(Ford Model T assembly line. Photo FoMoCo.)
With all the talk about jobs these days, it makes a Boomer sigh. We have all done some work we didn’t like much, but we lucky ones got a chance to see some things that really suck. I worked on a farm one summer, and that was an eye-opener. It was hard but at least it was outside.
The work in Detroit was hard-core at its very soul. There was outdoor work that our brief resumes qualified us for: laying asphalt or grounds-keeping were ones that most of the guys had a chance to try their hands at. Nothing quite like a Michigan summer day and red-hot black top. Thankfully, Michigan skies are gray most of the time due to the moisture from the lakes that surround the peninsula.
In the summer of 1969 one of the Dad’s who was a wheel at Chrysler got Muhammed and Beau Diddley and Max and Max’s brother jobs on The Line at the Dodge Truck on 9mile and Mound.
They worked there all that summer after high school- no air conditioning in the plant, hot as hell, and they dragged themselves back to plush suburban Grabbingham exhausted after every 8.5-hour shift.
Pocket was there at the same plant, same awful repetitive motion for eight months, bridging some time between stints at Eastern Michigan in Ypsitucky, which is what we called the adjoining city to Ann Arbor due to the high concentration of crackers who had come to work in the Willow Run plant building bombers.
The rhythm was the same in every UAW plant, and it was one that had been negotiated on the sweat of working people from the dawn of The Line at Henry Ford’s Model T plant in Highland Park.
The plant is still there, as is the original little factory at 411 Piquette Avenue. Surprising, really, since so much more has been demolished. They say that 50,000 factories have been knocked flat.
The plant where I was on The Line is gone now, knocked down a couple years ago. We got the same two paid fifteen minute breaks and one non-paid 30 minute lunch.
The work was mind-numbing, and we regularly screamed out of the Kelvinator plant to hit the Silver Slipper and see how much beer we could drink in the twenty available minutes inside the tavern. Working in the plant was like being condemned to some awful eternal now of timelessness.
But as bad as The Line was, it paid enough for the people who worked there to buy the products that came off the end of it. The work molded the character of the town, and while the attitude still remains, those days are gone. That is what polished off the city, the last decent jobs being devoted to knocking down the big plants.
And now, for the most part, it is all gone, vanished.
Back then, when I did the six operations on each shell that marched, inexorably, toward me and then into infinity, I had the radio behind me cranked up to CKLW, The Big 8, and the music kept me sane.
Or something. More about The Beat tomorrow…
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com