Brooke has decided that the way to make the best of the way things are, at least for now, is to stay in town. Keep living at home. She has thought about becoming a physical therapist but is enrolling in the fall in a more general program at U-Rock. With her dad not home much, she doesn’t want to move away and see even less of him than during most of her high school years.
At 2:02 p.m., the school band stops playing, and the senior class president rises to address his fellow graduates. “After today, we enter the real world where the possibilities are endless. We can be whatever we want to be if we work hard enough.” Then come speeches by the two honor graduates and the school principal, none of them hinting that possibilities around Janesville are less endless than they used to be.
The school choir sings Garth Brook’s “The River”—chancing the rapids and dancing the tide and not sitting on the shoreline.
It is a little after 3 p.m. by the time Brooke crosses the stage to receive her diploma, as a Wopat near the bottom of the alphabet, the sixth graduate from the end. Matt and Darcy are beaming, clapping hard. Helped by Marv’s thundering voice, a loud cheer for Brooke arises from her family on both sides of the bleachers.
Tammy Whiteaker is walking up the bleacher steps of Monterey Stadium, where Parker High’s graduation will begin in three and a half hours. The stadium has stood since 1931, when the city of Janesville and its school system, in trademark, good-government fashion, joined forces to win a federal grant to build a track and football field and bleachers in one of the many parks for which Janesville is known. This particular park, Monterey, leads down to the Rock River at the spot where it narrows, just across from the hulking General Motors Assembly plant, which had been producing Chevrolets for eight years already when the stadium was built.
Tammy is here early, like no small number of other parents, to save good seats for tonight’s ceremony by spreading blankets over a little section of the concrete bleachers. Everything else is pretty much ready. Her parents are providing most of what is needed for the girls’ graduation party tomorrow afternoon, her mother having made two hundred meatballs, with Kayzia helping. An older cousin of Jerad’s, who is close to his mother, has made other food, including the chicken and stuffing sandwiches that everyone loves. Tammy offered to pay her back but knew the cousin wouldn’t accept, which is a good thing.
In these hours before commencement, one thing that isn’t settled is how Alyssa and Kayzia will afford the University of Wisconsin–Platteville, which sent each of them an acceptance letter in October. Over the winter, they wrote essay after essay, applying for every scholarship they could find, as well as filling out federal financial aid forms. Kayzia is concerned about their financial aid packages, whose contents they are still waiting to learn. She and Alyssa were required to list their incomes—hers is $8,000 this year, a lot for a student—along with their parents’ earnings, creating the illusion that her family can afford college better than they can.
With their good grades, AP courses, and U-Rock classes, they are graduating near the top of their class. Alyssa has a 4.15 grade-point average, putting her twelfth among the 324 Parker graduating seniors; Kayzia has a 3.7 GPA and is thirty-third. So they were not surprised—but excited, still—when invitations arrived last month to Parker’s Senior Awards Ceremony. At least, they’d be getting something.
The ceremony was disappointing. Scholarships from the community these days are not abundant. Alyssa and Kayzia each won $1,000 from the Noon Rotary and a $100 scholarship named for a teacher at their elementary school. Plus, Alyssa won $1,000 from the Janesville Community Foundation and will be allowed to renew it if her college grades are good. All very nice as far as it goes, but not much of a dent in the nearly $15,000 it will cost each of them for their courses, plus living on campus, their freshman year alone.
As it turns out, they also will get $500 each their first year for having signed the Wisconsin Covenant back in eighth grade, pledging to maintain at least a B average and do volunteer work. It’s not much money, but they feel lucky they were in eighth grade when they were; Governor Walker closed the program so that no new students are able to sign the covenant.
Beyond these scholarships, they will work as many hours as they can, Kayzia holding two jobs in Platteville and Alyssa coming home every other weekend to keep her job at the car dealership where her mom works. And it still will not be enough. One July day, after she takes out an $8,000 private loan that she will need to repay with 11 percent interest, Alyssa will post on her Facebook page: “That moment when you feel like the people who are in charge of education don’t want you to receive one. I hate working my butt off to have to figure out a way to get the education I deserve.”
