Janesville

by Amy Goldstein

  One speech is by Russ Steeber, who, in addition to being the Council’s president, works as a captain in the Janesville Sheriff’s Department. Russ begins with the very words that Mary often uses. A game changer is what SHINE will be.

  His argument unfolds: “The city of Janesville, for almost 100 years, produced automobiles. . . . Unfortunately, those days are done, and that stream has dried up. Although we can hope that that plant someday opens its doors again, the reality is, we have to redefine what the city of Janesville is. This is one of those opportunities that can really take and define where we are for the next century. . . . And I truly believe that sometimes, when you look at making a decision like this, you have to be bold. I understand that the money the city of Janesville is about to possibly expend can be fairly extensive, but we are looking beyond SHINE. . . . We are looking at other technical type jobs that could come in, other medical research that could come in. We are looking at developing a region for the future.”

  The opposing view comes from Yuri Rashkin. Yuri is the Council’s most colorful member—born in Moscow, emigrated with his parents as a teenager, and arrived in Janesville eight years ago. He is a musician, a Russian interpreter, and a talk radio host. He already was a Council member four years ago when a man in town was arrested—and eventually sent to prison—for a foiled contract murder plot against Yuri and a Ukrainian woman he was dating who was the man’s estranged wife.

  Yuri takes his Council work seriously, and he has concluded that the cost of the SHINE opportunity is too steep, the gamble too big, and the opportunity for public input too slim. The core of Yuri’s soliloquy is a long metaphor: “I feel like we maybe are looking to cross a river that we really need to cross, because we need the economic development, and we have a great company with people I’ve been really impressed with, who are looking to build a bridge, and they got an awesome plan, because we really need to get across the river . . . but this material has never been used, and the bridge has never been built with this stuff.”

  By the time the Council members vote, two hours and twenty-one minutes have passed. Mary is fearful. But four vote yes, one abstains, and Yuri alone votes against SHINE.

  Mary stands up and rushes out the Council chambers door and into the hall, where a celebration already has begun. In a few minutes, she and the SHINE team and everyone else who worked for two years on this deal will gather for a toast at O’Riley and Conway’s, the Irish pub on Milwaukee, a block from the Municipal Building, whose booths display old photos of Paul Ryan’s ancestors and the rest of Janesville’s Irish mafia.

  For now, Mary is just starting to taste relief. If the vote had gone against SHINE, she would have felt like a failure, shot down not just for the future home of an isotope-making plant but for Rock County 5.0’s vision. General Motors to Moly-99. Such a long way to have come.

  And with that thought, Mary finds Piefer in the midst of the party breaking out in the hallway and gives the founder of SHINE a hug.

   38

  Janesville Gypsies

  The gypsies from Janesville, scattered among General Motors plants across the Midwest and the South, are now staying in touch with each other and with what is happening back home through a Facebook group, Janesville Wisconsin GM Transfers. It has 535 members, including Matt Wopat.

  Posted February 18: “Seems like everyone thinks their new plant is full of idiots—we had our share at home too. It was just better cuz we WERE HOME.”

  Posted March 29: “Today in Fort Wayne, I talked to somebody from Arlington that heard from someone in Lordstown that heard from someone in Wentzville that is related to someone in Lansing that heard about a psychic in Detroit that contacted Elvis, and Elvis said that he heard from a ‘good source that is high up’ that the day Hell freezes over, GM is going to reopen the Janesville plant. Probably just a rumor.”

   39

  A Charity Gap

  Ann Forbeck, the Janesville school system’s homeless student liaison, often is out around town. But her base is at Edison Middle School, in a hideaway on the second floor with pale cinder block walls papered with posters. On the wall behind her desk: “Dream lofty dreams and, as you dream, so you should become.” On a side wall: “Do you know where you will do your homework?” And a lime green bumper sticker on her file cabinet: “End child poverty 2020WI.org.” Ann happens to be in this small office when she gets a call from the director of the YWCA of Rock County. It is late on a Monday morning, one week after the City Council has approved the $9 million for SHINE.

