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Chapter 3

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My journey to the mysterious world of automotive design followed a strange path of detours with occasional mental leaps backward in time.

It started in Chadsey High School where I flunked the 10^th grade and had to go to summer school to move on to the 11th. I hated everything about high school from the cruel in-group/out-group social politics to the boring classes. Ironically, it was a class I enjoyed that got me in trouble.  

To be precise, I didn’t really like the class but I loved the subject. American History had fascinated me from the time we got our first TV set in 1952 and I saw Walter Cronkite doing an innovative information and entertainment show called, You Are There.  

In Cronkite's show he interviewed historic figures like George Washington on the scene of famous historic events. The actors and sets were bad enough that I caught on pretty quickly that Cronkite hadn't really gone back in time and taken his microphone and camera crew with him. Still, the concept was so fascinating that it stuck with me. Forty years later I even used it with an updated twist as the centerpiece of my first novel.  

All of human history captured my imagination and it had always seemed to me that I was somehow a part of it going as far back as it went. When I learned to read, I read everything about it that I could get my hands on from The Real West magazine and articles in Life Magazine to my sister's Look & See cards. The Look & See cards featured pictures of famous men and women in history. Their biography on the back could be read only with a special red translucent paper. It was like magic, one of my other passions. 

The Look & See cards, together with my older brother's World History books gave be a jump on my classmates in 9^th grade World history. But I still may not have aced the class because the class itself was incredibly boring. Worst of all was the homework that ate up my time with names and dates that didn't seem relevant to anything I cared about. 

My grades were all over the board. I got A's, B's, C's and D's. I flunked 9-b arithmetic, but that didn't stop me from moving on to grade 9-a. It just forced me to change my curriculum from College Prep to General. My father's experience with his college education had turned me off to college, anyway, so it didn't matter. The only thing that did matter was getting through the school term with as little pain as possible. Anything that had to do with math or homework was a great pain.

My math problems had less to do with boredom than they did with my failure to grasp the subject. When I was 10 years old I got rheumatic fever, which kept me out of school for several weeks and put me so far behind in arithmetic that I never caught up. Moreover, one plus one equals two never did make sense. I kept asking, one what plus one what? and the answers didn't compute.  

On top of that, I was dyslexic and nobody knew what dyslexia was. The numbers 6 and 9 and 5 and 2 often, but not always, looked the same to me and any double-digit number was as likely as not to appear transposed. 26 could look like 62 one minute and 59 another. I taught myself some tricks to get around the problem with reading but those tricks relied heavily on context and in arithmetic there was no context. 

When I recovered from rheumatic fever and went back to school, the homeroom teacher had divided the class in half according to the students' performance in math, the smart half and the dumb half. I took my new seat with the dummies. I was officially dumb in math. No big deal. So were most of my friends. We had a ball.

Faced with the fact that I was retarded in math, I had to excel in other areas to keep from becoming a total mental reject. My parents would never have accepted that. On the other hand, if I did too well I'd be an outcast with my friends. It was a fine line to walk but I was good at it. You had to be smart to do that, and deep down I always knew I was smart – except for math.  

One thing I excelled in was art. I could do that without fear of recrimination from any quarter because I also excelled in fighting. I only found out that art wasn't considered masculine when I got to high school. By then, my masculine credentials were not in question but the idea that art somehow had a feminine connotation no longer held sway. In short, I bypassed the whole issue before I knew that it was an issue. It was never an issue with my family or my friends. They thought it was great, so there was nothing to stop me from pursuing it – except for my high school counselor.  

My counselor would not sign me up for an art class. He thought that I was better off in the College Prep curriculum that didn’t include art. He was frank with me. He told me that very few fine artists made enough money to live on and commercial art had no future for “colored” people. He seemed to think I would do well in college despite my struggle with math but because he was white, I questioned his motives.  

It was 1960 and the prospects for a black person with a college education didn't look that promising to me, either. Was my counselor steering me away from art because he honestly believed in my employment potential as a college graduate or was he doing it because he didn't want me to reach my full potential as an artist? I didn't know enough about him as a man to make a firm assessment of his motives.  

