Chapter 10: Teamwork
The weeks following my layoff were hard on my self-esteem and my marriage. I'd never thought about how much of my identity was tied up in where and how I made a living and the extent to which my identity was no longer my own. Now I was forced to think about it. When I was a member of the Ford design team so was my wife Rosemary. The wife of an unemployed man had a bum for a husband. What did that make her?
The essence of the problem was time. Rosemary's sense of time and mine did not mesh. Chrysler needed modelers and would begin hiring at the first of the year. Rosemary was sure that I would get the job in January because my application was already in, I had gone to the Chrysler school for ten months and worked at Ford for fourteen months. I wasn't so sure that Chrysler was willing to hire another black modeler. When I got laid off they had two. I knew that two other black modelers were laid off from Ford before I was and didn't know whether Chrysler had already hired one or both of them. Was I ever going to become a member of the Chrysler design team or would I to have to wait for the Ford recall?
Jasper and Rosemary Garrison were also a team. To stay together we had to work as a team until my job application at Chrysler came through or I was recalled to Ford. To me, that meant setting short term and long term goals and living within our means to achieve them. Rosemary didn't even like the idea of setting those kinds of goals. She didn't think I would be without a job long enough to make that much difference in the plans we made when we got married five months earlier.
We had saved enough money to pay the rent on our small apartment on ground zero of the '67 riots, to buy food and to take care of the other bills for a few months. We couldn't afford to do much beyond that, which is where the strains in our marriage began to show. Rosemary didn't drive so the payments I made on my '67 Mustang was another source of irritation because she had nothing of her own to compare with it.
My decision not to apply for unemployment compensation saved me the embarrassment of standing in the unemployment line but forced Rosemary to forego the little things she liked to do to make life more enjoyable. These were the things we argued about because we wouldn't have had to do without them if I had been willing to defer payments on my car, apply for unemployment and borrow from our saving. I did apply for any kind of job I could get but my previous employment as a modeler worked against me. Whenever it looked as though I had a clear shot at a job because the job was open and I was in the right place at the right time to fill it, the answer would usually come back "overqualified."
There was one exception. McKinley Thompson phoned Nehemiah, Calvin and me to ask us to work on his private project, a sort of modern Model-T for the sub-Sahara African car market. Nehemiah still had his regular job at Ford so he worked with us only on the weekends. The experience was uniquely instructive because we could see what drove the simple design. We could see the relationships between design, facilities, materials, manufacturing and costs in a way that nobody could who worked in one department of a multi-million dollar corporation.
Our pay wasn't enough to live on. It eventually meant standing in the unemployment line once a week as well as standing in the employment lines of any company in the metro area that was taking job applications.
I don't know where the Michigan Employment Security Commission got the people who passed out the paychecks in 1967. It wouldn't have surprised me to learn that they got their jobs only by showing a humorless disposition and answering "yes" to three key questions:
1) DEMEANOR Are you cold, condescending and rude?
2) IMPARTIALITY Can you treat everyone in the unemployment line with an equal measure of demonstrable contempt?
3) EFFICIENCY Can you demonstrate that contempt when passing out checks with merely an inflection in tone or a flick of the wrist?
If you walked into one of those places feeling bad you were guaranteed to feel worse when you left. The system might have been designed that way. The laid off modelers I ran into later who reported to offices other than the one I went to had similar experiences. Perhaps the idea was to make it so uncomfortable to collect an "unearned" check that we would try harder to get work as though being out of work and without a paycheck that put us above the poverty line weren't incentives enough. In any event, it was an experience I didn't want to repeat.
In February Chrysler asked me to report to work as a clay modeler. Out of the jobless fire and into the domestic frying pan.
My money problems were over. That didn't mean the money arguments at home were over. There was still a conflict in priorities. Rosemary was two months pregnant. We still lived in the same apartment, in the same crummy neighborhood. She wanted to move. So did I, but I was bent on paying off the car my car and banking as much money as possible as a hedge against another layoff. I had the respectability of working in automotive design and the prospects of a bright future with the creative brand of modeling I brought over from Ford. I also had the responsibility of having to work the kind of overtime that was common for modelers in Ford Exterior. Often I was required to work past midnight.
