Go to
Chapter 5

Table of Contents

Chapter 4: Malice  

After what you have just read it may seem incredible to you that I trusted Paul Schiloff. You have to remember that I was 19 years old with no frame of reference for what it took to be successful in the field of clay modeling. Schiloff was nearly as old as my mother was.   He was more than a technical instructor; he was a mentor. He showed no overt signs of racism or other motives for going out of his way to hurt me. You can't see people's motives. All you can see are their deeds. Sometimes it takes years to put the deeds in context and to make rational inferences about the motives behind them.  

For instance, my mother had a kind but stingy nature. She would have made Ebenezer Scrooge look like a spendthrift if my father's generosity hadn't acted as a counterbalance to her natural proclivities. I knew that she was the oldest child in a poor Southern family of 12 children. I knew that she pushed a plow and picked cotton on her parents' farm, that she never spoke of her mother and that her father relied on her to care for her younger siblings. I knew that she had only two brothers, Jasper and Lewis, that she ever talked about and one sister, Ruth, that she corresponded with regularly. I didn't know until around the time I entered Schiloff's school that she had to hide any small thing that she got for herself to keep her brothers and sisters from stealing it. Now I knew why she clung so tightly to everything she had. 

What did I know about Paul Schiloff? 

I knew his name. I knew that he had a push broom moustache and a funny "S" curl of hair on the forward slope of his scalp surrounded by a large bald patch. I knew that he was well spoken and that he laughed at the cartoons that a student name Al drew of him. I know that he liked to joke around with most of the students, and to share stories that only Charlie and Socrates seemed to appreciate. I knew that he had worked at Chrysler and American Motors, that he had students from his previous classes who went on to work for Chrysler, GM and Ford. I knew that he knew the business from the inside. I knew that he passed on tips to us that would not only help us with our technical skills but also help us to look, speak and act the part of professional clay modelers.  

Paul Schiloff was Henry Higgins. We were Lisa Doollittles. 

Something about James Bodel irritated Schiloff to no end. Schiloff didn't like the way he wore his hair cut so close to his scalp. He didn't like the way Bodel dressed, sometimes in coveralls. He didn’t like Bodel's demeanor. He hated the way that Bodel kept to himself and his aversion to giving complements and saying "please" and "thank you." Most of all, Schiloff didn't like the way Bodel ignored him when he told him that those things would work against him in the setting of a design studio. 

I'm only guessing, but I think that Bodel's bohemian appearance and unpredictability were personal problems for Schiloff. His school was the first of its kind in the country and we didn't always know when the press would come by to take pictures or interview one or more of us. I think Schiloff was afraid that Bodel would embarrass him. 

Schiloff didn't get along with Frank Mendolia, either. Like Bodel, Frank had a bad habit of telling Schiloff where to get off. Frank had recently gotten his discharge papers from the Army. He had supreme confidence in himself and would not stand for Schiloff talking to him as though he were a child.  

In other ways, Frank was like Sam Mayers. Frank was also quick-witted, outgoing and constantly on the prowl for a good laugh. The friendly insults that Frank and Sam hurled at each other were a riot. You could never tell who was going to win these extemporaneous contests and the looser always laughed the hardest.  

Frank and Sam worked together on a scale model truck that was showcased in Parade Magazine. Years later I would meet a highly respected modeler at American Motors who told me that the guys who designed and modeled that truck were his heroes. He said that the truck inspired him to become a clay modeler. Paul Schiloff had little to do with it apart from giving Sam and Frank a place to work. 

Schiloff gave Nehemiah and me a place to create a bench seat from a "brownline" drawing (a blueprint, only brown in color). Our seat wasn't as sexy as the bucket seat that Dennis Campbell and James Brooks modeled but we did every bit of it on our own and we had every reason to be proud of the results.  

Other students took up various positions on a full-sized clay car that they turned into a Dodge Charger. Some students worked on interior door trim panels. Some did an instrument panel. All of used the same basic skills. All of us made our own aluminum dies for clay extrusions. All of us made our own tools and our own model cars to present to Chrysler when we were finished.  

