Aaron Feuerstein, CEO Who Paid Workers After Malden Mills Fire, Dies At 95
BROOKLINE (CBS) - Aaron Feuerstein, the CEO who kept his employees on the payroll even after a fire nearly destroyed his Malden Mills factory in Lawrence, has died. He was 95 years old.
Feuerstein's son Daniel told the Boston Globe his father died Thursday night after complications from a fall at his home in Brookline last week.
A wind-fueled fire nearly destroyed the Polartec textile factory at Aaron Feuerstein's Malden Mills complex in Lawrence on December 11, 1995.
Feuerstein gained national attention after he continued paying workers as he rebuilt the business following the devastating fire.
"I was proud of the family business and I wanted to keep that alive, and I wanted that to survive. But I also felt the responsibility for all my employees, to take care of them, to give them jobs," he told 60 Minutes in 2002.
During the interview Feuerstein was asked, what's going to be on his tombstone?
"Hopefully it'll be, 'He done his damnedest,'" he said. "You know, that I didn't give up and I try to do the right thing."
Feuerstein's company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2007. It was later sold and its manufacturing plants moved to New Hampshire and Tennessee.