Industry
Far and away the single most important industries in the 1920s through the mid-1950s was concentrated on the creation of textile and woven fabrics needed by the manufacturers of clothing, linen, draperies, parachutes, etc. plus curtains, towels, wash clothes, car seat covers, raincoats, tents, etc., etc.
Large -scale textile production plants (as many as 13 at one time) employing hundredths of industrious and mostly able-bodied individuals (men, women and young children), who were willing to work 12 to 16 hour-long daily shifts Monday through Friday (half-day shifts on Saturday and Sundays off) successfully had created the Lowell of old, a Massachusetts manufacturing super-center, that was the envy of ambitious and well-healed industrialists from all over the planet.
The overarching, clanking and ubiquitous machinery consisting of interlocking subsystems of grinding mechanical wheels, pulleys, levers, chains and leather straps, which were all coupled to power sources such as steam engines or electric motors played a noisy but remarkably harmonious melody of productive output.
Fortuitously, the owners of this huge layout of inter-operatively connected hardware (software was yet to make an impact on economic benefits associated with fabric production) physically located in adjacent buildings had, in addition, a captive, crippled audience of indigent, distressed, hungry, low-skilled, poorly-educated, former peasant farmers from countries far away such as Ireland, Greece, Quebec, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and other lands of broken economies and socioeconomic distress.
Poverty and an ever-present, internal fear that one’s personal situation at home could, very likely, become even more impossible to bear with, perhaps, a bed-ridden, ailing spouse and six shoeless children (ages: two to eleven) playing on cobblestone streets graced with ample quantities of horse dung (automobiles arrived in the 1930s) plus sand, pebbles and many broken shards of glass (plastic containers happened later) served as a salient stimulus in the work-life of every responsible, God-fearing parent.