More experienced workers figured out shortcuts, like draping wires over their shoulders or hanging a connector with plug-in wires around their neck instead of walking back to the rack to pull out new wires each time, or plugging their wires into the connector ahead of time so when the harness came down they could just stick the connector in instead of doing everything then. As long as you made rate, that left time to read a book, or talk to the next person, or listen to your music. When she had been at it for a few months and was good enough to have her own system, Tammy could actually work two stations. At the Austintown plant they took their lunch break at the bars, and some of them came back drunk, and there was one guy who paid her twenty dollars to work his station for an hour while he sobered up. All you needed to succeed on the line was discipline and a little creativity, and she had those. But at first she did it exactly the way Methods told her, and sometimes she’d end up trying to finish in someone else’s station. A few people put down a piece of red tape, telling you, “I don’t want nobody in my station, don’t cross this tape.”
Her first year, she was laid off before she had her ninety days, which was when health benefits kicked in—then they brought her line back. For a while after that she was laid off every year, usually around February or March, five months at the longest, and during those stretches she made as much as 80 percent of her pay for doing nothing. The 1984 agreement between Packard and Local 717 of the Electrical Workers started her out at 55 percent of the base rate for everything, wages and benefits and vacation, and then she had to work ten years to get up to maximum rate. Once she had seniority she could bump someone with less time out of a better job, like running the high lift at the distribution center, or a better shift, like day turn so she could be home when the kids got out of school. But in her first ten years she got bumped around a lot by older workers. Most of Packard’s plants were in Warren, but there were others scattered all over the Valley, and Tammy worked in just about every one of them. In Warren, the main factory on North River Road was a quarter-mile stretch of numbered buildings all joined together—Plant 10, the cable-making area, Plant 11, where the high-speed presses ran—and you could walk straight from one end of the factory to the other, like a street. They called it Route 66.
The worst was Plant 8. Tammy hated working there. The job was bad—a harness with two wires, a couple of clips, and a grommet, and you assembled a bazillion of them for eight hours. Plus, the work rules—you couldn’t clock out and leave the plant, you had to work straight eight and bring your lunch with you. The Jobs Bank was at Plant 8, where they put the newer hires, the third-tier people who didn’t have the same benefits. On the other hand, the Hubbard plant was her favorite. You didn’t have to go through turnstiles if you wanted to eat your lunch outside. Hubbard was like a close-knit family, until they closed it in 1999 and she had to go to Plant 8 despite having seniority, since there were no other openings.
At first Tammy was kind of excited about being in a union. Youngstown was a union town and she understood that power, even if the steelworkers had taken a beating. One year Local 717 went on strike. She had heard all the stories about the mills and imagined being Rosie the Riveter, a rebel walking the picket line. But she was on second shift, and by the time it was her turn to walk the line, they had settled. Over time, she got pretty jaded about the union. She went to a meeting and spent it watching a couple of white guys argue. She wasn’t paying a babysitter and driving half an hour to Warren so she could watch two white guys argue. Some of the union reps were just about themselves, trying to move up to the international so they could draw down two pensions. At one plant, Thomas Road, which was like a freaking dungeon, everything dingy and dirty, there was a foreman who would turn on the machines to shorten people’s breaks and once locked up the phones so the new hires couldn’t receive calls, and the union rep just sat in his office and didn’t do anything. As Packard cut more jobs and sent more work off to the maquiladoras in Juarez, the union got weaker, and you knew in the end it wasn’t going to save you.
The work didn’t destroy your body like in the steel mills, but it beat you down. Tammy developed asthma after she worked the solder pot at Thomas Road, dipping copper wires into melted lead—it felt like her chest and back were trying to touch, and it got so bad that sometimes she had to be hospitalized. Like a lot of workers, she also got carpal tunnel syndrome—they called it “Packard hands,” treated with splints and medication—and years after she had stopped working in the factory the pain still sometimes woke her up at night.
