Nothin' but Blue Skies Read online

  To Mr. Matt Mann, J. W. Sexton High School history teacher,

  who taught me the story of America

  Contents

  Prologue: Gus’s Bar

  1. The Sit-Down Striker

  2. The Arsenal of Democracy

  3. The Motor City Is Burning

  4. Burn On, Big River

  5. I’m a Flintoid

  6. “A Rust Bowl”

  7. Homestead

  8. New Jack Cities

  9. The Smell of Money

  10. “We’re All Going to End Up in Chicago”

  11. “Nature Always Bats Last”

  12. Lackawanna Blues

  13. The Second Great Recession

  14. The Corner of Palmer and Jesus Saves

  15. Flintstones

  16. “This Is Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile”

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Prologue

  Gus’s Bar

  For me, the glory days of American industry smelled like paint.

  I went to J. W. Sexton High School in Lansing, Michigan, an art deco brick fortress that stood across the street from a Fisher Body auto plant. Fisher Body resembled an enormous backyard shed, clad in a corrugated steel skin whose shade of green was somewhere between the Statue of Liberty and mold. In the summer, Fisher Body’s emblem—a landau carriage—bloomed in a floral pattern on the factory’s front lawn. In the fall, second-shift workers stood on the balconies to watch the Sexton Big Reds butt heads across the street, in Memorial Stadium. In the spring, I ran laps around the stadium’s four-hundred-meter oval, inhaling atomized paint fumes with every gasp—a sweetish metallic tang I still associate with the track team. The industrial atmosphere can’t have made me faster. Our band teacher, whose window opened toward the factory, developed a heart condition after years of breathing oxygen scented with Oldsmobile paint jobs.

  Facing every gate was a tavern, so Fisher Body’s shoprats could speed from punch-out to bar stool in five minutes or less. Gus’s advertised “Booze and Burgers.” The Shop Stop was renowned for its postshift brawls. The bars were off-limits to students, and so was the Sav-Way, a party store, (the Michigan term for a liquor store), whose coolers were stacked with six-packs.

  In Lansing—as in Flint, Detroit, Pontiac, Saginaw, and all the other industrial abrasions on the palm of Lower Michigan—General Motors owned the air, the sky, the land, and the water. The chemically tainted air carried a new-car smell more primal than the showroom aroma. At night, the sky over the twenty-four-hour factories turned pink, an aurora automobilis that tattered constellations by outshining all but the lowest-magnitude stars. The biggest building in town was the Oldsmobile Main Plant, which had been the state fairgrounds until General Motors decided to assemble R. E. Olds’s buggy alongside the Grand River. When you vaulted over the arched back of the double bridge, built to accommodate shift-change traffic, the Oldsmobile legend shone above the factory in pink neon. And if you looked down, you might see similarly unnatural colors on the water, a rainbow slick I called “Oldsmo-bile.” While you were trying to fall asleep, your bedroom filled with the clacket of locomotives carrying Delta 88s along tracks stitched into the coaly riverbank. When you woke up, the drop forge stamped out car parts to a Mordor beat, a half-ton hammer pounding sharply on an anvil, amplified by a copper dawn.

  In the 1970s, Oldsmobile was the third-bestselling brand in America, trailing only those titanic rivals Ford and Chevy. Lansing employed twenty-five thousand autoworkers, a constituency so large that candidates for president of the United Auto Workers local bought ads on the radio.

  An industrial park is not the most wholesome setting for a secondary education, but in those days, it made perfect sense. Most auto plants are surrounded by suppliers—of tires, radios, door handles, floor mats. Sexton supplied labor. In 1943, when the school was built, General Motors was the largest private employer in the world. For the next thirty-five years, there might as well have been a tunnel from the graduation stage to the assembly line. One week, you had a diploma in your hand. The next, a ratchet. A healthy young man didn’t even need to graduate high school to work in the shop.

  “I had this student,” my history teacher once told me, “a real chuckle-head. Just refused to study. Dropped out of school, and a year or so later, he came back to see me. He pointed out the window at a brand-new Camaro and said, ‘That’s my car.’ Meanwhile, I was driving a beat-up station wagon. I think he was an electrician’s assistant or something. He handed lightbulbs to an electrician.”