That moment will come in a month. This afternoon, Alyssa and Kayzia are focused on getting ready for commencement, curling their hair into corkscrews and putting on their Kelly green caps and gowns. When the time comes, the Whiteakers need a few cars to get everyone to the stadium, but Tammy has spread enough blankets for them all: Noah, who is fourteen now, and his girlfriend; Alyssa’s boyfriend, Justin; Kayzia’s boyfriend, Phil; both sets of their grandparents; Jerad and her.
They have just sat down on the blankets when a guy says “hi” to Jerad. Someone he knows from the assembly plant but hasn’t kept up with. He hasn’t kept up with most people from General Motors.
Down in front, on the track at the edge of the football field, Deri Wahlert is working commencement this year, giving hugs and helping kids and parents with questions, making sure things go smoothly. Last year, she organized a graduation party for her Parker Closet kids, a luncheon with balloons and gifts and school administrators and a motivational speaker. Unlike the Whiteakers, some of her Closet kids, she figured, wouldn’t have parties at home. This year, she went smaller: a marble cake with strawberry frosting. Thirty-two of her forty graduating Closet kids came, along with Amy Venuti, the AP psychology teacher who helps Deri and introduced Kayzia to the Closet. A few of the kids couldn’t come because they had to work.
At 7 p.m., the evening is perfect, sunny and in the low 70s with a light breeze, as “Pomp and Circumstance” begins and the Parker class of 2013 walks, double-file, to white folding chairs on the track. Alyssa and Kayzia are among the first, because they have been selected as part of the class leadership team, which walks up a ramp and takes seats on a small stage at the field’s edge, festooned with Kelly green ribbons.
The theme of Parker’s 2013 commencement is “Carpe Diem.” The principal, Chris Laue, tells of the importance of controlling the present, because the future is unforeseen. He tells of students who, each in their own way, have seized the day, including a girl who worked two jobs to support herself and her family and came to school every day. He wasn’t talking about Alyssa or Kayzia, though he could have been.
A math teacher, Joe Dye, who was Parker’s head football coach and now has coached track and field, borrows the school team name for a riff on resilience. “You are Vikings,” he tells the graduates. “When there are challenges, Vikings battle them. When there are storms, Vikings weather them. When there is no wind at your back, when there are storms, Vikings know how to row.”
The Janesville school system itself, buffeted lately by revenue cuts and an enrollment dip, has been pulling a Viking-like maneuver. This year, the school superintendent has traveled to China to form relationships there through which the school system will invite Chinese students to attend Janesville schools—for a yearly fee of $24,000 each. A flicker of Janesville’s old entrepreneurial spirit.
It is just before 8 p.m. when the principal instructs the graduates: “At this time, prepare to receive your diplomas.” He calls the names of the class leadership team members, Alyssa and Kayzia among them, who take turns handing diploma cases to the principal as each Parker student crosses the stage. It is just after 8:30 when Alyssa and Kayzia are handed their own diplomas, a few minutes before fireworks are shot off along the Rock River’s bank.
As the girls�
� names are called, the slanting evening sunlight throws a golden glow on the vacant assembly plant across the river. Neither their grandfathers, with their good pensions after thirty years, nor their dad, cast out after thirteen years, look over to notice.
Epilogue
On the Wednesday before Halloween of 2015, the people of Janesville awoke to a front-page headline in the Gazette. “It’s Over.” Seven years after the last Tahoe came off the assembly line, four years after Janesville became the only assembly plant in the entire General Motors Corp. assigned to the limbo of “standby,” the company and the United Auto Workers had just agreed to a new contract that would shift the empty behemoth to a different category: permanently closed. In recent years, as the city was splitting into its two Janesvilles, separated by political outlook and economic circumstance, opinions on what to do about the closed plant had become a bright dividing line. Business people and economic development leaders had been urging GM to designate the plant as officially closed, so that its site could be sold off and reused for a new purpose. On that morning, they celebrated. Many of its former workers, however, had been hoping all this time that the plant would someday reopen. For them, the morning’s news, particularly as the U.S. auto industry was reaching record sales, was like a death knell.
