Life, Progress, & Happiness at Victor Camden
By: Graham Alexander
Workers enter through the front entrance of Victor Building 17 (The Nipper Building) | Despite its stature at Victor Camden, this building was not a headquarters building of the Victor Company - instead it was a manufacturing building until it was slowly converted to offices in the 1950s.
When we released the ‘Death, Destruction, and The Labor Movement at Victor Camden’ article a few days ago, we caused a stir among the Victor Family. Of course, we’d always planned on highlighting the opposite of the negative side of life at Victor (which was really more of a commentary on early labor regulations…not on Victor itself). By ALL means…the happy stories far outnumber the negative incidents by 1000:1. By all accounts, information, paperwork, exit interviews - Victor Camden (and later RCA-Victor Camden) were a beloved workplace - revered by most of ‘the family’…and in the modern age many of these standards are carried on at the Victor Camden County Campus of Victor Talking Machine Co., and L3Harris (which evolved from The Victor Company’s government communications contracts and is still based in Camden today)
Victor was a rare beast even by early 20th century manufacturing standards; the public AND employees of Victor Camden often saw the company as a sort of laboratory of dreams - the latest inventions - home entertainment devices, the latest music (and later radio and television technology) - one never really knew what celebrities or politicians could pop up at Victor Camden; think of it in the modern era as working at somewhere between GOOGLE and Nintendo. For music fans, Victor Camden was - and remains - ‘mecca’. Thus, we’ve decided to highlight a few of the critical elements that Victor brought to the average Victor employee’s life in exchange for their services - some of these are well known; others not so much. While reading this, try to place yourself into the context of an early to mid 20th century American worker - the world is changing rapidly around you…and industrial life can be a hard one if you aren’t at the right company. We’re proud to say that Victor Talking Machine Co. was one of these very progressive firms - creating a campus for their workers that enriched the time they spent there; and these actions precipitated the naming of the entire workforce the Victor Family….honoring the closeness of the people and company that built the modern music and multimedia industries.
Victor becomes one of the first major companies to adopt the 8 hour work day (and voluntarily!)
STORY: Adopted in October of 1915, The Victor Company never had unionize as long as co-founder and President Eldridge R. Johnson was in charge. Johnson had come from a poorer rural upbringing and worked upwards of 12-15 hours a day in his younger years; after early studies began to show that 8 well rested hours of labor was usually about equal to 10 or 12 hours of exhausted labor, The Victor Co. followed suit with creating their schedules to reflect a much fairer 8 hour work day.
The Victor LunchClub in its final state before being demolished - the structure was originally a row of Victorian era homes, and then a brick cube building (called The Victor Lunch Club), and finally Victor Building 3 - which contained the new Victor LunchClub
The Victor Lunch Club serves thousands a day
STORY: A dining experience for musicians, carvers, woodworkers, finishers, record label employees - The Victor LunchClub held a lot of incredible memories. Originally a series of buildings on North Front St. (next to 201 North Front St., what is now known as Victor Building 2) - The Victor LunchClub was a series of homes that the Victor Company purchased as a means of having employees take their break in an organized manner as the company grew from just a few employees - to over 5000 regularly in the course of 3 decades. Early on, a modified home with a sizable kitchen attached to the plant - served as a perfect prep area for employees to take their breaks and get a bite to eat. As the population of Victor Camden skyrocketed - soon; these rows of homes were modified to accept 200, 500, 1000 employees - staggering their lunch breaks at any given time. Soon, the amount of workers dining at any given time became too much; and The Victor Co. addressed this by building a large Victor LunchClub that attached directly to Victor Building 2 (and was located in Victor Building 3). This world class facility replaced the rows of homes in which the original Victor LunchClub had grown - and this space would serve meals well into the 1990s when GE abandoned the building.
The Victor LunchClub building was demolished in 2019
The Bowling Alley installed in the basement of the former Victor Trinity Recording Studio - which became the Victor Gym in 1936 (demolished in 1961)
Doctors on staff; the Victor Health & Life Insurance Plans
STORY: An excellent solution to rising medical costs at Victor Camden was to build a hospital facility on site - staffed with doctors whom could write prescriptions, give check ups, and take x-rays (among other things). Surgery was performed by doctors note at nearby Cooper Hospital. The medical and life insurance plan of Victor was legendary - and provided for widows pay, sick benefits, and greatly reduced costs of medical care in an era where this was exceedingly rare to have.
The Victor Gym (and Victor Athletic Association)
STORY: The Victor Company opened its first sports and hobby employees association (The Victor Athletic Association) in 1907. The FIRST Victor Gym was a small calisthenics facility located in a Victor owned town home on the site of what is now Victor Bldg. 17 (The Nipper Building) in Camden. This, however, was so demolished - and a small space was reserved on floor 2 of the building that replaced it for this same purpose. It is in this space that Victor hosted employee BOXING matches, parties, and other activities for employees. In 1936, the world famous Victor Trinity Studio located at 5th St. was shutdown after the construction of what became the hi-speedline (train) created an impossible environment for vibrations and recorded sound.