  That was not the story of my generation. I started high school in 1982, the rock-bottom pits of the Rust Belt era, when Michigan’s unemployment rate was 15 percent. Our physics teacher began each semester with this lecture:

  “It used to be,” he said, “that you could walk out of here, walk across the street, and get a job in that plant. That’s not the case anymore. You guys are going to have to study hard and go to college if you want a good job.”

  Sometimes, as I walked past the plant, I would stare through the high windows, watching an auto frame jerk along in its progress from chassis to Cutlass. That was as close as I ever got. Fisher Body wasn’t letting any students inside for field trips or character-building summer jobs. Auto work was not my class’s calling. The morning after graduation, there was a line outside the personnel office, but that was just my schoolmates performing their parents’ ritual, for a god who no longer listened to prayers for $20-an-hour jobs. “Generous Motors” had dropped that nickname and reverted back to its sterner title: “the General.” And the General was not enlisting privates.

  The army was, though, so my friend Larry joined up in the winter of our senior year, because he knew his father couldn’t get him in at Oldsmobile. When Larry came home, three years later, his old man gave him a hard time about not finding a job right away. Across the generation gap between a baby boomer and a Gen X-er, Larry delivered a speech about how kids his age didn’t have it as easy as their fathers.

  “I think that you’ve just lost touch with reality,” he told his dad. “I think that you have to know, if everyone had the same opportunity that you did to just walk into a personnel office, fill out a piece of paper, go to work the same day, we’d all be there. Times are different. You didn’t have to go to college to earn the life that you have now. You can’t just walk into General Motors today.”

  Still, as long as Fisher Body remained standing, I knew Lansing had not been abandoned, and neither had our ideal of urban life. The twentieth-century auto plant was a great integrator, a great income leveler. Not only did blacks from Tennessee and German Catholics from rural villages build the same cars, they earned the same money as budget analysts at the state capitol—often more, with overtime. Sexton’s swath of west Lansing took in the biker neighborhoods by the airport, the ghetto that produced Earvin “Magic” Johnson, the country club, and the governor’s mansion. We were a statewide power in basketball and golf. A local joke went, “What’s black and white and black and white and black and white? The lunch line at Sexton.”

  Fisher Body closed in 2005, after General Motors decided it could no longer afford to truck auto shells across town to the assembly plant by the river. GM wanted to put the entire process under one roof. I visited the obsolete factory during its demolition. The green skin remained, but cranes and bulldozers were consuming the innards. Hanging from the weave of a chain-link fence was a sign with this Big Brotherish slogan: “Demolition Means Progress.” The warehouse grid of windows was bulleted with broken panes, the glass torn away like paper targets on a shooting range. Peeping through the ragged holes, I saw snarled heaps of metal, th
e entrails of an assembly line. Down the street, Verlinden School, which had educated the West Side’s middle class since the Prohibition twenties, wore a plywood bandage over its first-floor windows. An aluminum bungalow was stickered with a yellow foreclosure notice. Sav-Way, site of so many lunch-break beer runs, subsisted on an inner-city trade of baby food, lottery tickets, canned spaghetti, diapers, and Wild Irish Rose.

  Five years later, Fisher Body looked like the Badlands of South Dakota, with Nagasaki in one corner, where the demolition crew had left chunks of concrete riprap and ochre ribbons of steel, twisted at pipe-cleaner angles. Deindustrialization has its own flora, and Fisher Body was now a garden of weeds and wildflowers that grew on the graves of factories: red clover, teasel with its prickly lavender crown, Queen Anne’s lace, the most ragged of flowers. It was evening when I walked the fence, so the mellowing dusk glowed through the petals of the black-eyed Susans, illuminating a field of tiny suns.