Occasionally I had to work around the clock. Rosemary wasn't buying it. Nobody worked hours like that. She began to suspect that I was putting in extra hours with another woman. When I convinced her that I was really at work she began to wonder aloud whether I loved work more than I love her. She still couldn't believe that I had to work that much overtime.
The design studios were less than a ten-minute drive away in the old Highland Park office and manufacturing complex as opposed to the half-hour drive to the Ford Styling Center in Dearborn. Getting to and from work was therefore easy. Chrysler had no Styling Center as such. All but one of its design studios were on the fourth floor of the office building.
The four flights of stairs added a little more to my travel time but not enough to keep me from making things easier for Rosemary by coming home sometimes for five or ten minutes at lunch. I didn't do it. She had a problem with that because it left her with so much time alone. I had a problem with setting a precedent that would leave me with no time for myself. I had another problem with the risk of something happening at home that would make me late for work and the fear that Rosemary would create delays to make me choose between her and Chrysler. For the sake of domestic tranquility I would have had to choose her.
Perhaps a white modeler could have taken that chance. I couldn't because everything I did wrong reflected badly on the other black modelers. The ability of any black man to do the job as well as the best white men was still a young experiment in the American auto business. All it took to tilt the opinion of the fence sitters the wrong way was for one of us not to do the job as well as the average white man. All of us felt that responsibility each other, to our families and to anyone belonging to an "out-group" that might someday follow us into the field of automotive design.
The total absence of women in Chrysler design was a constant reminder of how prejudice alone could decide the fate of any out-group. Ford's Styling Center had been large enough to hide a female or two as well as a few black men in drafting or engineering so it was possible to imagine they were there even though I never saw them. But at one time or another I had visited all of Chrysler's design studios, which were small by Ford's standards and my own head count of women turned up none. If you wanted to get a good feel for what you were up against as a black modeler all you had to do was talk about women modelers.
Why were there no women modelers?
Because women couldn't do the work.
Why couldn't they do the work?
Because women couldn't do the heavy lifting that men could do. They wouldn't want to get into the unladylike positions modelers sometimes had to assume. They had long fingernails, which were impossible to steel down the clay with. As soon as they burned their dainty little hands dipping them in hot clay they would quit. Their presence would be distracting, which would lead to a general breakdown in discipline and a lowering in quality standards. They lacked the natural aptitude for using tools the way men could. They didn't have the unique intellectual and emotional skills that men had to learn the finer points of modeling. They would take jobs away from men who needed them more than women did to support their families.
You can fill in the remaining "reasons" for excluding women from clay modeling with any stereotype you like. The real reason that most male clay modelers didn't want to work with female modelers was because females in a "man's profession" would undermine their sense of masculinity. Clay modeling was a big part of their masculine identity. I didn't know of any homosexual modelers and the heterosexuality of a female modeler was sure to be questioned.
An absence of women on the job meant that men could say anything they wanted to about women in general without negative consequences. They could tape pictures of naked women in suggestive poses on their toolboxes, boast about their sexual conquests and tell jokes that they couldn't tell in mixed company.
If there were any homosexual modelers, they would never tape pictures of naked men on their toolbox or boast of their sexual conquests. These displays would be offensive to their co-workers and subject the offender to ridicule and probable dismissal. The issue, therefore, was not whether anyone should have to accept offensive sexual pictures or language on the job. The issue was whether the majority should rule in such matters to preserve their comfort zones or whether the sensibilities of the minority should be accommodated to respect theirs.
Although the word sexism had not yet been invented and the word racism was just coming into common use the parallels were obvious to me. Essentially, they were the same things prejudgments of individuals and corresponding actions based on traits attributed to a group. There were bound to be exceptions to the rule but the burden of proof was on the individuals and the rule didn't have to change for the group.
The open racism that I experienced at Ford was not as prevalent in Chrysler interiors. Someone high up in the company was calling the tunes there. I got it occasionally from a few of my fellow modelers. I didn't get it from my supervisors Gordon Westlake and Larry Birdwell. I didn't get it from my job Leaders, who were Chrysler's equivalents of Master Modelers. The people who had immediate power over me all appeared to be fair and forthright men. I never saw or heard anything definite to the contrary. All of the talk about racist executives and job leaders involved the front office and the Chrysler exterior studios.