The Victor division took this opportunity to turn the building into a world class facility for The Victor Athletic Association - creating a full gymnasium for basketball, tennis, badminton, volleyball - and more; and utilizing the basement space to install lounges and a 2 lane full size bowling alley for employee’s 24/7 use.
The Victor Gym (as it became known) hosted 1000s of events in the already historic former Victor Recording Studio until the company sold the building in 1961 and it was demolished to make way for what is still a parking lot (which…of course…no one uses).
The Great Caruso outside of Victor Bldg. 15 in Camden, NJ
Celebrities, Musicians, Politicians
STORY: The glamour of working at one of the world’s foremost entertainment companies had its interesting side perks; musicians recording at Victor, world renowned figures and politicians constantly toured the Victor Camden Plant’s manufacturing, offices, laboratories, research departments, photo studios, recording studios, mastering departments, pressing plant, and more - creating an environment in which a music lover felt that every day while working for The Victor, one could be presented with a new adventure or experience.
Some musicians and celebrities known to have visited the Victor Camden Plant (at one time or another - and for one reason or another) include;
Duke Ellington, Woody Guthrie, Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein, Dwight Eisenhower, Bill & Hillary Clinton, Walt & Roy Disney, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, The King & Queen Of Siam, Woodrow Wilson, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Glenn Miller, Bruce Springsteen, Roy Rogers, Theodore Roosevelt, Enrico Caruso, Big Bill Broonzie, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Buddy Rich, John Coltrane, Andy Warhol, LeadBelly, Memphis Minnie, The Carter Family, The London Philharmonic, The Boston Symphony Orchestra, The NBC Symphony Orchestra, Abbot & Costello, Leonard Bernstein, Sidney Bechet, Gene Autry, George & Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rachmaninoff, Hoagy Carmichael, Al Jolson, Nat King Cole, George M. Cohan, Charlie Christian, Cab Calloway, Russ Columbo, Xavier Cugat, ‘Sleepy’ John Estes, Ella Fitzgerald, Geraldine Farrar, Lionel Hampton, Benny Goodman, Alma Gluck, Kate Smith, Coleman Hawkins, Lena Horne, Tommy Johnson, Lonnie Johnson, Harry Lauder, Charles Lindbergh, Furry Lewis, Bennie Moten, Billy Murray, The Memphis Jug Band, Bill Monroe, John McCormack, Sonny Boy Nelson, Eugene Ormandy, Walter Page, Oscar Peterson, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Artie Shaw, Dinah Shore, Hank Snow, Roy Smeck, John Phillip Sousa, Mamie Smith, Tampa Red, Arturo Toscanini, Paul Whiteman, Sonny Boy Williamson, Calvin Coolidge, Warren G. Harding….and many many many many many many more….like…. a lot more.
A Summer ‘Voice Of The Victor’ Internal Trade magazine; encouraging salesmen to try selling records and phonographs during their vacations at the shore.
Paid vacations, sick time, and a month off in the summer
STORY: Today, consumer society has a way of getting us to buy buy buy at all times of the year; but summers in the earlier part of the 20th century were a little more simple. The Victor Company took the entire month of July (or August) off - in lieu of an expected sales droop for that season. The company tried its best to create sales during that time of year by creating potable models of turntable that one could (if they dared) drag to the beach with them for the summer (and many did!). None the less, it meant that employees were given a full month off to enjoy their summer…it also meant not having to hear the complaints of employees trapped inside giant brick ovens - in the pre air conditioning era. Days got hot, no matter what, but all Victor Buildings were built with large windows to take advantage of the natural river breeze nearby. Air Conditioning units would enter much of the plant in the 1920s- which we will talk about more below.
Over time, this vacation would be slowly eliminated into 4 weeks….3 weeks…and finally 2 weeks of summer vacation as the consumer society grew and summer demand didn’t dip nearly as it once did…a causality of an era with a much slower pace of life. No matter reduced, vacations and sick time remained a staple more akin to the modern day standards of these policies for Victor employees and their successors.
The new record album section of the Victor Family Store
The Family Store
STORY: Originally located at what is now Building 8 (originally building 3) and later moved to The Victor Trinity Studio Building - and then BACK again to Building 8 in the 1960s, The Victor Family store (and later RCA-Victor Family Store) allowed for the easy purchase of nearly unlimited quantities of cost (or near cost) goods from the Camden Victor factories. As a result, many of the local Philadelphia area workers were the first with technological advances like the first electrical phonographs, radios, televisions, color televisions, and even video game consoles. Being able to keep up with the latest hit records and music equipment must have been a very exciting concept - and it also meant your uncle who worked at Victor/RCA was almost certainly guaranteed to deliver you the best gift of all…from The Family Store.
