Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  The 1971 Delta 88 was created by a less priapic design team—given the mores of the era, American males no longer had to express their desires in molded steel—but it was the model that carried my infant car seat, so I took several photographs of my father’s Oldsmobile. With its snouty hood and crimped tail, the ’71 Delta 88 could have been—and probably was—an automotive extra on an early episode of Hawaii Five-0. By 1984, Oldsmobile was building 1.2 million cars a year, but those square-edged Cutlasses, indistinguishable from Buicks or Pontiacs, just looked like old cars, abandoned in this parking lot a quarter-century before, long enough for even the intermittent sun of southern Michigan to bake the gloss from their paint jobs.

  As a Midwestern cub reporter forced to work weekends, I covered at least a dozen Saturday-afternoon car shows. Eventually, I developed a rule for estimating the nativity of an attendee: subtract fifteen from the model year of his ride. Everyone was posing with the car he wished he could have lost his virginity inside, or the car that, had he owned it in his midteens, would have resulted in the loss of said virginity. Restoring classic autos is the perfect middle-aged hobby, because it directs financial resources toward preserving the virile emblems of youth. (Even if, as is more likely, you actually lost your virginity in your dad’s station wagon.) If I’d had the money, I would have shown up in a 1979 Corvette, a car whose lewdly elongated hood resembles the tongue on the Rolling Stones logo, and equipped it with a stereo system powerful enough to blast Montrose’s “Rock Candy” loud enough to be heard from one end of a drive-in movie theater to another.

  In manufacturing towns, especially automaking towns, and especially Lansing, the classic-car rally has a civic purpose that goes beyond the individual statement “This is when I was young, dumb, and full of cum.” It’s an event that celebrates the peak of the city’s virility and fecundity, too. That’s why the title “homecoming,” which is associated with a return to high school or college, is so appropriate for a gathering of Oldsmobiles. Because Lansing has been stripped of its industrial identity. Now, it’s just the state capital.

  Classic cars and classic rock—generally of the greasy Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Dion and the Belmonts style—are inseparable elements of baby boomer nostalgia. A loudspeaker played Oldsmobile’s greatest hits. Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88,” which claims to be the first rock and roll song, was inspired by Oldsmobile’s greatest innovation, the V-8 “Rocket” engine. (A sign on the side of the plant boasted that Oldsmobile—and Lansing—was “HOME OF THE ROCKET.”) “In My Merry Oldsmobile” was the “Little Red Corvette” of the sheet-music era, a celebration of that new pastime—parking—made possible by the hardtopped auto. (“They love to spark in the dark old park / As they go flying along / She says she knows why the motor goes / The ‘sparker’ is awfully strong.”) At a memorabilia table, I found the 1964 LP Oldsmobile Spotlights the New Stars in Action: Ann-Margret, Anthony Newley, Sergio Franchi, Peter Nero, John Gary, Ketty Lester, Gale Garnett. If you listened to any of those pop vocalists, you probably drove an Oldsmobile. Oldsmobile may have inspired rock and roll, but unlike the Ford Mustang and the Pontiac GTO, it did not take inspiration in return. In the 1950s—the Rocket-engine era—the Olds was some badass American iron. In its mature years, however, Oldsmobile sat smack in the middle of GM’s brand hierarchy, which ran from apprentice electrician to general sales manager: Chevy, Pontiac, Olds, Buick, Cadillac. TV detective Joe Mannix drove an Oldsmobile Toronado. The real-life cops in Lansing drove Oldsmobiles. The Indy 500 pace car was an Oldsmobile. (The power-ballad band REO Speedwagon did not take its name from an Oldsmobile, but from a truck produced by Ransom E. Olds after he sold out to GM and started a new company, using just his initials. One of the members happened to see the truck’s name on a chalkboard in a history of transportation class at the University of Illinois. REO was rightfully worshipped in Lansing, from its bar days to its county-fair dotage. Appropriately, it peaked commercially in the early 1980s, about the same time as the Oldsmobile. At the R. E. Olds Transportation Museum, in Lansing, the docents will point out that the name is properly pronounced “Reo,” like the street and the school in Lansing.)