The only note of caution was the comment that one of the clay modeling supervisors made that the delay in hiring me was because of my "cocky" attitude and the fact that I had gone to the interview in a brown suede sweater instead of a suit. One of the Supervisors had expressed these reservations about hiring me but he didn't express them to me. He told one of my Leaders who relayed to me what the Supervisor said.
You could get this kind of information only second hand because the interview was supposed to be confidential. The Supervisor broke that confidence by telling the Leader. The Leader wasn't willing to go all the way in breaking his confidence by telling me who the Supervisor was. Was it Birdwell or Westlake? Did he interpret my show of confidence as cockiness because of my color or because of my age? And why did the sweater I wore to show that I understood what kind of work I was applying for strike one Supervisor as appropriate and strike the other one as inappropriate? Was it really a matter of personal preferences or was the real issue my color?
I was Chrysler's fourth black modeler. Gene Lofton was first. James Brooks was second. Calvin Morrison was third. Gene and James worked in Dodge Interior right next to where I worked in Plymouth Interior. Often we were loaned out to each other's studios so the three of us frequently worked together. Calvin was in Chrysler Exterior. To say that he worked there was to say that I worked in Lincoln/Mercury Interior at Ford. He was assigned to Chrysler Exterior. He didn't last long.
While Gene, James and I worked directly with stylists, draftsmen and engineers, Calvin sharpened his tools, maintained the clay ovens, packed hot clay over wood and Styrofoam armatures and filed aluminum dies for clay extrusions. These were minimum skill tasks that all clay modelers had to perform but they were Calvin's only jobs unlike the white modelers who came into the studio with less experience than he had. He was on a dead end street and he knew it. When I visited him once in his studio a couple of months after I got hired, I got a lot of cold, hard stares. It was such an uncomfortable experience that I never went back.
My prospects at Chrysler looked exceptionally good. The pace of work was slower than it had been at Ford and the modelers were not expected to be as creative. They relied heavily on cardboard and masonite templates made from mechanical drawings to do most things that Ford modelers did on their own with a few key points and sketches. Both approaches had advantages and drawbacks.
The stylists liked the way Ford modelers worked because it gave them more immediate feedback on their proposed designs, which allowed them to try out more of them. The seasoned Chrysler modelers resisted it because it gave them more work to do, most of which was unnecessary or counterproductive. They were also afraid that it would lead to general abuse of the modelers, which was why Chrysler modelers had recently joined the United Auto Workers Union.
The Union gave individual members legal rights and collective bargaining power that they didn't have outside of the Union. It gave us protection from arbitrary management decisions that threatened our common interests as well as the interests of Union workers in other departments. These were the up sides to being in the Union. It had its down sides, too.
I couldn't see the up sides for the first few months because the U.A.W.'s rules for what modelers could and couldn't do got in my way. If I needed a masonite template I couldn't simply make the damn thing and move on, I had to get a work order for the wood shop to do it and wait for them to get around to me. That sort of thing slowed everybody down, which was as often as not a good thing because it also gave everybody time to think about what he really wanted to do and the best way to do it.
Here I have to get a little technical because I have to use some technical terms that you will be seeing again and again.
When you're formulating a new design you have to think in terms of overall proportions and basic shapes. A stylist's sketch or rendering of an instrument panel, for instance, had few surfaces that came together at hard intersections. But to be sure of getting the basic surfaces right the top, the front, the bottom and sides you had to extend each surface until they met at a theoretical intersection. Then you could round off the positive intersection to get a convex radius that flowed smoothly into both surfaces and add clay to the negative surface to get a smoothly flowing concave radius called a fillet.
When you had good basic surfaces to begin with most of the ridii and fillets were no-brainers. You could drag them in with a simple tool cut into the right shape and the resulting surfaces would give you a tangent where the radius or the fillet ended. For a more complex fillet or radius requiring a higher level of skill, you could draw a line on the clay called a cord where you wanted the tangent to be and work to the cord. This is where most modelers struggle a bit at times and some never catch on.