  Ann’s days are unpredictable, each trilling of her cell phone bringing a fresh challenge to her formidable problem-solving skills, often requiring her to rush down the stairwell across from her hideaway, past the school’s main office, out the back door, and into her ten-year-old Mazda, with its bumper stickers for Project 16:49 and public unions, so that she can deal with the latest emergency involving a teenager with nowhere steady to live. The call from the YWCA’s director, Allison Hokinson, sets Ann in motion once again. This time, the drive is quick. The Y is just a few blocks from Edison.

  When she arrives, Ann learns from Allison the particulars of this emergency: A woman drove up to the Y in a car with no license plates and got out with two teenagers—a girl and a boy. Her grandkids. The grandmother walked with them into the Y and announced to the staff, “I can’t keep these kids.”

  Their mother, her daughter, had just left Wisconsin with a younger child, after depositing the older two with her. With a tiny one-bedroom apartment and not much money, she was willing to let the kids stay with her for two days, but that’s it.

  At this point, Allison did something she had never done before. She walked into her office to get her purse, opened her wallet, and handed the girl and the boy each a $10 bill. And then, of course, she called Ann to say that she had on her hands a pair of teenagers two days from becoming abandoned.

  Handing kids her own cash, Allison was aware even as she did it, wasn’t the best idea. A slippery slope. Not a solution. She did it this time because the sister and brother weren’t the only ones traumatized by a mother who had left the state and a grandmother about to ditch them. Allison was traumatized, too. This wasn’t the first time she had come face-to-face with homeless youngsters without relatives with the means to keep them. But the timing today couldn’t be worse.

  This pair are exactly the kind of unaccompanied homeless teenagers that Project 16:49, Ann’s project, is supposed to help someday with a shelter for girls and one for boys. The YWCA has a big stake in the project. Eleven months ago, the Y’s governing board had voted to become its fiscal agent and parent organization. Yet tonight, just hours from now, the board is going to vote again—this time, on a recommendation from Allison that the Y jettison responsibility for Project 16:49.

  Allison hates that she has reached this conclusion. And she hates that she needs to tell Ann.

  When the Y took on the project, it was a half year after the debut of Sixteen Forty-Nine, the documentary that exposed the lives of its three homeless kid stars and began to wake up Janesville to the surprising fact of homeless teenagers in town. Since then, the film has been shown at venues around the county. Fundraising has picked up. The first big event was a benefit concert, “It’s not Fine—16:49,” with five bands on a Saturday night and so many people who came out that some were turned away at the door. The benefit concert raised more than $10,000. Then came a pancake breakfast by the young adult ministry of Faith Community Church and a downtown pub crawl and a nice donation by the local builders association. Even a raffle of a red antique Chevy hot rod, whose owner donated it for the cause.

  Ann is feeling good that consciousness about Project 16:49 has sparked around town. But it’s not nearly enough yet. And now, late this morning of February 20, Allison knows that, when Ann arrives in a few minutes to figure out a plan for this about-to-be-abandoned sister and brother, she will need to hand Ann some very bad news.

  Allison’s recommendation to the Y’s
board is a reflection of what has been happening with philanthropy all over town ever since General Motors shut down. The Janesville tradition of generosity has been colliding with the limits of what the city now can do. This is no longer the same Janesville in which Joseph A. Craig endowed the YWCA with a mansion. He bought the place on Courthouse Hill that had once belonged to a man, A. P. Lovejoy, who had given Craig his start in business. In 1953, at the age of eighty-six, Craig bought the Lovejoy mansion from the estate of Lovejoy’s widow for the express purpose of presenting it to the YWCA as its headquarters. Craig paid to remodel the mansion and a few years later for an addition, and it remained the Y’s headquarters until it outgrew it a half century later and moved to its current site. This was just one, late example of the philanthropic acts that Craig performed for Janesville over his ninety-one-year life. He promoted 4-H clubs locally and nationally. And back during the Great Depression, he bought the entire Rock County Fairgrounds to prevent the then-destitute county fair—Wisconsin’s oldest—from fading from existence.

