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Chapter 4

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Chapter 3: IQ 

Although all five hundred of the hopefuls seemed to be in the same room with me, there was supposed to be only two hundred fifty. It was a big room and the place was packed. Another two hundred fifty were scheduled to take the test the following day.  

Those of us who made the first cut on day one, three of whom were black, met individually with three white representatives of the entities that were sponsoring the program. They told us what the school was about. It was about the "wizards in smocks" that I had seen in the book I got from the Ford Rotunda who sculpted cars of the future in clay. Only Ford wasn't one of the sponsors. Chrysler was. The other two sponsors were Highland Park Community College and the Federal government.  

Chrysler needed modelers and there were no schools in the country that taught the required skills. Ed Getner, the Chrysler representative and head of design at Chrysler's styling facility in Highland Park, told us this much. The rest we had to gather later from other sources.  

Chrysler did need modelers. It also had only one African-American modeler on its payroll, which put government pressure on the company to find and hire qualified black modelers. Ford had only one black modeler and General Motors had none. That meant that Ford and GM would soon be feeling the pressure to hire blacks because now it was illegal to exclude them just because they were black. The "token" black was officially a thing of the past. 

When my turn came to speak to the men representing the sponsors, I got the strangest sensation that they were looking at me as though I was an exotic creature of some sort, hitherto unknown to man. All three of them stared at me as they introduced themselves and shook my hand with their mouths slightly twisted into goofy grins. The government man then asked me a startling question. 

"Did you know you have an IQ of 180?" 

"No," I said and waited for the next question. 

Well, I knew I was smart and 180 sound like a high IQ. Beyond that, I didn't know what it meant because I didn't know what numbers separated high IQs from average ones. However, now I knew what kind of test I had taken. And now I had a pretty good idea that the people who cooked up the idea of using it to select the best candidates for the school thought that it was a good way to screen out blacks without violating the law. According to all of the statistics I'd seen on race and IQ the chances of any African-American finishing in the top 10% were extremely small1. If the number of blacks I'd seen in the testing room was an indication of the number who took the test the next day, the statistical likelihood that any of us would make it was almost nil. Before, I was nervous. Now I was pissed. I had to be careful that I didn’t let the anger show.  

IQ scores were never a big interest of mine. The only time the subject came up in the literature I consumed was in comparisons of blacks to whites and "others" where blacks scored low or when the subject was genus or mental retardation. I couldn't even spell genus and I thought I was retarded in math. I carried around the same stereotypes of people with high IQs that most people did in the '50s and '60s. It was either someone who looked like Albert Einstein or a skinny nerd with round, horn-rimmed glasses and a slide ruler in his breast pocket who did square routs in his head. Neither of those images fit me.  

Looking back from where I am in the year 2002, I know that the aptitude tests I took in high school must have been IQ tests, which is how I ended up in the X classes. No one ever told me that I had a high IQ. If they had, I'm not sure that I would have been especially impressed. No one had to tell me that I was intelligent and scoring high on most tests was a trick. I knew the trick. The reason I did as well as I did on the test for the school was that it was the first time I saw how to apply the trick to the math questions, which gave me the guts to answer a few of them. 

I believed that the IQ test took to get into the clay modeling school was flawed because I didn’t have to know what most of the answers were to deduce which ones had to be right. Moreover, I could see no correlation between the questions on the test and the occupation of clay modeling. Many of the people who did not do as well as those of us who made the first cut were practicing artists with years of experience. They certainly would have turned in better models than most of us who did make the cut if they'd had the chance.  

I am as sure today as I was back then that the test was a racist ploy that backfired. The thing most people don't realize is that racism doesn't just hurt blacks. If any of the brilliant white artists who didn't pass the test to present a model to the sponsors of the school are reading these words, they know what I mean. More about that later…

Chrysler's Ed Getner did most of the talking. He pointed to a tenth-scale clay model car on the table in front of the reps with surfaces as smooth and even as a sheet of glass. He said that I had to build a similar model using the materials he would give me. I was to return with it in a week for the final interview. He handed me a hard block of dark brown clay about two-thirds the size of a loaf of bread, a rectangular piece of wood, a block of Styrofoam and a plastic card. He said that I was to mount the Styrofoam to the wood and model a car of my own design over the foam. He didn't tell me what the card was for, so I asked. He said that it was for "smoothing the clay."  

