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Chapter 29

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Chapter 28: Stalking Goats 

A complete outline of the battle plan I needed to fight my war against Ford Motor Company formed in my head before Folgmann finished speaking. It wasn’t going to be a David and Goliath struggle. It was going to be more like Mayberry vs. Godzilla. Mayberry had no chance of Karate-kicking its way to victory. This situation called for a large application of Jujitsu.  

Because the only way to win was to use the momentum of Ford’s attack on me against itself I had to be sure that I was on the side of the angels and everyone who looked at my case could see it. I had to be sure that everyone could see that my fight wasn’t about one man’s attempt to get more money out of the company he worked for. They had to see that it about a pattern of illegal discrimination that kept all but a chosen few from getting the recognition we earned for the work we did. What happened to me was happening to others who were laying the golden eggs that made the company’s stock worth buying. Without an honest record of who was doing what to move the company ahead, the future of the company and all but a few who worked for it was in jeopardy.  

The most potent weapon I had was the truth. 

An attack on me was an attack on one fifth of Ford’s black modelers. Since George Rogers retired, only five of us were left on the payroll. As far as the records used in my evaluation were concerned, it looked as though I didn’t start working for Ford until 1977. It looked as though the company did me more of a favor than it did for itself by hiring me and promoting me “so quickly” to A-modeler and Sculptor. Of the twenty or so B-modelers hired in ’77, Charlie Leak was the last one promoted to A-modeler and Sculptor and Charles Purnell wasn’t doing a hell of a lot better. Had I not intervened in Ballerie’s career path she would have still been in the Plastic Shop and Ford’s attack on me would have been an attack on one quarter of its black modelers. 

Calvin was Ford’s only black modeler with a history dating back to 1966. He was the only one above the midpoint of his pay grade. But none of us had ever gotten an O, so lowering me from EP to E effectively took all of us out of the running for Master Modeler in the foreseeable future.  

I did my “enraged modeler” routine and stormed out of Folgmann’s office fully expecting to get transferred to another studio. It worked. Folgmann let me go and Greg Arceri, who was now the Supervisor of a new Interiors studio, picked me up. In the meantime, Harry Strickler agreed to rewrite my Performance Review. I didn’t know how Strick would grade me but it couldn’t have been worse than what Folgmann did. I had written down as much of the conversation I had with Folgmann as I could recall while it was fresh in my mind and used it to prepare a letter to Mike Easton, the man in charge of Personnel for North American Design. I wrote another letter to Jack Telnack and one more to Ford’s Chairman Don Peterson.  

My strategy was to create so much upheaval in upper management that it threatened to bring down an avalanche of shit on the heads of Fritz Mayhew and Toshi Saito. Without their explicit order or tacit consent, Gerry Folgmann could not have lowered my PR.  I was banking on my belief that several people Ford held in high esteem would have rated me highly if they had been given the chance to do it.

Of all the modelers who started working for Ford in the 1960s, I had introduced more innovations into the system than any of them. Of the modelers McBain had asked to do the “baseball game” exercise I was the only one to find the flaw in the problem. I was the only one who wasn’t now a Master. I wrote for the Design Center paper. I contributed the biggest percentage of my income to the United Fund. I had never taken more than three sick days or personal business days off in a year. The previous year I had taken only one day off in December to be a pall barer at a funeral in Toledo. Of all the designers, engineers and modelers who were available to pull the Probe out of the toilet, I was the one who figured out how it could be done and I put my neck on the line to do it. 

The fact that Design Center Personnel chose me to represent modelers in key meetings with two senior VPs and to sit on its first steering committee had to mean something. And no one who saw what I did in Small Car could deny that I was one of the most valuable members of the team. Designers asked me to work on their designs. Contract modelers who knew nothing of Ford politics assumed I was a Master Modeler and came to me to help them with their modeling. All of the engineers were on my side. All of the Master Modelers who worked with me, including John Arzooian, were on my side.  

Dick Susalla and Chuck Lucas who had made Master on the last promotion list spoke out indignantly when anyone gave designers credit for my work.  

