|
|
 I was born in Mexico City to Jack Martin, a Scot - "Scotch whiskey is Scotland's second biggest export, " my father always said - who with my mother Ethel took the first freighter leaving Scotland after the end of World War II and hired on as a salesman and auditor with Mexico's Compania de Maquinas de Coser Singer.
The Singer Company became my father's passion, his religion.
One of the recurring memories of my childhood is going for long Sunday drives in the countryside, my father nodding and waving to everyone we passed. Slowing down to pass a campesino on a burro, he'd lean out the window, greeting him jovially with a "que tal compadre, como esta?" "Daddy, do you know that man?" my sisters and I would ask. "There are only two types of people in the world," my father would invariably reply, "Singer customers and future Singer customers."
 When I was seven we moved to Ecuador, where my father became head of sales, the only foreigner in the operation. Less than two years later we moved to Peru, and from there to Venezuela, then to Colombia, and finally to Argentina, where my father ran the company operations for three years.
He left Argentina because Singer fired him, along with many of its foreign managers, when the company began to diversify its assets in the late 1960s. Believing that the sewing machine was becoming obsolete, Singer began manufacturing missiles, embraced Star Wars, and eventually divested itself almost completely of its sewing machine holdings.
My father was fired when he was still young enough to get a job with another multinational back in Mexico and build up another pension. His friends, colleagues and bosses who remained with Singer weren't so fortunate. They lost their pensions, and their savings in the company, when Singer fell prey to ruthless corporate raiders beginning in the 1980s. Many remain on the sidelines watching, with anger and dismay, the tragic dissolution of the company they once served so proudly.
The Singer Company has changed hands many times in the last two decades, and its archives have largely been lost. The company was run more like a private family firm than a public company, and so its history is linked to that of the twelve men who steered the great Singer ship over the 154 years of its existence. The story is also that of the small army of agents, salesmen and executives, like my father, who were deployed by Singer to take the machine to the remotest parts of the world and into the grandest, and the most modest, of households.
The story, finally, is that of the sewing machine itself. Millions of Singer sewing machines, simple, sturdy, and practical, made their way around the globe, transforming the humblest of lives and affecting the economy, social fabric and culture of virtually every nation. Many of these stories are dramatic, and most have not been told.
The Singer Company marketed the sewing machine as "the Great Civilizer," taking progress and civilization to the furthest corners of the world. I am writing The Great Civilizer: The Singer Sewing Machine and the Modern World. My story, and that of my family, is the entry point. I was raised in the shadow of this giant corporation, which took precedence over our lives, and witnessed its private as well as its public face, all over South America, in Scotland, and later in Canada. My family spent several summers at the old Singer Lodge, built in the 1920s for Singer executives near the historic town of Singer, Quebec, and Canada has since become my home.
I hope you'll follow my adventures as I slowly expand this site, in particular The Singer Empire page, to reflect in more detail Singer's impact around the world. The Singer story is in many ways the back-story of globalism, and it is a grand and sobering tale.
If you have Singer stories of your own, of the importance the machine had in your family's life, of Singer salesmen and executives, or of the cultural and social impact the Singer company had on your own country, I'd like to hear them. I will edit and post some of the stories on the "Your stories" page.
 Jack Martin and colleague in the Mexican countryside.
I'm also looking for more examples of Singer's international advertising, newspaper and magazine ads and postcards, and photographs of company stores and businesses, particularly in remote locations, as well as for company records and unpublished memoirs of its salesmen and agents. All help in tracking down this material, and any stories that I use in The Great Civilizer: The Singer Sewing Machine and the Modern World, will be gratefully acknowledged in my book.
|
|
 |
|
|
top
Privacy Policy Site Map