She found out that she could be a little rebellious. Once, a temp came to work in her area, a white woman in her thirties, divorced with children. This girl was too scared to take breaks, she was scared to go to the bathroom or talk to anyone, because she thought she would lose her job. She was one of those people who would come to work early, when everyone else clocked in five minutes before their shift. She looked worn and stressed out. One day, Tammy saw the girl down on her hands and knees scrubbing up oil on the cement floor. That oil had been there for twenty years—she wasn’t going to get it off, and anyway you were supposed to suck up spilled oil with a vacuum—but she thought this was something she had to do. The labor gang was getting paid twenty-two dollars an hour to keep the plant clean, but there she was on her hands and knees, and the labor gang person sat on his fat behind with his feet up and watched this girl trying to clean the floor. Tammy hated to see that—how scared the girl was. “You don’t need to be down there,” she told the girl. She was pissed off enough to speak to their foreman. “Bob, you know that ain’t right.” But what could she do? Some of the guys in the skilled trades made life hard for the temps who were coming in and doing twice the work for half the money. Later, Tammy said, “I felt like this girl had a family. She needed a job, period. She needed to make money just like you did twenty, twenty-five, thirty years ago, to take care of your family, and she was willing to dehumanize herself because she needed that job and she could get fired for any reason. I don’t think our department had ever been that clean before she came.”
Mainly, working on the line was about finding ways to make the hours go by so she could get home to her kids. Sometimes she would change up and work her board front to back, sometimes back to front. She played her music (mostly seventies R&B and funk—she wasn’t that into hip-hop, she liked music made by instruments, not computers), which she had to hear over an industrial fan and four or five other radios on the line. Once, a white girl complained that Tammy’s radio was too loud, which actually meant that Tammy’s music was too loud, which meant that it was too black. That was one of the few run-ins she had on the line.
Most of all, she talked.
She spent more time with some people in the plant than she did with her family. She went out for lunch with them—Eli’s Famous Bar-B-Que on Thomas Road, Cabaret on North River Road where they cashed their checks on payday—and to bars like the Triangle Inn and Café 83. Tammy didn’t drink like some of the others and go back to work and get on that damn line that was going around and around—she didn’t know how they did it. They had fun at work, too. There was this one old lady on the line who was the nastiest, most ignorant person Tammy had ever met, but she was funny—she would come to work with a pig nose on her face and go around startling people, groping the men. They celebrated everybody’s birthday in the department with a cake, and they played football pools. Once, when she was out for a few months with Packard hands, she and a coworker won the Super Bowl pool, and she had no idea until he brought her half of the eight hundred dollars over to her house—he didn’t even have to tell her.
A few of them became her close friends, like Karen, a black girl from the north side, who got bumped off day turn and put on Tammy’s line in the afternoons, and Tammy trained her. She called Karen her little big sister because Karen was ten years older and a lot shorter. Karen had three kids, too, and they became best friends over that. Or Judy, who shared a table with her at her final job at Packar
d, Judy’s machine on one side, hers on the other, for three years. “That is how you build relationships,” Tammy said, “and it’s not like we were just running all over the place like it is in an office. We were stuck with each other. What else do you talk about? The tool and die guy—‘How is your wife doing? How are your kids? How is your son doing in football?’” When you worked with people that long, you watched their children grow up in the pictures they showed. Later, after she had left the factory, what she would miss was the camaraderie.
Miss Sybil, Tammy’s friend from the east side, worked at a General Electric lightbulb factory for thirty-eight years, from 1971 until she retired at age sixty-three, hauling fifty-pound bags of cement. “Anybody who thinks factory jobs were good jobs needs to go visit somebody on a line,” she said. “Most people wouldn’t survive in a factory. Mitt Romney would die in a week.”
Tammy survived for nineteen years. She never thought of that as anything special, and when anyone asked how she got through the work of doing the same thing a bazillion times, she hardly knew what to say. She did what she was supposed to do. It was a paycheck, a decent paycheck, and that saved her so she could save her kids.
