Chapter 5: The Nazi
Getting off to a good start in one's career obviously begins with making a good first impression. That's hard to do if you're black and your first boss is a nazi. On the other hand, how was I supposed to know that Ford Personnel would assign me to a studio headed by a nazi? How could I know that Ford, the same company that sponsored racially integrated family picnics and Christmas parties for all of its employees, would hold a nazi in such high esteem?
There was more to my initial misdirection than that…
Before Schiloff dropped his "You could have left anytime you wanted to" bomb on me, I had already decided upon a new strategy for getting picked up by Ford. I made a new presentation model and completed a set of tools that would impress anyone.
My redesigned model was a sports car, a convertible with a tapered bullet shape, a long hood, a plastic racing windshield and plaster bucket seats. My modeling tools covered the entire spectrum of rakes, wires and finishing tools with lathe-turned, heavily lacquered maple wood handles.
After the bomb, I knew I was ready, limp or no limp.
Earlier that year my brother George had been drafted and sent to Vietnam. My father had died suddenly in his sleep on Father's Day. My mother didn't drive so I inherited my father's '65 Plymouth Fury. In retrospect I can see that the reason my father bought the Fury was because Chrysler was a co-sponsor of Schiloff's school. He wouldn't have bought a Ford for anything. Ford had done terrible violence to his pride. Perhaps it was a blessing that he didn't live to see what Ford was about to do to his youngest son.
A young man without a job naturally believes the company that hires him is doing him a colossal favor. This was the mindset I brought with me to Ford's Styling Center in Dearborn. I didn't think about the money that I would make for Ford because I wouldn't know my value to the company. No moneymaking concern hires people to work for them without a reasonable expectation that it can make a profit on their labor. The money an employee made was supposed to be proportionate to his value. That's why clay modelers made so much money.
Granted, $509 a month wasn't a hell of a lot of money even in 1966 dollars. That, however, was just the starting salary for pay grade 4 B-modelers. Pay grade 8 Master Modelers made a small fortune.
The man I presented my model to gave me visions of one day becoming a Master Modeler. He couldn’t take his eyes off of it and told me that it was the best model he'd ever seen. The model on his disk looked awfully good to me. Like Ed Getner had done with his model, the Ford man said that he used it to show prospective modelers what to aim for. Only this guy was no Ed Getner. He was a personnel man.
The personnel man took my application and set me up for interviews with two clay modeling supervisors, Benny Barbara and Leonard Stobar. He asked me if he could borrow my model when I was finished with the interviews. Flattered that he would ask, I gave him my permission. I knew right then that the job was mine unless I fumbled the ball.
Benny Barbara was a thin, intense man in his fifties with a business suit that didn't hang quite right. He had been with Ford longer than the building around us had. He was in charge of the Ford exterior studio, the busiest studio in the design center. He said a few good things about my model. Then he took me aback with his animated reaction to my tools. He talked about them the way I'd hoped he would talk about my model. He went on an on about the value of a nice set of tools, picking mine up and looking them over as though they were priceless works of art.
By the manner in which Mr. Barbara spoke I could tell that he had little formal education. I therefore took care not to let any twenty-four karat words slip out. He told me that his "boys" worked harder than anyone else. He asked me if I minded hard work. I told him I loved it. He had not seemed capable of smiling when I first met him. By the end of the interview he was all smiles. So was I.
Leonard Stobar seemed to be the opposite of Benny Barbara in every respect. I remember him as a tall, heavy-set man who smiled easily, who seemed mildly pleased with my model and not at all interested in my tools. His suit did hang right on him. He was in charge of Ford and Lincoln-Mercury Interiors. Because I wanted to work in interiors, this was the man I really wanted to impress. However, he asked few questions and in general treated the interview like a mere formality, as though he had made his decision early or the decision had already been made for him and he was just going through the motions.
You can imagine my elation when I returned my model to the man in personnel and he told me that I was hired as a B-modeler. You can imagine how good I felt when he said that I would work for Leonard Stobar. Getting my green smock was literally a dream come true.
