Blue Collar
By Rod Kackley
(c) 2013 Lyons Circle Publishing
Chapter One: Welcome To Warren
Skies were filled with black smoke by 4 o’clock every afternoon. The smell and scraping sound of metal on metal were in the air. Diesel exhaust, carbon monoxide. Cars were backed up for miles going into and out of the auto plants in my hometown, Warren, Mich. the third-largest city in the state, home to the dynamo of American auto manufacturing, home to the Big Three.
Powerful stuff.
The phrase Rush Hour was Orwellian. Nobody moved fast. The roads and highways were jammed every morning. Frantic traffic reports were heard on every radio station, every ten minutes. So many cars moving, so many people whose lives were forged in factories and offices in Detroit, so many trucks carrying the raw materials destined to become the cars and trucks that moved America ; all merging all carrying our fathers and a few mothers to work, every day in the Motor City.
And,there were so many kids.
We were the Baby Boomers, packed into the houses that all looked pretty much the same, forming a marching, moving, swaying exodus of children who every morning walked to school and then back home for lunch, before going back to school.
The sidewalks and playgrounds were always jammed with kids. There was never a time of silence on our suburban streets until Dad got home and we all sat down for dinner.
Fathers came home at night. Mom was there. She had dinner on the table. Kids were home too after a day of school or in the summer, a day of riding through the neighborhood on our bikes with baseball gloves on the handlebars. You could never be sure when a game would break out.
Nobody worried about you. In Warren, a a subdivision was raising its children. If your mom wasn’t there, someone else’s mother was watching you.The same was true for your mom. She was watching the neighbor’s kids. They were always watching.
Just before Dad got home, Mom stood on the porch or opened the kitchen window and yelled. “(Insert name) time for dinner.” As one mother used to yell to the embarrassment of her son, my friend, “Aloysius, time to do the dishes.”
We all raced home when Mom’s call rang out. If we were on bikes—Schwinn bikes of course—all pedaling as fast as we could, usually yelling as loud as we could to each other, the Easy Riders of suburbia. We had to get home. It was mandatory. Everyone ate together, watched TV together—there was only one “idiot box” per household, that was what we called them then—and we all watched together.
Life was good for our fathers. There were strikes, layoffs, slowdowns, and assembly line changes that might put him in the unemployment line for a few weeks. That was okay. Those were usually deer hunting weeks in the fall and winter. No problem. Back then the phrase “layoff” meant “layoff.” Today layoff is a watered down euphemism for “fired” or “terminated.” Much harsher words. Much closer to reality.
Times were good. If your father didn’t work for GM, Chrysler or Ford; he could get a job at one of the tool and die shops that supplied the suppliers of the Big Three. High school diploma or not, that blue collar and a union card got him the middle class lifestyle that built America. That’s right. He was doing more than building cars, trucks, and tanks—yes, the defense industry added thousands of manufacturing and engineering jobs—our fathers were all building America.
Radio stations timed their newscasts to the moment when an autoworker’s butt would hit the upholstery of his car—and you know that car carried the same brand name that was stamped on his paycheck, Ford-Chrysler-GM—you drove what you built in metro Detroit. There were no exceptions. When you bought American, you bought American. There was no doubt in your mind that the car parked in your garage was made in America.
We listened to the Beatles on 45 RPM records on our phonographs. Long hair on boys shocked our parents, and us too. The Vietnam War was ripping our families apart. It was a revolutionary time. However, we didn’t see the biggest change coming. The last thing we were worried about was the death of the Big Three. We Baby Boomers assumed that the auto industry would be there when we needed it. Then again, we didn’t worry much about cigarettes except being able to hide them from our parents.
Life was good. We were living the American Dream. Manufacturing made it all happen. Manufacturing was the industry that drove possibilities. It meant we Boomers could go to college. It meant our parents could look forward to a retirement with grandchildren, Social Security, a pension and health care.
Even if you never set foot in a factory, you reaped the benefits. Companies that didn’t have unions still had to compete with union pay and benefits or they would never get anyone decent. Manufacturing made all of that happen, for all of us.
Don’t think for a minute that it was the corporations that made it happen. It was the people on the lines, assembly and picket lines. It was the people who had made it to the Middle Class in their blue collars who reached down and pulled more people up with them. They were the people who pumped money back into the economy. They were the people who were the job creators. They just didn’t know it at the time.
The auto industry brought my family to Michigan from Missouri. It is the typical story of a family facing hard times in the Depression, moving with what little they could carry in their trucks, a Grapes of Wrath movement north. My father and his brother would be sent back to the farms for the summer so that their mother could get more hours in at the GM plant in Flint. Back home, they used BB guns to shoot cockroaches off the walls of the apartment they would have to leave when the rent came due.
