Sweater girl
A conversation with the mother of modern Manchester
By John “jaQ” Andrews • jandrews@hippopress.com

For some, May Gruber needs no introduction. For others, here’s a quick primer.

You know the Millyard in Manchester? How about the Democratic Party in New Hampshire? Even this very newspaper? None would be quite the same without her.

In the 1950s, Gruber and her husband, Sol Sidore, started Pandora. Essentially a knitted sweater provider, Pandora grew into a multimillion-dollar business in the mill buildings of the Queen City. She took over the reins of Pandora herself when Sidore died in 1964. After starting a newsletter for employees, she branched out to create a weekly newspaper called the Manchester Free Press, a spiritual ancestor of the Hippo. She went on to play key roles in creating the Manchester Community Music School, New Hampshire Symphony and the League of Women Voters of New Hampshire.

She sold the Pandora factory in 1983. She put her own life story on paper a year later in Pandora’s Pride, and later wrote a second book called Sky Hooks and Track Shoes. She lives in Goffstown, where she rents part of her home to keep it occupied while she spends time in New York City.

When asked her age for this interview, Gruber replied, “You can ask.” She did say that she graduated NYU in 1931 at the age of 19 and left it at that.

You do spend a lot of time between New York and Goffstown. What keeps you coming back?
When I became president of Pandora ... the manufacturing was here and the showroom was in New York. And so I shuttled back and forth to be in each place because, one, you had to be aware of what the customers were saying, and two, you had to be aware of what we were manufacturing. After I sold it, I was so accustomed to going back and forth, I couldn’t give up either, because I love my home in Goffstown, and I have a very nice place in New York. It’s really a studio apartment, but it’s right near my alma mater, NYU. It’s a neighborhood familiar to me.

Did you have a store in New York?
A showroom. At 1407 Broadway, all the companies had their showrooms. When a buyer came in, she went from one showroom to the next, looking at the lines.

How much time do you spend in each place each year?
Well, I say that I come north for the summer and go south for the winter to New York.

Are politics different in New York than they are here?
I don’t get involved in politics in New York. I live in New Hampshire. I pay taxes in New Hampshire. I vote in New Hampshire. I founded the Goffstown Democratic Club. I think I can make more of an imprint here where it counts.

Do you consider New York more of a, New York is your second home, this is your first home?
New York is my fun place. I go to museums and I go to shows and I see art movies that you never see here. I shop in stores ... it’s just for fun. And doctors — my internist is in New York ... [He] has a specialty in geriatrics, and since I’m very old, I think that’s the right thing to do.

Do you still get over to the mills in Manchester?
My office is in the mill building because we still have quite a bit of interest in it. We sold Pandora, but we did not sell the buildings they were in. We now have the building that used to be our distribution center, and I think it’s the longest building in the Millyard ... and we also own the former locomotive works. We just bought it back from Dunn Furniture. And then we also own the little mall across the street, which we had bought to protect the Pandora factory store so that we would have more parking.

To “protect” the factory store?
We didn’t know what would go up there when it became available, and we thought it would be good to have more parking, because the Pandora factory store used to be a very popular tourist attraction.

Just for shopping, or because of the history behind it as well?
Oh, we had the most fashionable sweaters of the best quality at the right price!

Of course, of course. Factory outlets have become pretty huge in the region.
Yeah, but that was a genuine one. It was a lot of bargains.

When you go shopping, do you inspect the quality of the sweaters you’re looking at?
And it’s lamentable. It’s so sad.

How so?
We used to be so careful that our seams were straight and that the ends were tucked n properly and that the quality of the wool was the best, and now we’re getting synthetics ... with planned obsolescence.

Your stuff was designed to last as long as it could?
And it did. In fact, I still have a sweater from the Pandora days.

You had to wear a few different hats. You weren’t just a businesswoman crunching numbers ... How many different things did you have to do?
We operated with a long-range plan, usually a 5-year plan, and we had to go from the volume where we were to the volume where we wanted to be. In order to get the key results that we needed, we also always had to keep in mind the integrity of the product and the welfare of the people that worked for us. We had profit-sharing. We had scholarships for children of the employees, we had several scholarships. We had two weeks for those who worked this long and three weeks for those who worked [longer]. We even had four weeks for those who worked for us for more than 25 years. We had quarterly and then semiannual meetings with our employees to tell them the state of the business, because they were our partners in producing the product.

So you really kept the employees in touch with the whole running of the business.
We published The Yarn. That was when my husband was still alive; I was the editor of The Yarn, and once a month I’d go through the factory, through every department, getting all the news and publishing a newspaper. A little newspaper.

You also started a weekly paper for Manchester.
My husband, Sol Sidore, and I were Democrats. We were Democrats from the moment we came to New Hampshire. I remember the first candidate — he was a professor from Dartmouth, I guess — that dared to run on the Democratic ticket and we gave him a donation of $400. I think it was the highest he had ever received. When Kennedy got elected, Kennedy had visited through our mill. We have pictures of Kennedy in our mill. I had spoken with Jackie that day when they were up at the Carpenter Hotel having a reception after his day in the mill. We were invited to his inauguration. During the campaign, we had become acquainted with one of his PR people ... we decided the best way we could help the Democratic cause was to try to found a weekly newspaper to counteract the effects of the local rag.

