Joseph Leon Baker (1904-1997)

Industrialist and inventor

From 1992 to 1997, with a brief hiatus in the middle, Leon Baker was a familiar face at Ancaster’s Highgate Retirement Residence. “All the single ladies knew Leon,” said one of Highgate’s single ladies who wished to remain anonymous. In his younger days he had been a brawny, muscular man with the distinctively handsome look of a Hollywood character actor. He enjoyed a fine cigar and a good glass of wine, but never allowed himself to depend on either. Leon was a charming man, easy in conversation, well-informed, and impeccable in his manners. It was said that he never sat down to dinner until he had first helped each of his female companions with her chair.

At Highgate, it was his daily routine to circulate around the main building, spending some time in the commons room, some in the library, some in the garden if the weather was right. He once told director Clair Aiken, “We have such a beautiful, spacious place here, and I like to roam around and enjoy all of it.” That attitude was typical of Leon – always finding great pleasures in the simple things that many wouldn’t notice.

When visitors arrived unannounced, as they sometimes did, Leon would ask them to wait in the lobby while he put on a jacket and tie. Then he would hold court in the big armchair by the fireplace. He gravitated to such decor. The dens and libraries of his various homes had always featured leather upholstery, stone fireplaces, hand-blown coloured glass, brass ornaments, colourful shells from the Atlantic shore and big Coulter pine cones from California. His books were an ever-growing congregation of loyal friends that followed him wherever his career and travels took him. In conversation he spoke with a husky “George Burns” voice softened by a Connecticut Yankee accent. He would usually carry the conversation, always questioning and listening but rarely talking about himself. Indeed he was often so cryptic and dismissive about his personal life and career that one would have assumed them to be unremarkable. That would have been a mistake. The fact is, he merely seemed more interested in learning from others than in discussing what he already knew. Here, for the record, is his story.

Since at least the mid 19^th century, the Baker and Jennings families had farmed in Thompson Township in the extreme north-eastern corner of Connecticut. The main agricultural products of the district were dairy cattle and forage crops.

The second of four siblings, Joseph Leon Baker was born on April 5, 1904, to Joseph Baker Sr. and his wife, the former Ida Jennings. The Bakers operated a farm near the New Boston crossroads on the outskirts of North Grosvenordale, about seven miles due west of a cairn marking the only point where the Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut state lines meet. North Grosvenordale was one of a string of small mill towns along Connecticut’s French River valley. It’s focal point was a water-powered cotton mill, the town’s main source of employment. (When Joseph Baker Sr. eventually quit farming, he found work as a carpenter at the mill.) Drawn more to the industrial activities of the town than to the labours of farm life, Leon (who was known as “Joe” to family and friends during his youth) was to develop a passionate interest in the textile industry.

About 1922, following his graduation from Tourtellotte High School, Leon began attending Northeastern University in Boston. Although his transcript has not been located, it is virtually certain that he studied mechanical engineering in a newly established co-operative education program. Scholastic terms featuring academic courses were interspersed with work placements in local industries where students learned to apply their knowledge. Leon took this study method to heart and continued throughout his career to treat his work not merely as a source of income but as a learning experience.

By early 1927, at the age of 22, Leon was working as a mill hand at Saxonville Mills, a division of the Roxbury Carpet Company in Framingham, Massachusetts. At the time of his graduation he had been qualified for a relatively responsible position, perhaps in junior management, but he had chosen a different path. Co-operative education had taught him that there was much to be discovered on the manufacturing floor that could not easily be learned sitting at a desk. So he accepted a series of lower paying jobs in order to learn the carpet industry from the bottom up. Hands-on work with the carpet looms allowed him to observe the minute details of their construction, operation, and capabilities.

His curiosity seemed as boundless as his zest for life. On evenings and weekends, he loved spending quiet time in his room at the boarding house where he would read voraciously on an eclectic range of subjects. And yet he was certainly no recluse. He also enjoyed getting outdoors and walking the picturesque streets of Saxonville (once described as Framingham’s Soho district) with its historic buildings, shops, woodland trails along the river, and other interesting sights. Or he would go day-tripping in the country with those of his friends who owned automobiles. Such excursions often ended at a roadhouse where the fellows feasted on hot duck sandwiches, a popular treat in the Massachusetts of the “Roaring ’20s”.

Leon met his first wife, Ada Blanche Tresham, in March 1928, at a wedding of mutual friends in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She was the maid-of-honour; he was the best man. Blanche, a Canadian citizen whose family lived in Hamilton, had graduated in 1926 from Boston University’s School of Religious Education and Social Service, and was now employed as a church youth worker in Holyoke. Extraordinarily, Blanche and Leon were engaged just two weeks later, on or shortly after their first official date. Apparently Blanche proposed to Leon because, on their way to her annual alumni dinner in Boston, Leon, dressed in his tuxedo, had fixed a flat tire without “losing his temper or swearing.” It is noteworthy that “Joe” seems to have begun using his middle name “Leon” with his intimate contacts only after meeting Blanche. One can only assume that she had an influence on the change.

Despite their rapid decision to marry, Blanche and Leon took their time setting a date. Blanche was building up her hope chest, and Leon wanted to achieve some sort of financial stability. The stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent economic distress did not seem to have any effect on that goal. On July 7, 1930, they were married in a gala event at Ryerson United Church, Hamilton, with guests traveling from as far away as Manitoba and Georgia. It is worth noting that Blanche’s close friend, a lovely young woman named Lillian Fawcett, sang at the wedding.