  On the windshield of every Oldsmobile at the reunion was the owner’s name and hometown. They had driven from Ohio, New York, Georgia, and Florida, and flown from Germany. What else could inspire anyone living south of the forty-second parallel, west of Lake Michigan, or east of Lake Huron to visit Lansing? Not the state capitol, which looks like a snow-globe version of the real thing in D.C. Once the last of these Oldsmobiles rusted away, Lansing would be known as nothing but an answer on a third-grade quiz, along with Jefferson City and Springfield.

  A man in a lawn chair explained how to distinguish a 1972 Cutlass sedan from a 1973 Cutlass sedan by studying the taillight design, demonstrating that the difference between gearheads and sci-fi fans is not nerdy obsessiveness but money and practicality. I walked past a 1971 98 hearse. The coffin in the back contained a skeleton wearing a “Go To Hell” cap.

  An Oldsmobile historian named Jim Walkinshaw was offering rides in the oldest Oldsmobile in existence: a 1905 curved dash, the open carriage on wheels in which President Theodore Roosevelt rode when he became the first president to visit Lansing (and the last, until Bill Clinton). With a top speed of twenty miles an hour, the curved dash was as sporty as a golf cart.

  “Is this thing street legal?” I asked Jim, who was costumed in a motoring cap.

  “It’s street legal,” he told me as we did a gentle doughnut around the parking lot. “Any car is street legal.”

  The Homecoming’s impresario was Don Cooper, a retired autoworker wearing an Oldsmobile sun visor over his winter-white hair. I introduced myself to him in the command tent and insisted he tell me the story of his career at Olds, just because I love listening to baby boom auto-workers talk about how they hired in at the shop. I didn’t start my first full-time job until I was twenty-six, and it only paid $12.50 an hour. My last two full-time jobs no longer exist. For a Generation X-er, tales from the 1960s are employment porn.

  Cooper started at Oldsmobile on September 13, 1965, less than three months after graduating from high school. According to Oldsmobile Labor Relations, it was the company’s largest hiring date since World War II. This was no coincidence. The next afternoon, the business page of The State Journal, Lansing’s daily newspaper, carried a story headlined “Carmakers Boosting Production.”

  U.S. auto production was expected to climb sharply this week with General Motors and American Motors assembly lines humming again.

  GM built relatively few Buicks and Chevrolets last week as it picked up the tempo of production following a shutdown for changeover to 1966 models. GM’s output last week was only 1,020 cars, but that figure probably will be upped nearly 50 fold this week as all 23 of its assembly plants get back into production.

  Ford had two of its assembly plants on overtime operations Saturday as it continued to build up its new car stockpile in advance of public announcement time.

  On the front page of the same edition was a story about President Lyndon Johnson pledging unlimited American commitment to prevent the Reds from overrunning South Vietnam and signing a draft-card-burning ban. The war had killed 629 Americans by then.

  During the Vietnam War, America could afford guns and butter. The late 1960s were the pinnacle of this country’s prosperity. What was good for American militarism was good for General Motors. In 1964, GM received $426 million in defense contracts. By 1967, that figure had increased 69 percent, to $776 million. AC Electronics delivered guidance and navigation systems for Apollo capsules. The Allison Division produced turboprop engines for cargo, antisubmarine, and reconnaissance planes. The Hydra-Matic Division received a contract for 469,000 M16A1 rifles, enough to arm every U.S. infantryman in Southeast Asia.

  Vietnam was the perfect little war for General Motors. During World War II, the entire auto industry was devoted to building tanks, ships, planes, guns, bombs,
and bullets. From 1942 to 1945, Everett Ketchum’s Chevrolet plant in Flint built nothing but army trucks. By war’s end, he said, “everybody had a four-year-old car and maybe it was a junker to begin with.”

  Not during Vietnam. Americans enjoyed the prosperity that war produced. In 1965, the year LBJ dedicated American troops to combat, GM sold 7,278,000 automobiles, with net sales of $20.7 billion, both company records.

