What Kayzia didn’t say in her note was that, in addition to her AP classes and her course at U-Rock, she is working two jobs. She is a receptionist for a chiropractor after school every day, and she does office work at a car dealer. The dealer is in the same family of dealerships as the one at which her mom started working in the fall, processing paperwork for car deals at $13.50 an hour—a full-time job, at last, even if it means that her mom misses being a teacher’s aide. Alyssa is working three jobs—at the same car dealer as their mom and as a lifeguard for Parker’s swim teams, plus she has started selling Tupperware. Alyssa wants her to sell Tupperware, too, Kayzia tells Deri, but she isn’t sure. The good news is that the chiropractor has decided to let her work a sixth day, on Saturdays, for the next couple of months.
Deri hears a lot of stories like this. She knows what she can suggest, and it is never enough.
“Have you guys been to ECHO?” she asks.
At the mention of ECHO, the main food pantry in town, Kayzia starts to cry. Her mom tried ECHO before and was furious when she was told that her family wasn’t quite poor enough to qualify. ECHO is so strapped that it is limiting food these days to the first forty people in line when the doors open, and only if you haven’t been there in at least a month. Last spring, ECHO was so short of money that it had to stop handing out emergency gas cards and bus tokens. For part of last summer, it cut its staff’s hours, so that for the first time since it opened in 1969 it wasn’t distributing food on Fridays. Strapped or not, ECHO had made her mom so mad, telling her that her family was just over the income limit, that, when Kayzia and Alyssa were collecting donations for ECHO with the National Honor Society, they didn’t tell their mom where the seven hundred pounds of food that the society collected were going.
Kayzia doesn’t explain all that. She just says to Deri, “They won’t give us food.”
Deri stands up. As she often does during conversations like this, she walks over to her desk, picks up the telephone, and calls the school social worker. Parker used to have two social workers, but that was before budget cuts. It’s down to one, even though nearly half of the 1,400 kids now come from families with incomes low enough that the federal government pays for their school lunches—almost twice as many as before the assembly plant closed.
Deri calls the social worker because she knows she should, even though, after this much time with the Parker Closet, she often feels as if she has become a social worker herself. Kayzia can hear Deri’s end of the phone conversation. “He can’t get unemployment insurance because he quit. . . . Yeah, if you hear anything, pass it along.”
Deri comes back over to Kayzia and hands her a small card with ECHO’s phone number on it. “They’ll pay your rent one time,” Deri tells her. “It depends on how much funds they have.”
Kayzia may still be in high school, but she knows what’s going on enough to remind Deri that ECHO, even when it has funds, does not help people make mortgage payments. Before GM went away, who would have thought that families that own their homes would have needed ECHO? Deri tells Kayzia that at least she can give her a few donated cards for free groceries at Sentry Foods.
For the past two years, the Whiteakers have gotten Bags of Hope—groceries to tide them over to New Year’s. Not this time. Each Janesville school has a quota on how many families it can sign up for Bags of Hope. The school system has exceeded its target, raising $46,000 this year, but more schools are doing Bags of Hope now, so Parker got a lower quota than before. “There are so many families and only thirty-five spots,” Deri tells Kayzia. She doesn’t tell Kayzia that at least fifty Parker High families that really need the groceries will not be getting any, or that she and the social worker she just called sat down a few weeks ago with the whole long list and had to make awful decisions. That they tried to reach as many families as possible by coordinating, when they could, with schools that have younger brothers or sisters. That they felt they should give preference to families that hadn’t gotten Bags of Hope before. Or that the families lucky to have been chosen will be getting less than the two weeks of groceries that Bags of Hope has handed out in the past.
All that Deri tells Kayzia is that she has managed to get another private donation so she can provide gift cards to some families for Christmas dinners. “So don’t you worry about that,” Deri says.
Kayzia smiles.
Kayzia says that her mom just bought toilet paper, so they are okay with that. And a neighbor has given them a pot roast, so Kayzia is going to make it with some potatoes. And they are not having Christmas lights this year, to save on the electricity. And her grandmother is coming for Christmas and will help out.