It did not seem prudent to ask more questions about using the card. If I had such a high I.Q., I guess I was supposed to figure it out. I never did. It took me forever just to learn how to soften the clay without burning it. The final product was a little lumpy. All in all, though, it wasn't too bad for someone who had never touched modeling clay before.  

I returned to the Professional Building with my lumpy model along with four or five other guys with theirs. The appointment schedules must have been staggered so that we wouldn't all show up at once. My model was clearly better than some of the others were and no better or worse than others.  One smug-looking guy named Moritz Schmidt had only half a model. It didn’t look much like a car but the surfaces were as even as the one Ed Getner showed us on the model that we were supposed to immolate. Someone asked him how he did it. He said, "I used the card." 

You didn't have to be an expert to tell that all of the models had serious defects. In that small group, at least, there were no standouts. As near as I could tell I wasn't out of it. My odds were still 50/50. Depending on how I handled myself in the interview, I just might make it. 

The interview went well. The government guy beamed over my model when I first brought it in. The other two men looked less impressed until I explained how I made it. Whatever they thought of the model they seemed to like the way I solved problems or at lest the way I explained how I solved them.   

I was not a clay modeler so no one could have expected my model to be perfect. The flaws were obvious. So, instead of trying to hide them or make excuses for them I decided to use them to my advantage. The name of the game was to demonstrate how eager I was to learn and how deferential I was to Ed Getner's superior knowledge.   

My biggest break came when I asked about getting the lumps out of the surface. I had used the card by curling it and pressing it into the clay as I stroked it. The result was a smooth, gleaming finish but not one that was as even as the model on the table or the one in the waiting room on the lap of Moritz Schmidt. This time Mr. Getner held the card as though it was a tiny sandwich and swiped the clay with the edge. The card left behind the smooth, even contour of the edge where it cut into the clay. 

I didn't have to put on an act to show how amazed and delighted I was at what I'd seen or how stupid I felt for never imagining that the card could be used in that way. The three men laughed as I hoped they would, not at me but with me. Mr. Getner then proceeded to show me other neat tricks that I lapped up like a dear at a saltlick. I could see that he was lapping up my genuine enthusiasm for his impromptu display of skill. I was so enthralled in his demonstration that I had to make a conscious effort to back off a little to keep the fact that I was already behaving like a clay modeling student to keep from looking insincere.   

The interview lasted less than five minutes. The signs looked promising. Unfortunately I didn't have enough sighs. How could I feel confident in extrapolating from such a small sample? I'd seen only five or six models including mine. I hadn't seen the other forty-four or forty-five. For all I knew, the models that I saw, included mine, were the worst of the lot. 

A few days later I got a letter informing me that I was in. The class started in June. 

In the meantime one of my job applications had come though and I began work immediately at the Chrysler Assembly plant in Detroit. I got one of the easiest jobs in the place, assembling break components on a bench for the '65 Chrysler Imperials coming down the line. For reasons I never learned and everyone was curious about, I was the only male doing that work. The others were black women. 

A week or so into the job I discovered that the way one of the women taught me to put my part together was least five times less efficient than it could be. Instead of standing in one spot for hours putting together just enough components to supply the man on the line who got them from me, I found that I could stockpile many times more of the things with less effort. Plus, the way I did it made it impossible to get it wrong.  

I wasn't about to tell the women who had been doing the job for years that I had a better system. I thought that the work would speak for itself and the longer breaks I took because I had more free time on my hands would give them an incentive to follow my lead. After about a week of this, my fellow break assemblers started giving me evil looks. They did not follow my lead. Instead, they worked much harder in doing the job the way they had always done it to try to keep up.  I was also starting to get the evil eye from some men on the line. I couldn’t understand what was going on until one of the women kindly asked me to slow down. What she told me was an eye-opener.  

