"Aaron Feuerstein, Mill Owner Who Refused to Leave, Dies at 95
After a fire devastated his Massachusetts factory in 1995, he kept paying his employees and spent hundreds of millions to rebuild."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/05/business/aaron-feuerstein-dead.html

By Clay Risen. Nov. 5, 2021

First half:

Aaron Feuerstein, a Massachusetts industrialist who became a national hero in 1995 when he refused to lay off workers at his textile plant after a catastrophic fire, then spent hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild it, died on Thursday at a hospital in Boston. He was 95.

Aeffia Feuerstein, his granddaughter and partial caretaker, said the cause was pneumonia.

Mr. Feuerstein’s company, Malden Mills, was by the mid-1990s among the last large textile companies in Massachusetts, which had seen its manufacturing employment numbers crater from 225,000 in the 1980s to about 25,000 a decade later.

Most other companies, faced with competition from lower-wage states and cheap imports, had either closed or moved production out of the state.

Malden Mills, located just outside the old mill city of Lawrence, was a shining exception: Not only did Mr. Feuerstein refuse to move, but he and his company prospered, thanks to its proprietary fabric Polartec, which it sold to clothing brands like Patagonia and L.L. Bean. In fact, 1995 was a banner year for the company, with sales up 10 percent to more than $400 million.
Then, on the night of Dec. 11, 1995, a boiler in one of the factory’s five hulking plants exploded. The shock wave knocked out the state-of-the-art sprinkler system Mr. Feuerstein had just installed, and 45-mile-an-hour winds blew the ensuing fire to three other buildings. The blaze burned for 16 hours, injuring more than 30 workers.

Three days later, most of the plant’s 1,400 workers lined up to receive their paychecks, figuring it might be their last from Malden Mills. Mr.. Feuerstein joined them. He handed out holiday bonuses and then announced an even greater gift: He would immediately reopen as much of the plant as he could, replace the buildings he had lost and continue to pay the idled workers for a month — a promise he later extended twice.

Working nonstop, he and his workers got the surviving building, the finishing plant, back in operation just one week later. Mr. Feuerstein bought an empty factory nearby to hold new equipment. By the first weeks of January, hundreds of his employees were back at work. And just 20 months later he opened a gleaming new $130 million complex.

A fitness nut who rose at 5:30 every morning to jog, read scripture and memorize poetry, Mr. Feuerstein announced the reopening with a quotation from E.E. Cummings.

“I thank you, God, for most this amazing day,” he said, “I who have died am alive again today.”

Mr. Feuerstein was a wealthy industrialist, but he was far from the Dickensian stereotype. He ate alongside his workers in the cafeteria, and he offered them no-interest loans for school....

(snip)

Unfortunately, the later years were not so kind to him.

Lenona.