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Chapter 17

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Chapter 16: The Game 

The call I got From Ford in July of ’74 telling me how important I was to the company’s future proved to be a premature move on an invisible game board. I never learned whose idea it was to make that move. It took me nearly thirty years to figure out the game. Only a year and a half earlier I had crawled back to Ford like a freed slave who couldn’t make it on his own begging to return to the security of the plantation. Ford had ignored my application. Now Ford seemed to be crawling to me.  

The weirdness factor in this unexplained role reversal stretched to new dimensions when I went to Dearborn to settle the details of my reinstatement. I did not recall my ’73 visit to the Styling Center until the Personnel man, Tom Powell, whipped out the application that I’d signed and dated January 30, 1973. I can’t explain that lapse of memory except to speculate that I blacked it out because it was such a humiliating experience. I have recently learned that I went so far as to take a physical examination at the Ford Research and Development complex. Ford’s company doctor told me about it late in 2002 when I applied for a medical retirement. I still have no independent recollection of it.  

When I returned to the Ford Styling Center in 1974 the sign above the entrance to the lobby had changed to “Design Center.” Other than that, everything looked the same to me as it did when I last recalled being there in 1967.  

Joan the receptionist was either on a break or off of work that day because a security guard stood in for her. No one had told the guard to expect me. We chatted amiably while we waited for Tom Powell to arrive. When he came to the lobby his demeanor reminded me of how I felt when I boarded a chopper for my first combat assault in Vietnam.  

That should have been my first warning that something big was up. I considered the possibility and brushed it off because I didn’t now enough about the man to make that kind of leap. For all I knew he had just gotten bad news about his wife, his kids or his stock portfolio. Maybe it was normal for him to carry himself this way. 

I shook the clammy hand he offered me and tried to look him in the eyes. His eyes kept shifting. This was something I had never seen before in a Personnel representative. I wondered how he got his job. He ushered me to a seat in the lobby and nervously informed me that two clay modeling Managers were coming out to interview me. Interview? Why would I have to be interviewed if it was Ford’s idea to bring me back?  While I mulled that question over I prayed that one of the Supervisors would be Benny Barbara who had taken such an interest in me in ’66 and ’67.

My prayer seemed to be answered when I saw Benny enter the lobby a few minutes later. He scanned past the Personnel man and me as though he didn’t see us and turned to the guard sitting in for Joan. The guard pointed in our direction. Benny approached us with a mixture of confusion and pique etched in his forehead. My heart dropped when he didn’t recognize me on sight. It dropped lower when he told Powell that he was preparing for a big show and asked why he had been called away.  

Powell was literally shaking in his shoes and doing a poor job of hiding it. Benny made no attempt to hide the fact that he was completely in the dark and highly suspicious about what was going on.  

I had a bad moment when I said something about working for him in ’66 and he shot me one of those, no-way-Jose looks. Oh my God, I thought, he doesn’t remember me at all. Although we quickly resolved the issue when I told him that I hadn’t been assigned to his studio but worked there on loan and on overtime I felt sweat pop up above my upper lip and under my hairline. My underarm antiperspirant stopped working. I knew at that moment that Benny had nothing to do with telling Ford Personnel what a terrific modeler I was. McKinley Thompson didn’t have that much clout. Who was left? Nobody I could think of. 

The Personnel man showed Benny my application. I could see it all coming back to him, a replay of 1966 – the kid with the nice model and the impressive tools – the kid that he couldn’t get because he didn’t have requisitions for new modelers. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Garrison.” You would have thought he would remember “Jasper.” 

The battery of questions that Benny then directed toward the Personnel man told me that he thought that the game was more about him than me. What was with this ’73 date on the application? Why was he just now learning that I was available? Did Ford put an ad in the newspapers that he should have known about? 

Benny had that look on his face that most people get when they think they are being conned. Yes, he could use me. Yes, he wanted me. But Personnel told him that there was a hiring freeze on modelers. Now he was being asked to interview me when he still didn’t have permission to bring anybody into his department. Who did have permission? Where were the other applicants? And why was this discussion taking place in the lobby instead of his office? I wondered about that, too. 