I was struggling to resolve one of these problems on the passenger side of an instrument panel with an acute theoretical intersection when I made a key discovery.
I knew that the base surface on top was good and so was the one on the bottom. Nevertheless, every time I tied to drag in a radius the resulting tangents were hideous. No matter what I did, the radius at one end was too small and the one at the other end was too big. The modelers working next to me on a similar design were having the same problem. All of us kept adding and subtracting huge amounts of clay with only marginal progress toward the goal. Something was fundamentally wrong but no one could tell what it was.
I took a coffee break and wandered the halls for a while deep in thought. When I looked up, I saw Calvin walking slowly toward me. He didnt see me at first because his head was bowed. He looked like a boxer who'd just had his clock cleaned in a fight he was supposed to win. Obviously, I wasn't the only one with problems.
"Calvin," I said.
He looked up. He seemed embarrassed to see me and hesitant to talk. He didn't smile. I'd never seen him like this before and never would have imagined it. Calvin Morrison, the proud, unconquerable Marine who excelled in everything he tired, looked defeated. How was that possible?
I asked him what was wrong. It was the same thing that was wrong when he hired in. Ed Getner, the Vice President of Design, who had been one of the people I interviewed with to get into Schiloff's school and who seemed to like me, had taken a dislike to him. His Leaders weren't giving him a chance to do meaningful work on the clay. He showed me the blank aluminum die in his hand. His job was to take it to the metal shop to have it cut out and then to smooth the edges with a needle file. From the way he talked I got the impression that it wasn't a real job; it was busywork. Calvin and I were far more alike than either of us realized at the time. I knew exactly how he felt and I worried about his future.
Returning to my studio to face the I.P. that was giving me such a hard time, I was now thinking more about Calvin's predicament than mine. I tried to concentrate on the clay model, walking around it, bending squatting, stepping closer and backing away to see if a particular view would give me a hint about what to do next. Instead, I kept seeing Calvin, the master of geometry, walking slowly down the hallway with his head bowed. How was I ever going to get that image out of my head?
I never did.
Calvin was locked into an untenable situation by forces beyond his control. Not so with me and the I.P. Something was locking me into a bad outcome but was it out of my control? I didn't think so. The solution had to be in the model somewhere. It was up to me to find it.
Then it hit me. Geometry. Acute and obtuse angles.
The only way to solve the problem was to break away from the templates and add a flat surface between the two compound surfaces I was trying to bring together. That way neither the top surface nor the bottom one had to form a radius around an acute angel. All I had to do was fix the edge formed by the top and the flat then draw a line on the lower part of the flat and work the bottom surface to the line. If a feasibility constraint on the bottom had kept me from holding the top edge all I had to do was fix the bottom edge and work the top surface to a line on top of the flat.
Now I had two theoretical intersections with obtuse angles instead of one theoretical with an acute angle. I could radius the theoreticals or draw cords on the top and bottom surface to get highlights that sang.
My joy in finding the solution and understanding why it worked was tempered by my knowledge that great modelers like Tom Beubian who didn't necessarily work to theoretical intersections would not have had the problem to begin with. Tom would have roughed in the whole I.P. quickly and taken his time to smooth out the surfaces later.
When I roughed in a model without establishing the theoreticals and tangents the results were hit and miss. As long as the design kept changing in the rough clay I could get away with it. Once we started moving toward a full dress show date I could identify two kinds of hidden flaws, surface flaws and structural flaws. I could fix the surface flaws with a little refinement. Structural flaws meant a total tear up. It was always a scuffle but not the scuffle that it had been at Ford.
Because the Chrysler clay was relatively glossy compared to Ford clay there were fewer diagnostic checks that had to be made to see what was going on with your job in progress. You had fewer flaws to correct in the second stage of refinement because you put fewer of them in during the first stage. You could always tell where you were and where you were headed. It gave Chrysler modelers a tremendous advantage and proved to me that I had been right about why it was necessary at Ford to sculpt so many more iterations of a design before a model started to come together in all views. Yes, everyone at Ford was indeed working blind.
