We'll miss you Weight Watchers!

I went to the downtown of Pottsville the other day with a sense of loss and wonder... Actually I ended up with that sense of loss and wonder after I got downtown. It involves the City's plan to demolish the historic International Weight Watchers Building. I looked across the street at the building for perhaps the last time and that is how I ended up with that sense of loss. I understood that progress will be made and a fancy new bus depot will erected there and that is where I got my sense of wonder....wondering where the passengers will come from?
Weight Watchers had been a part of Pottsville’s history and now it will be forgotten. Apparently when the Tilt Silk Mill opened in the late 1800’s it gave employment to hundreds of women. Women’s fashion was becoming big business and management shrewdly noticed that outfits worn by heavy women used more silk than those of slender women, yet the outfits cost the same amount of money. Since this was the Victorian era, a hundred years before the acceptance of hot pants, management focused on getting women to slim down. Yes! there were larger profits in clothing sales if everyone wore smaller sizes.

Weight Watchers was encouraged to open up a facility in Pottsville and the grand opening was sometime after the American Way Fair in 1892. It started off slowly with several women peeking in the door after work on payday, on their way to purchase their weekly supply of Mootz peanut rolls. It took several years for Weight Watchers to gain acceptance in the community a “large girth” was seen as a sign of affluence. After World War I thinness was whispered to be a codeword for creeping Bolshevism. “Better well fed than Red” was a slogan yelled by angry pickets along Centre Street as nervous chubby women wandered into the structure now known as the “International Weight Watchers Building” or IWW. Membership increased to the point that the District Attorney’s office was pressured to do something. Husbands demanded action as thin wives were less likely to be able to do the normal hours of household chores expected of them. The District Attorney had one his detectives - McParlan I believe - infiltrate the IWW; before long deportations were commenced, nearly breaking the back of the IWW.
The IWW building saw a decrease in activity during the depression as whenever one is depressed one tends to eat more. Yes, you heard me correctly….when people are depressed they tend to eat abnormally large amounts of food in a short period of time, even when not hungry. Thus, it was during this great depression that the citizenry tended to pack on the pounds as never before. Some say that Schuylkill County has never recovered from the Great Depression and that is why obesity is still a major concern.

In any event the group running the IWW Building began to relish (no pun intended) its image as a subversive organization. Soon the building’s façade underwent a transformation to its present stunning features. Some say the building reminds one of a giant sardine can with its subliminal message of promoting the consumption of fish. Yes, believe it or not, some people actually think that fish dinners are a healthier alternative to ring bologna and try to hoist this hoax upon the good people of the county. Other critics stated that the architecture of the new facade was pure Khrushchovka found only within the bowels of the Soviet Union during the 1950s. Now demands for more deportations flooded the district attorneys office but the county detectives reported back that nearly all of the women attending the IWW meetings were born in Schuylkill County. Deportations would be fruitless as the ensuing Charlie McCarthy hearings proved to the county.

Yes, I have a sense of loss now. The Tilt Silk Mill has been gone for decades with the local garment industry replaced by cheap labor in China, making cheap clothes for the cheap American women to wear 24/7. And now the IWW Building in downtown Pottsville will be knocked down leaving me only distant memories of the pretty chubby women who once graced the Centre Street premises, parading about in their made-in-America stylish silk garments. I will think of them and that sardine can building often as I try and ease my sense of loss over shots and beers at the Eagles Club.Please join me.