C It all began in the basement of a home on MacDonald Avenue in Belleville just a year after the war ended in Europe. With just two machines, Belleville resident Frank Hrachovec nurtured a fledgling hosiery business within the walls of his family home and by the time Foxboro resident William Andrews came on the scene in 1958, the company, which had just changed hands, had 12 employees. Andrews recalls Hrachovec was in poor health and forced to sell his business, then known as Belleville Knitters Company Limited, to two men by the name of Roy Vagg and John Denton. The partners changed the company's name to Vagden Mills and began operating the expanding company out of the modern facilities inside the building which today houses the Oddfellows Hall on the corner of Bay BENZIE Drive and SANCMA Sixth Street in the city's east Intelligencer end. Hrachovec came to this area with the Bata Shoe Company where he was employed as a foreman when he decided to begin his own hosiery business, Andrews said. "The (Bata) company had shut down their hosiery department and they had these knitting machines just sitting inside their storage and Hrachovec bought two of them to start his business with and he did very well in his new business. By the time I got here, the company was owned by Vagg and Denton," said Andrews who became a plant supervisor at the newly named Vagden Mills, Belleville's only sock factory at the time. Andrews already knew Vagg and Denton from working together at a hosiery company called Monarch Knitting in St. Catharines. It was the first company in Canada to make one-size socks, he said, adding prior to that all socks were sized differ- ently. Vagg and Denton introduced the feature into their product at their Belleville business and began to make high-end quality one-size socks. "We made socks for men, women and boys -- sports socks, golf socks, ankle-length and knee length socks. The ladies' golf socks had pom-pom on the back to hold the socks above the shoe. It helped to keep the socks from slipping under while they JOHN played golf. DENTON That brand name was Lady Palmer," recalled Andrews. Belleville resident Richard Burt was employed as a fixer at Vagden Mills when it was still located in Belleville in the early '60s. His job was to ensure the smooth operations of machinery. The site of the factory was just inside the city's eastern limits -- Herchimer Avenue -- at the time in a residential area, he said. The upper floor of the twostorey building contained offices and storage while the main floor was devoted to production. The majority of the workers in the company's knitting and sewing departments were women. "It was a good company to work for," said Burt, who went to work at the company's Trenton location for two more years after its relocation. The company's product was marketed exclusively through top menswear stores across the country, recalled Andrews. "Those stores handled nothing but branded highWILLIAM end merchanANDREWS dise and only few mills supplied to them. (The) Jack Fraser chain of menswear stores was one of them," he recalled. In the city, although the company did not have its own retail outlet, its product was available for local residents at Joe Burke's menswear store. In later years, the socks were made available at department stores such as WalMart, Sears, Eaton's, the Bay, Kmart and Zellers. Internationally, the company's socks made their way to markets in Japan, England, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the United States. With a brief exception during the 1960s when he worked in Toronto, Andrews worked at the company from 1958 to 1975. Vagden Mills had relocated to Sidney Street in Trenton during the late 1960s. The company's knitting department was still located on Bay Drive at least for a few years more, he said. By the time he left in 1975, he recalled the company employees numbered over a hundred in total. "I remember the company made so much more money in that year alone than we did in all of its history of operation. It was doing really well," recalled Andrews. The company's success in the city encouraged it to expand twice before it was forced to move to a bigger location in Trenton in 1967, five years after Vagg died unexpectedly. Denton retired from the company in 1989 and is believed to be living in the Bracebridge area. In the late '90s, the company went through some major labour problems and following a change of ownership and name, the company closed. Contact Benzie Sangma at: , bsangma@cogeco. ca £