Chapter 17: Full Circle
Whoever said, Ignorance is bliss, wasnt thinking about a gas leak in your house that crept up on you as you slept or a car bomb ready to detonate when you turned the key to your ignition. Whoever said, Knowledge is power, wasnt thinking about a black B-modeler in the bigoted American auto industry with the knowledge to blow away the competition and no way to convey that knowledge to the top.
What you dont know can hurt you. What you do know cant do anyone any good if youre not in a position to use it.
Consider two examples from the American Civil War:
Following the Wilderness Campaign of 1864, a Union colonel named Emory Upton devised a tactic for overcoming heavily fortified enemy positions. Although he was only a colonel he commanded a brigade and he was able to talk General Grant into trying it out with 17 regiments under his command. He had only partial success the part that he could control. His troops were able to take the positions but he didnt get the support he needed from divisions under General Meads command to exploit his advance. He was eventually forced to retreat.
Grant saw that Uptons tactic was fundamentally sound and figured that he could make it work just by scaling it up. The fatal flaw in his thinking was that he simply didnt have the right corps commanders in the right positions at the right time to pull it off. Thousands of Union soldiers needlessly lost their lives in Spotsylvania Virginia as they resumed the attack by hammering away until the force of their superior numbers and sheer tenacity eventually hurled the Rebels backward toward Petersburg.
Whenever I think of Spotsylvania I think of Upton somewhere in that mess helpless to do anything about it
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A nameless private in the 48th Pennsylvania Regiment figured out a way to break the siege of Petersburg by applying his expertise as a coal miner. He told his regimental commander Lt. Colonel Henry Pleasants what he thought. Pleasants, who had been a successful mining engineer before the war, bought it. It was a way to end the war in one savage thrust.
The plan was to tunnel under the Rebel trenches, set off a shit-load of explosives and send and overwhelming number of Union troops charging into the breach immediately following the blast. Pleasants sold the plan to his brigade commander who pushed it up the line to Gen. Ben Butler, his politically appointed 1X Corps commander. Butler loved it and took it to the commanding officer of the Army of the Potomac, Gen. George Gordon Mead. Mead thought that the idea sucked. His engineers also thought it sucked. They were sure that it couldnt be done because it wasnt in their manual. They were sure that the tunnel couldnt be dug deep enough or sufficiently ventilated to keep the workers alive.
Mead gave Pleasance the go-ahead anyway just to keep the troops busy.
Pleasants turned Meads busy-work into a feasible operation by actually digging the impossible tunnel. Butler assigned Brig Gen. Ferreros division of black combat troops to spearhead the assault. No one could have been better motivated than the black troops. Moreover, one of Ferreros regiments lead by a nameless black sergeant (as opposed to a white colonel) had recently proven itself in combat with a successful attack on a heavily defended enemy position. On top of that, Ferreros division was the only one at Butlers disposal that hadnt been so badly bloodied in recent fighting that it could be considered combat ready. In short, Butler chose the black troops for solid military reasons.
Working within their true area of competence, Meads engineers correctly determined that setting off half a shit-load of explosives under the enemy trenches would be more effective than a whole shit-load.
The spearhead troops had to follow combat engineers with all the appropriate training and equipment for getting in and out of the thirty-foot crater quickly and clearing enemy obstacles on the other side. Every man in Ferraros division knew the overall plan and his specific role in the assault. They practiced until they were ready.
According to Bruce Cattons A Stillness At Appomattox white combat engineers were supposed to clear the way for the black infantrymen in the original plan but claimed that they never got the word. I question that account for two reasons: 1) Communication breakdowns like that happen often in small, hastily arranged assaults. Not since the Roman legions have they happened in big ones that were planned and rehearsed. 2) Ferraros black division would have had its own combat engineers.
Twelve hours before the scheduled assault Mead and Grant decided that it would be bad politics to send black troops into the crater first. They were afraid of what abolitionists and Radical Republicans would say in the Northern newspapers if they didnt succeed and were butchered in the attempt. With that race-based decision the operation was doomed.
The plan still might have worked if Grant had used the Armys flexible regimental structure to put Emory Upton in charge of the spearhead as he did at Spotsylvania. Instead, Mead ordered Butler to reassign the lead element to one of his white divisions. Grant backed him up.
