The latest meeting of the R and H Retirees Club for former employees of Bridesburg's Rohm and Haas Co., held last week, started off like most of their meetings - they recited the Pledge of Allegiance and sang "God Bless America."

It was the group's first meeting back after a summer break and the first meeting held since plant's closing was announced on Friday, Aug. 21.

About 30 or so members gathered in the gymnasium of the Bridesburg Boys and Girls Club at 2901 Bridge St. last Friday.

Bill Minich, co-president of the group - here "R and H" doesn't just stand for the company's initials, it also means "Retired and Happy" - nodded his head and somberly read aloud the names of former Rohm and Haas employees and family members who had died over the two-month summer break.

In the 25 years the group has been gathering, Minich said, time has taken a toll on membership and meetings often begin on a similar note of remembrance.

With the recent announcement of the plant's impending closure, it seemed the Bridesburg plant itself could have joined that list.

Throughout the hall, remembrance was order of the day.

The words "remember when" seemed to preface every conversation as former employees took time to remember the plant that provided them with gainful employment for many, many years.

"When I started, we had 3,000 employees," remembered Ted Ostenriedder, who worked at the plant for more than 35 years as a materials packer and lab technician. "You had to park all the way down by the river."

German immigrants and inventors, Otto Haas and Dr. Otto Rohm began the company in Philadelphia in 1909 at a production facility on North 2nd Street.

There, the men developed a dog manure substitute, named Oropon, which was used in the city's then thriving tannery industry.

In 1920, the company - now with plants in Bristol and Chicago, Ill., - purchased the Bridesburg plant from Charles Lennig and Co., which had used the plant to produce sodium sulfide and sulfuric acid.

In its heyday, the Bridesburg plant had employed more than 3,000 workers.

In those years, many retired employees were quick to recall, the plant had its own bowling alley, gun range and even an air-raid shelter under the parking lot that could house all of the employees in case of a nuclear attack.

"At that time, there was no better company than Rohm and Haas," said Vince Mosiniak, who worked there from 1963 to 1996, and was the foreman of the utilities department at the time of his retirement.

But, for years prior to the plant's closure, Rohm and Haas had been dogged with lawsuits and complaints about the company's products potentially causing health issues for its employees.

In fact, the company, now owned by Dow Chemical, is still tied up in legal red tape over a number of cases of brain cancer that took the lives of technicians who worked at the company's Spring House facility in Montgomery County.