Kilmer House

As a company that’s 122 years old, Johnson & Johnson has many traditions.  One of those traditions is having employees with many years of service, not just in New Brunswick…but as the Company grew, in operating companies across the world in locations as varied as the U.K., Mexico, Brazil, India, Australia and South Africa.  How old is that tradition?  It started in 1886, the year we were founded.

The New Additions to the Storehouse Buildings in 1912

With the opening of new storehouse buildings on Nielson Street in New Brunswick in 1912, Johnson & Johnson continued its tradition of inaugurating new buildings by having a reception and dance for employees.  This was done after the building was completed, but before the machinery was installed, so that there would be room for a celebration.  Once again, to recognize the Company’s large population of Hungarian employees, the Company brought back Prof. Chas. Mezei’s Hungarian Orchestra as one of two orchestras to play for employees during the dance.

The inside cover of the program for the 1912 reception and dance listed the “Roll of Honor,” employees who had 20 or more years of service with Johnson & Johnson...at a time when the Company itself had only been around for 26 years.  Here’s what the program book said:

“A striking feature of the conditions which prevail throughout the realm of Johnson & Johnson, is the relation between the management, their associates and employees. [sic] A long service is not uncommon in the ranks, and there are a number of persons who have been constantly employed from the inception of the business…They have virtually grown up with the business, and become imbued with the principles and the methods which govern its relationship to those with whom it comes in contact.  They are closely interwoven in the woof and warp of the business fabric.  All have conscientiously given their best efforts to the success of the enterprise, and this is what made it what it is.  Long service seems to be a distinctive feature in the history of the corporation.”  [April 20, 1912 Reception and Dance Souvenir Booklet, Opening of the New Storehouse Buildings.]

That last sentence was certainly accurate, since almost half of the original 1886 employees were still there in 1912.

In 1912 there were 35 employees who had been with the Company 20 years or more.  This included six employees (three men and three women) who had been with the Company since 1886, the year Johnson & Johnson was founded.  These earliest employees had been persuaded to leave Robert Wood Johnson’s previous business, Seabury & Johnson, and take a chance on joining a small startup business operating on the rented fourth floor of a former wallpaper factory next to the railroad tracks in New Brunswick, with the revolutionary and, to some, outlandish idea of making the first mass produced sterile surgical dressings to save lives in hospitals.  In 1912, the little startup was a constantly growing and very well respected business with several thousand employees.  (By the way, Fred Kilmer, his joining date listed here as 1888 instead of 1889, was one of those “Roll of Honor” employees.)

Early employees recommended the Company to their family and friends, and it was not unusual to find multiple generations of a family and/or multiple family members – brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins – employed here.   This was especially true in New Brunswick’s Hungarian community, where many of the city’s Hungarian residents worked for Johnson & Johnson and were fiercely loyal to the Company.

Two of the “Roll of Honor” employees, Elizabeth --- (joined in 1886) and Gussie --- (joined in 1892) had not only risen in the ranks to become department supervisors, but they were trained in first aid (a concept that Johnson & Johnson started) and were proud members of the Company’s First Aid staff, which provided help to employees who were taken ill or injured at work.  Joining them on the First Aid staff was a fairly new young 19-year old employee who would also go on to have a long career with the Company:  Robert Wood Johnson, the son of one of the founders.  He went on to lead Johnson & Johnson from 1932 to 1963, and made it into the decentralized, publicly-traded worldwide family of companies that we know today.

So if any readers -- or their friends or family members -- are long-time Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies employees, they are part of a tradition of long service that goes all the way back to the Company’s founding in 1886.