Butler dejectedly followed his orders and abandoned hope. He had his three remaining generals draw straws for the job. Gen. James Lodlie, a man who got his military training in heavy artillery, drew the short straw. Every officer and enlisted man in his division knew him as an out and out coward. This vital information never reached the ears of the other division commanders, Ben Butler, George Mead or Ulysses S. Grant.
When the horrific blast sent chucks of earth, timber and body parts hundreds of feet into the air, Lodlie went to his bunker and got soused. Lodlies men dribbled into the thirty-foot crater without the combat engineers they needed to get out. Worse than that, they didnt know why they were there. When they saw Rebel soldiers who were badly wounded or buried, waist deep, chin deep and upside down in the blast-plowed earth, they organized a rescue party. One officer used his men to salvage a Confederate cannon while Butler looked on from an observation post too far away to get a clear view of what was happening.
Meads headquarters was so far back that he couldnt see anything at the front. Grant had taken an army corps well off to the enemy flank to draw defenders away from the crater and to exploit any weakens that developed if the crater operation failed. He kept in touch with Mead by telegraph but Mead could contact his forward elements only by couriers who took ten minutes to reach them and ten minutes to get back to him. His orders were therefore twenty minutes behind the reality of the existing conditions to carry them out. Mead didnt know that the spearhead had turned into a spoon to scoop up enemy soldiers and equipment that Pleasance knocked out of the fight with his explosion.
The delay caused by the chaos in the crater, gave the Rebels, stunned by the horror and confusion of the titanic blast, time to recover. They rallied their troops around the rim of the crater and poured deadly volleys of rifle and cannon fire down upon the Federals. Pleasants short road to victory had become a kill zone. The only people who knew it were the Federals in the crater and the Confederates on the rim.
Ferraro did not tell his black troops, now last in line, of the change in plans or why they were so late getting started. No one necessarily told him. When he ordered his men to advance the crater was congested with blue coats under heavy fire. They still didnt know their objective. The black troops were in no position to enlighten them. The Rebels slaughtered the few black Federals that made it to the front and killed or captured the few white ones already there who saw the need to advance and did it. Ferraro had to know that he couldnt direct his men under these conditions or save them. When his troops moved out he slipped into the bunker with Lodlie. At that point getting plastered with a coward was the soundest military decision he could make
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The more I get into the events leading to my eventual return to Ford and the projects I was involved in there, the more apparent it will become why I took up so much space with Spotsylvania and the crater. These were the blueprints for business as usual in the auto industry. The only thing that kept one company from completely dominating the others was an even distribution of bigotry, misinformation and ineptitude.
My first peek at the shared weaknesses of the American auto companies came when I left the interviews at Ford and resumed my duties at AM.
In 74 GM was the unquestioned industry leader. Honda and Toyota werent in the picture. The myth that everyone had something to learn about styling from GM had become an article of faith. With that mindset American Motors brought a Chevy Nova into the Exterior studio to identify and emulate whatever it was that made GM cars superior.
The stylist, modelers and engineers walked around the vehicle, opening and closing doors, lifting and lowering the hood and trunk, stooping or stretching to study the lines and surfaces. From time to time one of us would catch anothers eye and scrunch up our faces or shake our heads in consternation. Gary Guchard said what all of us were thinking.
This is crap.
Gary was right; the kings new clothes werent woven of the finest materials with the most stylish cuts that anyone who was not a fool could see. King GM may have led past parades in such garments but thats not what we were looking at here.
I cannot overemphasize the fact that good design conforms to basic rules of aesthetics that apply to any form of art going as far back as prehistoric cave dwellers. Some of their drawings where done by artists. Some were done by hacks. Anyone can tell the difference. Anyone with a trained eye can tell you exactly what it is that makes the difference.
The Cro-Magnon artists would have known that the Chevy Nova we were supposed to be learning from was just what Gary said it was crap. The proportions were whacked. The hood and finder lines didnt match. The highlight on the surfaces meandered. Roger Nalph joked that it looked like Dick Teague snuck into the GM Tech Center one night and did the whole thing himself.
AMs stylists and modelers did learn what made GM cars superior. It was the name, GM. The public wasnt buying superior cars; it was buying cars with a superior reputation. Chevy customers were buying out of habit. When they saw what we saw, that habit was gong to change.