When my curriculum changed to General, I got the art class. I also got the white art teacher who looked down his nose at commercial art. He told me that my work looked "too commercial." That was one of his biggest putdowns. He didn't have anything good to say about any of his black students. He offered us no encouragement and heaps of ridicule on the rare occasions that he bothered to pay attention to us.  

Mr. Art Teacher put a different spin on my counselor's recommendation. The counselor may or may not have known about the realistic prospects of black people in the field of art but he did know the art teacher.  

One of the art teacher's pet students was an arrogant white kid that he gave permission to work on a piece of clay sculpture. I had assembled and painted many plastic models with a few finishing touches of my own. I'd carved cars of my own design out of balsa wood and made miniature furniture out of matchsticks and toothpicks. But the only kind of clay I knew about from firsthand experience before I got into this class was not suitable for making anything with the kind of detail I saw it in the pet art student's sculpture.  

I thought I could do better. I never got the opportunity to try.  

The art stores I knew about sold the kind of clay I needed but the clay together with the tools I needed to work it, were too expensive so I took up soap carving on my own. I continued to make woodcarvings and to assemble plastic models throughout high school but I never associated those hobbies with the wizards in smocks who made clay model cars for Ford. I never thought those hobbies would help me to become one of them. I was wrong. 

This brings us back to the History class I failed in the 10^th grade… 

In the 9^th grade I saw how to pass classes I didn't like without having to spend time on homework that took me away from the things I enjoyed like model building, comic books and my favorite TV shows. All of the teachers assigned weights to different aspects of their courses. They gave the greatest weight to the mid-semester tests and the finals. Just by showing up every day and participating in class you could skip the homework and butcher the pop quizzes if you got high scores on the mid-semesters and finals. As long as you didn't care about getting an A for the course you didn't have to worry about getting a D or an E.

This was a lesson in practical math that guarantied me a passing grade without the homework or the precious hours spent in studying for the pop quizzes. I had perfect or nearly perfect attendance every semester. I always had my hand in the air for something related to the subject under discussion, however remote, and I got A's on the big tests. The only class I had to work at in school and at home was math. There, I had to pull out all stops on all fronts to squeak by with a C. 

My 10-a American History teacher didn’t play the "weights" game. I don't remember her name so I'll call her Miss. K. To be honest, I have to say up front that I didn’t give Miss. K much respect because she didn’t look much older than the kids she was teaching but she talked down to us like she was God. She was also a strict disciplinarian in a casual, unreasonable sort of way. Two seconds late for class and off you went to your study hall to see your counselor with a tardy slip in your hand.  

The class I had before hers on the second floor of the new building was on the second floor of the old building at the far end. I had to run from Miss. Dodie's Physical Science class at the sound of the bell to make it to Miss. Kay's class on time.  

I was working on an easy A in Physical Science and Miss. Dodie was such a sweet little old lady that nobody left her class when she was still talking – even though she spoke in a soft monotone that made it a challenge to stay awake for the whole period. Most of the kids didn't stay awake. I think that was a big reason she liked me. Also, she loved her subject and despite her sleep-inducing delivery, that was enough to keep my attention. Sometimes she took her place in the front of the class with her hands to her side, never moving, and spoke only to me. I knew the answers to most of the questions I asked but I asked them anyway just to see her smile – and to keep from dozing off.  

There was no way to explain to Miss. K that I was late to her class because I'd asked Miss. Dodie a question too late in the period and her answer had taken a little too long to get me out of the door on time. Unfortunately, I was the only student who came to Mss. K's class from Physical Science so there was never anyone there to back me up. If I could have explained it, I'm sure that she would have pointed out the fact that it was still my fault and my responsibility to be on time for her class.

The fact that no one else in the class had to go as far as I did cut no ice.  

Miss. K tolerated no excuses for being late.  

I though I could get by with how well I did on the pop quizzes to make up for the points I lost on my occasional tardiness. Miss K made it clear that my performance on the pop quizzes was the only thing keeping her from dropping me from the class because I either failed to do my homework assignments or turned them in late. I sometimes took an extra day when the assignment appealed to me to give her more than she asked for. When she gave me a lower grade on those assignments than I thought I deserved she told me that it was because I handed them in late.  