Unfortunately, Chrysler couldn't use that advantage because so much control over the design was in the hands of stylists and draftsmen. If the draftsman did see the problem and fix it, it didn't get fixed. The only times the modelers had a chance to apply their practical knowledge of creating 3-dimentional forms where when the stylists were stuck or when everyone had to loosen up considerably to meet an early show date
.
Shortly after my breakthrough with the I.P., I saw Calvin again in the hall walking like a zombie. Instead of holding an aluminum die he was holding a pink slip. He hadn't quite gotten his 90 days in so the Union couldn't help him. It was the last time I would see him at Chrysler
By the fall of '68 I had settled in nicely at Chrysler and was beginning to get a bit of a reputation as a hotshot with at least one of the top interior design executives. Colin Neil looked and talked like a British aristocrat. He personally directed me on a seat that he was so happy with that he said he had never worked with anyone who modeled a job so quickly and so well. He added, "You're not thinking of leaving us, are you?"
That was a stunner. The Union limited how quickly I could advance at Chrysler. Ford had no such limitations. Neil's question implied that he thought Ford would recall its laid off modelers soon and that my skills would give me the bargaining power to make considerably more money by going back to Ford. I had to take his words with a grain of salt because I wasn't as sure of my abilities as he seemed to be.
We had been on a twelve-hour schedule for months, sometimes going until one or two o'clock in the morning without making much progress. At the start of every new day I could see that what I had done the night before or earlier that morning wasn't quite as good as I had thought it was then. I was beginning to feel as though my skills were slipping a little. As the day wore on I'd get my confidence back and feel pretty good about myself when it was time to go home. At the start of the new workday the cycle would begin again. I paid no attention to most of my fellow modelers' quality of work. I just assumed that it had to be better than mine was.
I saw two exceptions. Ray Frigard and Bill Wight, the men I'd worked with in Ford Interiors and had gone sailing with on Ray's boat late that spring, also seemed to be producing work that looked better at the end of the day than it did the next morning. They didn't seem to notice the quality difference in their work probably because there wasn't that much to notice. I saw it only because I was looking for it.
Then came our first all-nighter.
All of the modelers took our dinner break together at a bar and restaurant a few blocks away. Most of us ate a meal and socialized. Some guys put away a lot of booze. When we got back the heavy drinkers demonstrated right away that they could no longer model worth a damn. Everyone but them could see it. The rest of us appeared to be doing fine.
Between midnight and 2:00 A.M. everyone started getting a little goofy, tossing paper airplanes across the studio, pitching pennies and generally cutting up like children in school when the teacher was out of the room. On a normal workday you'd see these things or indulge in them now and then. On the long nights we packed as much of this stuff into five hours as we normally did in five days. We had to, just to clear our heads for the pressing work at hand.
Around three o'clock we were all business again. We had so much to do in so little time that it wasn't enough to work hard. We had to work as a team. We had to invent ways of doing things on the fly. And we were doing it all. It was a beautiful and exciting thing to be a part of.
By 7:00 A.M. when we had put the finishing touches on the models and assembled them, everyone was dragging ass. Still, we were happy with the splendid work we had accomplished in so short a time. We surveyed all of the doors, seats, instrument panels and package trays with pride. We slapped hands, shook hands, patted each other on the back and went home with big lopsided grins on our droopy-eyed faces.
Those of us who had labored around the clock didn't have to report to work again until that afternoon when everyone else was coming back from lunch. I looked forward to seeing our magnificent clay models.
I was in for a hell of a letdown. So were the other modelers.
The properties we saw that afternoon were not the ones we beheld at the end of the all-nighter. These things were abominable. They all looked like the work of the men who had consumed too much alcohol on the dinner break who had somehow gotten more intoxicated as they went along. The doors didn't fit the instrument panels the way they should have. The radii and fillets meandered. There were lumps and bumps in the surfaces. The foil looked like foil instead of chrome. The groves in the seats and doors that were supposed to flow along graceful curves looked as though they were dragged in by a man in a stagecoach being chased by bandits down a bumpy road.
I took no comfort in the marginally higher quality of the job I worked on than most of the others. The operative word is "marginally." There were big differences in the quantity and complexity of the jobs that had to be done overall. I knew that I wasn't the best modeler in the studio, that the Leaders' had done more than anyone else had and their work was crap.