It was the auto industry that put bread on my father’s table in those days and it was that GM plant in Flint that helped my grandmother move them into the Middle Class. It was the auto industry that employed my father’s mother, a single parent widowed at an early age. It was the auto industry where anyone in Flint with the last name of “Kackley” could find a job in the plants because of my grandmother’s tenure with General Motors.
And it was the auto industry that my father ran from, joking that he escaped from the auto factory assembly line, getting into the U.S. Army and joining the battle known as World War Two, so he could finally get some “peace and quiet.”
Truth be told, he was drafted. He came home and went to work, for a time, in the auto plants of Flint.
Years later, a white-collar, technician-engineer in aerospace, my father never lost sight of the fact that it was the benefits the unions had fought and bled for that gave him the middle-class lifestyle he enjoyed.
My father might not have carried a union card, but it was union blood that pumped his heart.
It was the unions that won, for single parents like my grandmother from the South a chance at a new life, a more than livable wage, a fairly decent work environment, and most importantly a sense of justice.
It was the unions that battled for the workers. Union leaders stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their “rank-and-file” walking picket lines in the snow and bitterly cold winds of Michigan, fighting toe-to-toe in mortal hand-to-hand combat with the thugs hired by the Big Three to keep union organizers out of Detroit and Flint.
It was the unions and the Big Three, finally reaching a mutually profitable, spit-in-your-face, don’t tread on me, partnership after years of bloody struggle that promised my father’s generation a middle-class lifestyle that included health care, retirement, and a better life for their children.
It didn’t last.
It all changed. Not quickly. Not fast. We were more like those frogs in boiling water who don’t know they are cooked until they are cooked.
It only got worse after my friends and I in the Class of 1973 started our adult lives. Manufacturing started seizing up like our parents’ lungs after too many years of Pall Mall, Lucky Strike and other fine tobacco. Just like our parents’ whose lungs and hearts could take no more, manufacturing collapsed. It died. The auto industry went down and dragged everything else with it.
It was the Great Collapse. It wasn’t a collapse with a crash, a slam, or even a thump like a big, huge piece of concrete falling from the sky, lifting clouds of dirt and dust and leaving a deep crater.
This was not like one of those skyscrapers brought down by dynamite or whatever they strategically place on every floor so that the building comes down in one smooth motion of a comfortable, easy death, hurting no one, leaving no collateral damage in its wake.
No, this was more like the Berlin Wall going down piece by painful piece as Japanese and German automakers swung their little, fuel-efficient wrecking balls at the Motor City. Death by a million bruises. Death by a million lost customers, vanished souls that Detroit is afraid it will never see again. Lost.
We tried running from Michigan in a reverse migration, many of us following the path that our grandparents blazed from south to north, in a reverse direction to the southern tier and western Sunbelt states as we decried the “brain drain” that is leaving the state intellectually bankrupt.
In the end it all came down with a shudder, a shimmy, a whine, a moan and the realization that the Detroit Three—nobody called them the Big Three anymore—really didn’t know what to do. The union bosses and the corporate suits were united in their uselessness. They couldn’t even tread water.
In the end, it all ended with that last gasp that is Nature’s way of sounding Taps because something had gone wrong, terribly wrong.
This then, was the Great Collapse.
Forbes magazine would list Warren and Flint as two of the “Most Miserable Cities” in the United States in 2012.
It has been bad, really bad in Michigan. My generation has lived through our version of a Great Depression that just never got any better, at least not for the middle class.
The Upper Middle Class, immortalized in song by the music of one of Detroit’s favorite sons, Bob Seger as the “UMC,” did fine, certainly better than we did. The class divide that our grandparents fought to bridge with their blood, sweat and tears and that our parents had crossed was disappearing. The gulf is open again, the chasm of inequality has split us in two, and it grows wider every day.
It would be up to our children to lead the protest, mobbing Wall Street with their Occupy movement. Perhaps we have taught our children better than we believed. They certainly had to pick up the baton that we dropped.
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Blue Collar is a work of fiction, Yet, it is very personal. Although the characters are all creations of my imagination, I would be lying if I didn’t admit they are also creations of my memory. Consider it fictional autobiography, with the sub title of “What If?” if you have to put a label on it.
Can you relate?
For Chapter Two, please click here, and feel free to read the back story and the story of the Green Acres Elementary School gang.
Rod
Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community tells the story of how my adopted hometown, Grand Rapids, Michigan created the Medical Mile, a medical-life sciences-education cluster of prosperity.
Last Chance Mile is available wherever books are sold including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes, as well as on the shelves of West Coast Coffee-Monroe Center, Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall and Schuler Books & Music-28th Street, Grand Rapids.
For an autographed hardcover or softcover edition, please go to www.rodkackley.com and click on the Add To Cart button.