Legendary record producer Fred Gaisberg see Alfred Clark into retirement in 1945; both men started with Johnson & Berliner at first Victor Studio in Philadelphia are early as 1897 (when it was still called The (Berliner) Gramophone Co.)
Stock options, retirement, and pension plans
STORY: Mr. Johnson believed workers should have the chance to own a part of the company they are doing work for. He was a big believer in self governance - and he made sure the company was designed with this idea in mind. The stock options offered at Victor weren’t wholly unusual for the more progressive figures of the industrial revolution of the early 20th century; Milton Hershey (of The Hershey Company) was also of this mind. None the less, the ever important incentive that workers had to keep creating and building the finest Victor Victrola(s), Victor Home Audio, and Victor Records may very well have been a critical part of why the company was so beloved by its employees; they owned large portions of it.
The Victor retirement and pension plans saw their first rise in 1920 or so, and many of the surviving RCA-Victor Family retirees are still benefiting from this early progressive industrial action in 2021 - over 100 years later. The 1980s saw the company pension account as so valuable; many believe it helped seal the deal for the GE acquisition of RCA/Victor in 1985 - corporate raiders very much wanted to perform some (probably immoral) mystical financial acrobatics on it.
Work vehicles like this were also serviced
Free & low cost car service
STORY: The Victor Company garage was originally to service delivery, executive, and artist vehicles (Victor maintained a fleet of luxury limousines by Pierce-Arrow reserved for the most important of recording artists and clients). This garage was located in the building 5, 6, and 7 complex on the first floor - and by the ‘teens’ - the garage was opened to ALL employees for quick and easy service of their new Model T Fords. Servicing of vehicles meant Victor had 4-6 mechanics JUST for their car repairs at any given time….not so bad!
Christmas bonuses & turkeys
STORY: The Victor Company was one of those firms famous for throwing Christmas parties and celebrations for employees - they even held many a parade up Cooper St. The company was also keen on Christmas bonuses and giving away turkeys to all of their 5000+ employees for their Thanksgiving (and later Christmas Dinners). This tradition lasted many years - and was skipped one year during the 1920s when Victor’s bosses heard some employees were RESELLING the gifted turkeys…whoops….Turkeys returned again the following year.
A 1942 employees event at Johnson Park (Building 8 in background)
Victor’s ‘Johnson Park’ & free events
STORY: Eldridge R. Johnson was sitting in his office at 201 North Front St. in Camden NJ at The Victor Plant (Victor Bldg. 2) when he realized; when I look out my window…its ugly.
The ‘ugly’ he was thinking of was the old ‘Cooper Mansion’ - a run down large home in the middle of a large square block smack dab RIGHT in the middle of Victor’s triumphant music empire. With the taxman barreling down, Johnson decided to buy the land and home - demolish it - and build a beautiful large park with a wading pool and monument park - placing a museum archive building on the property . For decades after, employees would lounge in the park, visit exhibits in the building on the property (including an exhibit that featured Johnson owned original manuscript of Lewis Carrol’s ‘Alice In Wonderland’), and celebrate everything from Christmas to war production goals on the sprawling one block by one block park known officially and originally as ‘Johnson Square’.
Free professional and practical skills education(s)
STORY: The Victor Co. had 5 primary arenas of professional education that today would be defined as; Manufacturing/Craft Skills (which were largely trained in house under apprenticeships), Record Label Administration/Legal Skills (which required a legal degree for some positions - some of which were paid for by the company as requested by employees looking to take over roles in the copyright and patent department), Sales (sales of Victor Home Audio/Victrola(s), and Victor Records were taken on by an elite force of salesman trained professionally in the very particular art of sales of these goods. These positions required a salesman to complete a 2 month course known as ‘Victor Academy’ (classes held daily at Victor Building #2) followed by a training period, and Victor Engineering. The Victor Engineering Department (which also included the making of recordings and records) required training for some positions which was administered either by in house courses or apprenticeships - OR - by third party university training. The local university in Camden, NJ (which is known today as Rutgers Camden), offered carefully curated courses in electrical engineering and related fields - allowing Victor to subsidize the formal training of Victor Family Members that showed propensity towards such fields - and keep a steady flow of top notch engineers into the company for the purpose of inventing new sound, home audio, and eventually related video, computer, and communications technology at the Victor Laboratories in Camden - in order to stay on top of the competition.
1940’s Advertisement for The Family
Victor Employees Day at Clementon Lake Park, July 1953
June 1927 ‘The Voice Of The Victor’ Trade Magazine
New HVAC installed in the 1970s at Building #2 - replacing some of the 1920s systems.
