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| May 1, 2008 | The
Newspaper of the NYSSCPA |
Vol.
11, No.8 |
Reminiscing with Greenspan
By Stephen E. Franciosa, Westchester Chapter President
Of late, I’ve become an economics junkie. I just can’t get enough. It started a few years ago when I began to regularly read Paul Krugman’s Op-Eds in the New York Times. Just this past Saturday, I made the mistake of moseying into the library and emerging with Alan Greenspan’s latest book, The Age of Turbulence.
After completing the first chapter, I skipped to the last so I might get a glimpse of where he would have taken me when I was concluded. It is in the last chapter that Greenspan opines upon productivity growth. He recalls “visiting in the 1960’s a tall and narrow stamping plant built at the turn of the century. …But it was only decades later that I learned that I had entered one of the last surviving relics of a certain aspect of America’s industrial history.” At the end of the 19th century, steam power was being displaced by electric power. Machines “ran on so-called group-drives, elaborate arrangements of pulleys and shafts. …To avoid power losses and breakdowns, the lengths of the shared drive shafts had to be limited. This was best achieved when factories rose vertically, with one or more shafts per floor, each driving a group of machines.”
It was in one of these vertical factories, in East Harlem, that I interned at during college and then remained an additional two years as an accountant after graduating. And not only did the factory have the very shafts and pulleys that Greenspan mused over, but a maintenance staff capable of keeping things going with, as the chief engineer would say, spit and glue. It was here, at the Washburn Wire Company, that I first took a physical inventory, maintained a fixed asset ledger (within which, incidentally, was listed “spittoons”) and learned the process of cost accounting. It was because of this experience in my neighborhood factory that I initially chose not to pursue a career in public accounting. I enjoyed seeing things built, and being an accountant was the way I was able to contribute to the process. Sadly, Washburn closed down soon after. Truthfully, while a vertical factory made sense mechanically, transporting wire between floors became costly. And with competition from Europe and Japan heightening, the end was apparent. Unbeknownst to me, the age of turbulence was soon to begin.
Stephen E. Franciosa can be reached at sfcpas@optonline.net.