Dick was particularly incensed when he assigned me to model running light housings for a version of the Probe that a new, highly touted designer named Mark Conforci was supposed to design. It was a tough assignment for any designer. As the show date neared Susalla grew increasingly impatient with the young designer’s inaction. He didn’t want his modeler to get the blame for a designer’s negligence. In Conforci’s case it wasn’t negligence; it was ignorance. He didn’t know how to start. I had to do the design and the modeling. When Mimi brought Toshi, Fritz and a large entourage of other shooters to view the running lights, Mimi credited Conforci with the design. Susalla turned beat red with anger and said, “Conforci didn’t do any of that. Jasper did.”  

Susalla was a great modeler but, like Frank Baylow, he was short on tact. That’s what took him so long to make Master. he called things as he saw them. If somebody’s feelings got hurt, too bad.  

I understood why Susalla reacted so angrily. The issue wasn’t as cut-and-dried as it seemed on the surface. Modelers often made pivotal creative contributions to the design process that designers couldn’t make or stepped up to the plate in dicey decision-making situations when designers wouldn’t. When we hit a home run the designers sometimes got the credit. It happened with black modelers consistently but imagine that it happed to Dick more than once.  

In the past we could afford to let it go as long as we got paid for what we did overall. Things were different now. The company was moving full steam ahead to minimize the role of clay modelers as  a group by taking designs directly from electronic easels and milling them in clay. If modelers in general were devalued, our merit increases would certainly follow suite.  

Chuck Lucas was probably as indignant as Dick Susalla was about designers getting credit for lauded aspects of the Probe design that I was responsible for. He was present when I developed the body side and he often gave me full credit for the overall design. I didn’t take him literally, of course. It was just his shorthand way of saying that time after time, when the designers got stuck or the designers and engineers reached an impasse, he saw me coming up with a way to move the project forward. I wasn’t the only modeler who made a difference in the Probe design. As Chuck Lucas also said, the Probe was a modeler’s car – a car that could not have been designed without a considerable amount of technical and creative design modeler input.  

Chuck Lucas saw as clearly as I did that the company was making a huge mistake in taking modelers out of the design process equation with it’s approach to replacing us with machines. It looked like a great idea on paper because so much lead-time was wasted on developing the clay models. No one objected to letting machines do things that they could do better than we could but, as everyone directly involved in design knew, the long lead times had more to do with executive indecision than they did with primitive modeling techniques. Men with sharp axes and the knowledge of when, where, how and why to use them could clear a patch of forest faster than men with chainsaws who didn’t know what they did.

Al Biggs, a grade-6 modeler was getting in on the ground floor of Ford’s move to electronic modeling and milling. I thought Bill Bomgardner, a Master Modeler, had staked out this area before Biggs entered the Design Center’s ‘86 clay modeling class. It worried me that Biggs didn’t know enough about clay modeling or automotive design to make sound modeling decisions or to recognize bad ones that the designers instructed him to implement. Somebody was creating an empire for him by sending him to classes on the latest and greatest in milling hardware and software. They were making him the expert that everyone would have to go to in Ford’s clay modeling future. Why? 

The last thing Ford needed was an ambitious lord of a new fiefdom. We had too many of them already. I suspected that part of the reason Toshi wanted to see me downgraded was because I stepped out of my place as a modeler in doing too many things that executives were supposed to do with too much success. You couldn’t justify the enormous difference in pay between a grade-7 and a grade-14 if the seven is making better executive decisions than the fourteen. A grade-7 modeler wasn’t supposed to make any management decisions. I hadn’t planned on making any. It just turned out that way because the executives decided that the Probe was dead and I showed everybody that it wasn’t.  

Theoretically, All Biggs was just another clay modeler getting special technical training. In practice, he was getting technical training that made him uniquely valuable – training nobody else could get. Nobody else even knew about it until he’d done it. When I sat down in Gerry Folgmann’s office to receive my E, I knew that Al Biggs got an O.  

All of the above figured into my letter-writing campaign that I began on March 7, 1989, a few days after my meeting with Folgmann. His bogus justifications for lowering my PR to below average and lowering and delaying my merit increase put him and Toshi in an indefensible position to withstand an objective challenge. I couldn’t use Biggs’ O to compare to my E because Biggs didn’t work for Folgmann or Toshi. I knew only that Howard Thompson did better than I did and I could see no way for Folgmann or Toshi to argue that my performance was inferior to his.  