Benny was so openly skeptical of the Personnel man’s motives for bringing him to the lobby that I feared my bargaining position would be eroded in a fight that had nothing to do with me. The Personnel man wasn’t giving Benny answers that made sense so as soon as Benny asked me a question that allowed me to clarify the situation as I understood it I told him what Powell told me on the phone. I told him about the looming retirements and young modelers being brought in to replace the ones that where leaving. He took it as spanking new information and asked the Powell about it. 

 “Retirements? What retirements?” 

Powell turned red and made the whole thing sound like his idea, as opposed to a company directive. He told us that he looked at the ages of Ford’s modelers, projected where they were likely to be five and ten years down the line and took it from there. He told Benny that I had the best qualifications he could find including the fact that I had started my modeling career at Ford so my name rose to the top. It was the first thing he said that made sense to Benny. It did not make sense to me.  

Benny didn’t know that I was already modeling at American Motors with Chuck Clayton, Felix DeRose, Jerry O’Donald and Bob Jamison, four other modelers who had worked at Ford. All of them were modeling when I was selling insurance, serving out my Army enlistment and driving a high-low. The oldest of them still had a good 15 years of working life ahead of him. If no one in authority had campaigned to get me back at Ford, why hadn’t Ford called any of them? 

At first it was Benny who smelled a rat. Now that bad smell was tugging at my nostrils. Something funny was definitely afoot. 

Benny relaxed, apparently thinking that he was getting a preview of requisitions that would be opening up in the near future. He gave the Personnel man his blessings to hire me as though it was a silly question to ask and left to attend to more pressing matters. That didn’t make me feel any better. I thought I was there to talk about money. I hadn’t known until now that my reemployment was in doubt and Benny’s casual okay wasn’t going to be enough to do it for me.  

I still had to pass inspection by some guy I’d never met. If he was philosophically opposed to hiring black people I didn’t stand a chance – unless the decision had already been made.  

As Benny disappeared down the corridor that led to the design studios, a tall man with a full, brown beard emerged by the reception desk looking as confused as Benny had looked. The Personnel man waved him over to us and explained what he was doing there. He gave no indication that he understood what he was indirectly explaining to me. This was a botched pass play. If Personnel was the quarterback and the Managers were the receivers, the receivers were running the wrong routs.

How could any of the five clay modeling Managers not have known until the last minute that I was coming, let alone why I was there? That open issue let me know that Benny’s instincts were right. Whatever this meeting was about had nothing to do with the company’s long-term manpower needs in modeling or with me as the best candidate at the time to help fulfill those needs.  I was there for another reason. So were the Managers. And only Tom Powel knew what it was.  

The man with the beard was Jim McBain, the Truck Studio’s clay modeling Manager. He was in his mid forties and, like Bennie, a little rough around the edges when it came to expressing himself verbally. He treated the fact that he hadn’t been told about me coming in for an interview as an indication that I had strolled in off the streets on my own. Neither Tom Powell nor I bothered to correct that impression.  

McBain’s eyes swept across my application as though it was a blank sheet of paper and handed it back to Powell. Then he asked me questions that I’d answered on the form he was supposed to have just read. It was as though he was filling in the outline of a picture he had drawn in his head before he stepped into the lobby. He made me feel like I was being interrogated by a cop who decided I was a criminal when he first laid eyes on me and everything I said in my defense was a lie…. If I came there for a modeling job, where was my model? If I had experience in the business why didn’t I know I needed one? He knew every modeler who worked at Ford in the ’60s. Why don’t he know me? 

McBain’s questions left no doubt about his attitude and no room for compromise. Whatever he saw in me, it wasn’t a modeler or a potential modeler. When he told me that he thought Personnel was wasting his time and mine, I flashed back to the man at the door of the testing room of the Professional building ten years earlier who told me the same thing.

Powell looked as offended as I felt. After all, he told Benny in front of the guard and me that it was his idea to bring me to the Design Center. Therefore McBain was challenging his judgment. I could see that he was on the spot and I decided to leave him there just to see how much I could learn about what was really going on. He said that it would be Personnel’s decision as to whether or not to hire me.  

The cat was out of the bag. This wasn’t about me as a young modeler. It was about me as a black modeler. It was about politics and the law. 

McBain shrugged and said, “Then what do you need me for?” He smiled as if to say, that’s what I thought, and left without waiting for an answer. 