I never learned who was responsible for sending me to the Lincoln-Mercury Interior studio. On my way in, I met Nehemiah with a portable tool tray in hand on his way out. We had little time to talk. Still, it was good seeing him because he was a friend and because his presence in the studio meant that I wouldn't be the first black modeler my new coworkers would have seen. I didn't know it then, but Nehemiah normally worked for a Master Modeler in another studio. He had been in the Lincoln-Mercury Interior studio only on loan for a few hours.
In those days there were few Master Modelers. When one of them was put in day to day charge of a studio, he had a tremendous amount of power. It was that Master Modeler, not the clay modeling manager, who assigned jobs and graded performance.
In my first fourteen-month stretch with Ford, I saw my manager Leonard Stobar only two more times. I saw him once in the hallway from a distance and once when he signed my performance review.
The man in charge of my career at the outset was Harry Finley, the Master Modeler in charge of Lincoln-Mercury Interior. Nothing about his appearance struck me as sinister. If anything, he looked a bit timid, which didn't seem to go with his muscular build or his influential status. He spoke quietly and gave me a weak handshake coupled with a steady, non-threatening gaze. He told me to relax and work on my tools.
Several of the modelers were working on tools. Most of those men were recently hired B-modelers like I was.
Harry supplied all of us with a long wooden shaft from the Wood Shop and a steel tip from the Metal Shop about an eight of an inch thick roughly cut in the shape of a three-pronged star for the tip to make a mouse. A clay modeler's mouse is an instrument for scoring clay models at precise locations along a precisely indexed rail. It can be anywhere from a foot to several feet long. It has a pointed tip and one flat side to hold against a another tool called an angle block that allows the modeler to position the mouse at a precise right angle to the job along the rail.
In school, we had all used the same mouse, which belonged to the school, just has we had used the same angle blocks and C-clamps for securing small jobs to the worktable. The Lincoln-Mercury studio had community mouses as well, but there was nothing like having your own.
The bulk of the material that Harry gave us to make tools consisted of rectangular blue steel in various sizes with different degrees of flexibility that had to be sharpened or cut into useful shapes. Appropriately enough, they were called steels. I already had a good set of steels from school but judging from the ones that the experienced modelers had on their jobs or in their toolboxes I knew that I could use more of them.
Schiloff taught us that a flat, metal, foot long measuring instrument squared off on both ends and incremented in inches and fiftieths of an inch was not a ruler. It was a scale. He taught us that a dashboard was a piece of wood that separated the front seat occupants of horse drawn buggies from the mud thrown back by dashing hooves of the horse. An instrument panel was that hunk of plastic with the glove box, the speedometer and all that stuff on in. A car's beltline was the line that went from the A-pillar to the C-pillar. The A, B and C-pillars held up the roof. The windshield was the windshield. The door glass was the door glass. The back window was the backlight. Everything above the beltline was the greenhouse.
Schiloff taught us what a mouse was and how to use it with an angle block. He taught us how to make templates off of sections of clay models using a compass and a piece of cardboard. He taught us how to use a device called a bridge for plotting and measuring coordinates in three-dimensional space. He taught us how to apply aluminum foil to clay to simulate chrome and a thin, latex material called Di-Noc to simulate paint. He taught us how to use our steels on full-sized models the way Moritz Schmit used the card on his scale model. These were some of the basics. Sharpening steels was another basic skill. Schiloff taught us how to do that, too, only he didn't do a good job of it. That's another story…
For the first week or so, I saw no difference between the way Harry treated me and the way he treated the other five or six B-modelers. All of the modelers wore green smocks. But the B-modelers stood out from the A-modelers and Sculptors the way a doctor in his first week of internship at a great metropolitan hospital stands out from the residents and surgeons. Some of them were more analogous to bumbling orderlies. I didn't see how any of them could have gotten into Schiloff School. Nevertheless, I watched Harry send all of them, one by one, onto the floor to work on seats, doors and instrument panels.
The closest I got to a job on the floor was when Harry asked me to vacuum the loose clay from the carpet under the instrument panels on a work platform called a styling buck. He was very nice about it. I didn't mind the vacuum cleaning duty at first because I sometimes saw another young modeler named Paul Takessian performing similar taskes. I thought that everyone would eventually get his turn. This was another one of those important things I didn't know about until years later. Paul was not a pay grade 4 B-modeler. He was a pay grade 3 C-modeler.