“You are doing everything right,” Deri tells her. The problem, she says, is the economy, and it’s not their fault.
Deri pauses for a moment. And then she asks: “How are you and your sister doing with all of this?”
“It’s really, really hard.”
“Do you feel guilty,” Deri asks, “for going off to college next year?”
Kayzia nods three times. “Just because I help my parents so much, even though they don’t ask for anything.” And she worries about Noah, who is in eighth grade—the same grade she and Alyssa were going into when the assembly plant was shutting down. Her parents don’t have the $6 to give to Noah for middle school recreation nights, so Kayzia gives him the cash. “I won’t be there for him,” she says. “He’s my little brother. I want six or seven dollars to be there for him. I don’t want him to miss out on everything.”
“You have each other,” Deri says. “It’s cheesy, but it’s true.”
Kayzia writes this down in her notebook.
“My dad filled out three applications this morning, before I even went to school,” she says, “so he is trying.” And he has signed up with BioLife, just past the Interstate, to donate plasma, because, even though he is scared to death of needles, it’s $60 a week if you go twice.
“I was going to donate plasma,” Kayzia tells Deri. “I asked him what do I have to do, do I need to make an appointment? He got mad at me.
“We’ll get through it,” Kayzia says. “We already do.”
Deri stands up and wraps Kayzia in a hug. And Kayzia walks out of the social studies classroom and into the hall that is filling with kids because the bell for the next class has just rung.
Friday afternoon. Christmas miracles.
Tammy Whiteaker plans to go to the food-bagging operation tomorrow morning for the Bags of Hope. She will be taking along Jerad and Noah, but not the girls. Kayzia will be working at the chiropractor’s. Alyssa will be doing her own volunteer work, making fruit baskets for Rotary Gardens through DECA, a school club that is helping her build skills in marketing and entrepreneurship and is, in fact, making her quite a good Tupperware saleswoman, even though she is just starting out.
Bagging food and not taking any of it home will not be easy. Still, it hasn’t occurred to Tammy not to go. Bags of Hope have arrived at her home in the past. She needs to give back.
Tomorrow will be December 15, the day a mortgage payment is due, and they still can’t afford to send it. But today, Blackhawk Credit Union has finally, finally decided to let Tammy and Jerad refinance their mortgage. Their new mortgage rate will be just 3.75 percent. Tammy figures this will save them nearly $250 a month.
So she already is in a good mood when she gets a call. Deri is on the phone. A family has dropped out. No longer wants to accept donated food. The Whiteakers will be getting Bags of Hope, after all.
Saturday morning is gray, the rain cold and driving. By 7:30 a.m., inside a big distribution facility on the south side of town, next to a bay of new John Deere lawn and garden tractors, 150 volunteers are milling about, next to row after row of long tables stacked with groceries. Among the volunteers is a smattering of UAW Local 95 members, GM retirees who still come as a reminder of all the years when the assembly plant’s management and the union came together for the holiday food drive. Now, most of the volu
nteers are teachers, parents, and kids.
At 8 a.m., the volunteers gather in a large circle around Jim Reif, a Craig High School math teacher who gives the morning’s pep talk that Marv Wopat delivered for twenty-five Christmas seasons before the plant shut down. The teacher’s message is low-key. The 350 families around Janesville that will be getting groceries “are all going to be appreciative when we are done, because they are going to have enough food to get through the Christmas break.
“We are early,” he says. “Go slow, and be perfect.”
Jerad is one of the bag runners, walking up and down the aisles with one Woodman’s-donated paper bag at a time, starting out with it empty and feeling it grow heavy with the food that volunteers place inside. Tammy is stationed halfway down row #5, two rows over from the lawn and garden tractors. When each bag runner comes along, including Jerad, she puts inside Saltines, Stove Top Stuffing Mix, and Swiss Miss cocoa powder. “I like this,” she says, as the stacks before her dwindle, background music of sleigh bells playing over the public address system. “It makes me feel good.”