I had to agree with McBain. Why did Personnel need him or Benny?

Powell had to have enough authority to tell a couple of grade 11 Managers to drop everything for an “impromptu” interview but not enough to for them to defer to him as they would a superior. Personnel obviously didn’t need Jim McBain or Bennie Barbara to decide what was going to happen to me. Ergo, the decision was in the hands of someone at a higher level than anyone in the Design Center, although it may have started with Powell for the reason he gave me over the phone. Now, we were merely going through the motions. 

I drove home feeling like a chump. Ten years after the Civil Rights Act the Big Three were still playing games with color. Of all the supervisors that could have been asked to interview me McBain was the only one I didn’t know. Why was he called? How could he have formed an opinion about me as a modeler when he didn’t know my work, he talked to no one who knew me and he didn’t read my application?  What was he looking at, then, if not my color? And what did it matter if the decision to bring me back or not to bring me back was out of his control?  

The following month I got a formal letter from Powell telling me that my application had been rejected because my salary demand was too high. That was nonsense, of course. Salary  “demands” are negotiable. That’s what I thought he called me to Dearborn to negotiate a year and a half after I put in my application. The subject of money never came up.  

If I had known about the class action race discrimination lawsuit against Ford I would have known why everything jumped off the way it did. Ford took my application in ’73 and held onto it because I was one of the aggrieved parties in the suit. What happened to me with my work assignments and my Performance Review involving a nazi and a Klansman was strong evidence in support of the plaintiffs’ case. Ford had to take my application in ’73 because the callback offer it made to me in ’68 based on the recommendation of the nazi and the Klansman could have killed them in court if they hadn’t. Now the application itself was potential evidence that couldn’t be destroyed without the risk of severe penalties to the company if the court found out about it.  

Now that I know how class action lawsuits work, I know that Tom Powel was probably a lawyer and the individuals making the claim against Ford did not include anyone that I knew. I would have to have been a lawyer specializing in illegal discrimination suits to know why those things were as important as they were.  

The strength of a class action lawsuit rests on the merits of the individual claims against the accused company. If the attorneys for the plaintiffs in such a case have enough clients to show a pattern of discrimination against a particular group, they seek class status for the entire group before a federal judge. If the judge certifies the class and the plaintiffs win, the company has to pay everyone in the class a token amount to discourage further acts of illegal discrimination. The people in the representative group usually receive substantial awards according to the individual merits of their claim.  

This was the game…. 

Powell called me for whatever reason. Once he did, his superiors wanted to find out what I knew about the lawsuit and to figure out what to do with me to undermine the plaintiffs’ case. Hiring me or not depended on which option was most likely to keep me from becoming a plaintiff in the lawsuit. McKinley, Sam, Nehemiah, Calvin and George had more to loose than to gain by suing the company. Moreover, with the exception of McKinley Thompson, they didn’t have a case they could win in court.  

The key to my case was a black modeler name Charles Purnell that the company hired in ’69. I didn’t know he existed at the time, much less what his employment status had to do with mine. Like Chrysler, Ford was playing a numbers game with black modelers. By engineering my failure to return in ’69 the company fell short of the black modelers it needed to comply with the Civil Rights Act. Because Charles didn’t join the company when it hired so many people in ’65 and ’66 he would be behind them forever in seniority.  Now, with my break in service, he had more seniority than I would have had if Ford rehired me – which wasn’t in the cards until the lawsuit.  

With all of the cards on the table my case would have opened the door to the practice of racial discrimination throughout the entire Ford Research and Development Complex. I was important to the company, as a symbol. The question was whether Ford had more to gain or to lose by brining me back. The only way that Ford’s attorneys could answer that question was by interviewing me to find out what I knew about the lawsuit. In that context, the last minute call for the Managers to come to the lobby made sense as a legal smokescreen to cover what was really going on if my name surfaced in the suit. A strictly administrative decision to hire me would look like an admission of guilt to feeding me the poison pill[1] that resulted in my failure to return in ’68.  

