Janesville

by Amy Goldstein

  Ann has never testified anywhere before, but her delivery is solid. She tells Deb and the other lawmakers in the golden room that the Janesville school system has counted 968 students this year who do not have a fixed place to sleep at night. Of those students, 170 are on their own, without an adult. These, she says, are the students that Project 16:49 is trying to help.

  “Mostly, kids end up couch surfing,” Ann testifies. “We see in our kids a lot of depression, a lot of anxiety. We want to make sure kids have a future.”

  Ann and Robin show clips from the documentary, ending with the scene of Brandon sitting on a step in a school stairwell, saying that his mother won’t come to his graduation. Some of the lawmakers are looking as weepy as the first audience that saw the film.

  Ann has done her homework. When the film clips end, she says, as if she lobbies in the statehouse all the time, “We want to put together some legislative fixes.”

  Getting help for her kids would be easier, she says, if state law allowed those who are sixteen or seventeen to sign up for housing assistance or BadgerCare by themselves, if a parent is not around to give consent. She has brought a model statute from Oregon that she found. A legislator from Beloit tells Ann that she would be happy to look into the Oregon law. It isn’t a guarantee, but perhaps it’s a start.

   54

  Glass More than Half Full

  Another spring weekend, and Paul Ryan is home, as usual, from Capitol Hill. Tonight, he is looking out from a small stage at 750 well-heeled Janesville citizens packed into the Holiday Inn Express banquet room—the room where Mary Willmer revealed her poor girlhood to the Circle of Women, where Rock County’s Republicans gathered to watch their native son lose a chance at the White House.

  Paul’s experience on the vice presidential campaign trail happens to be the subject of the remarks he is making tonight—remarks that are personal, whimsical, sentimental, moored in love for his hometown. The occasion on this last Friday of April is the annual dinner of Forward Janesville, the business alliance hell-bent on reviving the city’s economy. The members of Forward Janesville, the city’s business people and civic leaders, are seated at round tables squeezed close together tonight because, with Paul as the keynote speaker, the 2013 annual dinner has a record draw. Tickets sold out weeks ago.

  Each table is covered with a heavy sand-colored tablecloth, and at each place setting is prime rib with hollandaise and, as a party favor, a clear tumbler with green printing that says, “We See the Glass More than Half Full.”

  While some in town scoffed at the slogan that Mary came up with early in Janesville’s economic crisis—that everyone needs to become ambassadors of optimism—Forward Janesville embraced it. Exuding optimism has become central to Forward Janesville’s credo and its strategy. The organization now has a cadre of volunteer “good-will ambassadors,” who attend ribbon cuttings and visit every Forward Janesville member at work at least once a year.

  To begin this evening’s program, before Paul speaks, John Beckord, Forward Janesville’s president, takes the stage and introduces a video. The video was made for this occasion, and its purpose is to deride what John calls “um, a pervasive, negative attitude in the community, especially anonymous online commentators.”

  “The Crabby Bloggers” is the video’s title. It juxtaposes upbeat statistics about Janesville’s economy with a cartoon that features furious typing and grumbling by blogging nay-sayers. It celebrates “a resurgence in employment opportunities,” showing that 1,924 jobs have been created in Rock County by forty-one companies since the start of 2010.

  At a table toward the back of the banquet room, Bob Borremans, head of the Job Center, murmurs his sympathy with the bloggers, “That’s my perspective.” As a civic leader, Bob is attending tonight’s dinner, but he doesn’t share this crowd’s prevailing view of the glass as more than half full.

  Nearly two thousand new jobs are not trivial, but neither the video nor John mentions that the county still has 4,500 fewer jobs than when GM announced it was closing the plant. And when the video highlights the opening this month of the Janesville Innovation Center, built with a federal grant and city money to provide office and manufacturing space to nurture start-ups, it gives no hint of the scant interest so far among fledgling companies in renting space in the center.

  When the video ends, John is back at the microphone, talking up the most recent issue of Forward Janesville’s magazine, with its cover article, “Thirty-three Reasons to Be Optimistic About the Future of Janesville, Rock County and Wisconsin.” He reminds the audience about the billboards “advancing this notion that we can all become ambassadors of optimism and be part of the comeback story that we’re experiencing right now.” And then John introduces Mary, who he says is a thirty-fourth reason to be optimistic about Janesville’s future.

  Mary walks onto the stage in an elegant black dress and recalls this very dinner three years ago, when she and Diane Hendricks “stood up on this stage and really looked out at an audience that was probably in a bit of shock. . . . We had all been through some really tough times.” Since then, Mary says, “we’ve gone from feeling sorry for ourselves as a community to having hope and inspiration and motivation.”

  If John and the “Crabby Bloggers” video and Mary herself attest to certain headway in Janesville since the depths of the Great Recession, they attest to something else, too: an optimism gap that divides these crusaders for economic development with the experiences of many other people in town.