* * *
Tammy didn’t know Flip Williams very well, he was ten years older, though she knew his brother. Flip controlled the drug trade in the KimmelBrooks projects on the east side. He went to California and became a Crip and did prison time for cocaine trafficking in the late eighties. When he got out, he came back to Youngstown and tried to take over again at the Brooks. On the night of Labor Day in 1991, Flip went with three teenagers to a house in the Brooks where a dealer who had taken control of the local crack trade lived, and they handcuffed him and duct-taped his mouth. (He had planned everything, drawn maps of the house, used walkie-talkies he bought at RadioShack.) Flip told one of the teenagers, his girlfriend, to phone the guy’s two friends who ran the trade with him, and she lured them to the house. While all this was happening, a fourth man, Teddy Wynn—he was a cousin of Barry, the father of Tammy’s first child, and had just gotten out of the air force—happened to stop by the house for a visit. Wrong place, wrong time. Flip tied them all up, then he strangled Teddy and one of the others, had his girlfriend turn up the stereo to muffle the noise, went room to room, and shot all four in the head.
By the time Flip was finally executed for the Labor Day Massacre by lethal injection in 2005, the KimmelBrooks projects had been torn down, rebuilt, and renamed Rockford Village. Tammy felt the execution was long overdue. Flip had committed a lot of other murders on the east side that they didn’t even catch him for. How do you hold someone in jail who caused so much devastation in one community?
In the late eighties and nineties, Youngstown always made the top ten cities for homicides, and it led the country in the murder of black women under sixty-five. The media put the focus on Mafia killings, because during those years Youngstown was the scene of a border war between the Genovese and Lucchese families, with a lot of high-profile mob hits—in 1996 a Mahoning County prosecutor, just about the only county official not in the pay of organized crime, was shot in his kitchen and lived. By the end of the nineties there was no money left in Youngstown to fight over, and the Mafia wars died out. But Youngstown went on being Murdertown, because most of the killings were happening in neighborhoods like Tammy’s, over drugs and dis.
Tammy knew too many people who’d been killed to count. When she looked over the smiling faces in her yearbooks, she could point to the kids who’d ended up dead, or in jail or on drugs, and it was at least half. A girl at her high school was shot in a drive-by at the Brooks. One of her best friends from childhood, Geneva, dropped out of high school and had two daughters, and right around the time Tammy graduated from East, a guy got out of a car and started arguing with Geneva, threw her down to the ground, and shot her in the head. No one was ever arrested. Tammy’s uncle Anthony, a junkie like his older sister Vickie, was killed and his body dumped on the east side. “The late eighties through the nineties, Youngstown just got crazy, really crazy,” Tammy said. “When you think about it, there weren’t jobs.”
When Tammy’s brothers were coming up, she assumed they identified as Crips because they were always wearing the blue. They lived with their mother on Shehy Street, two blocks from Charlotte, and sold outside the house and ruled the street. Tammy never saw their father give them any discipline. Their mother tried—she wanted more for them, it hurt her that they were always getting into trouble—but they talked back to her in a way Tammy never would have. Vickie was using again, though Tammy didn’t know it at the time—for years she believed that her mother had stayed clean since Tammy was in sixth or seventh grade. Vickie would have Tammy drive her to pick up something from a friend, or bring money to someone she owed, and only later Tammy understood that it was drugs, and she was enabling her mother. She found out the truth when her mother got addicted to the Oxycontin they were giving her for pain because she had degenerative osteoarthritis, where her joints just disintegrated and her bones got so brittle they would crack if she moved the wrong way, and the doctor at the nursing home where Vickie was a patient let Tammy know that her mother was on heroin.
Around the corner from Vickie’s house there was another gang, the Ayers Street Playas, who identified as Bloods. In the late nineties, Tammy’s brothers were on the front line of a gang turf war over the crack trade, though Tammy didn’t realize that until later, either—“I wasn’t really entrenched in the stuff that was going on, because I had kids and I was trying to keep them out of it.” One day, the oldest brother, James, was shot and wounded in broad daylight on the front porch of the house on Shehy Street. The youngest brother, Edwin, was sitting in a car with a friend in the vacant lot next to the house one night—a guy with a gun walked up to the window and reached past Edwin and shot his friend. A few years later, a different car, sitting with a different friend and the middle brother, Dwayne, Edwin was shot three times in the back by a gunman in a ski mask. He survived. Both Dwayne and Edwin ended up doing serious prison time.