There was more to why the women were not making things easier on themselves than there appeared to be. The woman told me that she knew my way was better but not everyone could do it that way and they would get into trouble because of it. I knew she wasn't telling me everything because no one else had ever tried to do it my way, which required fewer steps. I assumed that their resistance to change was one of those human traits that have nothing to do with logic. I assumed that they were set in their ways and didn't want a man, especially a young man with two weeks of experience, showing them how to do their jobs better.  

I got another eye-opener during a break when I talked to the happy-go-lucky guy on the line who got his break part from my box. He was about 30, black, college-educated and extremely bright. He had majored in philosophy. One time I asked him why someone as smart as he was seemed to be so content working in an assembly plant. He told me that the job did not require him to think about what he was doing. Therefore his mind was free to go wherever he wanted it to take him.  

I couldn’t do what he did. I tried. Lord, how I tried. The more senseless the labor, the greater my agony. I couldn’t stand busywork even when I was in kindergarten. I wanted to make something.  

Hard work was fine if it was necessary. Unnecessarily hard work was almost intolerable. Unnecessary easy work was absolutely intolerable because it was boring. Boredom was torture. I had more to do with my time than just think sublime thoughts. You couldn't read, write or make anything if your eyes and hands were engaged in meaningless labor.  

The line-worker/philosopher seemed like a good guy to share my frustrations with so I told him what the woman told me about slowing down. He noted my youth without condescension and proceeded to tell me what the real deal was. The stumbling block wasn't with the workers; it was with management and its "keep'm hopping" mindset.  

He said, "You take too many breaks. Management doesn't like that." He said that he knew it didn't matter to me because I was leaving soon, but it could have a bad ripple effect on the whole plant. I didn't understand my place in the subtle power games played by labor and management. I was a wildcard and therefore a potential liability to both sides.  

This was my first lesson in the corporate politics that overshadowed race. Politics came first. Keeping busy meant more than being productive. Productivity was a management level concern.

The real reasons the women didn't stockpile their parts the way I did were to keep from having more work piled on them to keep them busy and to give the men on the line some slack. The line kept pace with the components. If the break assemblers picked up their pace the other component assemblers might have to follow suit whether or not it made sense. The line would speed up and everyone would have to work harder.  

Naturally I thought about my father and his brothers who complained so often about the pressure to speed up the line and the associated quality control problems. No one in authority was going to admit that mere factory workers could or would do their jobs better than they were told to do them by their supervisors. A good idea in the suggestion box was one thing. A successful demonstration on the floor was another.  

By the way, GM Diesel did adopt the first idea I put in the suggestion box. I didn't get any money or recognition for it, probably because it was so simple and I no longer worked for GM. I don't know about my other ideas. I wasn't there long enough to see what happened to them.  

When Ford Motor Company announced the first energy absorbing bumper in 1956 it wasn't a new idea to me. I saw it on a piece of paper two years earlier that my father drew up and explained to my brother and me before he dropped it in the Ford Rouge suggestion box.  

My father never got credit for his idea. Someone else did. I'm not accusing anyone of stealing the idea from my father. His paper might have gone straight into the evening trash. For all I know the people who did get the credit for it and actually did the engineering, designing and testing to make it work thought of it before he did. I am saying that the suggestion box is a great way for the management of large corporations to adopt good ideas whatever the source without revealing or even acknowledging where it came from. I learned in clay modeling school that you can't patent an idea. You can only patent a product… 

Remember that bit about racism directed against black people having an adverse affect on white people?  

African-Americans comprised 15% of the population; yet, we were 20% of the class. Take away the students who didn't take the test and our overrepresentation goes higher. If you think that happened because Chrysler, the government or the community college gave us a special preference, you're wrong. In a fair system our representation could have gone either way, at least two of us might not have made it because we didn’t have strong art backgrounds. Furthermore, the man at the door insured that we would get to take the test because he thought, just by looking at us, that we couldn't be bright enough to score in the top 10%. Had he been only a tad less bigoted we could not have fooled him. He would have turned us away just to play it safe. 

