Janesville

by Amy Goldstein

  And with these fears, two weeks into this fall semester, Jerad’s time at Blackhawk ends.

   16

  Ahead of the Class

  For Kristi Beyer’s thirty-seventh birthday, a month into their second year of criminal justice classes at Blackhawk Tech, Barb Vaughn gives her a present. It is a wooden plaque, with a saying painted in pale green letters on silvery raw wood: ONE ROSE CAN BE MY GARDEN . . . ONE FRIEND MY WORLD.

  Barb had read the quote and hand-lettered it onto the piece of wood she found in her and Mike’s garage. The saying seemed fitting, because, thirteen months after she and Kristi arrived at Blackhawk, each struggling to hide her jitters, it is clear to them both that their friendship has become indispensable. At first, they propped each other up as they morphed from factory workers to students. Now they are pushing each other forward, sometimes feeling that it is just the two of them alone, out ahead of the rest of the class.

  Barb has never thought of herself as a competitive person, a striver. The one time a boss asked whether she wanted to try being a supervisor—at a factory where she worked, making golf bags, before Lear—she turned down the opportunity. But now, any grade beneath an A has become unacceptable. She can’t put her finger on where this change has come from. It is just here.

  And by this birthday of Kristi’s on September 22, her mother, Linda Haberman, who turned to Blackhawk herself at twenty-nine to find her way forward from a failed marriage, has never seen anyone studying so hard. Like most people in Janesville, Kristi takes the Green Bay Packers seriously. Now that football season has arrived, the living room television naturally is on for games.

  Doesn’t she want to put away her books, her mother asks?

  “I got to study,” Kristi says. “I got a test on Monday.” Studying does not get timeouts. The books stay open through the Packers games.

  Kristi and her husband, Bob—by now, nine months into his Lear layoff, without a plan yet what to do about it—share their house with her mother. Seven years ago, the three of them found the yellow ranch house, blocks from Parker High School on the west side of town. Linda was already retired from her hospital secretary’s job; she put her pension into the house and makes the mortgage payments. Kristi and Bob cover all the other expenses. Kristi knows her mother thinks of her as her best friend. Even so, her mother brings up now and then that maybe she should let Kristi and Bob have the place to themselves. Kristi always protests, telling her mother that she is right where she belongs. And so it was that Kristi and her mother were watching the television in the living room one night a summer ago, with Lear over just days before and Kristi uncertain which way to turn. Kristi always controlled the TV remote, so it was not surprising that a detective show was on. This night’s episode happened to be about fingerprinting, and it got her mother thinking about Kristi always paying such close attention to the crime shows.

  “Why don’t you go into that kind of work?” Linda asked.

  “Yeah, maybe I will,” Kristi replied.

  Kristi has always been someone who, if she was going to do something, was going to do it fast. She decided fast on Blackhawk, where she found Barb, who, it turns out, loves detective shows, too.

  These days, Kristi comes home from school Mondays through Fridays, settles onto the living room couch, opens her books, and—stopping only for supper—studies until time for bed. At some point every day, even though they have been together in classes five days of the week, Barb calls Kristi, or Kristi calls Barb. They talk over life and assignments and lessons that one or the other doesn’t quite understand. Through all these conversations runs a rivalry over who has the best grades, even though the truth is that they both are getting As.

  As she listens and watches, her mother has an insight about Kristi that she doesn’t say aloud. Kristi needs to prove something to herself: that, at thirty-seven, she isn’t too old to make a fresh start.

   17

  A Plan and Distress Signals

  Mary Willmer and Diane Hendricks are ready to go public.

  For months, the banker and the billionaire widow have been working with a tiny group of economic development promoters to flesh out their unorthodox vision of a shared destiny for Janesville and Beloit. They have invited business leaders to a few more private meetings, after the first one that left Mary shaking with relief in another woman’s bathroom. Still, they have managed to keep their work hush-hush, not wanting it to leak out before the proper time.

  Just before Halloween, they decide the time is right. Rock County 5.0 has not yet reached the goal of $1 million in private support. But it is $400,000 along the path. Respectable. And the project now has five well-defined, five-year strategies to buttress its 5.0 name: persuading local companies to stay and expand, attracting new businesses, offering special help to small businesses and start-ups, preparing real estate for commercial uses, and forging a workforce that employers will want to hire. This is the hopeful vision of Rock County from a business-centric point of view: moving beyond Janesville’s automotive identity.

  Even though the idea is to unify the entire county’s fate, Mary keeps in mind, now that it is time to go public, the long, deep rivalry between the Janesville Gazette and the Beloit Daily News, and the reality that almost no one living in one city reads the other’s newspaper. So she and Diane invite reporters from both papers to the Beloit headquarters of ABC Supply.

  The next day, on October 29, stories announcing the formation of Rock County 5.0 appear on each front page.

  “It will change the culture within Rock County, long-term,” Mary is quoted as saying.

  “Maybe the loss of General Motors was the catalyst that’s finally going to bring these communities together,” Diane says. “But this is not based around the loss of GM; it’s based about the needs of Rock County.”