  The two Janesvilles are still trying hard to pull themselves—and their community—back up. They haven’t forsaken the old can-do. And yet, by this spring, if you ask people in Rock County whether the economy has recovered, nearly six in ten will tell you that it has not. Not surprisingly, among people who have lost a job since the recession began—or live with someone who has lost a job—two thirds will tell you that the economy has not recovered.

  And here is another glimpse at the gap between Mary and her fellow optimists versus the rest of town: a survey has shown that nearly six in ten people think that Rock County will never again be a place in which workers feel secure in their jobs, or in which good jobs at good pay are available for people who want to work. Most of the rest think that returning to such a place will take many years. Just one in fifty believes that Rock County has returned to the job security—or to the good jobs at good pay—that it used to provide.

  Overall, just over half say that their household’s financial situation is worse than when the recession began. Yet among people who lost a job—or live with someone who did—nearly three fourths now say that they are worse off. And of those who found a different job, two thirds are being paid less than before—compared with slightly more than half overall.

  These, then, are the two Janesvilles—some spared harm, some hurting still, no matter how vigorously they have clung to the old can-do.

  Tonight, the job losers and the pay losers are not in the banquet room, tucking into tulip glasses of strawberry and chocolate mousse for dessert as Mary is onstage, saying that, since the dark, stunning days right after the plant closed, sales tax receipts have been rising and industrial vacancy rates falling. The progress this community has made, she says, is phenomenal.

  Then Paul bounds onto the stage to a standing ovation so echoing and sustained that it is almost enough to make you forget that Janesville—that his very own ward—voted against him both for vice president and for Congress just five months ago. If Forward Janesville’s members are Mary’s brand of optimists, they are Paul’s people, too. They adore his vignettes from the campaign trail—an experience he describes as “kind of like you get stuffed into a cannon and shot out into the country” on a campaign plane dubbed the Flying Badger in honor of Wisconsin’s state animal. And they adore the Valentine he is delivering tonight to Janesville. The hard-bitten national press corps who tailed him everywhere, discovering his favorite Wisconsin supper club, the Buckhorn. And seeing his old high school teacher
and Stan Milam, the veteran newsman, on national TV, explaining what Paul and what Janesville are all about. And the homesickness that crept up on him in hotel rooms with his family back home. “Well, technically you’re not alone. You’ve got about twenty Secret Service agents with you, some with machine guns, outside your door. You got staff and you got law enforcement and all these other people. But I would lay in bed at night, thinking about this place, this place where I grew up in.”

  They adore his ode to flying back from Washington into Milwaukee, as he did just hours ago, and the drive home, passing the spot where he bow hunts; passing Ryan, Inc., where he mowed the lawn as a kid; passing the funeral home where he washed cars in high school; passing St. John Vianney, where he went to church as a boy and he goes with his own family now. Every time, he says, “I get the same feeling—the stress of DC literally just rolls off of me as I . . . come into town. It’s a feeling of comfort that you really can’t describe that you have living here. It’s a feeling of belonging to something, of belonging to some place, that you live in a community that is bigger than yourself.”

  Paul now reaches for a broader point, a point that adds up to “the American Idea,” a catchphrase he has devised lately that fuses his fiscal conservatism with a newer identity he is carving out as author of a Republican approach to poverty. The American Idea is Paul’s new way of expressing his belief that people who need help in their lives should look, not to government as the New Deal and the Great Society encouraged, but to generosity and resources within their own communities. Janesville is, he says, “a community that . . . [has] so many dedicated people; it’s a community where we think about, you know, HealthNet, ECHO.”

  Paul does not mention that the need is so great and the charity on which Janesville still prides itself so strained that HealthNet has had to cut back the number of new patients it can take each Wednesday, or that ECHO has people lining up outside two hours before the doors open, hoping to be one of the first forty in line before the food pantry has to cut off the line for the day. Paul is still deep into his Valentine. “It’s an amazing community. It’s a community that is second to none to raise your family. And when I come home every weekend, I think about how special it is. And I look around this city, and I see people who have been here literally for generations of families. The social scientists, they call this civil society. I call it Janesville, Wisconsin.”

  Paul is winding down, and the 750 business people and civic leaders are sated on their prime rib and mousse and the words of their native son. “The point is,” Paul is saying, “there’s a reason why we have all these generations of families that stay in this town. You can’t put your finger on it. But if there’s anything that Janna and I learned during this campaign, in this town—a Democratic town, and believe me, I’m a Republican—it’s the absolute warmth, the hospitality, the community, the ‘we’re in it together’ kind of spirit we have here. That’s what makes this town so great. That’s what makes it home.”

  The members of Forward Janesville are on their feet, and this standing ovation makes the one they gave Paul when he first stepped onto the stage sound like just a warm-up act. They are thrilled by his message. And Paul is thrilled to be surrounded by his fellow optimists. Instead of heading out into the soft air of this April night, Paul sticks around. He stands with his wife, Janna, and older brother Tobin and sister-in-law Oakleigh. They are standing toward the front of the banquet hall, greeting old friends, many of whom he has not seen since the campaign.