Why do I say "us"? Coming right up… 

The fist student I met when I arrived for my first day of clay modeling school was Nehemiah Amaker. Nehemiah was an unassuming African-American with a slight build and a medium brown complexion. He was three or four years older than I was. He spoke in a dialect that sounded like my cousins in South Carolina. He was easy to like.  

Nehemiah and I talked about the test that made it possible for us to get into the school and what it took to get past the man at the door. I was amazed that his story was almost identical to mine. Some agency had referred him to the Professional Building to take the test. The man at the door told him that he had been sent to the wrong building. He wisely played dumb and the guy let him in.  

Later in the day I got to speak with Sam Mayers, James Brooks and Charley McCuen, the other black students, about the man at the door.  

Same story.  

If any of us had been dumb enough to listen to the man at the door or to protest our right to be there it's a sure bet that we wouldn’t have gotten past him. Eventually I got around to asking all of the white guys in the class about their experience with getting into the school.  

Different story.  

Not one of the white students even mentioned the man at the door. In one way or another they heard about the school, aced the test, built a model and passed the interview. Three of them told me that they didn't take the test. Two of the three said that they didn't have to take it because they had friends in the business. It also turned out that Moritz Schmidt, the guy with the half model who obviously knew how to use the card, also had friends in the business. Most of us didn’t even know that the clay modeling profession existed until a month before the school started. 

Sam Mayers knew about clay modeling because he was taking a class in Automotive Design at the Center of Creative Studies in Detroit after a four-year stretch with the Air Force. Sam was a stocky, dark-skinned fun-loving, quick-witted guy who joked with everyone and laughed easily. He feared no one and he was generous with his time in passing on what he knew about design to anyone who showed an interest. He was one of the best teachers I ever saw in action. He probably took the best looking model to the interview because of his design background, his prodigious talent and the trick with the card.  

James Brooks, a slim, handsome, dark-skinned jack of all trades and master or master-to-be of every one of them, knew Sam from the Air Force. He heard about the business and the class from Sam. Brooks, as Sam called him, was a true genus. Anything he decided to do he did extremely well. He could speak with such ease in any dialect that if you weren't looking at him you might have thought that he was a German, a hillbilly, a British aristocrat or a white, Midwestern suburbanite. Because he knew Sam, he probably knew the trick with the card, too. 

Charlie McCuen was the kind of guy who had to grow on you. At 35, he was the second oldest man in the class. A Greek-American named Societies was the oldest at 40. Charley was a bit aloof and seemed downright unfriendly until you got to know him. He was a professional artist who had seen some hard times including a rough tour of duty in Korea. He acted as though he was much wiser in the ways of the world than the rest of us. The more I learned about the ways of the world the more I could see that he was much wiser than I was.  

On the first day of school in a converted Chrysler showroom in Highland Park, Michigan, a city within the city of Detroit, our instructor introduced himself and his credentials to the class. Paul Schiloff had been in the business for almost 20 years. He had taught many classes, although none as large and high profile as this one. The press wasn't there the first day but we would get visits from local the local and national media several times before the course was finished. The black students were always prominently featured. The course was scheduled to last for ten months. For eight hours a day, five days a week Schiloff would be teaching us something about art and automotive design and a lot about tool-making and clay modeling.  

Our first assignment was to take a little test. For some reason, Schiloff looked straight at me before passing out the test sheets.  

The entire test consisted of only ten questions, which made its reliability highly suspect in my eyes. Furthermore, I didn't usually do particularly well on short test so the very idea of it unsettled me. Each question was the same: out of each set of five abstract shapes and squiggly lines, which one was best? It wasn't like any test I had taken before but I went into my "test mode" and did what I could with it.  

When we were finished, we handed our paper to the person next to us to score. Schiloff got the odd paper and read off the correct answers. He then asked everyone to read the score of the paper they marked. Everyone got at least one wrong answer. Everyone, that is, except me. I got all of them right.  

All eyes turned to my scorer, a white guy named Rodney, and me. Both of us were embarrassed. Rodney turned beat red. On a ten-question test like this getting a perfect score could have been a fluke. Then again, who could say that the people who made up the test were correct?  