American Motors had proven with the Javelin AMX that it could style cars as well as anyone. Unfortunately, good styling is only part of good design. The Javelin bumpers were more decorative than functional. A 5-mph corner impact resulted in damages to the sheet metal that the bumpers were supposed to protect that exceeded the new federal guidelines by a considerable margin. A change in bumper protection meant a total change in design. With its colossal investment in the Matador AM didnt have the financial wherewithal to do that. It put its remaining resources into other vehicles that showed a potential for profit.
To be fair to Dick Teague, AMs chairman and CEO Roy Chapin made manufacturing and marketing decisions that dictated most of the companys shortcomings in styling. Some of those decisions were quite profitable in the short run, like the introduction of the Gremlin, Americas first sub-compact car. The Gremlin was a chopped off Hornet that sold well in its first years. The insurmountable problem for Teague was that the use of carryover parts, so successful in making a Hornet into a Gremlin with minimal initial costs, spilled over into AMs general philosophy for building new cars. The excess use of carryover parts to reduce costs created built-in obstacles to optimum design that couldnt be overcome by anyone. In that context Dick Teague was a miracle-worker.
This is not the sort of thing you will read about in official histories of AMs financial ups and downs. The automotive writers cant tell you about them because they dont know. They can tell you about hardtops and convertibles, 2-doors, 4-doors and power trains. They can tell you about pricing, standard and option packages, safety and performance features and limited measures of quality. They can tell you, in retrospect, what type of car appealed to which segment of the market. They cant tell you why one car in particular will be more appealing than another. Design professionals in any auto company can tell you.
For example, you would be astounded at what could have been done with a 74 Gremlin if the doors beltline could have been lowered by three quarters of an inch. Dick Teague knew it. Bob Nixon knew it. All of their stylists knew it. Roy Chapin didnt know it and he didnt have the inclination or aesthetic sensitivity to learn. Fords top brass would make the same penny-pinching mistake in the 80s with its Escort EXP.
Im not talking about a head-to-head comparison of one companys model to another. Some people are going to buy your product for reasons that have nothing to do with styling or engineering. Some people will prefer one model to another as a matter of personal taste. Im talking about designing to a standard that meets a trend or sets one to be competitive with any new offering. In the 70s it took everyone in the industry four or five years to go from concept to assembly. Sometimes it took longer. Therefore, when you looked at a new design you didnt have to see too far ahead to know what your competition was going to be.
Whenever a company put out a redesigned vehicle, the tooling costs alone guaranteed that the same basic design would be on the road for several years. That was why we could pull in a 74 Chevy Nova with a good idea of where we would stand in 78 or 79 when the public got its first look at our redesigned Hornet Concord and Spirit. You can see what a tremendous competitive advantage a reduced-lead time would have been apart from the many millions of dollars that would have been saved in development costs.
And there I was, the lowest ranking member of the American Motors design team with the knowledge to cut our lead time in half and no way to make it happen. Having seen the GM myth of excellence for what it was, another of my great frustrations was in seeing terrific stylists like Gary Guchard and Roger Nalph wasted on polishing turds while the company went down the crapper. As the company went, so did I
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For a short while it looked as though I lucked out in not being rehired by Ford in July or August. In October Ford laid off more clay modelers than it did in 67. That meant several men, including A-modelers who dodged the bullet in 67 ended up on the 74 or 75 casualty list. Ford got around the problem of losing the modelers it wanted to keep by promoting them to Sculptor. It then started laying-off its modelers according to seniority in grade beginning with the B-modelers. Ford had no black Sculptors so all of the black modelers got their walking papers in the first wave.
This time the first to go did not have their pick of other companies to work for in their field. There werent any in the state of Michigan and few anywhere else. None of the auto companies were hiring because they were feeling the same economic pressures that prompted the Ford lay-offs. I felt lucky to have a job. That feeling was short-lived.
In March of 75 I got my walking papers from American Motors when it, too, began laying-off modelers. I was second from the bottom in seniority so AM didnt have to cut deeply to get me. The cut got Jerry ODonald and Phil Campbell, too.