Paul was intelligent. He was a craftsman. And he was eager to break into modeling. Hiring in as a C-modeler was his foot in the door. Harry used him to perform chores as varied as sweeping the floor, vacuuming bucks, keeping track of time cards, ordering supplies and loading the clay ovens with hard clay billets to soften them up. Paul also cleaned the ovens and carried hot clay to the men working on the floor. I loaded the ovens and carried hot clay to the men on floor, too. So did the other B-modelers.
As the newest modeler in the studio I didn't know what I was expected to do. I didn’t mind doing things that had little or noting to do with clay modeling because the distinction between other B-modelers and me was not yet clear.
Sweeping the floor was the janitor's job in the big studios but we didn't have a fulltime janitor. Keeping individual work areas clean was the job of the individuals assigned to the work areas. Keeping track of time cards was Harry's job. Ordering supplies and loading, cleaning and maintaining the ovens was the job of a clay maintenance man in the larger studios. In the smaller studios everyone was supposed to do these things. As the low man on the totem pole the bulk of these jobs fell to Paul Takessian.
I hadn't heard the expression "nigger work." I didn't know that Paul was being treated the way he was because he was a pay grade below the B-modelers and I so no reason to think that I was being treated the way I was because I was black. As a black man without Schiloff's school behind me, I didn't think about the fact that I would have never gotten the chance to see the inside of a design studio except, perhaps as a janitor. I thought that Paul and I were just paying our dues like everyone else.
Harry had a small desk on one end of the studio in which he kept papers and medallions of some sort that he liked to show off to his friends from time to time when I was in his sight at the other end of the studio. Whenever I would walk by his desk during those "show times" the group of men surrounding Harry would fall silent as he put the things that he was showing off back in the desk drawer. The only time Harry spoke to me was when he gave me something to do so I didn't think that I was ever going to find out what those cool things in his desk were.
Here, I have to tell you that I had practiced staring at people from behind to in my high school art class as a game to see how often I could get them to turn around. It worked with surprising frequency.
One day when Paul and I were sweeping and vacuuming the clay chips from the carpet of a clay instrument panel I got the familiar sensation that I was being stared at. Whenever I had gotten that uncomfortable feeling in the past I would turn around and see Harry staring at me.
This time, instead of looking for myself, I turned off the vacuum cleaner and asked Paul if it was Harry's eyes I was feeling on the back of my neck. He told me that they were without bothering to check. That's when he told me bitterly that Harry was a nazi. Paul never hid the fact that he despised his boss so my first reaction was to ask him if the was calling the man a nazi because of is low opinion of him. That’s when he told me about the Nazi paraphernalia that Harry kept in his desk.
Anytime someone you don't know well makes such extreme charges you have to wonder as much about the accuser as you do about the accused. I didn't have to wonder long.
Have you ever seen the TV commercial where a guy saws a workbench in half and the voice-over say, "Some times we all do dumb things? I could have had a starring role in a commercial like that with the stunt I pulled with drilling the holes in the sharpened metal star blade of my mouse to attach it to the wooden shaft.
All of the vices in the studio for securing work like that to a table were occupied. The studio C-clamps were far to big and I didn't want to borrow a smaller set of clamps from another modeler. So, I pressed down hard on the three-sided blade with the fingertips of my let hand and, with a portable drill motor in my right hand, I started drilling a hole in the squared off extension.
As the tip of the drill was penetrating the metal, it caught and spun the head around before I could get my fingers out of the way. The whirling blades slashed two of my fingers. Naturally I tried to hide my awesome display of dumbness but an older A-modeler named Bob Black was at the table with me and there was too much blood on my fingers to hide it from him.
Bob stood straight up in alarm. I saw very quickly that the cuts weren't as serious as they might have looked to him. The pain, however, was excruciating. The situation was more embarrassing than painful and so stupid that it was even funnier than it was embarrassing. People who never learn to laugh at themselves are wasting a lot of good material.
Bob hustled me to the back room where I washed the cut in the sink, elevated my hand and pressed down on the vein in my wrist while he hauled the first aid kit out of the cabinet. I was fortunate that no one else was back there. A little iodine, a couple of Band-Aids and I was all set.