I had two scheduled vacation days shortly after my meeting with Gerry Folgmann. I took thee sick days before then to call attention to my previous attendance record and to plan my writing campaign in detail. My letter to Mike Easton, the one I wrote to Jack Telnack and the one to Don Peterson included a “cc” at the bottom to indicate the people who would receive copies of their letter. People love to read other people’s mail. Lucy Berkowski, a new Personnel representative under Easton got one of the cc’s to put indirect pressure on her boss. My letter to Telnack, who, as the Staff Design VP, wasn’t in my North American Design chain of command, put indirect pressure on Toshi’s boss Fritz Mayhew, the NAD chief. Fritz did not get a cc.  The first battle was now engaged. 

Before I wrote the letters, I went to the Design Center’s Personnel office to get copies of my personnel file. I knew that I had witnesses going all the way back to 1966 who could testify that a nazi and a Klansman were responsible for anything negative that was written about me before I was rehired in ’77. I had witnesses I believed would testify to my superior performance after that. I wanted to use my Army Commendation Medal citation and my letters of recommendation from American Motors as evidence of my character and consistency as a team player performing to the highest standards.  

This is where I met Lucy Berkowski. She told me that I could look at my file but I couldn’t get copies of it. That was the first red flag. The second red flag popped up when I noticed that the folder with my name on it, contained what was easily the thickest file in a very deep drawer. Pete Gardnick, my fellow Vietnam vet who started with me at Ford in 1966 had a file that was less than a third as thick as mine. The same was true with George Green, my fellow organizer in the ’86 SEOW Union drive. It takes a lot of paper to make that much difference.   

I couldn’t look in the other folders to see what made mine stand out so strikingly and most of what I saw in my file used language and codes that I couldn’t decipher. Moreover, I had to work quickly to make a preemptive strike in anticipation of what Folgmann would do with the war dance I did on his desk. I did it before with Leighton and Walker. It wouldn’t take much for them to get together and show a pattern of violent instability on my part. I had to put them on the defensive.  

I looked for a list of all my Performance Reviews on one sheet of paper. The only list of my PR’s I could find just showed the ones that accompanied my Merit increases and, of course, the E that got me nothing. A missing Performance Review between two E’s was an EP. With this record of performance I had no chance of ever becoming a Master Modeler.  

Then I looked for the ARCOM and the letters of recommendation. They were also missing. That’s when I decided to add Lucy Berkowski’s name to my list of people to get copies of my letters to Easton, Telnack and Peterson. I wanted her to be a player in the game. In my subsequent letter to her I did not threaten a lawsuit. Instead, I put the sort of detailed notes in each letter that one would find in a paper trail designed to pursue a lawsuit and strong hints that I wasn’t going to stop. In one of my letters to Berkowski I added the name of well-known National Public Radio reporter and a name she didn’t know – Sara Greer, my sister.  

Before the month was out, I again met with Berkowski after telling her that I had found my original AM letters of recommendation. I didn’t tell her that I had also found a copy of my Army citation. When I looked at my file this time, the letters of recommendation had miraculously appeared, although they were out of place. The citation that should have been included in my ’77 application along with the letters of recommendation was still missing. 

Each move and counter move told me more about what I was up against and what to expect.  I got the feeling that Berkowski was trying to play it straight with me. I got the feeling that she didn’t know what was going on but the more she found out the less she liked it. I got the feeling that the more her superiors saw what she was doing and how she was documenting it, the less they liked it. However I don’t believe that Mike Eason reviewed the memo that Berkowski wrote on Mark 9 closely enough to appreciate the significance of what she wrote about Gerry Folgmann’s identification of Harry Finley and Vic Clark. I hadn’t referred to them by name, only by “nazi” and “KKK” 

This, in part, is what she wrote: 

“Subject: Jasper Garrison’s Letters of Concern 

“Attendees: T. Saito, M. F. Easton, G. A Folgmann, L. L Berkowski.  

“A meeting was held at 4:00 P.M. today to discuss the three letters that Jasper Garrison sent to Messrs. Easton, Telnack, Peterson and carbon copies to Messrs. Folgmann and Saito and Ms. Berkowski. 

“Mr. Folgmann stated he informed Mr. Garrison of hid inclusion in the 1989 merit plan about two weeks ago and that he was scheduled for a merit increase during the 3^rd quarter and the increase would be between 5% and 6%. 

“Mr. Folgman said the ‘nazi’ reference was directed at Harry Finley and the ‘KKK’ reference was directed at Vic Clark. 

“Mr. Folgman stated that Mr. Garrison sent a letter to Mr. Telnack because he knew Mr. Telnack and did not know Mr. Mayhew….” 