Phil and I had become friends outside of AM. I visited him often at his art studio where I had an open invitation. He had a wealthy girlfriend and no dependents so he was able to make use of his abundant talents in woodworking, metal sculpting and glass blowing. He showed his work in art galleries around town and he was soon able to make a living selling it to rich old ladies in Birmingham with a slightly higher income than he received as a clay modeler. He was on his own and he was happy.
My situation was a little different. I didnt have the tools, the facilities, the background, the special skills or the special knowledge that Phil had to make it as an independent commercial artist. My special talents lay in invention, although I didnt know how inventive I could be until my depressed economic status forced my hand.
What do you do, for instance, when you need a $199 band saw and all youve got is a $19.95 saber saw? You mount the saber saw upside down on a bench, build a box around it with a slotted platform for the blade and modify the tip of the blade so that it fits into the lock-socket of the saw. I rigged similar fixtures to turn a cheap drill motor into a precision drill press and to convert the same drill motor to a fixed power sander.
For the animation game, using gladiators now instead of hoplites, I set up a board with rotating transparent acetate disks upon which I mounted cell drawings of all the body parts in opposing aspects. I used sliders with transparent scales edged in black ink and running from top to bottom and side-to-side to project different views onto a frosted drawing surface for an accurate composite view. To draw on the cells I needed frosted acetate. To see through them in order to project the relevant points, the cells had to be transparent. Transparent tape applied to the frosted surfaces made them transparent.
These were things I could do at home and it was becoming increasingly necessary to stick close to home. Seeking work out of state was therefore out of the question although I probably wouldnt have done that anyway in case the AM lay off was short or a clay modeling job opened up before then at Ford or Chrysler.
My 56-year-old mothers advancing bone cancer, which had forced me to move in with her before I started working at AM was rapidly approaching the terminal stage. The layoff meant that I could spend more time with her. The house was paid for and between my unemployment checks and her Social Security checks we didnt have to worry about getting tossed into the street or going hungry. Still, the emotional drain on both of us was tremendous.
Private and government insurance took care of most of her medical expenses. My Aunt Lillian dropped by often to cook and clean and do whatever she could to make my mother more comfortable. Mrs. Gary, my childhood fiend Lonnies mother, also came by to help out. Whenever I needed my brother or sister to do something that I couldnt, they were there. Occasionally, my 90-year-old Aunt Ellen, my grandmother Garrisons sister, leant a helping hand as well. She once took a bus in deep snow and sub-freezing temperature, walking the five long blocks between the last bus stop and the house to get there.
Throughout the pain of the cancer and the nausea of the treatments my mother was positively heroic. There were times I knew that she wanted to scream. Sometimes she sobbed but she never screamed. Not once. Even so, she said that the treatments were worse than the disease.
When the cancer got to her brain she had extreme difficulty processing information and making simple decisions. She spent more and more time confined to her bed, listening to religious music and reading her bible when she could focus her eyes and decipher the words. I spent more time doing my own research on cancer, coaxing her to eat, to go to her chemical and radiation treatments and cleaning up her vomit afterwards.
To ease my burden, my mother organized a handy array of towels, tissue paper and plastic bowls then called me into her room to proudly show off what she had done. I was proud of her and ashamed of myself for not doing more.
The paperwork that my sister Sara, my brother George and I had to deal with to satisfy the private insurance company and the government became increasingly demanding and complex. My mother had lasted longer than her doctors expected. The longer she lasted the endless forms that Sara, George and I had to fill out to keep her qualified for medical care became more demanding and threatening. Keeping her alive was costing the insurance company and the taxpayers money. Saving money while keeping up a façade of health care was their primary concern.
The final months of my mothers life were physically painful for her and emotionally painful for everyone close to her. They were spent with more visits to the hospital and longer stays. When she was there she had a constant flow of visitors that included my uncles, aunts and cousins from my fathers side of the family. Mrs. Gary and my Aunt Ellen came by regularly. My Aunt Lillian was there every day.
My mothers last trip to the hospital was the most traumatic. I took her into the emergency room where we waited
. and waited
and waited with my mother sitting in a wheelchair in front of the glassed-in reception desk writhing in pain. While we waited and I filled out forms, the young receptionist and an older nurse behind the glass shuffled paper and chatted about their boyfriends and a movie they both enjoyed. The place was not brimming over with people in need of immediate medical attention. The receptionists biggest concern seemed be an irritation in her left ear that she couldnt quit get rid of.