The next day, when no one indicated that they knew why I was sporting the Band-Aids on my fingers, I approached Bob about the items in Harry's desk without telling him what Paul had told me. He said that he didn't know what they were but he said it as though he didn't want to know. Then he started talking about an experience he had in the Army somewhere in Europe during WW II. He talked about having to pick up pieces of American soldiers who had been caught in a German artillery barrage. I noted that he said German, not Nazi. I think I got the point.
I became more confident that I had gotten the point when Harry gave me my first modeling assignment. He handed me a drawing and two pieces of quarter-inch masonite. He told me to tape the two pieces of masonite together and transfer the drawing to the top layer.
Finally, I thought, Here is my big moment to shine.
I headed straight for the supply cabinet and retrieved a sheet of white transfer paper to trace the outline of the drawing onto the dark brown masonite without damaging the drawing. I then went back to an open table near the wall, grabbed a wide role of masking tape from a pegboard of assorted tapes, tore off a long strip and looped the ends together, sticky side out. Someone snickered. I glanced to the side to see where it was coming from. I couldn't tell who had snickered but I saw Harry and his buddies all bunched together looking at me with smiles on their faces.
The smiles turned to laughter when I put the looped tape on the masonite, pulled it taught and pressed it flat.
I ignored the laugher and would have repeated that procedure with the masking tape if another modeler named Bob McLeod hadn't stopped the show. Bob was either a Sculptor or a Master and normally worked in a different part of the studio. He was not a part of Harry's circle. He just happened to be walking by when he saw what was happening.
He reached into the tape cabinet and pulled out a role of tape that looked like the one I was using. The laughter stopped and the small crowed dispersed. "You don't know about double-back tape," he said, do you?" My blank expression gave him his answer.
He tore off a strip of the tape and handed it to me. It was thicker than the masking tape and the texture was a little different. When you looked closely you could see that the color wasn't quite the same, either. Just looking at it in on the pegboard you wouldn't have been able to tell that there was a difference.
"Let me show you," he said.
He removed my looped masking tape from the masonite, replaced it with the strip of tape that he had handed to me an started picking at one end of the strip with his fingernails. All he succeeded in doing was tearing it. Then he looked around for an X-acto knife, found one on the table and began picking at the tape with the knife. The tape kept fighting him until he managed to pull away a small section of the back that revealed another sticky side. He mumble to himself, pitched the role in a nearby trash can and grabbed another one.
I sat there thinking that I could have been finished with this part of the job the way I was doing it before Bob McLeod got the back of the tape off. The new role, however, was kinder to him, "new" being the operative word. Bob told me that only with a fresh roll of the tape did the protective back peal away somewhat cleanly, leaving another sticky side on the back.
Now I knew what the joke was. This was nothing like my stunt with the mouse blade and the drill. In that case I had known damn well that I was doing the job wrong and did it, anyway, for which I deserved to be laughed at. I was a rookie and I expected to make rookie mistakes. But this was a setup all the way – a plan that had to have been either cooked up or endorsed by Harry Finley to make me look foolish.
I spent the rest of my time in Harry's studio knowing that I had a target on my back. When I felt Harry's eyes on me I knew that he was zeroing in on that target. I also knew that there were enough good people in the studio to keep him from doing anything too blatant.
Harry never used the n-word in my presence. He never raised his voice or looked at me face to face as though he saw me any differently than he saw the other rookies. The only way you could tell that he did see me differently was with another n-word that kept cropping up with modelers outside of Harry's circle in connection with the treasures in his desk. That other n-word was "nazi."
After several weeks of watching other B-modelers learning how to trace clay model contours onto cardboard templates, to read scales and brown-line drawings and to use their primitive tools on actual models I could see that I was heading nowhere.
I still had much to learn about my craft. I could pick up some things by observing but I knew enough not to practice on my own because I couldn't see everything I needed to see to tell if I was doing the right things. Much of clay modeling was a matter of touch. Without knowing what the "right touch" was for a given operation I was as likely as not to put myself in a hole by practicing the wrong things and learn bad habits that would be hard to break. I knew this much from close order drill in R.O.T.C. and the teaching lessons I was studying in the Army Reserves. The only way to teach recruits how to stand at attention, execute the proper facing movements and rifle movements on command was to catch them doing it wrong and correct them on the spot. That's why some soldiers never lean how to do some of these things correctly. They practiced doing them the wrong way. The only way for me to learn what I had to know to be a top-notch modeler was to get on a job with modelers who knew what they were doing and to do the work.