Lucy Berkowski was nobody’s fool. If she reviewed my history at all, she knew about my long history with Fritz Mayhew and she could probably figure out why I didn’t write to him. She had to know that she was sitting in a meeting with three men who had to be on the same wavelength to keep my Performance Review and my salary artificially low if allegations were true. 

She continued: 

“Mr. Garrison reported to Mr. Arceri’s studio on March 8 as Mr. Garrison was ill on 03/01, 03/02, 03/03 and was on vacation 03/06, 03/07. Mr. Folgmann stated that Mr. Garrison said the two vacation days were prescheduled and when he checked the schedule they were not.” 

So, according to Mr. Folgman, I was lying. The question of my sick days so early in the year arouse, as I knew it would, because the previous year I had taken only one business day; no sick days. The year before that, I took two business days and no sick days. They had to wonder why I suddenly decided to take three sick days in front of two vacation days. They had to figure that I was putting as many hours of those days as possible into my campaign to fight Gerry Folgman’s E. The reason Folgman dropped me to E and why Toshi and Eason agreed with it never came up directly in Berkowski’s memo, which makes no sense considering the fact that this is what triggered my “letters of concern.” 

Referring to herself in the third person, Berkowski said: 

“Ms. Berkowski informed the group she did a work history profile on Mr. Garrison that included a salary history. A salary comparison was also compiled of other employees in the same Design Sculptor classification. There was general In a preliminary review we concluded Mr. Garrison has not been disadvantaged. 

“Mr. Easton stated that Jim Harris will be handling a follow up with Mr. Garrison in Mr. Ewald’s absence. 

“Ms. Berkowski stated she would turn over all her information to Mr. Harris for his review and research prior to his contacting Mr. Garrison. 

“Messrs. Saito and Folgmann and Ms. Berkowski reviewed the 1989 merit plan for the modeling community. A preliminary review indicated the plan was solid. Ms. Berkowski stated that she would ask Mr. Harris to review the plan and do more in depth analysis. 

“The meeting ended with Ms. Berkowski stating she would follow up with Mr. Harris.”  

John Ewald was the Personnel man that Lucy Berkowski answered directly to in the Design Center. I hadn’t met him, yet, but I would. I never met with Jim Harris. I didn’t even see this memo or any or Ford’s other confidential documents until 1994, but I figured meeting like this would have to take place. I knew only that Personnel was scrambling to justify what Folgmann and Toshi had done, what Easton had not done and to defend the system that allowed it to happen. They said what they had to say but they had to do what I wanted them to do.  

Personnel had to conduct an honest investigation just to see where the company stood in the event my letter-writing campaign ended up in federal court. They had to know where they stood to put the best spin on their records and they had to do it in a way that made them appear to be trying to do the right thing.  

In my letter to Jack Telnack, I asked him to do his own investigation. I knew that he wouldn’t. I also knew that he would ask Fritz why I didn’t go to him and Fritz would be compelled to either come over to my side to get Jack off of the hot seat or stay our of the picture. Knowing Fritz as well as I did, I figured he would bow out. He did. 

I made Jack a good guy in my letter to him so he couldn’t ignore any of the letters without looking like a bad guy. Because of the Taurus/Sable success, Jack had become an industry icon. He was named in some polls as one of the top ten auto designers of all time. His picture appeared on the cover of national magazines as “the man who designed the Taurus” and the myth of how he did it had become an official part of automotive design history. He appeared as a celebrity guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show. He had an image to protect and he wasn’t about to let anything tarnish it. At the same time his position in the company forced him to defend its “pay for performance” policy as it was written and applied because the policy came from higher up.  

My meeting with Jack was friendly, if not totally frank. He told me how impress he had been with me on the Minnesota Truck survey and how his appreciation for my modeling skills and creativity had increased with what he saw me do in Taurus. He tried to make a joke of my wheel cover attachment system where the covers came off but the joke fell flat when I “jokingly” explained what happened. His kicked-in-the-head expression told me that he got it. The closest he came to acknowledging the merit of my reason for seeing him was a philosophical rumination on his disagreement with the forced ranking system. He told me that he would get his Personnel man George Valsa to look into the matter.    

The best Jack could do was to use his personal influence and his personal knowledge of my work in Truck and Taurus to raise the possibility that my downgrading had been a mistake. That’s all I needed from him. My witness list would do the rest.