Next to her is a Parker teacher. “I loved your daughters,” she tells Tammy. “They are the sweetest girls.”
By 8:45 a.m., all the food is in the bags, and the bags are laid out in neat rows on the concrete floor for the next phase of the operation: delivery. Some of the bag stuffers are about to be the drivers, and the organizers are handing them slips of paper with the names and addresses of families to which deliveries are to be made. Tammy has talked with an organizer ahead of time. No point in having a driver bring food to her house if she and Jerad and Noah already are right here. So Tammy picks up a slip with her own address on it.
The three of them are about to head out into the rain. They will run through the puddled parking lot to their car, and drive around to the back of the distribution center and get into a long line of cars. And when it is their turn, a man standing in the rain in a red vest will ask how many families they are delivering for, and Tammy will reply “one,” never hinting that the one is her own. And the man and another in a red vest will load six bags of groceries into their car’s trunk—half as many as in the past. Some Bags of Hope, though, are better than none.
But before they run through the parking lot in the downpour, while Tammy and Noah continue crossing the concrete expanse toward the door, Jerad stops for a moment. Behind a yellow cord, roping off some John Deere tractors, he has noticed a security guard. The guard’s shirt has an “Allied Barton” patch on the sleeve.
“How do you get hired by this company?” Jerad asks the guard. “I’ve applied multiple times and didn’t hear a word.”
The guard is kind. “I’ll tell my officer to keep an eye out,” he says.
Jerad thanks the guard, and keeps walking to join Tammy and Noah near the exit.
Part Six
2013
50
Two Janesvilles
As the fifth year without the General Motors plant arrives, the ways that time and economic misfortune can rend even a resilient community—a community determined not to lie down and give up—are now plain to see. The city on the Rock River is now two Janesvilles.
In one Janesville, Mary Willmer is in a whirlwind. She is in good spirits. The initial work of converting her corner of M&I bank into BMO Harris is starting to ease, even as her responsibilities at the bank are about to expand. Next month, she will become BMO Harris’s manager in charge of developing teams of “premier bankers” and financial advisors through a swath of Wisconsin that stretches nearly two hundred miles from Green Bay down through Madison and Janesville and into Beloit. Premier banking is offered to BMO Harris customers “in the mass affluent sector,” with savings in the range of $250,000 to $1 million. “At BMO Harris, we believe a higher level of financial achievement demands a higher level of attention,” the bank’s marketing material says. In her work, Mary will be striving to improve service to the well-off.
In town, she remains at the apex of the business community, pursuing her considerable volunteer work for nonprofits, attending charity events, continuing Rock County 5.0’s regionally minded efforts to rebuild the local economy. She sees progress. Leaving aside GM’s 4.8 million square feet of emptiness, the vacancy rate for the county’s industrial space has fallen from 13 percent three years ago to just over 7 percent. Rock County 5.0 was conceived of as a five-year project, and it will begin its fifth year in the fall, but, even after that, it will persevere, with Mary and her co-chair, Diane Hendricks, at the helm.
Toward the end of January, Mary attends Forward Janesville’s awards luncheon, at which she introduces the 2013 recipient of the organization’s lifetime achievement award. The businessman she introduces is Mark Cullen, the chairman of JP Cullen & Sons, Inc., a fifth-generation, family-owned construction business whose patriarch, like Paul Ryan’s ancestors, created a branch of Janesville’s Irish mafia. The construction industry, in Janesville and across the United States, suffered during the recession, but JP Cullen & Sons is well entrenched, with big contracts over the decades at the University of Wisconsin and other major institutions, even if its long-standing contracts with General Motors in Janesville ended when the assembly line went silent. Five years later, as today’s achievement award attests, Mark Cullen has emerged unscathed. As Mary is unscathed.
Mary’s life is evolving. She is falling in love. Her long marriage to a mortgage banker has ended, and she has just met a new guy, an architect in Madison. She recently was asking her Facebook friends to recommend their favorite all-inclusive resorts for a January trip to Mexico, and they are planning a week in California’s Napa Valley later in the year.
