Factory

They'll be locking up the doors and turning out the lights for the last time tomorrow at the old Frank H. Fleer Co. factory in Olney. The closing comes two months after the announcement that the old-line Philadelphia business was relocating its gum division south and contracting out all card-related activities. I spent the first couple of weeks of December telling people I wasn't moving to Mississippi and Fleer was not going out of business. It looked that way, I must admit, when one local TV station announced "the Fleer baseball card company was closing its doors forever" and area newspapers made much about the company leaving the area for good.

Annie Carpenter sat in a courtroom and listened yesterday as a businessman offered $2.2 million "cash money" for the assets of the Burlington City tin- box factory where she'd worked for 40 years and lost four fingers. And she listened as another businessman offered less - $2.04 million - but also promised a judge he'd reopen the Atlantic Cheinco plant and give jobs back to Carpenter and a hundred other laid-off men and women. The judge liked the sound of "cash money. " So, at 2:40 p.m. yesterday, Carpenter, who lost her fingers 32 years ago to Atlantic Cheinco's powerful stamping machinery, who kept working to raise five children alone and to pay off her mortgage, also lost her job. In stunned silence, she and about 20 other Cheinco employees filed from the third-floor courtroom in Camden when U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Rosemary Gambardella's decision ended two days of hearings.

While Ryan, Austin and Nolan Terrell show off their Batman toys and new radios, Wanda Terrell, the boys' mother, talks about the sickly lead scent that fills the air outside their Blackwood home. "You can't help but wonder if there's something in the air that could affect them," Terrell said. On Aug. 2, representatives of the Camden County Division of Health went door to door to collect blood samples from her three boys and six other neighborhood children. In a few days, she will learn whether the children have been contaminated by lead emissions from nearby Urban Casting plant.

Jim McCabe was looking for a subject that would make a meaningful play for the people of the Trenton area. "What was in my mind was the Revolutionary War. I knew there were battles fought here," said the playwright, a Dallas native. But when McCabe asked a Trentonian what he thought, the answer had nothing to do with George Washington's crossing the Delaware to fight the Battle of Trenton. "He said one word," McCabe recalled, "and that was Roebling. " As in John A. Roebling's Sons, the manufacturer of steel cable that for more than a century was one of Trenton's most prominent industries and for many years was the city's largest employer.

Down on the factory floor, where it smells of sweat and soldered metal, Alain Hauvel is counting the days until he goes on the dole. "Never thought such a thing could happen here," he muttered the other day. "Never could have imagined it. " He tapped a foot, took a puff and stole a glance at the assembly line, where the women busied themselves with the next batch of vacuum cleaners. Within the year, they will all be on the street. Hauvel had a good deal while it lasted. He had worked his way up to supervisor.

At the height of the Cold War, the Krasnoye Sormovo shipbuilding plant here produced a submarine every 10 days. Now, all work on the subs has ceased: The government won't even give factory director Nikolai Zharkov the money he needs to cut his half-built submarines into scrap. Across town, at the factory that makes the famed MiG warplanes, government production orders have slowed to a trickle, and plant director Vladimir Pomolov is seeking foreign buyers for his modern, $30 million MiG-31s.

When he graduated from Cherry Hill High School, Elmo Gibb, who was named after naval hero Elmo Zumwalt, could juggle "in several foreign languages" and play the balalaika. With these credentials, there were any number of careers he could have chosen. Gibb said he earned a college degree from the "Clayton Academy of Fine Arts and Vinyl Upholstery" and got his first job at the Penn Carbon Brush factory in Northeast Philadelphia. When the factory closed, he took what he thought was the logical next step.

The evening sky above this drab mill town's patched roofs and tarnished steeples is a Van Gogh swirl of pink and blue. Just off deserted Main Street, in the parking lot behind a rusting factory, a caravan of worn cars and pickup trucks arrives. Coaches emerge first, beefy men with thick legs, thicker bellies and close-cropped hair. They carry clipboards, and their swagger betrays their status in this football-mad region. Following slowly, moving in packs, are a few dozen high school players, muscular teenagers in numbered T-shirts, baseball caps, bandanas and shorts.

VERNA TYNER was 10 when her family moved to Venango Street in Tioga 40 years ago. "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven," Tyner said of her new home. "It was just a gorgeous, beautiful neighborhood. The lawns were manicured. The trees were trimmed. " But as Tyner grew up, the neighborhood fell down. Dozens of factories that dotted Tioga, Nicetown and Allegheny West began closing, putting thousands of people out of work. Among them: the Budd Co., which made railcars and later automobile doors; Tasty Baking Co., maker of Tastykakes; and the Stanley Blacker suit factory.

WHEN IT comes to large vacant buildings, developer Tony Rufo knows how to spot potential. More than a year ago, Rufo transformed the shuttered Nathaniel Hawthorne School into the Hawthorne Lofts: 53 units of luxury loft-style condominiums. The development offers floor-to-ceiling windows, a roof deck with a stunning view of Center City and ultra-low taxes thanks to a 10-year tax break from the city. According to Rufo's website, every unit has sold. But 2 miles south, just around the corner from South Philadelphia High School, sits a very different kind of Rufo property.