ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 4, 1996 TAG: 9602030003
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: G-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON STAFF WRITER
Castroville, Calif., has an artichoke festival. Winchester honors the apple, and hundreds of other towns celebrate their natural resources and economic engines.
Now, Martinsville area leaders are considering holding an event to celebrate the area's large knit goods industry.
A working name for the event, which could be staged for the first time this spring, is the "Sweatfest," a takeoff on the area's historically high sweat shirt production. One such producer, Tultex Corp. of Martinsville, with 7,500 employees worldwide, is a home-grown industry dating to 1937.
There is talk of holding a formal dinner dance, except the dress code would be a bit relaxed; everyone would wear sweat shirts and sweat pants. Organizers might try to identify and honor longtime industry workers with awards, such as "longest dyehouse employee," and want to stage a sweat shirt-decorating contest.
The purpose is to "celebrate this whole notion of Martinsville being this sweat shirt capital of the world," said Tom Harned, Martinsville's community development director.
Danny Robertson, vice president of merchandising at Tultex's Logo 7 unit and a 25-year Tultex employee, estimated that 70 percent of the world's production of sweat shirts was shipped from the Martinsville area in about 1980, at which time Harned's claim was probably true. But since then, the dispersion of fleecewear production worldwide raises questions about whether Martinsville still is the true "sweat shirt capital," he said.
Still, makers of knit fabrics and apparel are a dominant force locally, providing 8,100 jobs, or 18 percent, of all nonfarm employment in Martinsville and Henry and Patrick counties in the first quarter of 1995, according to the Virginia Employment Commission.
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