Dating, Marriage, & Babies
STORY: Thousands and thousands of marriages, life long relationships, and yes - babies - were born as a result of the Victor (and later RCA/Victor) Company in Camden NJ. combine that with the 1940s and 50s baby boom - and you’ve got an explosive number of RCA/Victor Family all around the world. There are too many to mention in this article; so we’ll save that for another article. Do you know a story you’d like to add to The Victor Sound Foundation Archives? email us info@victorrecords.com
Vacations & Outings
STORY: The Victor Co. management and Victor Activities Association regularly planned outings, picnics, shows, holiday parties, vacations, and more until the 1990s when the organization was folded into GE. The ability to create a ‘large outing’, meant the company often had ‘employee days’ where hundreds of Victor Family Members received private access to everything from top notch restaurants to amusement parks.
Good wages & cash awards for exemplary service
STORY: Wages at Victor were always very fair by comparison to other companies of the era. Eldridge R. Johnson was a manufacturer himself, and he cared deeply about the well being of The Victor Company - for that nearly 35 year period, Victor Camden had no need to unionize - and had but 3 strike incidents (which each lasted around 24-48 hours) before negotiations were successful and the men and women of Victor happily returned to work. When Johnson retired and sold the company in the late 1920s, the workforce feared they’d lost an ally. The 1930s saw a stagnation of wages as the economy collapsed between 1929 and 1931 - soon after RCA merged its manufacturing with The Victor Company. At this point, the employees saw it fit to unionize (being untrusting of the new parent company). From this point, the union company relationship was generally positive and kept wages in line with inflation and value until the company began to export manufacturing in great numbers through the mid century to other, lower cost manufacturing plants…a result of the parent company (Radio Corporation Of America) in New York City - and the globalization of trade.
Now, It may not seem as relevant now, but awards and commendations were a MAJOR source of pride for many early and mid 20th century Americans. Over the years, THOUSANDS of service awards and honors dinners were held to let The Victor Family know; we see your efforts - and we’re happy to be in business with you. Today it may seem a little antiquated, in fact - it may seem like ‘The Dundies’ from the popular television program ‘The Office’….but these commendations usually came with a cash award - and could be a jumping point for a promotion in the company.
Music while you work!
STORY: Sounds almost far fetched; but The Victor Company was the first company to create a plant wide music system for employees to listen to music while they worked. The P.A. system itself was one of the first of its kind and was designed with a central DJ point in building 2 - as early as 1922 (several years before such electrical systems became available to the public). The company even advertised this as a feature of working at The Victor Plant….and The Victor Company also conducted extensive research on the KINDS of music that made for more efficient work - and thus upped productivity. Due to an ongoing research event with the modern company, we cant talk about the results of those experiments….but you can assume uptempo Jazz, Sousa Style Band Marches and intense classical music were drivers of productivity.
And opera was not.
Air Conditioning & Heating
STORY: HVAC systems were not standard fair in early 20th century manufacturing….and BRICK construction buildings have a bad habit of acting as massive pizza ovens several months into heating up. The Victor Company made HVAC systems a critical part of their manufacturing facilities - creating a truly state of the art manufacturing power which would help greatly when New York based Radio Corporation of America was looking for a manufacturing partner (it had not manufactured its own equipment - despite developing products and patents for Radio technology). When the Radio Corporation Of America merged its manufacturing operations with Victor Talking Machine Co. to form RCA-Victor Co., a large part of the deal was that Victor’s manufacturing plant was so well thought of across the manufacturing industry…it would be turn key for Victor to begin manufacturing RCA products.
Work Breaks, Sex Romps, Card Games etc.
STORY: I’m not fully sure that this is negative or positive - you can take it for what it is - but the general tom foolery around the Victor Plant also had an underbelly of downright shenanigans. We’ve taken the oral histories of 1000s of former employees - who have stories of everything from late night card games, to threesomes in Building 17’s Nipper Tower, to card games with mafia men by the Building 12, to loading up the latest records on the back of a truck after hours to be sold on the black market. Usually, you wouldn’t see a brand embracing history like this; but its the music industry….why shouldn’t it have the grit of a rock ‘n’ roll story?
A charming story i’ve heard from a few people are the tales of employees gathering together to jam through some music during breaks in Building 17 or Building 2. Full drum sets, guitar amps, keyboards, P.A. Systems and all - the lineage of music is strong with The Victor Family…even in staff that weren’t at all involved in a distinctly musical process relating to the company or its successors. Which leads me to a last thought; a benefit of being part of The Victor Company - through the years - can be best defined as;
Satisfaction
As a member of The Victor Family (and successors), you knew (and know) that music is where you came from - and that your contributions amount to a tradition that is part of the single most impactful legacy in music…you are ‘His Master’s Voice’.