After a Muskoka honeymoon, Blanche and Leon returned to Framingham where they lived for just over a year before Leon was hired as a foreman at the Artloom Carpet Company in Philadelphia. At the new job, as before, Leon developed a close relationship with the loom operators and other workers on the factory floor. In an era of more formal business decorum, the workers never-the-less addressed him familiarly as “Joe”. After all, he was an unpretentious sort, he knew more about how their looms worked than they did, and since he had risen from the ranks he was considered one of their own. He continued to learn and began researching ways to improve the carpet manufacturing process.

Leon was interested in two types of looms, both of which were revolutionary when they were invented because they greatly increased production efficiency. One type, patented in 1906 by one of Artloom’s founders, was simple enough. Carpets were woven face-to-face and then split down the middle, yielding two carpets in the time it had previously taken to make one. The other type of loom is a little more complicated to describe. It utilized a light, fast-moving shuttle that did not need to carry its own yarn supply. Instead it featured a grasping hook that could catch the yarn from a bobbin at the edge of the loom and pull a double shot of weft across. Another hook would then pick up a second yarn supply on the other side of the loom and pull another double shot of weft in the opposite direction. That method also halved the production time over conventional systems. Leon, after much research on these two distinctly different looms, made a technical breakthrough that incorporated both processes in one ingenious machine. In 1940-41, he applied for three United States patents. Two of them concerned the design of the new loom; the other gave Leon the rights to the unique internal structure of the carpet produced by the loom. Shortly thereafter, the carpet structure was also patented in Canada. As the benefits of the Baker loom became evident, royalties began to pour in, not only from the industrial construction of the looms, but from every single carpet that rolled off of them throughout North America. The loom may also have played a role in the shag carpet era of the 1970s.

By the mid 1940s Leon and Blanche had moved into a roomy Cape Cod-style home on a double lot in the quaint, historic village of Langhorne Manor, Pennsylvania, where they would live for about 17 years. Leon became Artloom’s Vice-President in Charge of Production and oversaw a complete overhaul of the plant machinery. He was quite proud of the fact that he had been given blanket clearance to spend up to $1,000,000 – an extraordinary sum of money in those days – as he saw fit, and without additional consultation with the Board of Directors. Yet even at this stage in his career, Leon was still learning from the rank-and-file. He scheduled regular “pow-wow” sessions with the Artloom plant foremen to seek input from those workers actually on the production floor.

In 1945, Leon began investing in real estate. In December of that year, he purchased a double lot with a small cottage on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, a sand bar island along the intercoastal waterway, six miles off the Atlantic shore. He and Blanche would retreat there on weekends, but they also used the cottage as a rental property for at least part of each summer. Several years later, Leon purchased two more properties on the same street on the island, which were a source of rental income for nearly two decades. Meanwhile the island continued to develop as a popular vacation spot for well-to-do Philadelphians and New Yorkers.

According to the New York Times, Leon was appointed to the Artloom Board of Directors in March 1951 when company sales were at an all-time high. But within a year or two, the fortunes of the carpet industry in general began a market-wide decline. As carpet sales sagged, Artloom, being a relatively small player in the industry, suffered disproportionately. Evidently some acrimony began to develop within the management team. Perhaps able to read the handwriting on the wall where others didn’t, Leon began to look for a position elsewhere. Possibly upon Blanche’s urging he applied for and received a post as a Management Consultant at the Toronto Carpet Company. The Bakers moved to Port Credit in 1955-6. Leon worked at Toronto Carpet for about twelve years.

Around 1967 Blanche was diagnosed with cancer, and Leon took an early retirement to look after her full time. The two were deeply devoted to each other and during the two or three years of her illness Blanche – as strange as this may sound – essentially arranged a second marriage for Leon, with her old friend Lillian Fawcett, who had remained single all that time. Blanche died on August 14, 1970, and on September 2, 1972, a respectful two years later, Leon and Lillian married in a quiet ceremony.

After the marriage, Leon sold off the remaining properties on Long Beach Island, using some of the proceeds to purchase a cottage on Bay Lake Road in Bancroft, Ontario. For several years, he and Lillian summered in Bancroft and wintered at Panama City on the Gulf Coast of northern Florida. With their Airstream trailer in tow, which, of course, carried a selection of Leon’s favorite books, they also took long excursions to visit relatives in the United States. When they no longer felt up to cottage life and travel, the couple took up residence in a lakefront apartment in Burlington, then in a penthouse apartment on Robinson Street in Hamilton.

Eventually, due to Lillian’s health, they lived in a series of retirement homes, moving about frequently, never quite satisfied anywhere until they finally settled at Highgate in November 1992. When Lillian’s health finally failed, the couple moved briefly into Wentworth Lodge where Lillian died on May 12, 1995. Shortly thereafter Leon returned to Highgate to live out the remaining two years of his life. He succumbed after a brief illness on March 14, 1997. Lillian is buried with her father and sister at Whitechapel Memorial Gardens, Hamilton. The cremains of Leon and his first wife, Blanche, are interred outside the Bayview Mausoleum, Spring Gardens Road, Burlington.

Submitted by:

John B. Lord

Grand nephew of Blanche and Leon Baker

19 June, 2007