Vickie’s house on Shehy Street was right next door to a store, F&N Food Market, that was notorious for trouble outside, including a craps game that drew violent gamblers. One day, Edwin and Dwayne—they were in their late teens—were shooting dice behind the store with two Puerto Rican guys. Dwayne had his gun under a chair cushion in case of trouble. A friend of the Thomas boys, John Perdue, drove up and joined the game. Within minutes Perdue and one of the Puerto Ricans, Raymond Ortiz, were arguing about a five-dollar bet. Ortiz grabbed Dwayne’s gun and demanded the money. Perdue refused to pay. Dwayne calmed Ortiz down, and Ortiz and his friend walked away to their car, but then they came back—Ortiz was still in a rage—and the argument continued. It ended when Ortiz threatened or hit Perdue with the gun, and Perdue grabbed the gun and shot Ortiz in the head.
Vickie knew the dead man’s mother, and because it was the Thomas boys’ friend who’d killed him, with Dwayne’s gun, over a craps game next to Vickie’s house, there was a lot of bad blood between the two families. Not long after the killing, Vickie’s house was shot up—bullet holes in her refrigerator and oven—and Tammy moved her mother out. Then someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the house and the first floor was gutted. The mayor of Youngstown ordered his staff “to immediately tear down the fire-damaged, drug-ridden, violence-prone home at 1343 Shehy St.,” The Vindicator reported, under the headline NUISANCE HOUSE DESTROYED. A city backhoe rolled onto the lawn and began to claw down the front porch while neighbors watched in approval. “The East Side eyesore was gone by early afternoon.” The house had been worth around four thousand dollars. Its loss devastated Vickie.
By then, Tammy had left the east side.
Several times in the early nineties, kids broke into the house on Charlotte. Granny was around ninety and legally blind, and Tammy had moved her to the first floor. Tammy was stuck working afternoon turn, which meant that she didn’t get home until midnight, but she couldn’t af
ford to pay someone to stay at the house. Her children had to be babysat after school at her friend’s mother’s house on the south side, where Tammy picked them up on her way home. Until then, Granny was alone, and Tammy was afraid that someone would break in again and do something to hurt her because she couldn’t see. After twenty years at 1319 Charlotte Avenue she moved the family out in May 1992. Granny had lived on the east side for more than half a century, and she lasted just three months on the south side before she died.
Tammy rented out the house on Charlotte for three years. In 1995 she decided to sell it. All she could get was five thousand dollars, half of what Granny had paid in 1972, from a lady who then moved back to Puerto Rico and rented it out. After that the house started to decline, until it went vacant in the 2000s.
Tammy paid twenty-three thousand dollars for her house on the south side. It was painted orange, with four thick columns across the front porch, and beautiful on the inside. The neighborhood was above Indianola, an area that had been all white when Tammy lived on the south side as a girl, but now it was changing fast, with whites hurrying out and Section 8 renters moving in, including a lot of people she knew from the east side. Tammy had a fiancé on the south side. His name was Brian, and she had known him in high school, though he was two years older (most of her friends were older). They started dating in 1990, and Brian became like a father to all three of her kids, especially her younger daughter. He didn’t have a steady job—he worked on and off as an aide for the schools—but he helped Tammy deal with losing Granny, and he loved her kids. In 1995, around the time of her twenty-ninth birthday, Brian asked Tammy to marry him. She didn’t answer right away. She went to Cleveland with three of her girlfriends on a birthday trip, and they checked into a hotel, and Tammy discussed it with her girlfriends and decided to say yes, and it was right around the time they checked out of the hotel to go shopping that Brian was killed.
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