  Affirmation is swift. “It’s a great idea,” the editorial page of the Beloit Daily News says the next day. Rock County 5.0 “deserves the strong support of the people, their governmental representatives and the private-sector business community. Sure, times are tough. But they won’t get better without a positive attitude and a plan. There’s comfort in knowing, now, we’re all in this together.”

  This is a victory for Mary. And yet, from her perch at M&I Bank, she can’t escape noticing unmistakable signals that some members of her community are having a hard time keeping their lives glued together.

  These distress signals have not appeared right away. During the first six months after one shift at GM went down, wiping out jobs at Lear and the other suppliers, too, personal bankruptcies around town crept up just a little. But now, signs of people’s financial collapse are piling up in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court’s western district of Wisconsin. From the second half of 2007, when the recession hadn’t yet settled in full force and no one knew that the assembly plant would close, to the second half of 2009, the number of people in Janesville filing for bankruptcy has nearly doubled.

  Around town, “For Sale” signs are cropping up on the lawns of people who no longer can afford their homes. Of the families in which someone has lost a job, nearly one in three have missed at least one payment on their mortgage or their rent. One in six are moving in with relatives or friends to save money. Some aren’t finding an escape plan soon enough; the foreclosure filings in Rock County this year—about 1,200—are running 50 percent ahead of two years ago. Nearly half of the filings will lead to an outright foreclosure. This is part of a national foreclosure crisis that has been both a cause and an effect of the recession—inflicted first by chancy subprime mortgage loans and then by shrunken home values that trap people no longer able to afford their monthly house payments on mortgages larger than their homes are now worth. At 10 a.m. every Wednesday now, in the lobby of the Rock County Courthouse, a member of the Sheriff’s Department conducts a foreclosure auction of houses whose owners couldn’t figure out a way to keep them.

  These foreclosures, and an understanding in the pit of her stomach that people who lose t
heir jobs in America shouldn’t have to lose their homes, too, give Mary another idea. Her idea is to invite all the bank presidents and credit union leaders in the area to her office for a conversation about what they are seeing and what they might do about it. It becomes a hard conversation. By piecing together what each one is seeing, the situation looks worse than Mary and the other bankers have each noticed on their own. The conversation leads to an agreement that the banks, together with the United Way, are going to work very hard to support families, providing as much debt counseling as they can and staving off foreclosures as long as they can, giving as much as a year’s grace period in hope that people can find new work that will prop up their mortgage payments once again. This is the human side of responding to the recession, Mary thinks, with the banks taking some of the hit and not loading the full burden onto their customers.

  Still, the list of foreclosures in the Gazette keeps growing. Hard as it is for her to watch, with the girlhood memory of food stamps tucked away in a private place inside her, some people are losing their homes because their mortgages are held by national companies that aren’t cutting their customers any breaks. Or because their new jobs don’t come with pay that covers the mortgages they could afford in better times. Or because, with unemployment in Rock County still hovering near 12 percent by this fall, some people don’t have new jobs.

   18

  The Holiday Food Drive

  Even in good times, Janesville has had families that were poor, and the assembly plant was a charitable force. Around town, GM’ers were resented sometimes for their big paychecks and their fancy benefits. And yet, union and management alike, they prided themselves on a culture of giving that helped prop up the city’s homegrown nonprofits, filling crevices of need. Now, Christmas is approaching, almost a year since the last Tahoe came off the line. This is the season in which the GM’ers’ generosity found its biggest expression, the season of General Motors’ holiday food drive. This year, workers are gone. The crevices of need around town are widening. What will happen to the food drive now?

  No one in town is agonizing about this question as much as Marv Wopat. For the past twenty-five years, the food drive has been Marv’s baby and one of his greatest pleasures. Every December, as the UAW-GM Employee Assistance Program representative, he was in charge, together with a friend who was a plant nurse, of accumulating the donated groceries and distributing them to the families that needed them the most.

  Marv hadn’t started out making the food drive a big deal. It began when the nurse got a call at work late one night in the early 1980s about a family that had just been burned out of their house by a fire. It was two days before Christmas, and the family was in desperate need of help. Where better to call than the plant, with its giving culture and its lights on into the wee hours with workers making Chevy Cavaliers. Was there any way that GM could help the family for Christmas? The nurse told Marv, and they went down the assembly line that night and, by the time they got to the end, they had collected $3,000.

  The second year, they helped seven families with Christmastime groceries. The next year fifteen. And on it grew, with Marv eventually getting names from the school system and the county health department, and families by now knowing that they could ask to be on the list. Over time, it became 375 families, sometimes 400.

  Each year, Marv would handpick certain workers he knew were friendly and well-liked. Somebody from chassis, body shop, skilled trades—each of the departments. And the first week in December, the handpicked would walk up and down the assembly line, asking everyone to contribute. They raised $50,000, easy. The money would go into the Blackhawk Credit Union until it was time to buy the groceries. Woodman’s Markets, the grocery chain that began in Janesville in 1919, the same year that General Motors began making tractors in town, could be counted on to give a nice donation. The Seneca Foods plant out near the Interstate, a factory that processes peas, corn, mixed vegetables, and potatoes, provided pallets of canned vegetables.