The C I got on my report card could not have been for anything but my model car. There was nothing technically wrong with it that I could see. I deliberately designed it to be a sedan, rather than a sporty car that no one would ever build. I designed it to incorporate as many facets of modeling as possible and to steer me toward interior design.   

I didn't conclude that my model was responsible for the C because Schiloff told me that was it. He did tell me that my model needed work. He didn't tell me anything specific. He didn't mention my tools, my template making, my foiling or my modeling projects. By then all of us had developed an eye for what was good and what wasn't. All of these things were at least on a par with the other students, not only by my assessment but by students I asked to help me zero in on what I was doing wrong.  

Rodney told me that I used too many big words. Dennis Campbell didn’t have a clue. Nehemiah didn’t have a clue. Sam and Charley said that Schiloff didn’t like me. I thought they were giving me answers to spare my feelings so I asked them to be brutally honest. They said that they were being honest. So, I went to students that I rarely conversed with. One of them said point blank that it was my model. He said that the styling was old-fashioned. 

This was after the IQ incident in Schiloff's office but before he started sending modelers to Chrysler.  I was ashamed to think about the incident in the office. It only eroded what small measure of self-confidence that I had left. He had never said an unpleasant word to me.  

What else was there?  

The only thing I could think of was the shaken look he had on his face when I got the only perfect score on his little test the first day of school. Maybe I had imagined it. Maybe he didn't think I was living up to my potential and wanted to give me the shock treatment to snap me out of it.

Thinking about it all that day and the next didn't help. The more I looked at my model the uglier it looked. I started getting depressed. Maybe I wasn't cut out to be a modeler after all. If I dropped the class I wouldn't be the first. I thought long and hard about signing up for active duty in the Regular Army. The war in Vietnam was beginning to heat up and maybe my failure in Schiloff's school was a sign telling me that I was destined to fight in a war.   

Even as a civilian I felt deep down that I was really a soldier. I'd felt that was since I was about 10 and saw a picture of a Greek warrior fleeing in terror from an onslaught of Persian troops. Something told me that I had been that cowardly soldier in another life and that I would have to be a real soldier one day to set things right with the universe. I doubt that I am the only one who had ever taken a crazy notion like that into his head as a kid and resurrected it as an adult. The important thing is that the notion was in my head. I felt useless. My decision was made. 

I should have paid more attention to the fact that Schiloff's report cards went over like a swastika in a synagogue with all of the students who did not get A's. Brooks, who did get an A, told me that he felt my C and Bodel's and some of the B's he didn't agree cheapened his A. 

Nehemiah and Brooks lived within five blocks of me and took turns picking me up for school because I didn't have a car. I didn't ask them to do it. They volunteered. They were not people who could live with themselves if they drove and let me take the bus. Although I appreciated their kindness, it never set right with me to do all of the taking. It never set right with me that I couldn't do a thing about it.  

The three of us always rode together. They were never late for me. I never made them late for class. As soon as I got into the back seat and the car pulled away I told them that this would be the last time they would have to pick me up. I told them what I was going to do.  

Nehemiah cut the wheel to the curb and stomped on the break peddle as Brooks whipped around and looked at me as though I'd just announced plans for setting myself on fire. When the car came to a stop Nehemiah whipped around and gave me the same look. None of my answers to their questions satisfied them.  

At first it was just the fact that I was going to sign up for active duty in the Army that they objected to. Their arguments were not effective. Somewhere they changed tack without me being aware of it and started in on the black-people-sticking-together thing. I didn't listen to that either until I started seeing myself again as the cowardly soldier running away from another battle against a terrible foe.   

What did the people who suffered and died in the civil rights movement stick their necks out for if not to get people like me into positions that black people had never been allowed to enter before? Didn't I have an obligation to them to go as far as I was capable of going? 

I did not think of myself as an advance scout on an historic journey for black people. Nehemiah and Brooks convinced me that I was whether I wanted to be or not. If a white guy quit school he was a guy quitting school. If a black guy quit he was a traitor to everyone who fought for equal opportunity and to everything the civil rights movement stood for.  