  “More GM people earned more money and received more benefits during 1965 than ever before in the history of the Corporation,” boasted the next year’s annual report. “GM’s 1965 worldwide employment averaged 735,000 men and women and payrolls totaled $5,546 million. Its 409,000 hourly workers averaged $3.74—substantially above that reported for all U.S. manufacturing employees by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.” (This was when gasoline cost 31 cents a gallon, and a new house averaged $21,500.)

  The good times were just beginning. The national unemployment rate did not exceed 4 percent in any of the forty-eight months between 1966 and 1969. If you didn’t find a job, a job found you, which was one reason the hippies were so vilified for their refusal to work. In Gary, Indiana, steel mills bought billboard space to beg for workers. (Besides creating jobs, the war made them easy to obtain: the draft targeted young blue-collar males, withdrawing the most able-bodied specimens from the labor pool.)

  Don Cooper’s job search consisted of cutting class for an afternoon to fill out applications at all four Lansing auto plants: Motor Wheel, Fisher Body, Diamond Reo, and Oldsmobile. Diamond Reo called first, but Cooper’s father was the union rep of an Oldsmobile local and wanted his son to work there too, so he told Don to wait. He knew a mass hiring was coming. A week later, Oldsmobile called. After a physical that “amounted to if you could breathe,” Cooper was put to work on the frame line. His job consisted of turning the front wheel to the left, lifting the tire rod, pumping oil into the axle, then plugging it so the oil didn’t run out. The line moved at ninety-six frames an hour. From six in the morning ’til two in the afternoon, Cooper walked alongside a frame, crouched over, back and forth in a space twenty feet long. To occupy his mind, he sang pop songs, whistled, and swapped trivia questions with the guy squirting axle grease on the other side of the frame. The monotony was worth it. Cooper was earning $5 an hour, plus time-and-a-half for overtime, and double time for Sunday—and he got all the overtime he wanted. In his first model year, Oldsmobile came out with the Toronado, the first car in twenty-nine years to operate with front-wheel drive. In the car culture of the 1960s, when auto engineers were celebrities, this was as significant as the first Technicolor movie or the first moon orbit. The Toronado—a car nicknamed “Mafia,” because it was all hood—made the cover of Time, Newsweek, and Look. It won Motor Trend’s Car of the Year, the MVP award for automobiles. As PBA Bowler of the Year, Dick Weber won a Toronado. Miss America visited Lansing to pose with the car. (Professional bowlers and beauty queens were celebrities in the 1960s, too.)

  In 1966, Oldsmobile also moved its headquarters from a building that looked like a WPA post office to a midcentury-modern tower with a keypunch room to feed its IBM computers. The general manager’s office was adorned with glittering rocket logos in secular stained glass. It was the last year of the mod sixties, an era whose style Olds engineers helped define, and it was the very last year of America’s post–World War II optimism, before the Detroit riot, before the Tet Offensive, before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.—the last year America believed it could defeat poverty, racism, and Communism, and still send astronauts to the moon in silver-foil suits. My parents moved to Michigan in 1966, when my father followed a college classmate who’d been hired to work as an economist in the state’s expanding bureaucracy, overseen by Governor George Romney, the American Motors chairman who had introduced the Nash Rambler, America’s original compact car. From auto executive to governor was not a promotion. It was a lateral move. Who was more qualified to run Michigan than one of the businessmen who had built so many factories, designed so many bestselling cars, given lifetime employment to so many men a generation removed from rustic insecurity? The “wave” passage in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was about the San Francisco counterculture, a scene that could not have been more different from a Middle American auto town, but it captured the spirit of the entire nation in the mid-1960s: “There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning … We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave …” And then: “With the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

  In 1967, Don Cooper—safe from the draft thanks to a berth in the Coast Guard Reserve—married his high school girlfriend and bought a house. At the age of twenty, he had settled on a career, a mate, and a home. His life’s course was set. He wasn’t old enough to drink, but he drank anyway. An autoworker just had to wave his pay over the bar of the Rock Tavern, across the street from the shop. As Gus Caliacatsos would have said, if a man works, he deserves a drink—and at twenty, Cooper was a man.