I thought Miss. K hated me. It wasn't an issue of color, because she was hard on everybody whether they were as black as I was or as white as she was. All of the kids who did good work and followed her rules got good marks. When Derrick Humphries, a black, all-A student distended to do great things stumbled, she bent over backwards to help him get back in the race. But she would not bend her rules for anybody.  

I can see now that Miss K was giving me such a hard time because she was aiming higher for me than I was. Other teachers scolded me for "not applying myself," whatever that meant. I now believe that Miss. K's hard-ass attitude was probably her way of doing the same thing.  

When I was the only student in Miss. Kay's class to get an A on the mid-semesters, I thought that she would have to give me some slack. She didn't. Now when I turned in a late paper she automatically gave me an E. With finals coming up, I knew I was in a deep hole. Even if I aced the test, she might give me a D for the course. That's what it was really about with her, running the course.   

I still didn’t catch on.  

I figured I'd dazzle her – and the class – with my last homework assignment before the finals. This one seemed to play right into my hands. Instead of writing a dull essay on the differences between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over establishing a national bank, I wrote a three-page play with "Tom" and "Al" arguing it out. My spelling was hideous so I had to rewrite it several times to get it perfect.  

"Perfect" came a day late.  

Miss. K refused to look at it no matter how cogently I argued or how pitifully I begged and pleaded. After class I lobbied students I knew she liked to read it and intervene in by behalf if they thought it was good. They thought it was terrific and wanted to put the play on in class. They, too, tried to get her to look at it. She refused. She told me that I need not bother to take the finals because I had already failed the course.  

I took the finals, anyway. On the last day of school, she told me that she did not grade my test. She then told me, with a warm smile I would have called sadistic, that I didn't belong in her class. She told me that I had to go to summer school to make up the lost credits in order to graduate with my senior class in '64. She told me that my teacher was going to be a man I'd never heard of called Mr. Glovinski. She said that I was going to like him.  

What was I to make of that?  

I can't tell you how humiliating it was to go to summer school. It wasn't like the time my Cousin Luther from Inkster came to stay with us one summer to go to summer school. He had come to Detroit to take a class that he didn't do well in. But he didn't know the bright students from Chadsey who were taking extra courses for the love of it or to upgrade a B to an A. And he didn't have to go back to Chadsey in the fall. I did…  

Mr. Glovinski's American History class was as undisciplined as Miss. K's was disciplined. His pop quizzes were a snap. He didn't care if someone came in a little late and he talked about key historical figures the way I wrote about Tom and Al in my three-page play. These were real people to him and they came alive with his words. He drew meaningful connections between dates and events that weren't in the textbook. His face lit up whenever a student challenged him with an offbeat question or an uncomplimentary observation about the men in history that we had previously been taught to worship.  

Mr. Glovinski actually thought about what his student had to say. If a student's argument or observation that went against the textbook was good enough, he accepted it or respectfully disagreed as he would if it had been presented by a world renowned college professor. Mr. Glovinski loved it when his students challenged anything they didn't agree with. His arguments were also challenging. So were his homework assignments, but more fun than work. It was the easiest class I ever had and the most exciting. It was the first and only time I ever looked forward to going to school. How could anyone not get an A in his class? 

Indeed, the student's in Mr. Glovinski's class were not like most of the other students I knew. I couldn't put my finger on it but all of us were a little odd in one way or another. Most of them, like me, didn't want to be there at first but the only thing we seemed to have in common was a bit of a nonconformist streak. We knew that we weren't like everybody else and we didn't want to be. For high school kids, that is indeed odd. 

That summer school class had a small x behind it. American History-x. I thought at the time that the x stood for extra rebellious or maybe extra stupid, although the smart kids in the class were hard to account for. In any event, I thought that it was a summer school designation. When someone asked Mr. Glovinski about it, he just smiled.