Oddly, the deciding factor in my turnaround was my friends' naked anger at Paul Schiloff. What was he up to with that report card crap? I hadn't thought they would understand my feelings but they had understood them. As we drove on to school, we started sharing and putting together bits of information we had about our teacher. We couldn't decide whether he was a closet racist or not because of his decidedly favorable attitude toward Brooks and his decidedly unfavorable attitude toward Bodel. Racism wasn't always the answer. 

Persuading me to go back to school was not the same as persuading me that Schiloff's assessment of me was groundless. I didn't tell my friends about the IQ incident. I didn't tell anyone. When I walked through the classroom door I felt like I was wearing a dunce cap and the kids were snickering at me behind my back. I didn't have the guts to look at my model for weeks. Nothing I did seemed to be as good as what anyone else was doing. I couldn't see what made my work inferior. Perhaps that was what was wrong with me. Yeah, that made sense. If you can't see the flaws in your work, you can't fix them.  

Then Schiloff started sending students to Chrysler. Sam and Frank took their models to Ford. When Ford hired them, the whole structure of the modeler selection process and the ten-month course broke down. Paul Schiloff could no longer decide who was and wasn't ready to interview for a clay modeling job anywhere. When a student felt he was ready he picked the company he wanted to work for and went there on his own.  

Charley McCuen had worked at Ford in the '50s and left on bad terms. He took his model to Chrysler. A storm erupted when he and Brooks learned that they were the only ones required to take a test. Brooks had done so well that Chrysler had to accept him. Chrysler's only black modeler Eugene Loften learned that Brook and Charley both got got a ridiculously high score but Chrysler found another excuse to exclude Charley. Now the race issue was out in the open. So was the issue of Paul Schiloff's favoritism.  

Charley had been the first student to strike out on his own and to strike out with a major auto company. His failure proved that Schiloff's recommendations still carried a lot of weight. Whether or not Charley was right about Schiloff sending Brooks to Chrysler as a token to hold the rest of the black student's back, Charley's failure to get hired meant that anyone could be excluded for any reason if Schiloff didn't back him. That message wasn't lost on any of us.  

Eventually I got up the courage to compare my model with the remaining ones. I wasn't concerned that I was judging between inferior modes because the best ones were no longer in the school. In my opinion one of the worst models was the one that Moritz Schmit made. My opinion was widely shared. The absolute worst models were also gone.

I went to the room where the models were stored and looked them over one by one. All of them were good once you got past the question of personal taste. All of them showed why we were chosen for the class in the first place. All of them showed our training and our ability to hit the ground running in any design studio. Yes, all of them. Including mine.  

You don't get many epiphanies like this in one lifetime. When you experience such a moment of brilliant clarity where before only darkness had reigned you don't forget it.  

The precise moment that the truth illuminated my mind was when it hit me that that model I had been taking a critical look at was mine. Aesthetics are governed by fixed rules that can be objectively analyzed. Styles and opinions vary but the rules don't. My belief when I walked into the room that my model was somehow inferior to the others was so powerful that it had blinded me to the objective reality.  

When you took personal tastes out of the equation there were no superior or inferior models. The only true exceptions to the rule would have been two of the models made by students who did not take the test, build a model and stand before the judgement of the school's sponsors. Their models weren't in the room because those two students were now clay modelers at Chrysler along with James Brooks and Moritz Schmit.  

Moritz probably did have a good model that I couldn't see for what it was. The reason my low opinion of it was so widely shared was most likely because my opinion of Moritz Schmit was so widely shared. It was an opinion based entirely on personality. All of us could have been wrong about him.  

In the early days of the class Moritz did try to "teach" us things about using tools that most of us learned before puberty, things that he proceeded to prove he knew absolutely nothing about. He did follow Schiloff around and cater to his every whim like a house slave deathly afraid of being sent to the fields. But maybe gravity on earth did not exist solely because he was the biggest suck on the planet. Maybe there was method to his suckiness. Maybe he really did know something important about the business that we didn't2. Maybe there really was more to becoming a successful professional modeler than knowing how to make professional models.