  “A man came into work one day,” he said, “and we were talking about the baby boomers. I said, ‘I’m a baby boomer.’ He said, ‘I’m from the X Generation.’ He said, ‘Your generation will be the last generation that will earn more than the previous generation did. Your generation will probably be the last generation that the majority of them will own their own house. You’ll probably never move from your home. My generation will keep moving.’”

  (Cooper did move, once. When he was twenty-seven, he built a house on five acres in the country, enough room for his children, and for a pole barn to hold his collection of vintage Oldsmobiles.)

  In 1970, Cooper took part in the UAW’s last great nationwide strike. It was planned by Walter Reuther, before his death that year in a plane crash, and led by his successor, Leonard Woodcock, who later became ambassador to China. The union wanted a fifty-cent-an-hour raise, annual cost-of-living increases, and the opportunity to retire after thirty years, at age fifty-eight, with full lifetime benefits. (The next contract, negotiated in 1973, allowed workers to retire after thirty years at any age. “Thirty-and-out” would become such a staple of Michigan life that when Johnny Carson retired after thirty years of hosting The Tonight Show, that was the headline in the Detroit Free Press—as though the King of Late Night were just another stiff who’d put in his time.) At that moment, those requests seemed reasonable. General Motors was the most powerful industrial oligopoly since the days of the Robber Barons. The General built half the cars driven in the United States. Its dominance was so thorough there was talk of the government breaking off each brand into a Chrysler-sized company. A corporation so colossal could not only afford to share its wealth, it could not afford a mass desertion by its workforce.

  In September 1970, over four hundred thousand workers—ten times the size of Alexander the Great’s army—went on strike and stayed on strike for sixty-seven days, until GM gave them everything they wanted. In those two months, the strike cut the growth in the gross national product from 2.5 percent to 1.4 percent. The auto industry was the American economy. As he walked the picket line, Cooper was jeered by passing drivers, but the way he saw it, he was striking for every worker. As GM was the nation’s biggest company, the UAW was the nation’s biggest union. Its wages and benefits set the standard for all American labor.

  “We used to get stoned in the newspapers, every time we’d get something in our contract,” he said. “‘Well, the autoworkers drove the price up because they got a raise.’ But then everybody else would start getting raises, too, after we did.”

  THE 1970 GM STRIKE took place just as Americans were discovering Japanese cars. Throughout the 1960s, the Volkswagen Beetle was the only foreign car most Americans had ever seen. Volkswagen sold two-thirds of the automobiles imported to the United States, but imports were only 10 percent of the market—a measly fifth of GM’s s
hare. The Japanese had tried breaking into the United States with the Toyopet, whose model year and horsepower were identical: fifty-eight. Designed with Iron Curtain flair and engineered for Japan’s bombed-out roads, the Toyopet made it to Los Angeles by ship, then stalled on the hills separating the city from the rest of the continent. Americans bought exactly 1,913.

  In 1965, Toyota returned to America with the more powerful, more stylish Corona, which sold well among first-time buyers on the Pacific Coast. For precisely that reason, the Big Three didn’t take the car seriously. They figured those kids would graduate to a Lincoln or a Cadillac as soon as they could afford it. And California was not Middle America.

  “The people who buy Japanese cars probably all live on communes,” one Ford executive said, scoffing.

  After the little Nash Rambler became the third-bestselling nameplate of 1958, GM responded with the Chevy Corvair, best remembered as a subject of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, which revealed that the car’s rear-heavy design—the engine was located in the trunk—made it prone to spin out. GM responded by hiring a private eye to dig up dirt on Nader. Chairman James Roche was forced to apologize to the author before a Senate subcommittee. The incident made Unsafe at Any Speed a bestseller and put its humorless, ascetic author on the cover of Time.

  Nader was a contributor to the New Republic, so his writing appealed to people who felt cosmopolitan in a cramped foreign car—and would have been embarrassed to buy American for purely patriotic reasons. In 1966, the year GM made Nader a star, those attitudes were already moving from the big cities and the university clubs to mainstream America. Then they hitched a ride in the Corvair.