After the Sizzle

I got this back from a pal about the Earl bit. It is nice, and below it is my response:

Thanks JR–a real treat for a Michigan guy like me, but saddening.  While you were hobnobbing with the headquarters guys, my neighbors were the tool-and-die makers (i.e. the top of the blue collar ladder) for whom model-changeover was the busy time of year–the foremen and plant management.  The rythm of the southern part of the state (I’d say Saginaw where I lived in the ’50s, was the northern terminus of the

industry) was the model-year cycle.  The industry produced a prosperity for the state that allowed us to have, at one time, some of the best roads in the nation, the best public schools, nearly full employment and a middle class lifestyle for anyone

willing to work the line.  All that was lost because management did not see the Japanese coming or understand in time the market forces that would allow those four cylinder Asian econoboxes to become the industry standard.  Having learned nothing from the past, there are still no indications in Detroit of a vision or the kind of gobal industry leadership you described.  “Roger and Me” was an epitaph.  Your piece

is too in many ways, because the theme is “the glory that was Detroit.”  

I thought about it all day. Then I wrote him back.

After Mr. Earl Sold Us the Sizzle

Rick, thanks for the memories of a town that I loved growing up. The Motorama. The Ford Rotunda, with the ring around it composed of segments of all the great roads of the world. The one’s I remember include the Appian Way, the first superhighway of the classical age, and a dirt stretch of the Burma Road. Hudson’s downtown, the Detroit Atheltic Club, the Yacht Club and the Boat Club and Belle Isle. The big Stroh’s Brewery out by the New Center Area, the GM World Headquarters. The Dakota Restrauant, and Lelli’s and Greeketown. Perogies and Kielbasa in Hamtramk. The Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It was a touch town but a good one.

We left Kentucky Street by the D&W Oil Company when I was little. They were block busting, moving black families into the neighborhoods off Woodward and profiting as the white’s fled the city. Out in Birmingham, where my folks bought a house for $18,500 in the heart of Birmingham, my best childhood buddy was the son of a leathery master tool-maker at Ford’s. They still said it that way, like the old Henry was going to walk into the original model T plant down in Highland Park.

Ford had left his mark all over the region. You could still see the odd concrete hoops of the electric railway he built over the abandoned rights of way, and the model communities that he built for his workers, now down at the heel, because the workers, given the choice, woanted to olive with who they wanted to live with. Tough workers. Germans and Hungarians and Poles. Henry’s Fairlane Estate and Greenfield Village. The Glass Towers in Dearborn that the T had built. I married into a family that had a connection to one of henry’s original bookkeepers. The dissolute side had pissed away 1% of the Ford Motor Company in three generations. They lived large for along time.

The giant Firestone tire by the side of I-94 coming into town. Briggs stadium and the giant stove out in front of the State Fair Grounds. Fireworks on the River, and the trafic getting home. Then the city died. Commerce fled after the Blind Pig riots. Detroit is still there, the money, anyway, but now it is all out in Oakland County, in Troy, “The City of Tomorrow, Today” where we used to buy sweet corn from the field.

Stagflation and rising oil prices caused The World’s Largest Company to blink. The Big Three cut quality to keep prices down, and increasingly the equitable contracts that made working on the line an honorable way to live and pay your taxes were vulnerable. There were other places to assemble cars. The International Harverster strike in Illinois showed how it was going to go. The Company was going to hunker down and abandon the the social contract that made Detroit a decent place to live. The UAW- I was member in 1970-71- also protected workers in a thousand Union shops that made piecework for the big assembly plants. I had to call a Steward one time when the efficiency experts loaded an extra task on me that I could not perform as the assemblies moved by on the line. I was grateful for the protection. One by one the jobs moved away, the margins got squeezed, and short-cuts the companies took to continue to push product out the door without dealing with their fundamental problems.

My Dad remembered total quality, and when he went up to Petoskey to take over Curtis Wire Company he set up a white room to inspect the incoming spools of wire that would be made into oven racks. By a UAW shop. In its prime the little plant had 150 workers drawing checks. At the end, when Dad told them that they either had to give him some concessions or the little plant was going to shut its doors and they would take the Conglomerate was going to take the business to a new facility where the people were grateful to have the work.

They were down to about 78 paychecks at that point, and they dug their heels in, figuring Dad was lying to them. And so the plant locked the doors and the work went south. Everyone lived, though the site where the plant had done chromium plating all those years was deemed to be a hazardous environmental zone by the Michigan EPA, and there were some tense years trying to liquidate the place.

Meanwhile, Roger and Me told the story in Flint, which had once been a pretty proud blue collar town. A friend of mine was part of the rising generation at a corrugated box concern that out-sourced the packaging for the local DELCO-AC plant. When he and his brothers took over the business from his Dad, they found how hard it was to deal with an entrenched UAW shop. There was one woman who played the disability system like a fine violin. She would injure herself, take the maximum time off with full benefits, return, and like clockwork go back on the injured list at the first opportunity. My friend vowed to get her fired as a malingerer, and though it was years ago he made the vow, I’m sure she parlayed herself all the way to a pension.

It was a failure of corporate vision, and it was aided by the inability of the Unions to see that a global economy meant that the social compact had been breached by global capitalism. It made the exodus of jobs inevitable, though it didn’t have to be the way it was.

It was a privilege to grow up on the sizzle side of the business. But it was complex, the way an hourly job could get you by. A close friend of mine, lovely daughter of one of the legendary Lion’s Texas Quarterbacks got a job in one of the plants in Wixom, married there, and lived happily ever after, as far as I know. It was different then. A world away.

Thanks for bringing back the memories. But the one I treasure still is a Pontiac ad from the late ’60s. It is a picture of north Woodward, out where things are nice, right across from McManus-John|&Adams, the advertising firm that had the GM account. The center is a brand new Pontiac GTO, hurtling off the line at the light, flying by a sign that says simple “U.S. 10 North. Woodward Avenue.” The copy just read, “Need we say more?”

Nope.

J.R.