If the light of my epiphany had spread itself a little wider I would have seen that the B's and C's were in the same leaky boat.  

Most of us were under the impression that Chrysler had gone to great lengths to created a substantial pool of future employees because it anticipated a need for a substantial number of us ten months down the road.  All of us had expected to begin working for Chrysler at the same time the following year in April upon successful completion of the course.  We did not anticipate a grading system created and implemented by one man that would discriminate between us because of the elimination process we had to go through to make it into the class. We were already in the top 5% of candidates for the position. How could all of us not be A students?  

Schiloff's report card had no connection to Highland Park Community College. It was Schiloff's way of simulating the performance reviews that the Big Three used to determine the salary awards and promotion potential of its employees. Schiloff's grades put everyone who didn’t get an A at a distinct competitive disadvantage at the starting line of his career. Think of a 100-meter footrace in which runners with an A on their jersey begin 25 meters ahead of the starting line, runners marked with a B begin at the line and runners with a C begin 25 meters behind. The only way a B or C runner can change the order of the finishers is if the runners ahead of him stumble badly and never recover.  

Schiloff's grades predetermined the order in which his students became Chrysler employees. If Chrysler didn't request another group for six months the next students in line would forever be six months behind in seniority and consideration for promotion. Schiloff wasn't marking us for half a semester of school. He was marking us for life. 

Chrysler's investment in the school was peanuts compared to the good press it got from being one of its sponsors and the modelers' salaries it did not have to pay for unproductive months of on-the-job training. The federal government paid Schiloff's salary. The training facility was already in place. And the cost of supplies and equipment was miniscule. Chrysler had enjoyed a monopoly on the best new modeling talent available. It could get the immediate help it needed with new modelers who already knew as much as some of its modelers who had been there for years3. But when Sam and Frank signed on with Ford, Chrysler could no longer afford to keep the rest of us dangling without running the risk of losing the best remaining students to Ford. 

Now all parties concerned knew that they were taking a risk.  

The two students who took their models to General Motors taught all of us a lesson about the futility of pursuing that course. Apart from GM's policy of hiring from it's own clay modeler farm system, the number-one automaker had an elitist attitude toward outsiders, which allowed for few exceptions to the rule. The students who went to GM with their models had logical reasons to expect that they would be the exceptions. They did not take into account GM's policy of not hiring black modelers. GM didn't even have a token black. 

No, these students were not black. Both of them were good and white. But if GM's personnel representative hired them, what were they to do with Schiloff's black students who came knocking at their door? As long as they held strictly to a policy of rejecting all outsiders and started bringing blacks into their training system they could tell the feds a plausible story of their efforts to comply with the new civil rights law.  

The last thing anyone wanted was a deluge of unqualified black people pushing qualified whites out of a job. That was the racist bogeyman that had kept blacks out of the Big Three and American Motors before the civil rights act which specifically outlawed racial discrimination in housing, education and employment. American Motors had no open requisitions for new modelers and so few modelers of any color that they were functionally exempt from the law for the time being.  Who could have predicted that Chrysler's qualification standard that was statistically skewed against blacks would end up putting so many of us in the pipeline for employment as modelers?    

Before the year was out it became evident that Ford was the destination of choice for many of the students. Schiloff offered them words of encouragement when he thought that they were ready to try their luck. When he didn't think they were ready he gave them tips on what they should do to make themselves ready. Few of those tips involved alterations of any kind to the models. He spoke to them about things like dress and bearing, haircuts and after-shave lotion – things they would never think of that might make the critical difference.  

When I said I trusted Paul Schiloff, this is what I had in mind but it would take a dramatic event to bring me to that point.  

It occurred to me that Chrysler might have been playing a secret "quota" game with Schiloff's black students in which the limit had been reached with Brooks. Ford employed twice as many modelers as Chrysler did so even if Ford had a "black quota," hiring Sam Mayers wasn't going to be enough to fill it.