My summer school designation theory went out of the window when I went back to regular school in the fall and found myself in other x classes. They weren't as exciting as Mr. Glovinski's American History-x because the teachers weren't as inspired, but they were also easy. The homework was heavy but it wasn't really work and the x classes beat the hell out of other classes I had to take to graduate. I still didn't know what the x stood for. I didn't spend a lot of time worrying about it, either.  

Going to school was still a drag except for the x classes. I learned about the formal structures of logic in an x class and I read three books on the subject from the public library. The first book I ever bought with my own money was about logical fallacies. The author was Stewart Chase who also wrote a book on semantics called The Tyranny of Words. I learned about semantics, cultural anthropology and many other exciting things by way of the x classes themselves and the way they encouraged me to explore my interests outside of school in subjects taught only in college.  

In my senior year, I joined the Army Reserves on the condition that I take Basic Training when I graduated. Joining the Reserves required passing a battery of tests that seemed to me more like games except for the part that asked questions about numbers. I skipped that part.  

That year I also got into an x-class in English where I shared some of the "brain teasers" I saw on the test with other kids that I thought would enjoy them. Only much later did I discover what the Army qualification tests and the x classes had in common. This was my worst x-class because the teacher didn't seem as excited about the subject as the others had been. We'll call him Mr. Z.  

Mr. Z had little patience with students who asked questions he didn't have a ready answer for. He often wondered aloud what we were doing in his class. He couldn't understand why so many of his students were such creative spellers. That always made him angry. The only part of his class I cared for was, ironically, the homework. Every day we were supposed to write about our experiences and how we felt about them in a journal. The journals were going to be our finals. At the end of the school term he was going to read them. Our final grade would depend on them.  

When I turned in my journal, the teacher looked at me with disdain as he collected it along with the others. I was one of the worst spellers in the class, if not the entire school. During the semester it hadn't improved one bit. I did work at it – honest. I just didn't have it in me. 

I don't recall how long it took Mr. Z to grade the journals. I do recall what happened after he graded them. He was more upbeat than normal as he returned all of them except mine to their owners and told them that overall he was very pleased with their work. When I asked him about my journal, he gave me a serious look and told me to see him after class.  

My heart sank and my mind swirled with dreadful visions of trying to explain all of this to my parents. If I had gone to summer school when I failed 9-b arithmetic I would have had enough credits to get by, if I had passed. Now, It looked like I was going to stay a senior a while longer. 

Mr. Z's class was the last one on my schedule so after the final bell he asked me to join him in a conference room. I followed him to a small, empty room. He sat down and invited me to do likewise. Then he floored me with the most effusive words of praise imaginable and confided in me that he thought his years as a teacher were wasted until he read my journal. He mentioned the spelling and some other technical flaws but told me they were "nothing" compared to the stories themselves.  

That's what I did. I wrote stories, with dialogue, atmosphere and my feelings as an observer about interesting things I saw every day on my way to and from school, with notes on current events in the news. In my mind, the storytelling was just a gimmick to set my journal apart from the others. Apparently it worked much better than I had anticipated. 

Then Mr. Z gave me the good news and the bad news.  

The good news was that the x classes were for kids that might have special abilities that weren't well served in a normal class. The x stood for experimental. Mr. Z thought that I might have abilities too rare to be easily recognized for what they were. He thought that I was good enough to go straight from high school to work as an apprentice reporter or feature writer at a big newspaper like the Detroit News or the Detroit Free Press. He had friends there and he knew what they were looking for.  

The bad news was that the News and Free Press weren't ready to hire a black kid as an apprentice reporter or writer of any kind. He recommended that I look for a job – with his letter of recommendation – at a "colored newspaper" to get my foot in the door, polish my skills and then maybe… 

My ears slammed shut. The only "colored" paper in town was a weekly, written exclusively by, for and about Negroes. If I had the potential to be a student writer for the big dailies that were supposed to cover everything and everyone that was newsworthy, what was this "colored" shit? 

The issue was rendered academic by the fact that I would be out of high school in June and obligated to go to Army Basic Training in July. The idea of making the Army my career was starting to look good.