If the attorney’s representing the plaintiffs knew the relevant details about me and the bigots I worked for in ’66 and ’67 they would have the basis for Ford’s callback offer to me in ’68. Without much digging the plaintiffs’ attorneys would have learned that a white modeler got a callback offer like mine and he refused it for the same reason I did – it was a career killer – a poison pill. They would have learned that the offer was a pretext for not recalling anyone the company did not want.  

The plaintiffs’ attorneys would have learned that Ford rehired the white modeler in ’69 when he told a Ford Supervisor at a private party why he didn’t return. They would have learned that the Supervisor used his influence to bring him back with a salary that didn’t brand him as damaged goods. He lost three years of seniority. When all was said and done, I would lose ten.  

That modeler was Bill Weight, one of the guys who got his pink slip from Ford the same time I did, who went to Chrysler when I did but attended parties in Dearborn that I couldn’t because I was black. Bill and I sailed together one weekend on Ray Frigard’s boat while we were at Chrysler and one afternoon when I was home on emergency leave from Vietnam in ’71. When I went back to fight in Vietnam, Bill went back to work at Ford.  

Ford modelers who enlisted or were drafted into the Armed Forces before the ’67 layoff retuned with full seniority for the time they were in uniform. Normally that would not have applied to me because I wasn’t drafted. I wasn’t even working at Ford when I joined the Regular Army. Other laid-off Ford modelers who worked at various civilian jobs while awaiting a callback also had continuous seniority. That was the law. Before Ford could hire new employees within a year of their layoff notice it had to offer them their jobs back. Once the offer was made the company’s legal obligation was satisfied and it could hire whomever it wanted with no further obligation to the laid-off employee.  

The poison pill changed everything. From that point on everything I did to support myself and my family was guided by the fact that I didn’t have the job that the law entitled everyone in my situation to have as a clay modeler in good standing at Ford. The only thing that made my situation different was the nazi that Ford assigned me to work for in ’66 coupled with the Klansman who wrote my Performance Review in ’67.  

Although Ford had offered Bill Wight and me the same poison pill, that only proved that the practice existed to comply with the letter of the law while denying reinstatement to the people it didn’t want. Somebody with influence at Ford didn’t want Bill to return for some reason. Whatever that reason was it had nothing to do with illegal discrimination. Somebody else at Ford with more influence did want him back and he used his pull to get him.

Bill Weight was a Mason. So was Fred Hodely, the grade-12 modeling Executive who brought him back as soon as he learned why Bill didn’t return when Ford recalled him. The Masons and the Nights of Columbus were so entrenched at Ford that their influence was as strong as a labor union’s. In many ways the Mason and the Nights of Columbus fraternities were stronger because they could do things for their members without government rules and regulations that a union couldn’t. If you weren’t a brother in one of those fraternities you couldn’t even prove what they were doing because it happened behind closed doors for members only. 

A labor union has legal status that enables it to bargain collectively for the contract terms that its members will agree to work. It can check the power of a company to impose arbitrary rules that work against the interest of its members as a whole primarily through a body of law enforced by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). It can wage a legal fight for higher wages and better benefits when the company is doing well and it can fight to hold onto the gains it has made for its members when the company is not doing well. It can collect dues to finance its operation and in extreme cases authorize a strike.  

A strike is a weapon of last resort because bloodies both sides and there is no guarantee that the union will come out on top. Contrary to what many people believe, it’s in the best interest of the union to work productively and make the company as profitable as possible. The healthier the company the more they can bargain for.  

A union member, therefore, has standing before the law to protect his or her livelihood against arbitrary acts of discrimination. The standards for hiring, firing, pay increases and promotions are clear. They are written in stone and where a dispute exists the NLRB has the final say as to whether the company or the employee has the better case.  

Large companies like Ford usually pass on to its non-union employees the pay increases and benefits a union wins for its members at the bargaining table to discourage them from joining the union. They reserve the right to give or to withhold pay increases and promotions for its non-union employees as management sees fit with rules of the game that are not necessarily clear or inflexible. The theoretical advantage to superior workers is that they can advance as rapidly as their talents their talents will allow. The theoretical advantage for the company is that the cream will rise to the top. 

Any experienced engineer or model maker will tell you that there is sometimes a vast difference between theory and practical application. The result you get depends on the available time, tools, materials, facilities and personnel to do the job. The best results require the highest levels of honesty and expertise.  

