In the bright sunshine of spring, a light breeze flutters the banners that are still hanging to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Bata empire in Canada. But even in the sunshine the banners now seem slightly absurd.
The windows are dirty and you can't see into the plant. The banners and the anniversary celebrations last August were a brief happiness before the sadness that everyone knew was coming.
Hanging banners outside the Bata shoe plant was like tying a ribbon on the mane of an old horse before you take him behind the barn to shoot him.
At the age of 60, the plant that created a village and thousands of jobs and 142 million shoes has succumbed to the cruelty of the marketplace. The doors closed earlier this month.
Thomas Bata, the patriarch of Batawa who boasted of himself as the shoemaker to the world, has nothing to say publicly about the demise of the shoe factory he created in the late summer of 1939.
Mr. Bata's father, also Thomas, built Batanagar and Bataganj in India to make shoes for the world. So Mr. Bata built Batawa. He dreamed of creating a city, but the city of his dreams never got larger than a bucolic village in southern Ontario.
Nothing remains of Bata except the name of the village and the memories of the dwindling number of those retired from their labours.
There have been discussions with the municipality about maybe a library or a pool. As Bata chairman Jim Pantelidis explained, "to leave something behind in terms of, you know, leaving the Bata name behind there as a memento of the many years of employment that we had there."
From the start, Batawa was a classic company creation, the village that Bata built and ruled. This is the plant that hired the workers who lived in the houses that Bata built.
Nobody but Bata people lived and worked here -- close enough to walk to work and walk home for lunch. There was a Bata grocery store, a Bata recreation hall, Bata clubs, Bata teams, Bata lectures at the plant on Saturday morning and, of course, a Bata shoe store.
Walter Pavlica, who is 70 now, came here with his parents at the age of 15 in 1946. He has been a Bata loyalist for more than half a century.
"It was a real nice place to raise kids. It was like a big, happy family, frankly. You knew everyone in the village."
In the rise and fall of Batawa you can trace much of the pattern of the world for the last 60 years.
The Bata empire began in Czechoslovakia and it was from the city of Zlin that it spread to much of the world. But when Hitler's armies pushed Europe to the brink of war, young Thomas Bata came to Canada.
He talked his way into Canada and adroitly caressed the levers of political, economic and social persuasion. He did not want to go to Quebec because of language and distance; he could not go to western Ontario because the electrical current was wrong for his European machinery.
So he chartered a small plane and flew over the flat pasturelands from Toronto to the Quebec border. From on high, he chose the area north of Trenton because there was a river, a lake, a railway, a highway, an airport and cheap farmland.
He persuaded Canadian authorities to allow 100 Czechoslovak workers into the country and he set them to work to build his Canadian outpost empire. The first Bata shoes made in Canada came off the production line a few days before Hitler invaded Poland.
Frank Rabel, 83, was one of the original team of Czechoslovak workers in August of 1939. He recalls the first Bata operation in a long-abandoned paper mill in Frankford, north of Trenton; the workers were billeted in local homes.
By the end of the year, they had built the plant that would be the heart of Batawa -- four floors for shoes, the fifth floor for wartime production -- and they were building the houses that would be the homes of Bata workers for 25 years.
The houses were not palaces, but they were houses and they were better than many of the workers, whether from Czechoslovakia or Canada, had ever known. The weekly rent was about $10.
While all that was going on, they had to take night courses in English. Mr. Bata had a flat rule. The language of the workplace was English. Even when a Czech was talking to a Czech, it had to be in English.
The street names of the village reflect the commitment to adapt: Fraser, Sidney, Bishop, Haig, King George. The singular exception -- not surprising in a place called Batawa -- is Thomas Bata Boulevard.
If the Bata workers adapted to the language customs of the new country, the work rules were those of the old world.
For Mr. Bata it was a point of pride to address all of his workers by their first names. He, of course, was always Mister Bata. As Mr. Rabel said, "only his wife calls him Tom."
A stern apprenticeship program trained Canadian farm boys to be expert machinists.
Angela Medved, 75, worked in the shoe plant with her husband for 29 years. She is reluctant to say that it was a good place to work -- "Where is a good place to work?" -- but it was a nice community and a good life.
The Czechs were "kind of bossy," she said, but work was all right.
Another veteran Bata worker is Peter Suijker, now 63, who retired last year after 32 years in the engineering side of the Bata operation. He, too, acknowledged that working conditions were strict. "But if you knew your job you were okay."
A sunny springtime day in Batawa is a social occasion because most of those living in the village these days are retired from the plant where the banners are hanging.
So when Ed Jackson, 65, was out in the sunshine, raking the leaves from his lawn, it was natural that Herb Arens, 66, wheeled over on his bicycle for a chat. And equally natural that each of them trotted out a certain grumpiness.
With Mr. Arens, it was the severance package when he was laid off from the engineering works eight years ago. Still, except for that, "I enjoyed every minute of it."
With Mr. Jackson, who retired early a year and a half ago, the grumpiness was about the pay. Still, he allowed, even if the wages weren't that good, "it put bread and butter on the table."
The boom days of Bata and Batawa reflected the times, war and postwar. Then came the long, slow decline as tariff barriers crumbled around the world and Bata shoes made in Canada could not compete with the rest of the world.
These days there are hardly any Canadian shoes left. More than 90 per cent of the shoes sold in Canada are imported from the Third World -- most of them from China -- where labour is cheap and employment standards are low.
For the past quarter century, Canada's shoemakers have come to realize that competing with the market forces of the Third World is as thankless as trying to roll a stone uphill.
Mr. Pantelidis, who now heads Bata, and is a veteran not of the shoe business, but the international petroleum business, said the company came to the reluctant conclusion "that even under the best circumstances that we could imagine, there wasn't a business case that we could put together that saw that plant making money."
The surprise of it all is that Thomas Bata has had nothing to say in public about the closing of the Batawa plant. This, after all, was his creation, the triumph that made his mark on his adopted land.
Then again, perhaps it's not that surprising. His old colleague Mr. Rabel, for one, believes a strike at the plant 20 years ago left Mr. Bata bitter about Batawa.
Oddly, it came after Bata's best year, when 4.7 million shoes were produced at the plant. Labour and management fell out over which side would control the company pension plan.
In his autobiography Mr. Bata described the 1980 strike as his "most disappointing experience." He directed his bitterness toward the rank-and-file workers who, he said, did not stand up to be counted.
"Batawa up until then had occupied a special place in my heart. It was the first plant I had built, the place that had been my first home in North America, the launching pad, so to speak, for everything I had done in the past 40 years.
"By the time the strike was settled those emotional ties had been stretched to the limit."
He spelled out the bottom line after the strike: "We will expect Batawa to justify its existence in the cold light of performance rather than any emotional involvement."
The Bata operation has been dwindling ever since. The work force went from a total of about 2,500 to 210 last October when the closing was announced. At the end of March, there were just 60 who were finishing off final orders.
The little Bata box houses have long since disappeared, the lots sold to plant workers who built their own homes and created a pleasant suburbia.
In the warehouse that used to be the grocery store and the shoe shop, Mr. Pavlica finds a giant aerial photograph of Batawa half a century ago and points to his own house. He smiles and admits he misses the old days when Batawa made shoes for the world.
"It's sad, especially for an old goat like me," he said.