  Across the street from the old south gate, Gus’s Bar (Booze and Burgers) was still open, but with a For Sale sign pinned beside the front door. I opened the door, but not even the Mediterranean-white sunshine of a late-spring afternoon could disperse the thirty years of darkness that had accumulated inside Gus’s. Three men tending long-necked beer bottles watched a classic car auction on the TV over the bar. The only moving figure in the tenebrous scene was Gus Caliacatsos, a short, bald, bearded Greek who flapped across the perforated kitchen mat in plastic sandals, to check on a hamburger sizzling in grease. On a shelf behind the bar, rock banks were on sale for $25. A sign advertised rooms for rent, $100/wk.

  “I was never allowed to come in here when I was in high school,” I told Gus.

  “I ban the students from Sexton,” he said. “One day, they come in, loosen all the saltshakers.”

  I bought a $2 Budweiser, and Gus sat down with me at the bar. He shuffled through snapshots of his hometown, Preveza, a seaside hamlet of pastel villas, and explained how he had gotten from those bright skies to this dark bar, and why he was trying to go back again.

  Gus had arrived in Michigan in 1960, because in 1960, no place on Earth had more to offer an immigrant. After fleeing the Greek Civil War, he worked as a carpenter at the Canadian embassy in Germany. Pleased with a chair he’d built, the ambassador asked Gus, “What can I do for you?”

  “I want to go to America,” Gus said.

  So the ambassador gave Gus a Canadian visa and told him to see the American consul in Montreal.

  “Where do you want to go?” the consul asked Gus.

  “Where is the most jobs?” Gus asked.

  “Detroit, Michigan,” the consul told him.

  “Is that the capital?”

  “Lansing is the capital.”

  In Greece, Athens was the capital and the leading metropolis. Gus assumed Michigan was the same.

  “Then I want to go to Lansing,” Gus said.

  Gus opened his tavern in 1980, just two years past the all-time high point of GM’s employment. It was a shop bar, nothing but. They’re working hard in the plant, they deserve a drink, Gus figured. Shoprats raced across the street on their lunch breaks, and sometimes they didn’t return to the assembly line. Third shift was known as the party shift, or the bachelor shift, because you got off work early enough to hit the bar and didn’t have to be back until late afternoon the next day, long enough to sleep off a hangover. After eleven o’clock, the door never swung back on its hinges, and not even seven barmaids could pour beer as fast as the autoworkers drank it. Who got served first? Whoever shoved his money closest to Gus’s face.

  When Fisher Body closed, Gus’s customers promised to keep drinking in his tavern, but a week later, he had to lay off all fourteen bartenders. After that, it was just Gus and his wife. Then Gus’s wife went home to Greece, so it was just Gus, working from seven in the morning until two in the morning, except when he could nap in one of the empty sleeping rooms above the bar. On slow nights, he closed at twelve thirty. Ever since he’d opened the bar, Gus had driven Oldsmobiles, because that’s where his money came from. Parked on the sidewalk was a burgundy 1998 Cutlass Ciera. His last, because GM no longer makes Oldsmobiles, and Gus can no longer afford a new car. He was trying to sell the bar, because he hadn’t seen his wife in a year.

  “The city, they do nothing to save the plant,” he complained. “They don’t give tax breaks.”

  “Tax breaks would not have saved that plant!” shouted a man at the bar—Gus’s most loyal customer, a retired tool-and-die maker who lived in one of his $100-a-week flops. Bearded, tattooed from bicep to elbow, covering his baldness with a USS Bennington cap, he was drinking his GM pension by the pitcher. “That plant was obsolete! It was ancient! I worked there for thirty-five years. They would have had to tear it down and spend a hundred million dollars to build a new one.”

  “The golden days died.” Gus sighed. “Right now, Michigan the most dumb place, because there’s no jobs.”