As a Reservist my military job options were limited. My home unite, the 70^th Training Division of Michigan and Indiana, wanted a clerk typist at that particular moment so that's what the Army sent me to school to learn. If the Army could do that to a guy who absolutely despised clerical work and signed up with a training division to become a drill instructor, it was not the organization I wanted to make my career with. After my six months of active duty I decided to do my next five and a half years of weekly meetings plus two weeks a year active and get out. 

Meanwhile, I was an 18-year-old kid living at home with my parents and desperate to get out into the world on my own.  

In January '65 I got my first job as a "chip handler" at GM Diesel. I didn't have a car so I had to take the bus to work. I was given a shovel with holes in it, a wheelbarrow, a pair of leather gauntlets and told to climb into the "chip" bin of giant milling machines to scoop out the metal chips. The entire plant reeked of oil used to lubricate the machines. The largest concentration of the noisome odor was in the bins. However, I did not see chip handling as a dead end job. When I was hired I was told that I would soon get to work on a milling machine.  

Another ray of hope was the suggestion box that offered cash rewards for ideas that made the plant safer or more efficient. In the first week I noticed that the machines frequently kicked good parts out of the hands of the operators and into an area of the chip bins that required the machines to be shut down. When I saw it happen, I also saw that a simple shied attached to a certain place on the operator's platform would keep it from happening again. I described the problem, wrote out the solution with a detailed sketch and dropped it in the suggestion box.  

I worked hard and never took a break for over a month. My foreman, a taciturn man named Woolfgang, never told me that I was entitled to one. An older black guy who worked on one of the milling machines finally noticed what I was and wasn't doing and told me that I had 12 minutes before and after lunch to relieve myself, grab a snack or cool my heels if I wanted to.  

I started taking the breaks and working on my suggestions during the breaks instead of at home and during lunch. New men came in and took the milling jobs I thought I was going to get. I wasn't deterred by the young, black rookie who got four of his fingers chopped off. I went to his machine and immediately saw how it happened. That observation told me how easy it was to prevent such accidents from happening again by making only minor modification to the machine and the milling process. Whenever I asked Wolfgang about putting me on a machine he just walked away. I knew for sure that there was at least one opening.

Once, Wolfgang threw a scrap part in a Dumpster and told me to get it. I climbed the ladder, searched through the deep pile of sharp, oily metal and retrieved it. He looked at it. Threw it back into the Dumpster and departed. I stood there with long superficial cuts on my arms and legs. Tiny superficial cuts from the slivers of steel that inevitably fell into my gauntlets were a normal part of the job. For all I knew, Woolfgang's treatment of me was also a normal par to the job, standard tests for the staying power of new workers who hadn't made their ninety days. After ninety days my job would have been protected by the U.A.W. 

Eighty-nine days into my employment at GM Diesel, Wolfgang handed me a pink slip. He told me that I it was a "release" and that it didn’t mean I had been fired. He said that I wasn't cut out for the work I was doing and wished me good luck. Of course I wasn't cut out for the work I was doing! Hadn't I proven that I was better suited to run a milling machine? Hadn't I been promised the job? Hadn't I asked about it repeatedly? 

I have often thought that Woolfgang might have been another Miss. K, another good guy in disguise – a wonderful guy – a damn good disguise.  

It was now April 1965. President Johnson's war on poverty was in full swing. Total Action Against Poverty centers were set up in various parts of major cities to lift the underclass out of poverty. A TAAP center, converted from an old, abandoned police station, wasn't too far from my home. I went there to see if the people running the show could do more for me than I was able to do for myself with the unemployment office and job applications filled out everywhere I could sign my name to one.  

Dozens of black, jobless people were seated there when I came in. I waited on a wooden bench for my turn to see a TAAP counselor. He was a young white guy named Rafferty. He took some preliminary information, then told me that I wasn't qualified for the program because my father made too much money. I countered that my father wasn't poor but I was. He laughed and we started talking about all sorts of things. The more we talked the more his face seemed to light up. 