Even a small city wrenched by the worst of what a mighty recession metes out does not have a single fate. With broad outside forces—the federal government and the state, industry and labor—unable to lift back up its once prosperous middle class, Janesville has been left to rely to a considerable extent on its own resources. Fortunately, those resources include more generosity and ingenuity—and less bitterness—than in many communities that have been economically injured. Still, over time, some people prosper. Some grieve. Some get by.
This way of understanding what has happened in Janesville fails to align with the common wisdom following the 2016 presidential election, which ended in one of the most astonishing upsets of U.S. history when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. The common wisdom is that an unorthodox Republican (uneasy in his relationship with Paul Ryan and many other leaders of the GOP) became an improbable symbol of hope for the white working class, the fallen middle class, and other people who had accumulated grievances against a government they felt did not understand their pain and resentment. Certainly, the economic catastrophe that befell Janesville is the kind of reversal of fortune that fueled such grievances. And Janesville today has aspects of the polarization that epitomized this election. Unexpectedly, Wisconsin went Republican in 2016 for the first time in thirty-two years. And yet, despite all that the city has been through, Janesville’s Democratic identity held. Fifty-two percent of Rock County’s voters supported Clinton. That was nearly 10 percentage points less than the margin for Obama four years earlier, but the difference was mostly that fewer people turned out to vote for the Democrat and not that so many more voted Republican.
So, seven and a half years after the Great Recession technically ended, how is Janesville faring? Surprisingly well, or not, depending on how you measure. By the most recent count, unemployment in Rock County has slid remarkably to just under 4 percent, the lowest level since the start of the century. As many people are working now as just before the Great Recession; distribution centers have arrived, Beloit plants such as ones for Frito-Lay and Hormel Foods have been hiring, and some people are working further away. Good news. But not everyone who now has a job is earning enough for the comfortable life they expected. Real wages in the county have fallen since the assembly plant shut down. And while factory jobs have been appearing lately in some parts of the United States, Rock County is not one of those places. The county had about 9,500 manufacturing jobs in 2015—almost one fourth fewer than in 2008 and nearly 45 percent fewer than in 1990.
As for the results of Janesville’s vigorous economic development efforts, SHINE Medical Technologies, the medical isotope start-up for which the city agreed to provide $9 million in financing, has passed tough regulatory hurdles and won a construction permit from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It is behind schedule. Having hoped to start manufacturing in 2015, it is aiming now for late 2019. Yet in a tangible step, SHINE has just moved its corporate headquarters from outside Madison to downtown Janesville, with still more financial help from the city—another nearly $400,000 in incentives to renovate office space two blocks from where Parker Pen’s global headquarters once stood. SHINE expects to employ 150 people. For the moment, the big job news is that Dollar General has decided to put a distribution center on the south side of town. The city government is providing an $11.5 million package of economic incentives—a new Janesville record. The workforce that Dollar General says it will need—about 300 at first and perhaps 550 eventually—will bring the biggest hiring spurt in years. Most of the jobs will pay $15 or $16 per hour—far below the $28 wage GM’ers were being paid when the plant closed, but decent enough money in town these days. In a sign of a lingering hunger for work or better pay, when Dollar General held a recent job fair, three thousand people showed up.
The once mighty UAW Local 95 is a shadow of what it was, with a few hundred members and, with not many to pay dues, a perpetual effort to make money by renting out the union hall that Mike Vaughn’s grandfather helped to plan. In 2014, Labor Fest shrank from its usual three days to just two. The next year, it was canceled altogether on short notice, so the sidewalks of Main and Milwaukee streets were empty when the parade should have been marching by. There was no official explanation, but many believed that the holiday weekend festival had become difficult to sustain with labor’s role so diminished. In 2016, partly with money not spent the year before, Labor Fest managed to resume.