That’s where the theory of rising cream in the auto industry, especially at Ford, failed the test of practical application. Somebody had to decide who the “best” people were, to give them the opportunity to prove it and the recognition they deserved for doing it.  

If you belonged to the Masons or the Nights of Columbus in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s your chances of being labeled a star modeler, getting the chance to prove it and the recognition for doing it went up. If you owned a sailboat your chances of being designated a star increased when you worked for a Studio Exec who had a sailboat – particularly one that needed some work. A deer hunter could also reach higher levels than his talents propelled him to if his Supervisor was a hunter.  

The men who started their clay modeling careers at Ford in the 1950’s when the use of clay in automotive design was just coming into its own didn’t have to belong to any of these brotherhoods to get ahead. As long as they were white males who knew something about model building when the cars were modeled in wood or knew someone with pull at the brand new Styling Center in Dearborn they could do well.  

From the very beginning of the automotive clay modeling profession, the top echelon of working modelers and modeling supervisors at Ford the die was cast for the number of people who could go to the top. Benny Barbara was not a model maker but he knew Henry Ford Sr. personally and supplied female companionship to some of his top design executives. His managerial position was his reward. Other modeling supervisors were former plant foremen with personal contacts in Ford Design.  

Outsiders with special talent also did well because there weren’t enough experienced modelers within the Ford community of personal contacts to fill the need. They were accomplished sculptors with impressive résumés and winners of national automotive design competitions. They went to the first clay modeling schools set up by Ford and taught by the true masters of the new art form. Some of Chrysler and GM’s best talent was lured to Ford with higher salaries, a practice that continued into the early ’60s. The cream in these cases did rise to the top where there were enough open positions for them to fill. 

It’s not easy to talk about the management structure in Ford Design because the titles didn’t always match the position and you couldn’t use the titles Executive, Manager, Supervisor interchangeably. What Ford called its management team with respect to executive privileges and responsibilities went from pay grade 9 to 20-something with gaps between pay grades at different points in different areas. However, a Supervisor in one of the shops was a pay grade 6. In another shop he was a 7. In Modeling a Supervisor was a 9 but in some cases he did the job of a pay grade 11. A grade 8 Master Modeler sometimes did the job of a grade 9 Supervisor.   

In the ’70s, Ford’s pyramid of roughly 250 modeling personnel consisted of one grade-12 Executive, four grade 11 Managers, about a half dozen grade 10 Supervisors and thirty or so grade-8 Master Modelers. The rest were grade-7 Sculptors, grade-6 A-modelers and grade-5 B-modelers. Two grade-2 or 3 clay maintenance men ordered supplies and filled the clay ovens in the big studios. When I started my career at Ford a B-modeler was a pay grade 4 and a promotion to A-modeler meant a jump in pay grades to 6. That didn’t necessarily mean a big jump in salary because the pay grades overlapped so much that a grad 4 could actually make more than a grade 6.  

You can probably see that his odd and confusing structure of positions, titles and pay grades allowed a considerable amount of hanky-panky in awarding merit increases and promotions. That’s what it was designed to do. From time to time the company would reconfigure the structure to fit the need of a new game plan. What you couldn’t know was whether the new game plan had anything to do with designing cars.  

The bottom line for a modeler breaking into Ford in the ’70s was that the highest he could possibly go was a pay grade 8 even if the one 12, the four 11’s and the six 9’s magically disappeared. Eleven Masters would replace them. Once in place, they were going to be there until they retired or died. Then the number of them remaining in place and the Sculptors who would move up to the vacated Master Modeler slots would block the way for the modelers below them to move up until they retired or died.  

Some of the people I started with at Ford were already A-modelers or Sculptors. The longer I stayed a B-modeler the less likely it was that I would ever catch up with them.  

I went back to American Motors without much hope of being rehired by Ford so the official letter of rejection didn’t surprise me. The surprises would come in the next decade when I learned about the class action lawsuit. Only then could I put the call to me from Ford Personnel in ’74 and the even stranger interview in the proper legal and political context. By then I could no longer recover in court the damages I suffered. For Ford, that was only a minor part of the victory it won in my case. For me it was a gift of heartache that would keep on giving until a chamber in my heart literally exploded – and Ford could move in for the kill.