Every day I asked Harry when he was going to put me on a job. Every day he told me that he would do it "soon." A low point during those days came when Harry sent me to vacuum and wire-brush the carpet under the instrument panel of a young B-modeler whom I will call "G.W."
Seeing G.W in action on the passenger side of the AP was like seeing all of the Three Stooges in one trying to plaster and paint the walls of a house. The only thing he ever created was a mess. The man was a menace. It wouldn't have been so bad if he didn't throw himself into the job with such earnest enthusiasm and insist on going beyond the limits set by the job leader. All apprentice modelers are a handicap to some extent unless their leaders are exceptionally good at using what little talents they have to his advantage. No leader could have been good enough to use G.W's talents to his advantage because he had none.
This was the guy whose mess on the carpet I was sent to clean up. To minimize the clay that got on the carpet, modelers normally used large sheets of brown paper or cardboard the way house painters use drop cloths. Sometimes the paper tore or the cardboard got accidentally moved to the side so that clay chips ended up on the carpet anyway. That’s where the vacuum cleaner and wire brushes came in. With G.W, nothing seemed to keep the clay off of the carpet. He never noticed that there was a big difference between the clay he doped there and ground in with his feet and the clay chips left by everyone else. That was consistent with the fact that he never noticed the holes he was digging into the clay with is flying steels.
On this particular day I nearly lost it when G.W took a break from his clay model demolition and started giving me orders. I had nothing personal against him and I don't think he had anything against me. It was just that he was feeling comfortable in his role as a modeler and in my role as the guy who usually cleaned up for him.
Only Harry Finley could have said why he didn't come down on me for walking away, but he didn't. I can only guess in hindsight that it wouldn't have looked good for him because G.W stuck out so much as someone who didn't belong in a green smock. He had no concept of the relationship between his strokes on the clay with any of his impressive set of tools and the finished product. It was all truly magic to him. As you will see later, this was a way of thinking about clay modeling that was shared by many design executives who thought that they were doing all of important work by saying a few words and waving their hands.
A few days after I walked away from the job G.W was butchering, a Sculptor named Nick Mardinian came over to me at the back table where I was still working on my tools. He was a short, heavyset older man like my father, with graying hair. He looked angry at first but as he stopped on the other side of the table his expression softened. He told me to come with him. I assumed that Harry had sent him to get me and I was all prepared to get my walling papers or, at the least, to be given another mindless task when Nick shocked my shorts off. He told me to bring my tool trey with me. He said he needed help on his job.
I didn't know how much good I could do Nick but, thanks to G.W's example, I knew that he could have done worse.
Nick proved to be an outstanding leader. The job he "needed help" on was a door panel. I didn't know it then but two modelers on a door panel is one too many. I know now that he was only pretending not to watch me like a hawk when he asked me to "cut a template" on a particular inch line. In modeler's talk that means to scribe a vertical line on the clay at a given point with an angle block and a mouse, to trace the contour of the clay onto a piece of cardboard with a compass and to cut out the cardboard with an X-acto knife.
Nick gave me a simple section to cut and said nothing about the fact that it took me twice as long to do it than it should have. He picked it up and spotted it in on a rough section of clay. While he was working on that section he gave me another easy chore. Then he gave me more complex tasks, leaving me on my own when he could, correcting me when I screwed up and never once talking down to me.
I had finally gotten my turn at bat in the big leagues. Although I didn't hit a home run I reached base safely. When I went home that evening I felt for the first time that I was a real clay modeler.
The next day I was working with Nick when Harry gave G.W his pink slip. He left the studio with tears in his eyes. It was sad to watch even though everyone knew that he had to go. I took it especially hard because I knew what it was to loose a job the way he did and because I feared deep down that my refusal to clean up his job might have had something to do with it. Another fear that G.W's release evoked sat closer to the surface. What if Harry was letting G.W go merely as legal cover to get rid of me? What if that's why Ford hired him?