  It wasn’t just about food. Marv and some of the plant’s other Harley riders would take care of getting toys, once the list of families was drawn up and sorted by the number of kids in each and their ages and whether they were boys or girls. Other GM’ers would ring bells for the Salvation Army.

  The pinnacle of this generosity always came the Saturday before Christmas when hundreds of volunteers—UAW line workers and managers alike, many of them bringing their kids—would go down to the plant at 4:30 a.m. and gather in the loading dock area for the bagging operation. Pork chops were piled high in row one, chicken in row two, peanut butter in the next, and on and on. Donated Woodman’s grocery bags were unfolded and given a number.

  When the food was in its rows and the bags all numbered, Marv, his burly frame often in his Santa suit to delight the kids, stood in the middle and, every year, gave the speech he loved to give: “We want to thank everybody for working together—union and management—and Lord make sure everybody is safe today during the deliveries.” And then, in his booming voice, he said: “Go bag!”

  Within a half hour, the baggers were done, and the deliverers set out on their routes. The most beautiful assembly line you ever saw in your life, it looked to Marv.

  Last year, for the food drive of 2008, the GM’ers raised enough money to provide six bags of groceries each to 350 families. Three mornings before the last Tahoe came off the assembly line, the food was piled on tables in the dock area. Some of the workers bagging food that day had been laid off the summer before and had transferred to GM plants hundreds of miles away but came nevertheless. Some of the workers had no idea whether they would be able to afford their own groceries after the plant closed.

  On that food-bagging day, with the assembly plant about to shut down, Marv had an insight: The generosity that had fueled the food drive for a quarter century was about to become a lot more important. The food drive, he told a Gazette reporter, needed to outlive the plant. He would organize the drive in a parking lot if he had to. “You get out there and tell people you need help, and they fall out of the woodwork,” he told the reporter. “It’s too nice of a thing to lose in the community. We’re losing enough.”

  Now, with another December coming and the plant silent, Marv can see the truth of his words almost a year ago. He can see the truth over at ECHO, the main food pantry in town. ECHO stands for Everyone Cooperating to Help Others. It was created in the late 1960s by a coalition of Janesville churches. Now, at its headquarters, downtown at the corner of South High and Court Streets, need is welling up even among some people who have never been poor in their lives and never imagined that they could be. This year, ECHO is giving away 1.4 million pounds of food—nearly twice as much as two years ago and six times as much as the year before that. For the first time, a few people who have been ECHO’s donors are standing with shame in its early-morning line to get bread and meat and canned goods.

  Marv knows that need has been showing up, too, at Community Action, Inc., part of a string of antipoverty nonprofits born in the federal War on Poverty of the mid-1960s. This need seems different than the kind that Community Action staffers have grown accustomed to seeing walk into their Milwaukee Street office over the decades. The staffers are now seeing new poor who, unlike the old poor, don’t want to hear about FoodShare, as food stamps are called in Wisconsin, or BadgerCare, as Medicaid is called, or any other kind of government help for people low on money. These new poor are stressed to the max, having topped out their credit cards and raided their 401(k)’s and sometimes moved out of where they were living and moved in with relatives. In their stress, there is one very specific kind of help that these new poor want, and that is leading them to swallow their pride and call Community Action. Almost all of them want advice on how to find a J-O-B. Not as easy to find as the phone number for FoodShare.

  Marv has been in Janesville as long as ECHO has been in town and almost as long as Community Action. Now, with another Christmas coming, and the need rising and risi
ng, he has looked at the question of how to keep the food drive going from every angle he can think of. And the unexpected truth it comes down to is this: How can the drive go on without the workers to chip in when the handpicked walk the assembly line, or to arrive at 4:30 a.m. for the stacking and the bagging and the delivering? How can it go on with some people in town bitter now about GM leaving, and some people having no money to donate for other people’s food?

  He hates to admit it. It can’t be done.

  So when Marv is quoted again in the Gazette, he says that the end of the drive will leave a big hole—in the community and in his heart.

  Part Three

   2010

   19

  Last Days of Parker Pen

  Eight days into 2010, the last vestige of Parker Pen in town begins to pack up and move to Mexico.

  The following Friday is Linda Korban’s final day of work. Her final day arrives three months after she has reached a personal goal. In the fall, after the retirement of a co-worker, Linda became #1 in seniority among the 153 who still have jobs. To reach #1 has taken her forty-four years.

  Her relationship with Parker began in 1966. That spring, as in every spring in those days, members of the Parker Pen personnel department chose graduating seniors to hire by coming right into Janesville’s only high school at the time. The Parker personnel people brought along a test of dexterity and speed that it offered to any senior who wanted to try it. Most of the students who took the test were girls, because the understanding in town back then was that young men lucky enough to be offered a General Motors job would go to the assembly plant. And young women lucky enough to be chosen by Parker Pen would go to work at Arrow Park, a clean, friendly factory in which the making and assembling of pen parts required fine motor skills. Good work for women’s hands.