I was banking heavily on Mimi Vandermolen. She did not have the title of Studio Executive but she had the role and responsibilities. The Studio Executive had a big say in my previous performance reviews. In this one, where I worked most closely with the person in that role, she had been bypassed to allow Toshi Saito to do the dishonors. Whatever her title, Mimi was in the studio every day. She had the best overall picture of what everyone working for her did from day to day, week to week and month to month. Even if she wasn’t empowered to sign my Performance Review, there was no reasonably way to go around her evaluation of me. It was a professional disservice to me and professional insult to her.  

An objective observer would have to question whether my color and Mimi’s sex had anything to do with what was going on with us. The Probe was beginning to look like a winner so it could have been that Toshi was simply positioning himself to get the credit for it the way Jack had gotten the credit for the Taurus. At least it might have appeared that way to those who hadn’t seen Toshi’s little exhibits of racism and sexism. Either way, it looked bad for Toshi.  

Before I unleashed my next volley of letters and cc’s, talked with Howard Thomson, John Arzoo, Walt George and Jim Biando to make sure they saw me the way I thought they did. I did the same thing with Mimi, Scott and Sid. I did it again with Joe Warren. I couldn’t talk to Dick Trapp because he was in Japan but I put him on my witness list anyway. In all, I had four modelers Ford had rated outstanding, three top designers and the two Studio Engineers. I had more modelers, designers and engineers that I held in reserve.  

Gerry Folgman had consulted none of these people. He based his assessment on his personal observation that I took too much time with things that didn’t matter, that I highlighted when I should have been roughing and the highlights he saw were not good. Whenever he saw me polishing and studly a bad highlight to see exactly where I had to go next, he figured I was finishing up and couldn’t see the bad surface he could see. He didn’t give me credit for knowing a damn thing about modeling and judged me accordingly. 

In other words, like Rod Leighton and his Master Modelers, Gerry Folgman didn’t know what I was doing and assumed that I didn’t know. As soon as he saw something he didn’t like, he either explained to me how to do it or took me off the job. He never saw or timed my work from start to finish. 

Then next time I met with Folgman he was far more conciliatory. He hadn’t changed my PR but he had increased my raise and shortened the time in which I would get it to what Lucy Berkowski wrote in her memo – the one I didn’t see until 1994. He said something else that surprised me. He admitted that he might have made a mistake because my pay was so low for someone with my experience and it might have biased his observations. He told me that he couldn’t understand why I would stay so low for so long unless I belonged there. He also told me that he wasn’t sure until Toshi agreed with him and Personnel agreed with Toshi.  

The floodlights of my mind went on, tracing points in the progression of my career like bad dimension points on a body side. Mike Eason knew what was going on when I went to him for a pay adjustment. Matrix new it when he took my ’77 application. Powell knew it when he turned down my application in ’74 on the strength of a nazi and a Klansman’s recommendation, when he asked me to apply in ’73 and when he gave me the poison pill offer in ’68. These were all personnel decisions. No wonder my file was so thick.  

Much of my guessing game was over. Now I knew that Ford Personnel had a special interest in channeling my career toward a dead end. They tried everything they could think of to do it. When it appeared that I was trapped somehow I always found a way out. In retrospect I can see what a headache that was for the top dogs in Personnel. They got their jobs because they were the best at manipulating people and their working environments to serve upper management’s goals. They were having a hell of a time with me. 

Whatever Personnel was up to it had to be bigger than I was. But whatever I was doing to get off of the dead in streets was something they had to get a better handle on to control things the way they wanted to. I didn’t know what their goals could have been that spanned two generations with a clay modeler at the center of it. 

Maybe some of the goals had changed. Maybe they were afraid I would go back to school and get a degree that would make it impossible for them to keep me out of management. Maybe they were afraid that I already had more education than most of the clay modeling Supervisors and Managers in place. Maybe they were afraid of the freaky IQ score that got me into Schiloff’s school or my independent work on the baseball exercise that management careers rose and fell by before I found the flaw. Whatever they were afraid of it had to be in my file. 

One thing was clear. Ford Personnel was giving tickets to its African-American professionals for reserved seats in the back of the bus. That could not have been Ford’s ultimate goal. There was too little money in it and too much law against it. They had to be after a lager group to devalue. Ford’s salaried black workers had to be the stalking goats for the larger group. I had to be a very important goat.