  Where is today’s Joseph A. Craig? Where is today’s George S. Parker, who was another one-man philanthropic hurricane and, beyond his support for the Parker Pen Band, donated an entire fleet of the latest hospital beds to the wards of Mercy Hospital and contributed to the building of the Salvation Army temple and gave monthly awards to outstanding high school students and gifts to the Janesville police department and the fire department? Where are these moneyed, philanthropic industrialists now that Janesville so needs the help?

  The big generosity is gone, and so is even the next layer down, since Parker Pen ceased to have its corporate headquarters in town a few decades ago, and now the GM’ers—plant managers and workers alike—are gone, too. Like lots of nonprofits, the YWCA has lost board members who were GM’ers. And while fundraisers for some good cause or other still go on nearly every week of the year, Allison notices that nonprofits are all competing harder for a shrunken pool of dollars. And she notices that the compassion level is lower now and that certain segments in town even have started to say out loud that, if only people looked harder, they would find a job. As if it were that easy.

  Of all the philanthropy hits that Janesville has taken, perhaps none has been as far-reaching as over at the United Way of North Rock County. In 2009, the year after the assembly plant closed, the United Way cut its grants to community groups by one fourth. Although annual giving fell even more the two years after that, the United Way was able to avoid further cuts because of the remarkable gift and raffle of the last Tahoe—which rolled off the assembly line with all the cheering and hugging and weeping among the losing-their-jobs workers and the nostalgic retirees. Now, the United Way’s goal for this year—$1.3 million—is a million dollars less than a decade ago. And the United Way of North Rock County is planning to merge with an adjacent chapter. More efficient, sure, but some of its own staff are about to lose their jobs.

  As a result of this charity gap, the YWCA has taken a $10,000 cut in United Way funding for its housing program for women transitioning from violent relationships to independent lives. The Y is getting less money donated for the gas cards it has handed out—a lifeline for women who otherwise couldn’t afford the gasoline for their cars to look for a job, to get to a job. And all this is happening as the Y is starting to see more first-generation poverty than ever before—young women who are poor but did not grow up poor, who have a dad or a mom, or both, who worked at GM.

  All this is what has compelled Allison to take a hard look that she’d prefer not to have taken at what the Y can afford to do. Better to continue what it is doing already, as best it can? Or to take on the big Project 16:49 mission of housing some teenagers with nowhere steady to live?

  When Ann arrives at the Y to talk to the staff about this soon-to-be-homeless brother and sister, she is surprised that Allison first asks if she has a minute to step into her office.

  It is midday. Once the door is closed, Ann is stunned because Allison starts bawling. Allison is crying so hard that she can barely get out the words to tell Ann that, at tonight’s meeting, the Y’s board is going to kick out Project 16:49.

  Ann’s first reaction is anger. She is mad. Very mad. The number of homeless teenagers in Janesville is growing year by year, and she spends her days—and sometimes her nights—patching together not-good-enough solutions for them, especially the ones who have been abandoned and are on their own, as this brother and sister are about to become. And Project 16:49 is a better solution, and she has poured her heart into it since the two shelters she is planning to build were just a glimmer of an idea nearly four years ago. And now, after the film showings and the fundraisers have been going so well, but not yet well enough, it suddenly seems as if maybe Project 16:49 can’t happen, after all.

  Now Ann is crying, too. Stinging tears of betrayal.

  After a few minutes, Ann stops crying.

  She throws her arms around Allison and gives her a huge hug, because the thought has just come to Ann that the two of them are in the exact same boat.

  “We will find another way,” is what is running through Ann’s mind.