We got along like best buddies from way back. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do for a living, what I was best suited for or what my realistic options were. Everybody knew that the civil rights act of 1964 had outlawed racial discrimination in the workplace but no one knew what form it would take if the private sector resisted it. If I got a job suitable to my talents what would I be required to do. Could I work for the News or the Free Press only in a role equivalent to the black cop in the Junction Street incident? Not bloody likely.  

Rafferty suggested that I take an aptitude test…

I went into a testing room with a dozen or so other black people thinking that the objective of the exercises was to match my interests and abilities to available job categories. With that thought in mind, I determined to do my best in the areas that seemed to match up to rewarding work and to skip the parts that didn't.  

The group was composed mostly of chatty women who seemed to be enjoying themselves. The tester then stationed each of us at tables. Upon each table lay a metal object with skewers on both ends and a large pile of wooden, button-like things of various sizes with one hole in the middle.  The skewers resembled the ones my grandfather used on his farm in South Caroline one year to string tobacco – tobacco that my Brother George and I had spent long, hot days plucking from the field with hawks hovering overhead like vultures.  

I did not like the look of this test. 

The tester gave us identity tags and informed us that we had so many minutes to put the buttons on the hooks in descending order of size. She started her stopwatch. I leaned back with my arms folded watching the other black people bend to the task with alacrity like cotton pickers – or tobacco pluckers – giving their all for the white "massa."  

When the tester said, "Stop," everyone looked around to see how well they did compared to the others. One or two of them didn’t do much better than I did. One woman had gotten all of hers done correctly. She beamed with pride and the women around her congratulated her as though she'd won the grand prize in a game show. I shook my head thinking that she had probably won a menial job at a sweatshop.  

Had I know that this was a test of hand and eye coordination, which was supposed to correlate to intelligence I would have done better. I would, at least, have done something.  

The test had four parts. For part two the group moved to another room where we were seated at individual desks and given a multi-page form. This was a math test… Great. 

Parts three and four of the test involved verbal skills and abstract thinking. I dug into them. I know I did well. 

When I returned to Rafferty's office the next day he beamed at me and sent for my test results. When he got them, a shadow fell across his face. He frowned, and told me that he thought I would do much better. Then he said something about not trusting the results and asked me if I had any hobbies. I happened to have a three-inch M-I rifle I'd carved out of wood using lead for the metal parts. His eyes popped and the shadow lifted from his face.  

"Do you know what a clay modeler is?" he asked.  

"No," I said.  

He told me that he didn't, either but from our conversations and the miniature M-1 I showed him it sounded like something I'd be good at. He gave me the address of the professional employment office downtown and told me to be there at a given day and time to take another battery of tests. He said that there was a class for clay modelers opening up in June and he thought I could get into it. 

I showed up at the Professional Building with a typewritten note from Mr. Rafferty with a handwritten message that said, "I feel this is a sharp guy." The ruddy-faced man who sat by the door where the test was being conducted looked at me before he read the note and told me that I was in the wrong place. He said that I should go to the Manufacturing Building.  

Sizing up the situation quickly, I handed Rafferty's not to the man at the door told him that I don't know where I was supposed to go but that Mr. Rafferty had told me to come here. He read the note. His red face became redder and he made a call. I could here only his side of the conversation, which consisted of a long rant about sending "these people" where they didn't belong. In the end, he listened, grunted a few times and hung up.  

The man looked at me and apologized for his rudeness. He explained that 500 people were taking the test and there was room in the class for only the top 25 qualifiers. 90% of the applicants would not survive the first cut. The test was to determine who the 50 candidates would be. He said that he was angry because Rafferty was wasting his time and mine by sending me here. But since I was already here, I might as well go on in. 

There were no women in the room and only a dozen or so black men. The battery of tests lasted all day. This time I didn't skip any part of it because I had some idea of what it was for. I even tried my best with the math, which, to my surprise, wasn't that bad once I figure out the patterns that pointed to the correct answers.  

At the completion of the test the tester told us that he was going to read the names of the people who qualified for the school in the order that they scored on the test; highest score first. If he called our name we were to stand up. He paused. I held breath, preparing to hold it for a long time.  

The tester looked around and said, "Jasper Garrison."