  In the early 1960s, when the American consul told Gus, “Go to Detroit, young man,” Michigan’s per capita income was eleventh in the nation. By 2011, when Gus hung the For Sale sign outside his tavern, it was thirty-seventh. The state’s poverty rate, once in the bottom five, was in the top twenty. In the parking lot of UAW Local 602, across the street from Gus’s, a sign warns “Non-North American Nameplate Vehicles Will Be Towed At Owner’s Expense.” Fifty years ago, such a sign would have been unnecessary. The only foreign car seen on the streets of Lansing was the Volkswagen Beetle, which was considered an affectation of long-haired piano teachers and graduate students too poor to afford an Oldsmobile with an eight-cylinder Rocket engine. German engineering was at least respected, but “Made in Japan” had the same cachet as “Made in Hong Kong” on the underside of plastic toys. Europe and Asia had destroyed themselves in World War II. The only winner of that conflict, the United States of America, had emerged as the most prosperous society in the history of the world, one that spread its bounty among all classes. No state benefited more than Michigan, because no invention ever accrued more value during its transformation from raw material to finished product than Henry Ford’s automobile. That mechanical invention made possible Ford’s social invention, the American middle class. From 1960 to 1965, Michigan’s per capita income increased 30 percent, more than any industrial state’s.

  Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev bragged about building a worker’s paradise in Soviet Russia, but Michiganders already lived in one: weekly pay stubs the size of Third World annual incomes, two cars in the driveway, a cottage on an inland lake, and each November, a deer-hunting trip to the North Woods, which was stocked like a royal game preserve.

  I was born into this world, in the second week of 1967, a year when the nation’s unemployment rate was 3.8 percent. I am a coeval of its decline. When I was six months old, Detroit caught fire. When I was six years old, the Arabs stopped sending us oil. When I was fifteen, a presidential candidate declared that my hometown lay at the bottom of “a Rust Bowl.” When I was forty-one, General Motors begged the United States Congress to rescue it from bankruptcy. Although neither I nor anyone in my family ever built cars, as the son of an auto-making town, my life has been shaped by the auto industry’s fortunes. Most American lives have. Like red clover and teasel, this book grows from the ruins of Fisher Body, but it’s not just about that factory, or about Lansing, or about Michigan. It’s about auto plants and auto towns, steel plants and steel towns, even air-conditioner plants and air-conditioner towns, all over America’s industrial heartland, that country between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes that once produced so much hardware. It’s an attempt to answer, on a historical scale, the question I ask myself whenever I stand on the grounds of Sexton High School and look across Michigan Avenue: What happened to the factory?

  1.

  The Sit-Down Striker

  The Flint Sit-Down Strike, which lasted from December 30, 1936, to February 11, 1937, was to the American labor movement what Lexington and
Concord was to the American Revolution. At Lexington, a gang of farmers stood up to the British Empire, the most powerful nation in the world. They lost the battle, but the war they started resulted in the founding of the United States, a new kind of nation, in which no man swore allegiance to a king. In Flint, for the first time, workingmen defeated a major industrial power—in this case, General Motors, the largest corporation in the world. Their victory resulted in the founding of the United Auto Workers and in a new kind of America, one in which every man had a right to the wealth his labor produced.

  Whether we still live in that America is one of the subjects of this book, but Everett Ketchum lived in it for most of his career. One of the last surviving Sit-Down Strikers, Everett not only participated in the battle that founded the blue-collar middle class, he enjoyed all the spoils of the peace that followed. As a tool-and-die maker at General Motors, Everett earned $27 an hour in the 1970s: more than any of the necktied budget analysts and wildlife biologists in Lansing’s mazes of state government cubicles. After retirement, he was guaranteed free health care for the rest of his life—thirty-eight years so far, only a year less than he worked in the shop.

  That’s why, into his nineties, Everett was still healthy enough to flirt with waitresses. Everett and I are not related, but in the complicated way that extended families form, he’s the grandfather I haven’t had since I was a teenager. For years, he and his second wife lived across the street from the woman who became my father’s second wife. After Everett was widowed, he married my stepmother’s mother. Widowed again, he shared our Sunday dinners, our pew at the Presbyterian Church, and our Christmas Eve men’s luncheons. Sometimes, his randiness was embarrassing. At one of those luncheons, he used the cream pitcher to tell the waitress an off-color joke about breast milk. And I could never bring a date home without Everett’s winking at me and drawling, “Boy, you sure got an eye.”