When Ford hired Nehemiah, I resolved that I would be Ford's third black modeler but with the holidays coming up I had to wait until January 1966 to make my move. I took my model home over the weekend. The following Monday I was going to take it to Ford.   

Fate had other plans. 

Like many older cities in the United States, Detroit began as a fort on a river. Fort Detroit no longer existed on the banks of the Detroit River but Fort Wayne was still an Army post on the river. My Reserve meetings were held in building # 9.  

What I remember most about the January meeting that changed my life forever was a conversation I had with a fellow reservist named Pool. Like me, he was 19-years-old and black. Unlike me he had not taken ROTC in high school so I outranked him. But I wasn't going as far or as fast in the Reserves as I'd hoped and we had a common bond of frustrations with our progress in the Army and in civilian life. Pool said that if a bomb dropped on the building only one person would be hurt and he would be it. I could easily imagine the bomb that would hurt only one person but I told him that I would be that person.  

When the meeting ended that evening Pool and I walked out of the building together. A metal rail divided the concrete steps leading to the parking lot in two. I was next to the rail. We were about three-quarters of the way down in our field uniforms talking about the senseless hurry that everyone seemed to be in when I noticed a car approaching the stop sign directly in front of us. The driver, wearing civilian clothes, swung wide going too fast stop but not too fast to make the turn.  

I pointed to him. "Look at that fool." I said.

Pool said, "Yeah. There goes another one." 

Naturally, there were three stop signs protecting the pedestrians leaving building # 9, one across the driving lane in front of us and one on each side. Pool was nodding toward a car on our left that was going too fast to stop for his stop sign. The driver of this car was in uniform.  

The four of us, both drivers, Pool and I, saw what was happening at the same time. Pool started backpedaling. The man heading toward us slammed on his breaks but not in time to avoid hitting the car that was crossing his path. I could see both drivers' bug-eyed faces before the moment of impact, the drunken black face of the civilian and the sober white face of the Reservist. Then I saw the Reservist do something so unbelievable that it froze me in place for a critical fraction of a second. I saw him cut his wheel toward Pool and me.

I grabbed the rail and pictured myself sailing safely over it. I could still hear the screech of breaks, the boom and crunch of steel colliding with steel and a growing din of excited voices. I could feel my hands on the rail but I couldn't see or feel myself gliding over it. Something was holding me back. 

That's strange, I thought, wondering what had happened to Pool. Then I heard someone to my right screaming. Where the screams seemed to be coming from made me think that it was Pool. I feared that he had been badly injured…but why couldn't I get over the rail? The next thing I new I was looking up at the bumper of a car and I realized that I was the guy who was screaming. I felt terribly embarrassed, I shut my mouth and I felt the pain – in that order.  

Don't ask me to explain any of that. I can only tell you what happened.  

My right leg was pinned under the tire with the right side of my knee and ankle against the edge of the steps and the tire resting in between. Yes, I know, my leg should have snapped like a twig but it didn't. Finally, someone took charge of the situation and rolled the car off of me. 

Schiloff brought the class to see me in the hospital. He seemed genuinely concerned. When I got discharged with my leg in a cast his attitude toward me took a 180-degree turn. Now I seemed to be one of his favorites. I told him that I was taking my model to Ford. He told me that I should wait until my leg was out of the cast because Ford was never going to hire someone with a medical condition.  

Schiloff's advice made good sense and I had sense enough to take it. When the cast came off I was left with a bad limp. Schiloff told me that the limp would "prejudice my case" and advised me to wait until it went away.  I took that advice, too. 

You may have read the short version of this story in Iago in Brentwood where I used it to illustrate the power of an authoritative white voice over a powerless black voice. A paragraph concerning Schiloff advice about waiting for the limp to go away bears repeating: 

"About 3 months later, when it didn’t go away and the first class was gone except for me, a Congressional delegation came by to check things out. No African-Americans were in the second class…so I know why they wanted to talk to me before they left. I told them how long I'd been there. They were astonished. They wanted to know why. When I told them what the instructor had told me, he looked me straight in the eye and said with wounded conviction, "Jasper, I never told you that! You could have left here anytime you wanted to."