, buoyed in part by the machinery needs of World War I.
James became president. Andrew became vice president and treasurer. The family
business was secure - for the lime being.
Pillars of the community
The automobile industry burgeoned after the turn of the century.
A Rochesterian, George B. Selden had been the first in the world to file a patent
application for a complete automobile. James Cunningham, an Irish immigrant who
settled in Rochester, had hundreds of employees producing a full line of automobiles.
From the start, Gleason machines made the gears that made cars move.
"They really defined the technology for the world," says David Cole, director of the
office for the Study of Automotive Transportation at the University of Michigan.
“This was a very important company in the revolution of the automobile.”
James and Andrew became true businessmen. The list of James' achievements goes on
and on: president of the Chamber of Commerce, a founder of the Industrial
Management Council and several national industrial societies, charter member of the
Community Chest (the forerunner of The United Way), trustee of the University of
Rochester, winner of numerous awards.
He belonged to the Genesee Valley Club, whose members came from Rochester’s most
successful families. He was a friend of George Eastman and lived just a few blocks
away in his own East Avenue mansion.
The Gleasons had arrived.
They had their indulgences: James would get a new Cadillac every year. But they had
also learned from their father not to flaunt success. During the Depression, James still
got his new Cadillac, but he had it painted to look like the old one so nobody would
know.
James married and had a son, but he seems to have been a better businessman than
family man. He and his wife, Miriam, were seldom seen together. Each would call the
Genesee Valley Club to make sure the other wasn't there before going to eat.
Their son, E. Blakeney Gleason, went to Harvard Business School. He was the heir
apparent to the empire, and it showed. He was a world traveler and a lifelong bachelor
with a full Wine cellar. He lived well and drank hard. One Rochester club banned him
for enjoying himself a bit too much.
Andrew, meanwhile, had seven children, who were forbidden to speak the name "Kate"
in the house.
But Kate was still making waves in the world. She remained Independent, declining
100 marriage proposals over her lifetime. (She favored engagements but not marriage,
which would have slowed her down.)
In 1917 she became the first woman in America to be named president of a bank - the
First National Bank off East Rochester. She also was the first woman elected to the
American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
She built several low-cost housing developments in East Rochester, Including one using
a poured-concrete method she designed and patented. It earned her a most unlikely
honor. She became the sole female member of the American Concrete Institute.
She developed land in San Francisco, then had to sell it to make way for the Golden Gale
bridge. She was working to establish an artists' colony in South Carolina when she died
in 1933.
Red ink — and salvation
Andrew stayed at Gleason Works until 1934, when he retired and moved to Virginia.
Only one of his children, Lawrence, joined the company.
That left James to run the show during World War II, when Gleason Works made parts
for bomb sights, aerial cameras, PT boats and aircraft. Company employment more than
doubled to 1,800.
James became chairman of the board in 1947 and never missed a day at the office His
son. E. Blakeney, succeeded him as president but died in 1958.
Gleason Works remained a family business: Andrew's son Lawrence was promoted lo
president. Well aware of the family legacy, Lawrence wrote to his oldest son, James, and
asked him to join. James had studied philosophy at Princeton, graduated and was
working in the Far East.
"I had no intentions of joining the company," says James, silting in his Gleason Corp.
office "But when your name is on the front of the building, it makes a difference.”
James, like his father, started out in the foundry and worked his way up. He was
working there in 1964 when his great-uncle, James E., died in his office before 5 pm on a
work day. He was 95.
In 1968, the family business became a public company. When Lawrence retired soon
after, a non-family member became president for the first time.
That changed in 1980, when James was unexpectedly named president
He faced a big task. Like many companies at the time, Gleason Corp. had diversified too
much and was suffering because if it. Throughout the 1980s, the firm lost money and
struggled to fend off hostile takeover bids.
James, known to his employees as “Jim” decided to refocus on what his great-grandfather had started more than 100 years before: building machines to cut gears.
By 1990, the company had turned around and become profitable again. The James S.
Gleason era was officially and finally a success.
The last Gleason
The family continued to influence Rochester through the Gleason Foundation,
established from family estates to benefit charities and education. Engineering students
at the Rochester Institute of Technology sit in the James E. Gleason building and
graduate from the Kate Gleason School of Engineering.
But the family members themselves, all descended from Andrew, scattered across the
country. A few Gleasons remain in the area, including Andrew's son William and five of
his grandchildren.
Remnants of the rift between Andrew and Kate remain. Andrew's namesake, a grandson
who lives in Penfield and who was born about the time of Kale's death, describes her as
“goofier than a s___ house rat.”
Jim is the only Gleason working for the company. This year he'll turn 65, and though he
has no immediate plans to retire, he says it's highly unlikely that either of his daughters
or any other Gleason will ever run the company.
Today Gleason Corp. numbers 2,600 employees worldwide; just over 900 work at the 30acre Rochester headquarters. It's one of the area's mainstays, but staying in costly New
York state isn't a given, says Jim Gleason.
After all, if the Gleason story proves anything, it's that a will to succeed leads lo change.
When James E Gleason died in 1964, Rochesterians were hanging out of their windows
to watch the funeral procession of the man declared “The first Citizen of Rochester.”
Less than a year later, wrecking balls were smashing through his East Avenue mansion
to make way for the offices of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union.
A worker at the demolition said at the time, "That's progress. Nothing stays the same."
Information for this story came from Gleason family and newspaper
accounts, interviews with Jim and Jan Gleason, historical research from
the city historian office and published interviews.