“Couldn’t be happier,” Mary posts on Facebook the day that she helps her youngest, Connor, celebrate his eighteenth birthday—and that she books the wine country trip.
The same week as the Forward Janesville luncheon, the Whiteakers get some help. Jerad, still out of work, has gone online to apply for FoodShare, Wisconsin’s version of food stamps. On Monday, three days before the luncheon, a woman from the state government calls him for an interview. The next day, Jerad is notified that his family has been approved to receive $160 toward groceries per month. The amount is less than Tammy used to spend on groceries for the five of them each week. It is less than FoodShare would be sending if it hadn’t insisted on counting Alyssa’s and Kayzia’s incomes because they are now eighteen. Not right, Tammy thinks, that the state expects kids in high school to be propping up families’ incomes. Still, $160 will be a big help.
The Whiteakers live in the other Janesville. This year, 41,000 families in Rock County will get FoodShare, twice as many as the year before the assembly plant shut down. The Whiteakers are not the worst off in town. They have not lost their home, though Tammy still wonders sometimes whether they should be looking for a needle-in-a-haystack buyer who wants a nice house with a backyard pool—and find a cheaper place to rent. They have not been out of work all this time; they are just bumping in and out of jobs that don’t pay enough. With their good grades and their AP courses, the twins now have acceptance letters from the University of Wisconsin–Platteville, a campus about a hundred miles west of Janesville that is good for Alyssa’s interest in engineering and Kayzia’s in medicine. The girls are pretty confident that they will find a way to afford it, even if they aren’t sure how. No, the Whiteakers aren’t the worst off. They are just part of a broad tumbling downhill as a result of which, for many families in town, life is not what they’d expected.
To bring in extra money, Tammy has started selling Norwex—a line of cleaning products she likes because they are made without damaging chemicals. After coming home from the car dealership, she has begun to do Norwex-selling parties, hosted by relatives and friends, in the same way that Alyssa is doing Tupperware parties.
And Alyssa has just discovered a way to work more hours. One of her teachers at Parker mentioned something called Virtual Academy, a state program in which the Janesville schools
take part. It allows students to study independently, taking their classes online. The main teacher who oversees Virtual Academy in town is Dave Parr, who is still leading the Janesville Education Association, even after the predawn Walmart episode in which another shopper wouldn’t stop yelling at him about how good teachers have it.
When Virtual Academy started a year before the GM plant went away, most of its students had trouble learning in a traditional classroom, or were drawn by the wider array of Advanced Placement courses available online. Dave has watched the changes among the city’s teenagers. The cars in the parking lots at the two high schools, Parker and Craig, have gone from new ones bought by parents to old, used ones that students are paying for with what they earn at their own jobs. Just as Kayzia and Alyssa are doing. For making car payments or helping out with families’ bills, Virtual Academy has a benefit: Its students are exempt from Wisconsin’s limits on how many hours teenagers are allowed to work. The online courses available seven days a week, day or night, its students are trusted to get their studies done on their own schedule and work as much as they want. This has become the main draw.
Alyssa figured that maybe she can bump up the hours at one of her three jobs—the one at the same car dealer as her mom—from fifteen hours a week to twenty-four, if she can go in at 1 p.m. a couple of weekdays. So, earlier this month, she took a test to assess whether she would be a good fit for Virtual Academy. The results showed that she is self-motivated, efficient at time management, hardworking, optimistic. Quite a good fit.
So at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, January 24, mere hours before Mary will introduce Forward Janesville’s 2013 lifetime achievement winner, Alyssa is not at Parker. She is sitting on the living room couch at home, with a black ASUS laptop that she bought herself. Rocky, their miniature pinscher, is quiet at her side. Alyssa is doing Marine Science, module 1.07. “What makes the ocean a nice place to live?” She read this module last night but wants to review it before taking the quiz.
Janesville Page 25