The plant's printing presses, which had clattered loudly day and night, sat strangely silent. No forklifts bustled by, beeping, beeping, beeping.

"It was like The Twilight Zone," Sam Smiley recalled.

In between marathon Scrabble games and poker rounds, employees at the soon-to-be-shuttered Reynolds Packaging plant in Downingtown painted walls, cleaned machinery, and watched movies, making plans for a final barbecue in the parking lot - ribs, potato salad, chicken.

"Everybody had a job to do - and then, all of a sudden, nothing," said Smiley, who started at the plant in 1977.

Since it opened about 50 years ago, the Downingtown plant had been printing packages for consumer goods - Marlboro cigarettes, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and Whitman's candy.

"You could go into a store and pick a product off the shelf," said Smiley. "We were proud of our work."

If you bought a bottle of Nestle's Coffee-Mate anywhere in the country, the printing on the wrapper was done in a nondescript factory on Lincoln Avenue.

Now, after 31 years, Smiley has no work, and neither do the majority of the other 150 people laid off from the plant earlier this spring. On a beautiful March day, they turned in their employee badges, some gathering at Chelsy's Tavern in Downingtown for one last round with friends.

There they were, another set of statistics, joining the 13.7 million other Americans who are unemployed and the 456,000 who lost jobs in manufacturing in March.

But why them?

The complex stew of decisions that led to their joblessness in March involves New Zealand's richest man, the skyrocketing price of oil, the credit freeze, a botched integration of businesses under their roof, a mothballed printer, and a revolving cast of consultants and managers, evidence of an inconsistent focus on the plant's printing business by a series of owners who saw it as an adjunct.

"The only reason we were closed is that nobody wanted us," said Kenneth "Mike" Phillips, who worked there since 1982.

Statisticians can now count Phillips as one of 16,387 people unemployed in Chester County - the county in the Philadelphia suburbs that has seen the biggest increase, by percentage, in the number of jobless.

Every company that closes has its story. This is one of those stories. But what all the stories have in common are economic currents that ebb and flow as impersonally as water in a creek, washing away lives and dreams and changing the course of life in a community.

At Chelsy's, for example, there's no longer a need for a morning bartender. There aren't enough thirsty workers coming off overnight shifts to put a bartender to work serving up suds instead of cereal at 7 a.m.

Even tips aren't the same.

"It is a trickle-down effect," said bartender Karen Mack as she served beers on March 27, when the Reynolds group gathered for a final round.

Long before the company, then known as MillPrint, opened its factory in Downingtown, the area attracted a thriving paper business. MillPrint built its plant in an industrial enclave tucked among the farms of rural Chester County.

The Brandywine Creek, which runs through town, powered so many paper mills that Downingtown was known as Milltown.

"You could smell the paper before you could see the town," said Gary Smith, president of Chester County's Economic Development Council.

None of the mills remains open now, although one has a new life as an upscale eatery where patrons can order filet mignon on a charming deck overlooking the creek that once powered its machinery.

Milltown also benefited from its location. Like Conshohocken today, Milltown grew at the intersection of two major commerce routes - Route 30, which headed west from Philadelphia, and Route 322, which carried freight from Lake Erie to the Jersey Shore.

"Because of the transportation, because of the way the river flowed through the town," Smith said, "these mills started to sprout."

They spawned spin-offs - "companies that added value to the raw material," he said, parlaying the skill sets of the workers in the region.

Papermaking begat box building, and also printing, which begat printing on materials other than paper - laminates that attached, for example, foil to paper to create packaging for pouch tobacco.