Schiloff appeared to be a bit shaken. That was the end of our tests.

Schiloff seemed like a nice enough guy at first, but Charley McCuen never trusted him. Charley told me that he thought the man was prejudiced. The word "racist" had not yet replace "prejudiced" in the lexicon of common usage. "Just watch him," he said.  

I did watch him. For months, I couldn't see what Charley was talking about. Schiloff was particularly deferential to Charley and Sam. He acknowledged their super knowledge of art and for the first hour each day that we spent drawing, Sam and Charley were our instructors. Charley was the expert in Fine Art. Sam was only a student of automotive design, but he was damn good at it and one hell of a teacher. 

Charley's assessment of Schiloff's true character did not begin to ring true with one giant clatter of bells.  It began with a series of little things that smacked of favoritism.  

Schiloff gave all of us the same primary instruction in the tools of the trade, how to make them and how to use them. He taught us how to make templates and read blue prints. But Moritz, Socrates and a few others always seemed to get more help and encouragement than the others. James Brooks didn't get a lot of extra help because he didn’t need it and Schiloff seemed to like him as much as he liked Moritz and Socrates.  

Oh, I forgot to mention that one of Brooks' many talents was whipping out a pocket knife, opening it with one hand like a switchblade and twirling in his finger like a drum major's baton. 

Like Schiloff's white favorites, Brooks also got to work on major interior projects and the full-sized clay car with Schiloff's help while Charley, Nehemiah and I were left to fend for ourselves. Sam made his own way with little help from anyone. Schiloff's favorable attitude toward Brooks notwithstanding, he still seemed to tilt to the white side. A notable exception was an erasable student named Bodel.  

Paul Schiloff hated Bodel. One time Schiloff passed out report cards. The only people in the class who didn’t get A's or B's were Bodel and I. Moritz got an A. Socrates got an A. Sam, Charley and Nehemiah got B's.

Like Brooks, Bodel was also a true genus. He excelled in everything he tried. I may have had the highest IQ but, in my opinion, Bodel, Brooks and a quiet little chess player named Zane were the brightest people in the class.  Then again, there was Charley McCuen, Dennis Campbell, Phil Huzzar, Nehemiah Amaker, Frank Mendollia and, of course, Sam Mayers. On any given day any of us could and did shine the brightest. 

One day Schiloff called me into his office for a little chat. 

The first thing he did was to ask me what my IQ was. To say the least, I was confused. Didn't he know? For reasons I cannot explain, I said 116.

I wasn't trying to play a mind game. That's just what came out. The government man only told me what I scored on the test. I didn't see it. 116 was a number I had seen on one of the tests I'd taken at the Army Reception Center in Fort Leonard Wood. I cannot tell you what it meant or why it popped into my head and rolled off of my tongue.  

Schiloff had never shown a particular dislike for me in his manner. The only student he made it clear that he didn't like was Bodel. Now, as I gave him my answer to his question there was no mistaking the hatred in his face, although I couldn't make myself believe it. It was a scene that you would never put in a fiction novel because there was no logical context for it. It came from out of the blue  

The next inexplicable thing he did was to tell me that his IQ was 135. Then he handed me a pad of paper and a pencil and gave me a math problem to solve. I didn't know where to start. The question that kept pounding away in my head was, "What does this have to do with clay modeling?" By then, I knew enough about the trade to know that it was a rhetorical question. None of this had a damn thing to do with modeling.  

I was too confused to be angry and too ashamed of myself for not being able to solve the math problem he gave me to challenge what he was doing. I didn't know what he was doing. When Schiloff saw me struggling, he let me sweat awhile then dismissed me. Outside of his office he gave no hint that anything unusual had happed.  

Shortly after this bizarre episode in the fall of '65, Schiloff got a call from Chrysler to send them five of his best students. He sent Moritz, Brooks, Socrates, a quiet, blond ex-marine who never mastered the basics and another guy whose name and face eludes me.  

From time to time Schiloff sent other students to Chrysler. Some of the remaining students dropped out, others took the clay models they had made in class to Ford or GM. Not all of them were successful.