What happened?
We had gotten some sleep. That's what happened. Our critical faculties were in proper working order, no longer driven by impossible demands and unrealistic expectations that kept us from seeing what we were really doing as we neared the finish line. Now, we could see through better eyes what we had done.
You can't pack three eight-hour workdays into one 24-hour stretch. Clay modeling requires too much concentration and too many clear-minded, moment-to-moment decisions to sustain a professional level of craftsmanship indefinitely. At some point lapses in concentration and judgement were bound to creep in. That was the difference in performance that I saw in myself and in the other Ford modelers that I was paying attention to after the long nights preceding the all-nighter. Had I broadened my scope of observation, I probably would have seen it in some of the Chrysler modelers' performance as well.
Anytime you do work that combines technical and aesthetic considerations on an accelerated schedule you have to make judgements about what to do and what not to do. You have to set your priorities to meet the deadline for completion with the highest priority going to a faithful representation of the design. Feasibility becomes the lowest priority and therefore gets the least attention. Everything else falls somewhere in between, with craftsmanship standards sinking steadily as the deadline approaches.
In late October, I got the call from Ford that I was waiting for. Ford was offering me my job back if I accepted a lower salary than I was making at Chrysler. When I learned that Ford made higher offers to its white laid off modelers at Chrysler I declined. Federal law required Ford to recall laid off workers before it could hire new ones. Making low salary offers to its least desirable people was a legal and effective way of labeling them inferior employees. The law did not require companies to hire inferior workers. That was not common knowledge in 1968.
Everyone was aware of the federal pressure to hire more blacks in areas that they had been previously excluded from. The news was full of stories about "lowering standards" in the Detroit Police and Fire Department after the '67 riots so that more blacks would qualify. The '68 riots, though nowhere near as violent in Detroit, had made the issue an ongoing topic of debate.
Most white people were convinced that standards for black people were being lowered everywhere by heavy-handed federal mandates to get them jobs that they otherwise would not have been qualified to take. Some politicians were running campaign ads featuring white men bitter and dejected because they were denied jobs again and again in favor of "someone else" who was less qualified.
This is that atmosphere that I had to breathe when I first entered the Chrysler International studio on loan for a few months. It was a small exterior studio located on the ground floor at the south end of the complex. It was small with only one full-sized exterior model and a proportionately small complement of stylists, draftsmen and clay modelers. We had one studio engineer. The Supervisor, a man named Len Klemic, looked enough like the tough guy actor Jack Palance to be his brother. He made no pretense at being happy to see me. This guy, I thought, is going to be trouble.
I got greetings from most of my co-workers that ranged from lukewarm to frosty. I'd been through this routine enough times not to make much of it. Having a black man in an automotive design studio was a new experience for all of these guys. Unlike Gene Lofton, whose skin color was lighter than some descendents of Southern Europeans that he worked with, my skin color showed a decidedly sub-Saharan African ancestry. There was no way to pretend not to notice it. There was also no way to pretend that it didn't matter to the white design professionals who had little or no experience with black professionals. We were all on trial.
Looking back on the time I spent in Chrysler International I can't recall a single person I would call a bigot. It turned out that the reason Len Klemic wasn't trilled to see me was because he had so few veteran modelers and he was hoping for someone with at least five or six years under his belt. Some of the other people in the studio simply had lukewarm personalities and the rest were more curious than hostile. As soon as it became evident that I was a plus to the studio in helping to develop its full-sized Australian Falcon, I could see the change they saw in me. I went from a black man with a tray full of modeling tools to a modeler who happened to be black. All in all it was a good experience.
I recall one modeler because of his sharp wit and storytelling ability, because he lived in Dearborn all of his life, because he had worked at Ford and because his last name was Baird. He was an uncle of a guy named Tom Baird who had been laid off from Ford with me.
I met Tom at Chrysler but didn't get to know him well until I returned to Plymouth Interior where I was now permanently assigned. I never visited his home or went to baseball games with him as I did with Ray Fregard and a Leader named Bill Johnstone who even managed to talk me into going to his church one time in downtown Detroit. A conversation that I would have with Tom in 1969 would change my life forever.