  It will not take long for Ann and Robin Stuht, her 16:49 partner in Beloit, to approach other organizations in town for help—and be turned down. If their shelter for girls and shelter for boys are going to materialize, they will have to do it on their own. They are social workers. They have no idea how to form their own nonprofit. They will need to learn.

   40

  Gypsy Kids

  At five-foot-eight, Bria Wopat is a starter on the freshman girls’ basketball team at Milton High, just over the Janesville line. Games are Monday and Friday nights, times when her dad, Matt, is in Fort Wayne. She gets lots of playing time and, when she is in possession of the ball, dribbling down the court or shooting a basket, Bria’s mind is, of course, on the game. But sometimes, when she’s made a basket and glances up into the bleachers and sees her mom sitting by herself, clapping, that’s when, for a flicker of time, it hits her how much she misses her dad.

  It’s not the same to have her dad call just before 10 p.m., when he’s gotten off work, and listen to her mom tell him how well she did on the court that night, and then, when it’s her turn on the phone, have him tell her how proud he is of her, sweetie. There is less to talk about, because he wasn’t at the game.

  She remembers Friday nights when she was younger and her dad was working second shift right in Janesville. Fridays were the nights, about once a month, when she and her mom and her older sister, Brooke, would go down to the assembly plant, stopping on the way at Taco Bell or Subway or maybe packing up leftovers if they’d had something for supper that her dad especially liked. And her dad would come outside on his supper break, and they would all sit in the parking lot and talk until he had to go back to work. Back in seventh grade—two years ago—was the last time they could do that.

  Spring is coming, and it will be time soon for Bria to start to do the mowing again and clear the weeds. Even though she knows her dad wishes he were around more to do the lawn and other chores, she and Brooke figure the weekend should be his time to relax and, besides, he also has his apartment in Indiana to take care of.

  Bria can tell that her dad says to her and Brooke all the things he thinks will make them feel as good as they can about him being away: If he were still working second shift at home, it’s not as if he would be around anyway when they get home from school or for dinner. And if he hadn’t taken the GM transfer, who knows how much time he really would have had with them, if he’d ended up with a job in town that didn’t pay enough so he had to take a second job on weekends, like some kids’ parents are doing. Even as a fourteen-year-old freshman, Bria knows that what they need to do is just do the best they can. And that’s what they do.

  Twice now, she and Brooke have gone down to Fort Wayne to see their father’s life there. Once was with their mom. The other time, she and Brooke spent a week. On Monday morning, they drove with their dad th
e four and a half hours to Indiana, leaving early enough to be sure he would get there in time for his shift that afternoon.

  Mornings that week, the three of them went golfing at the course where he kills time with other GM gypsies. While he was at work, Bria and Brooke watched movies. They walked to the public library down the street from his apartment in the Willows of Coventry. They were going to all drive home when he got out of work on Friday night, except that he got called in for Saturday overtime and, then again, for Sunday overtime. Her dad didn’t want to let Brooke, who hasn’t had her license that long, drive back with Bria on their own, going through all that Chicago traffic without him. So they all drove home late Sunday night, and her father got a couple of hours of sleep and then got picked up for his car pool at 8:15 a.m. on Monday.

  On weekends, they spend as much time together as they can. Brooke, a junior now, doesn’t hang out much with her friends on weekend nights when they get together at someone’s house or go to a movie or, in the summer, have a bonfire. Her friends aren’t surprised anymore when she says that maybe they can do something after supper one night during the week, if there’s not too much homework, because she doesn’t like to go out weekends when her dad is home.

  Bria and Brooke don’t watch their favorite TV shows during the week, like Ghost Hunters. Instead, they record the show so they can all watch together on Sundays. The good thing is that another favorite, Finding Bigfoot, is on Sundays anyway, so they can just squeeze, all four of them, on the couch and watch it when it’s on. Sunday has been family day for her family, since even before her dad started working far away. Except now he gets to pick what he wants for dinner on Sunday nights, because he is not around to pick during the week. Making fajitas is a favorite.