  Like Paul, Bob Borremans is in no hurry to leave. His wife, Dyann, is away for the weekend. When the speeches end, he wanders into a hallway linking the banquet room with the hotel lobby, and settles into a wingback chair. After this weekend, he will go back to his latest project, trying to launch an innovative way to teach out-of-a-job people new skills by leaning on local companies for help. Bob knows that the upbeat talk of John Beckord and Mary and Paul and their fellow optimists packed into the banquet room doesn’t match what he sees, still sees, coming through the Job Center’s doors.

  By this night, April 26, 2013, four years, four months, and three days have gone by since General Motors pulled out of town. “I was optimistic we would be farther along,” Bob reflects. “I believe we’ve done the best we can do, given the circumstances. Have we recovered? No way.”

  The Forward Janesville crowd, as Bob sees it, believes that sugarcoating reality might make Janesville more appealing to new businesses. And yet, as he thinks about the situation, the truth is that a lot of people are still hurting, still can’t afford their mortgage or their rent. “To sit and say things are back to normal is bogus,” he muses. “I have a problem with people not accepting reality.”

  Bob gave up a few years ago on trying to persuade Paul to visit the Job Center, to see the work the center does and the people who, after all this time, still need a decent job. But what the hell? Bob gets up and walks back into the banquet hall, where, at the other end of the room, Paul is still shaking hands and giving hugs and autographs. Bob stands at the edge of the crowd. Finally, as the crowd thins, as some Forward Janesville members are taking their “We See the Glass More than Half Full” tumblers and heading into the Holiday Inn Express parking lot, Bob and Paul are face-to-face.

  Bob introduces himself to his congressman, hands him his business card. Bob tells Paul that he should stop by the Job Center. Paul is in an expansive mood. Sure, he says. Happy to visit.

  Bob walks away, wondering on this optimism-drenched night whether Paul will ever come to glimpse the Janesville that he knows.

   55

  Graduation Weekend

  It is early June—five years to the week since General Motors announced that it would close the assembly plant. Graduation season has arrived.

  Matt Wopat has been worrying whether his sixteen-year-old Saturn will get him back for Brooke’s commencement. The car hasn’t been as reliable lately as he wished. Last month, three nights before a rare Thursday solo drive home for his stepdaughter Brittany’s wedding, Matt had just left the Fort Wayne Assembly Plant and was on the phone with Darcy, as usual, when trouble cropped up. “There are no lights,” he told Darcy. No headlights or rear lights or dashboard lights as he turned north onto I-69 for the five-mile stretch toward his apartment at the Willows of Coventry. Then, as he was easing over to the Interstate’s shoulder, the car died.

  Luckily, another GM’er from Wisconsin was behind him. Not a guy he knew well, but someone with an apartment at the Willows of Coventry. The guy stopped and gave him a lift.

  The culprit turned out to be the alternator. It cost Matt $210 to have it replaced, plus the towing, and he ended up being late to work the next day. All this reminded him that needing to keep an extra car in Fort Wayne is more expensive than living at home would be, and he can’t afford to go buy a new car. In fact, he and Darcy had tried to persuade Brittany to wait another year, until she was a little older than twenty-one and the wedding expenses wouldn’t hit so close to the graduation party for Brooke and a cousin finishing high school, too. But Brittany was eager to marry her boyfriend. And the Saturn, with its new alternator, held up on the drive back for the May 4 wedding—Star Wars Day, with Han Solo and Princess Leia on the cake. Matt’s dad, Marv, who was ordained as a minister over the Internet and already had performed weddings for three cousins, officiated.

  The Saturn also held up, thank goodness, on the drive home for Brooke’s graduation weekend. So now it is a muggy Sunday afternoon, and the skies are threatening around 1 p.m., an hour before the ceremony is to begin. A decision is made to move the commencement indoors, from the Milton High School football field to the school gym. This means that there are not enough tickets for the best bleacher seats. Matt is sitting on one side, in the good seats, with Darcy and Bria. Across the way, on an upper row toward the back of the gym, are Brittany and her new husband; Matt’s sister, Janice, and her husband; Matt’s nephew; Darcy’s dad; Darcy’s sister and brother-in-law; and, of course, Marv, who h
as ridden his Harley to the graduation. Marv is still on the Rock County Board of Supervisors even though he is now dividing his time in retirement between Janesville and Florida, where he has a lady friend. Most of the family together, where they belong. Home.

  The Milton High class of 2013 is filing into the gym, the girls in crimson caps and gowns, the boys in black.

  Matt is clutching his Samsung camcorder, Darcy is holding a camera, and Bria has a camera on her cell phone—small trappings of the middle-class life that GM is still supporting, even if it does cost more to live in two places. Matt waits to start videoing until his daughter appears in the gym’s back door and walks to her seat to the cadence of “Fanfare,” the processional being played by the school band. “Brookie,” Darcy shouts out when, near the end of the alphabet, Brooke finally emerges in the doorway, a big “B” in sparkly silver glitter decorating the top of her mortarboard.

  Inside the program listing the 235 graduates is the class motto: “Things turn out for the best for the people who make the best of the way things are.”