Finally, my mother lost her patience and said to the receptionist as loudly as her weak, squeaky voice would let her, I need to see a doctor right now! Im a cancer patient!
The TV doctor shows and news stories about the nations war on cancer had given my mother the illusion that it meant something to the Detroit Metropolitan Hospital staff that we were dealing with. I saw that illusion cruelly shattered in her face when the receptionist looked at her as if to say, how rude of you to interrupt my conversation, then swabbed her ear with a Q-tip and went back to what she was saying to the nurse.
The words cancer patient had not magically opened the doors that my mother had anticipated but the Q-tip-in-the-ear-trick set loose the barbarian inside of me that would open them. Nothing was wrong with my voice. I used it at full volume to heap curses on the receptionist. I pounded the glass with my fists and threatened to bash her face in.
I was hopping made but I wasnt as out of control as I appeared to be. All the while I was waiting for someone to take care of my mother I was carefully measuring the priorities of the people we had to go through to do it. Their number one priority was their paperwork. The nurse never even looked around to see what was happening on the floor. Priority number 2 for the receptionist was the irritation in her ear. Number 3 was her conversation with the nurse. Attending to Mrs. Garrisons excruciating pain came last. My loud cursing, banging and violent threats shook up their priorities. Now they had to think first about the possibility that they had a violent madman on their hands and whether or not the glass cage he was rattling would hold.
Instantly, I had the nurses undivided attention. While the receptionist threatened to call the cops the nurse tried to calm me down. She went through the form I filled out when I entered the emergency room and found an error I made that she said caused the delay. She then showed the receptionist something else on the form and told her that when she saw that she was supposed to move the patient to the front of the line. A few minutes later a doctor came in. My mother got an injection to relieve her pain and the doctor signed her into the hospital.
To everyones surprise, my mother seemed to recover in a few days. Her pain was gone. Her mind was clear. Her appetite was good. She was feeding herself and feeling optimistic about her future.
On Mothers Day 1976 I came to see her at a rare time when she didnt have other visitors. She was in especially good spirits. Her room was festooned with flowers, get-well cards and heart-shaped balloons. The doctors had taken new tests and she was confident that the results would be good. She told me with a smile to keep my fingers crossed.
She was sitting up in bed talking animatedly in her squeaky voice about how wonderful her doctor was, the same one who had performed the surgery in 71. She avoided talking about my children because she knew the subject was painful to me. She talked, instead, about the things she planned to do when she got home. She made jokes and heaped praises on my Aunt Lillian and Mrs. Gary for bathing her, holding her hand and fixing her hair. She was grateful and embarrassed that my Great Aunt Ellen did so much for her when she wasnt in the best of health herself. She said of her latest crisis, It was rough, but Im still battling. She smiled. I smiled back.
On that bright note, a group of men walked in wearing stethoscopes like neckties and white, linen jackets. Leading them in space and bearing was a tall, straight-backed man with glasses and thinning dark hair slicked back over his stern, aristocratic head. My mother squeezed my hand. Thats my doctor, she said. She told me the name that matched his nameplate but Ive been calling him Dr. Asshole for so long that thats the only name I can remember.
Dr. Asshole said nothing to his hopeful patient or to me. He was too engrossed in a peripatetic lecture for that. Eavesdropping on the lecture, I could tell that he hadnt entered the room as a physician. He was there as a business executive, the head of something he called the Bed Utilization Committee. I gathered from the foundational information he was imparting to his entourage that this was the first stop on his tour.
Dr. Asshole explained to his group that the hospital could no longer afford to use bed space for patients that could not benefit from treatment. Before I could fully absorb the grim implications of what he said, he lifted the chart from the foot of my mothers bead and used it to illustrate his point. The way he searched for the name Ora Juanita Garrison on the chart as he specified the items that made her case hopeless told me two things: 1) In the time it took to get to her room from wherever he started he had forgotten her name. 2) Unless he was looking at a brand new form with the patients name in an unfamiliar place, his focus of attention was on something infinitely more important to him.
My mothers hopeful grip on my hand slackened. I didnt have the courage to look at her. Her doctor was telling other doctors, in her presence as though she were a lab animal instead of a human being that the test she expected to be encouraging was a death sentence. He couldnt figure out what was keeping her alive so he decided that her presence in the hospital was a waist of bed space. He might as well have said, Take this patient for example; shes as good as dead.
