ELLENVILLE — It's as dark a day in memory as it was hot and bright in reality.

ELLENVILLE — It's as dark a day in memory as it was hot and bright in reality.



Men and women staggered out of the building's front doors clutching their one-page walking papers:



"The last day of your employment will commence on July 30, 2004."



They streamed out of Imperial Schrade Knife's front doors with tears in their eyes and anger in their hearts. Some embraced. Some paced the property, still in shock, cursing in impotent rage.



Without warning or ceremony, without so much as a fare-thee-well, 260 workers had been turned out of jobs they'd loved and built their lives around.



The industry that had made Ellenville as famous and as prosperous as a small community can be shut its door forever 10 years ago.



Call it an anniversary of sadness. The company's vast, empty building seems emblematic of Ellenville's current economic condition: it has Ulster County's highest unemployment rate. Many of the shops that once thrived along its main streets have plywood for windows.



The workers from Schrade? They have moved on — to other places or other jobs and other lives.



To where? How many? Are they OK?



No one seems to know exactly. No one has tracked them. No one, it seems, is planning a 10-year reunion to harken back to the old days.



The village — the entire community — has moved on too.

It has gone all-in on casino gambling as the answer to its decades-long decline. It is one of nine competing proposals in a region that will get one and possibly two, casinos. Some consider the proposal for the former Nevele resort a long shot.



Ulster County Comptroller Elliott Auerbach admits to wearing rosy shades about the fate of the Nevele proposal. He may not have a choice. He's born and raised in Ellenville and has served as both its mayor and manager. He's seen the worst happen. It's given him a sharp eye for the hidden benefit, the silver lining.



***



Time was, you came to Ellenville for a good time, a good meal and maybe a stroll down crowded streets where two neon-covered movie marquees ran double features nightly, bringing a touch of Hollywood glamour to the hard-working people — plant workers, shopkeepers, housewives — who made Ellenville tick.



You wanted a bagel, a turnover, a loaf of bread? Three bakeries stood ready to serve you. Got a headache? Five drug stores took turns staying open on Sundays. Sam's was the place for a great hamburger, at a price that seems impossible today. How about a dress for the high school prom? Kaplan's Dress Shop.



It was the '50s and early '60s, cars were gas-guzzling land barges made of real steel in the U. S. of A, and Ellenville was a quintessential small American town, a microcosm of all that was good and solid and energizing about the country.



"My dad would sometimes keep his hardware store open until 11 or midnight, there was so much business," Auerbach said.



It's impossible, he said, to underestimate the impact Schrade had on the community. He grew up among the sons and daughters of blue-collar cutlers and their white-collar administrators.



"My high school girlfriend was the daughter of Schrade's purchasing agent. I went to college with the daughter of the company president."



There were other industries — Hydro and ChannelMaster among them - that drew people to the area where they bought homes and had kids who grew up in a well-regarded public school system.



But Schrade was more than a job. It was a place whose vast factory school kids visited on tours. And what the men and women of Ellenville made there was special. And it was something you could hold in your hand, a gift handed down through the generations, something many sons of Ellenville carry with them to this day.

The workmanship the company demanded and got from its workers was the bulwark that allowed it to thrive in competition with other domestic knife-makers like Camillus and Gerber and Case.



The men and women you saw shopping at Woolworth's gave Schrade its worldwide reputation for quality and excellence; they wore that knowledge with quiet pride.



In return, the company took care of its workers.



"It may be an urban legend, but the saying goes that when anyone ever asked why there was no union, the question was always 'Why?'" Auerbach recalled.



No union ever made inroads into Schrade, even as the company's fortunes began to flag in the winds of international competition in the 1990s and 2000s.



***



The Council of Industry has been around since 1910. Its mission is to promote the success of Hudson Valley manufacturers. The council's executive vice president, Harold King, says the story of Schrade's demise is a familiar one, with more than a touch of irony.



"By the late '90s, the company was facing stiff competition from offshore, places like China and Korea flooding the market with cheap knockoffs that looked high-quality but really weren't," he said.



Demand for quantity from such big-box stores like Walmart and Home Depot added further pressure to the situation, what King described as the "commodification of product."



"If you're a vendor and you want to do business with the big boys, the demand is constant, you really have to be aware of your margins."



The irony in the story, of course, lies in Schrade's fraught relation to Walmart. The world's largest employer planted a new outpost barely a mile from the empty Schrade plant in Napanoch last year. Its arrival has been the best employment news the community has seen since Schrade closed.

Could the Schrade story have been any different? The evidence from one of the company's major competitors suggests not.



The Camillus Cutlery Co., located in the Village of Camillus outside of Syracuse, has a longer pedigree than Schrade and for decades was one of its major competitors. Since the late 1940s, it was the exclusive maker of folding knives for the Boy Scouts of America. In the '60s, it manufactured highly regarded survival knives for the U.S. military.



But the same competitive winds that helped take down Schrade buffeted Camillus. According to news reports of the time, employees moved to a four-day work week in 2005 amid allegations of poor management. Later the next year, following large wage and benefit cuts, 78 workers went on strike. A lock-out ensued. The workers capitulated at the end of 2006, but only 15 of them were rehired.



Three months later, the company declared bankruptcy and in September of the same year, sold its brand names and intellectual property rights to the Acme United Corp., an international conglomerate with facilities in the United States, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong and China.



***



Walter Gardiner ran Schrade for the final 15 years of its existence. He won't talk about those days.



Within days of the company's closing, he'd hired 15 people from Schrade's custom knife department and launched Canal Street Cutlery, in the building that Schrade operated from before merging with the Imperial Knife Co. in 1985.



The inheritor of the region's once-extensive knife-making industry now employs 12 people responsible for manufacturing what Gardiner calls "semi-custom" knives for the specialty and collector markets.



Gardiner knows better than anyone the halcyon days of American-made mass-produced anything are gone and not coming back, despite the popularity of invoking those days by politicians.



The Internet wasn't a big player in manufacturing 10 years ago. It is now. And it's changed the face of manufacturing and merchandising.



"We've accomplished a lot of things, but we've not grown much," Gardiner said last week. "There's a finite amount you can do by hand."

***



Auerbach said Ellenville was always a maker of things.



"Besides Schrade, there was ChannelMaster and Hydro (Aluminum)."



A grimace. A shrug of the shoulders. A shake of the head.



"All gone."



jhorrigan@th-record.com