Factory

Caroline Guy was walking by a group of her co-workers when she shaped her hand into a gun, pointed it at Pamela Hanible and squeezed the imaginary trigger. Bang. Bang. A month later, on Aug. 28, 1995, co-worker Anton Golden testified yesterday, he saw Guy again, this time with a real gun in her hand. Again her target was Hanible. "I saw Caroline fire two . . . shots at Pam," Golden said. Guy's first-degree murder trial began yesterday in Bucks County Court. Two eyewitnesses described how Guy shot Hanible, 28, of East Mount Airy, about 6 that morning as the first shift shuffled into the Van Leer factory in Warminster.

A massive five-alarm fire - believed by authorities to have been set - swept through a vacant five-story soap factory in the city's Fishtown section last night, threatening nearby rowhouses and forcing the evacuation of dozens of residents of at least three blocks. The blaze was reported shortly after 6 p.m. in the 400 block of Moyer Street and quickly spread, with the help of high winds, across the L-shaped brick building. The west wall of the factory collapsed at the height of the fire, which lit up the night sky and filled the neighborhood with smoke.

Agnes Szupowal's dress told the whole story. Basically, she was wearing an American flag, with blue and white stars on the sleeves and red and white stripes flowing down her body. Szupowal, 73, wore the dress to yesterday's dedication of the Flag House, a former factory of the Valley Forge Flag Co. that has reopened as a 58-unit home for the elderly. Szupowal, one of a handful of former flag company workers who will now move into the home, said the space had been transformed.

The big red sign atop the old Lee Tire factory, the suburban landmark that was a symbol of Conshohocken's past industrial might, was taken down yesterday. The 95-year-old plant was converted into office use in the 1980s, and since then the sign had read "Lee Park" instead of "Lee Tire. " Now, after a $10 million overhaul, it is being renamed "Spring Mill Corporate Center" and given a new image by its owner, Michael O'Neill's Preferred Real Estate Investments Inc., of Conshohocken.

It is just south of the Lug and Tug building supply and across Route 257 from Weaver's store, whose sign out front says "Lumber, Hardware, Guns, Ammo. " You go around the corner at Mong's custard stand, which looks closed for the season, and out the road that runs toward the bleak gray woods and the field with the rusted oil well. Right there, on the outskirts of this windblown village halfway between Egypt Corners and Oil City, in the heart of rural northwestern Pennsylvania, stands the plain brown building in which is made the endangered commodity that, once a sensation, is probably not now manufactured anywhere else on earth: Old-fashioned, roll-operated, 74-note player pianos.

The Philadelphia region - often a sponge for economic ills - so far has dodged the manufacturing recession plaguing other parts of the United States. "The city and region, because they've done so poorly in recent decades, and because they've become so minimally dependent on manufacturing, are escaping the chaos," said Joel Naroff, chief economist with Commerce Bank in Cherry Hill. "This is a case where the region's extreme diversification . . . is working to its benefit. " The region's muddling economy in the 1990s - with "no super engine of growth," according to Naroff - has created a situation in which there are "no major imbalances which would expose us," he said.

A clothing manufacturer and a nonprofit group want to create a worker-owned apparel factory in North Philadelphia that would employ welfare recipients who live in the empowerment zone. The company, Independence Apparel, would hire about 60 people in three phases over an 18-month period, organizers said. Applicants must live in the three Philadelphia neighborhoods that comprise the federal empowerment zone the city shares with Camden. After working two years, employees would earn a part of any profits.

Whenever he called his friends together for a neighborhood baseball game, Bernard McGinty said, there were plenty of bats - both wood and aluminum. And for each player there was always one bat that felt just right. That special feel gave McGinty the idea for a new company that would specialize in customized baseball bats to fit hitters from Little Leaguers to All-Stars. "We can create a customized bat, adjusted for an individual, complete it in one day, and ship it overnight to the customer's home," McGinty said, pitching the idea to an important audience last week.

The Budd Co. factory in Philadelphia is one of those places that, as rumor has it, is always about to close. "Those kinds of rumors have been around since I started here" nearly 36 years ago, the plant manager, Eric Reiff, said. Worries about the factory's future intensified after Ford Motor Co. said in January that it would close three assembly plants, including two that use parts stamped by Budd in Philadelphia. Ford accounts for more than 80 percent of the factory's orders.

When Vashti Burton broke down and wept, right there at the witness table yesterday morning, the pain of an entire community was spread forth before the court. Common Pleas Court Judge John W. Herron listened intently as Burton catalogued a sad history of petty thefts and prostitution and crack use flowing from an abandoned factory at 2500 Reed St., a half-block from her rowhouse. Minutes later, the judge cracked down on the factory's absentee owner, New Jersey developer Allan M. Pullman - an elusive figure whom city officials once called Philadelphia's "largest tax delinquent.