The last time I saw my mother smile was the last time she would ever smile. A few days later Ora Juanita Garrison was in a nursing home. Two weeks after that she was in a cemetery plot
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After my mother died, her Social Security checks that had been a constant battle to receive came to the house with the regularity of a utility bill. I think it had to do with the forms I signed to get her into the nursing home before the hospital dumped her into one of their choosing a snake pit for old, infirmed, indigent people with advanced Alzheimers disease. In any event, sending the checks back with an explanation for why I was returning them didnt work. The checks kept on coming even after I sent one back with a copy of the death certificate.
Somebody finally caught on to the fact that my mothers Social Security checks should no longer be going out. I got a letter demanding the return of those I had already sent back and specifying the criminal penalties for not returning them. I correctly identified it as form letter automatic sent out because of some line on some form that somebody in some department of Social Security got without knowing what had happened in another department. I ignored the letter and heard no more about it.
Meanwhile, my unemployment benefits had long expired and I was looking for any kind of work I could get. I was under the constant threat of going to jail for refusing to pay child support. This was a threat I couldnt ignore because I had been jailed once before for the same thing when I was out of work and separated from my family by no choice of my own. My brother paid the courts ransom money to get me out.
This happened in 73, after I put in my application at Ford and before I got the job at U.S. Industrial Glove. I was $300 behind in my payments. The Friend of the Court pulled me in front of a judge who said, You look like a strong buck. You should be working. He threw me in jail for contempt of court because of my refusal to get a job.
The only thing that was keeping me out of debtors prison now was the fact that when my wife left with the kids while I was working at AM she hadnt told the Friend of the Court how to contact me. I didnt know how long that state of affairs would last. The Court assumed, without checking the facts, that I had run out on my family and was ducking my responsibility to take care of them. The truth was just the opposite. I was ducking the Friend of the Court so I could take care of them. You cant do much good for your children inside a jail cell. More than anything, I wanted to take care of my kids. I wanted custody of them. I was making inquiries into how to go about it when I got laid off.
Gary Guchard was one of the people I confided in about getting custody of the kids because he and his wife were fighting a similar battle to adopt a baby. They had a happy marriage, a stable home and they wanted desperately to raise a child. No child could have gotten better parents but there was always some damn procedure blocking the way to adoption.
Gary and I kept in touch after the layoff.
I was out of modeling for two years. Phil Campbell furthered my education in plastic fabrication, which I would need to manufacture my inventions. To pay the bills, I did odd jobs for my friend Bob Thomas. For a couple of weeks I drove a taxi. I would have settled for anything I could get, pumping gas, sweeping floors, washing cars. You dont know what humiliation is until youve been turned down for one menial job after another with help wanted signs in the window.
Overqualified.
Too old.
Too early.
Too late.
No one ever said Too black, but thats was I knew I was up against when I answered ads for model makers at some job shops or learned through the grapevine that a job shop was looking for modelers.
When I set up the interview over the phone with the manager of a job shop called Aero Detroit in the northern white suburbs, he was overjoyed to hear from someone with my background. When I got there, he greeted me with a warm handshake. The men in the shop all white greeted me with hostile stares. All the manager could talk about were reasons I shouldnt take the job. The work was too hard and dirty. The men Id have to work with would resent my education. I would be working more in fiberglass than clay. He couldnt afford to pay me what I was worth. It wouldnt be fair to me for him to hire me. Good-by. Good luck. The end.
At another job shop, I ran into Dug Olson, Bob Ellison and Mike Wyman from Paul Schiloffs clay modeling school. I met Mike Wyman in the third class. He joked, 30 years old and we still cant hold a steady job.
Jim Biondo, the stocky, hyperactive manager who took me to the modeling studio said that the company wouldnt let him have a modeler. He thought that he might get me in by way of the plastic shop if I could get his co-manager, Pete Andrezzel, to go for it. Pete was relaxed and friendly. He told me that he needed a fiberglass man. The next time I would see Jim and Pete would be as fellow employees of Ford.
In February 1977 I was concentrating on my inventions and forming a company to manufacture and market them when I got a phone call from Gary Guchard. Hey, he said. I hear that Ford is hiring modelers.