Oh, we’re quite familiar with the local rag.
That’s why I love the Hippo, because they are quite familiar with the local rag.

Do you think you were successful in combating the local rag?
Tom MacIntyre became senator, and he told us that we had tipped the balance for him in Manchester, because Manchester voted him into office. We felt so proud that we had accomplished something.

It’s interesting that you state it like that, because a lot of papers these days try to emphasize their neutrality, not being biased.
We tried to be very objective and print the news as the news should be printed, without red-letter editorials on the front page or anything sensational. We just printed news.

So you can still be objective even while you have the ...
Well, you are. The Hippo Press is fairly objective, I think.

We certainly strive to be.
That’s what a reporter is.

I guess just providing a balance to the dominant media outlet can be the goal.
Well, people read us. And once you read, you begin to question the status quo. That’s all you need.

Do you still have any urge to dip into journalism?
Thanks to journalism, I wrote the book. After that I wrote a second book. But at the moment, I’m doing my writing on e-mail.

I was curious what you do with yourself these days ... How do you spend your time?
The day does not have enough hours. And that’s true of any age ... I’ll give you Mother’s Day. My daughter and son-in-law came up from Cambridge and took me to Richard’s Bistro for brunch. My friend Mimi Bravar took me to see opera in Concord in the afternoon, and the opera was wonderful. When I got home, I had time for a little run because I try to get in a mile a day.

Was there anything you did, either at Pandora or with the Free Press, any one thing that you’re particularly proud of?
Oh, the one thing that I’m particularly proud of: I tried to be a good wife to my husband. I tried to be a good mother to my children. But I’m proudest of having five beautiful children, two wonderful adopted children, really, and I figure when I look at the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren that I must have done something right in between. But being a typical Jewish mother, I always felt guilty that I wasn’t doing enough. I feel particularly proud of having the 19 years of Pandora. Pandora was like a sixth child, it meant so much to us. And we had wonderful people working for us. When we would have one of our quarterly meetings, we would say, “The home of the most beautiful girls and the finest men in Manchester” for our employees. And we did have some beautiful girls.

Beautiful girls and fine men — were there matches made there?
Oh sure. If you have 1,200 employees, you’re going to have some of them attracted to each other.

On the same day former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton were giving a joint commencement speech at UNH’s Durham campus, Gruber’s son Ralph Sidore was set to speak at UNH Manchester. The Sidore children are well-known in the area for their continuing participation in the Sidore Lecture Series, originally established in 1965.

It must make you proud to see your family having a continuing influence and contribution in Manchester.
I blame a lot of that on their father. Their father believed that the more you give, the more you’ll get. He was that way in business, he was that way ethically. He was a wonderful guy. The children absorbed his philosophy. They’re civic minded. For instance, the Gruber Foundation, of which I’m the chairman, we believe that since the Pandora mills made their money in Manchester, they should give back to Manchester. So we confine our giving to Manchester projects.

How would you say Manchester or the greater Manchester area has changed since the heyday of Pandora?
[pause] ... Make believe you didn’t ask me that one.

OK ...
You have to ask me, “What priorities do you have at present?”

Well, what priorities do you have at present?
I have three. First one is, I believe in long-range planning. I’d love to see, whether it’s the country or the state or Manchester or Goffstown, that we know where we’re going. I’d love to see a plan for the next five years or 10 years or 20 years, because we have changed from an agrarian, when New Hampshire first got its constitution, to an industrial, at present, to a global economy, which is coming tomorrow — in fact, it’s here already. If we don’t plan how we’re going to adapt ourselves to all these changes, we’re going to be left way, way behind ... I think we absolutely need a different New Hampshire state constitution.

The next thing that I would want: I want to see a broad-based tax. I think that this property tax is for the birds. Not even for the birds. It is the most regressive you want. It attacks the weakest part of our economy. I’m talking proportionally. Whether you pay rent or you pay it in taxes.

Yeah, you pay it somehow.
And usually, it’s single mothers! And in order to meet their obligations, these single mothers, many of them of minority standing, are working two jobs. What happens to their children in between? I don’t know. I think if we had a property tax eliminated and a percentage of whatever we pay the federal government, let’s not make it complicated.

The third one is, how do you spend the income tax? I’d like to spend it on education that prepares our children for the industries of the future. Math, science, technology, whatever it is that we have to give them so that we’re not offshoring. We are the leaders in creative, not rote, thinking, creative thinking, because without imagination, we’re stuck in the past. By education, I mean having teachers who can effectively impart information and get paid commensurately for their skills. I’m talking of special education, because more and more children are being born autistic, you know that?

That involves a lot of prediction. That can be difficult to do.
In my book, Sky Hooks and Track Shoes, I think it’s the last chapter, “Tackle whatever terrifies you. The rest becomes boring.” Difficult to do means it’s a tougher challenge. Let’s figure out how to do it. Let’s go from the end and work backwards.