As for the assembly plant itself, it is unclear how long it will sit alongside the Rock River as an abandoned cathedral of industry. Early in 2016, Janesville’s city manager sent General Motors a letter, asking for a $25 million “legacy fund” to benefit the community. The letter pointed out that a similar act of philanthropy by Parker Pen during World War II had led to the creation of the Janesville Foundation. So far, GM has not answered. Meanwhile, Wisconsin officials have told the company that it is responsible for cleaning up elevated levels of contaminants—not severe enough to harm public health—that have been found in sediment of the riverbed next to the plant. While this jockeying goes on, General Motors has begun trying to sell the 250-acre site. GM has identified as potential buyers four companies that specialize in the redevelopment of obsolete industrial property.
The trajectories of the politicians who helped shape Janesville in recent years have diverged. On October 29, 2015, the day after the Gazette headline announcing that the assembly plant would be permanently closed, Paul Ryan was sworn in as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. When his predecessor, John Boehner of Ohio, abruptly resigned, Paul insisted at first that he did not want the job. And even as pressure mounted on him from the party’s elders, the people who know him in Janesville believed he wouldn’t trade away the House Ways and Means chairmanship that he had attained just ten months before—his budget-wonk dream. But he did. Ryan remains the nation’s fifty-fourth House speaker, second in line of succession to the presidency.
Scott Walker is still Wisconsin’s governor, after a brief foray into the most recent Republican presidential primary. He was reelected in 2014, his promise to create 250,000 private sector jobs during his first term unfulfilled.
State senator Tim Cullen decided not to seek reelection that year, saying that Wisconsin politics had become too polarized and too unfocused on the issues he cares about most. In 2015, he published a book, Ringside Seat: Wisconsin Politics, the 1970s to Scott Walker. Tim devotes time to two local foundations that he created years ago and is considering a run for governor in 2018.
Sharon Kennedy has retired from Blackhawk Tech and moved to Michigan. She has published a book on her research into technical colleges’ retraining of unemployed Midwestern factory workers, Classroom at the End of the ‘Line,�
� and is teaching doctoral students who want to become community college leaders.
Bob Borremans retired from the Job Center after successful treatment for tongue cancer. He is consulting to two workforce development projects that he is unsure will get off the ground, serves on the boards of two local nonprofits, and has just been recruited to join Wisconsin’s Aging Advisory Council.
Mary Willmer continues to work at BMO Harris Bank. She has remarried and moved to a Madison suburb. She remains involved in Rock County 5.0 and other volunteer activities, including the YWCA’s Circle of Women fundraiser.
Diane Hendricks remains chairman of ABC Supply and a major Republican donor. She gave $1.9 million to support Trump’s candidacy and $8 million to a Wisconsin super PAC that paid for negative advertising against Clinton toward the end of the 2016 campaign. She was rewarded with a spot on Trump’s inaugural committee.
In the Janesville school system, Ann Forbeck, who cofounded Project 16:49 for homeless teens, has changed jobs and is now a social worker at Craig High School. Early in 2014, Project 16:49 opened its housing for girls, called Robin House after Ann’s partner, Robin Stuht, in Beloit. So far, it has sheltered thirty-seven girls, up to seven at a time, including one girl with learning disabilities whose parents had worked at General Motors and left her behind when they moved to GM jobs in Indiana. Planning and fundraising continue for the house for boys.
Deri Wahlert still teaches social studies at Parker High and runs the Parker Closet. She has married her longtime partner and become Deri Eastman. She is specializing now in teaching at-risk students and has begun to keep donated food in her classroom for times when her students don’t have enough to eat at home. For the 2016–17 school year, the Closet has about two hundred students—as many as ever.
Among the former autoworkers, Barb Vaughn continues to work with adults with developmental disabilities. Since 2015, Barb, the former high school dropout, has been a member of the governing board for Rock County’s Aging and Disability Resource Center. Mike changed jobs the summer of 2016 and is a human resources generalist for United Alloy. He is working days.
Janesville Page 28