If you saw G.W in action I wouldn't have to convince you how bad he was. By the same token you would think that I was being paranoid to even consider that his presence in Harry Finley's studio had anything to do with me. I shared that opinion. I had to be pretty damned important for Ford to go through all of that trouble just to get me.
This was the way it broke down…The name of Ford's first African-American modeler has been lost to history because he didn't last long enough for many people to get to know him. I learned about him in 1977. In 1966 everyone I knew believed that Ford's first black modeler was George Rogers, a light-skinned artist who had started in 1962. Back then, "tokenism" was the name of the game. If anyone accused Ford of not hiring blacks in Styling they could point to George and say, "Not so." But by the mid-'60s tokenism was so well known as a tool of racial discrimination that Congress stepped in with the Civil Rights Act and company's like Ford could no loner use it. Thus, Ford hired Sam Mayers, Nehemiah Amaker and me. If Ford was out to get anyone, why not Sam or Nehemiah?
The mystery was not why G.W got his pink slip. It was how got as far as he did. If he had to present a scale model car the way all perspective modelers were supposed to, it's for damn sure that he didn't make it. He couldn't have made his tools, either. He had to know someone who knew how to build an acceptable clay model. He had to know someone who knew how to make the tools. He had to know someone who knew how to get him in the door and someone who was willing to do it. In these respects G.W was not unique. Nepotism that extended to friends and neighbors was rife in the Ford Styling Center just as it was at Chrysler.
The one thing that set G.W apart was his ineptitude, which pointed to a mystery behind the mystery. How could anyone who knew enough about the business to build a winning model for him and a set of tools that would have impressed Benny Barbara – how could someone like that sponsor someone like G.W? How could they not know that he would fail? I don't have the answer to that one. To understand my position it's important only to know the questions. I had a lot of questions.
The same day G.W left the Styling Center forever, Harry pulled me off of Nick's job and put me back to work on my tools. Nick protested but Harry quietly told him that he had something else in mind for me. I couldn't tell what Harry had in mind. I knew only that it had nothing to do with me working on a clay model. I also knew from my experience with Bob Black, Bob McLeod, and Nick Mardinian that there were experienced modelers who were willing to help me develop my skills if I simply approached them and asked. I was careful to pick the modelers who were working on project of their own. They were glad to help.
The good part of walking around to different jobs and picking up tips from friendly modelers was that I actually got to use my tools from time to time. The bad part was that I had a bad habit of setting them down and forgetting where I put them. I don't believe that I have every run across anyone who was as bad at misplacing his tools as I was. Fortunately they all had my name on them and if I didn't find them on my own most of the modelers were good enough to return them to me when they found them.
I went along like this for the rest of my stay in the studio. Up until my last few days there I thought that when my tools disappeared it was purely because I had forgotten where I put them. I had a name for this kind of absentmindedness. I called it "the crayon thief."
In the third grade I opened the drawer of my desk, didn't see my crayon box where I thought I had put it, then stood up in righteous indignation to announce that someone had stolen my crayons. The teacher made the whole class stay after school and not move from their desks until the thief confessed. My classmates urged me to look again. I cross my arms and refused. After about ten minutes of this, some of the girls started crying and the boys started giving me dirty looks. I opened the drawer wider and was mortified to see the corner of my crayon box. So, naturally, I stood up again and announced, "Someone stole my crayons and put them back in my desk!"
I don't have to tell you how that went over.
From then on when something of mine disappeared, the first thing I thought of was the "crayon thief." Since Harry had me making tools anyway, it didn't upset me too much when a missing tool didn’t come back because it gave me something real to do. The "busywork" was killing me.
By then I had a reputation as a guy who couldn't keep track of his tools. When my tool started disappearing every day and not coming back, it occurred to me that someone might be hiding them to teach me a lesson. I could also see that my reputation gave a real thief a golden opportunity. Tool steeling was an art with some modelers.
One day I laid down a tool, noted where I put it, and turned to do something else. When I turned back to pick it up it was gone – and Harry's boys were laughing. The crayon thief didn't deserve the blame this time. Someone in the studio was out to hurt me.
I learned many years later from a first-hand source that Harry had made an announcement about me to the whole studio before I got there. He said, "I'm going to get that nigger."