Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  “We never had a local strike,” a plant designer said. “We had one where Fisher Body shut down for an hour. Flint was always an adversarial relationship. When the Oldsmobile forge plant started making differentials, we brought in a guy from Chevrolet Flint who had experience. He didn’t talk to anybody in the factory. He had no communication with the hourly guys whatsoever. He got kicked out of our factory in less than a year.”

  GM had a “hard” problem in Lansing—obsolete, inefficient factories—not a “soft” problem of surly employees. Even though he’d been told his city’s abandonment was inevitable, Hollister thought he could convince GM to rebuild in Lansing. Along with the president of the largest UAW local, he created the Keep GM Committee, which met every Monday morning at seven o’clock. It was Lansing’s first order of business. They visited Toledo, which had torn down several neighborhoods to prevent GM from moving a Jeep plant to a cornfield fifty miles outside the city. To put a body shop, a paint shop, and an assembly line under one roof, GM needed two hundred acres, so Hollister hired an engineer to find two hundred acres. And he used the launch of the Alero as a civic moment to convince GM that Lansing and the Oldsmobile were inseparable.

  In the mid-1990s, Oldsmobile was a car with an image problem. R. E. Olds had sold out to General Motors in 1908, but his car was so successful it took GM nearly a hundred years to screw it up. But screw it up GM did. During the seventies and eighties, Oldsmobile was moving over a million units a year, making it the nation’s third-most-popular brand. As the middle car in GM’s brand hierarchy, its reputation was correspondingly middle-class and middle-aged. According to market research, the average Olds driver was a sixty-two-year-old who wanted to advertise that he’d achieved a respectable but not ostentatious standard of living. Cutlass Supremes and 98s were seen in the parking lots of every public golf course, Congregational church, and state-college football game, and helped define the era’s look of squared-off sedans.

  GM’s decision to consolidate its divisions was made by chairman Roger Smith. Smith is just as much a villain in Lansing as he is in Flint, but for different reasons. Oldsmobiles had always been designed in Lansing. Now they were designed by a Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac team that reported to Detroit. As a result, Buicks, Oldsmobiles, and Cadillacs became indistinguishable—a collection of shoe boxes with tires.

  “That era in the eighties, when they were the slab-sided, front-wheel-drive cars, those babies looked terrible,” said Oldsmobile historian James R. Walkinshaw, co-author of Setting the Pace: Oldsmobile’s First Hundred Years. (His chapter on the eighties is titled “Fall from Grace.”) “And they all looked alike. I wouldn’t have bought one, personally. That’s all part of that Roger Smith thing. We lost the capability to solve problems in-house. We couldn’t get freshened body styles, so our cars became old, stodgy.”

  Don Cooper, who was nearing the end of his thirty-two years with Oldsmobile, thought the car went bad when the “Oldsmobile” sign came down. He continued to call his workplace by its birth name, even as most of his co-workers switched to “B-O-C.”

  GM tried to turn Oldsmobile into an American BMW, specializing in sporty luxury cars. That was a niche nobody needed. On the sporty end, Oldsmobile lost sales to Pontiac, which was building the Fiero, the Firebird, and the Trans Am during the eighties. On the luxury end, it lost sales to the Buick Skylark, the Buick Regal, and the Buick LeSabre. By the end of the decade, the million-selling Oldsmobile was selling fewer than seven hundred thousand cars.

  Oldsmobile. Even the name sounded stuffy. The marketing brains in Detroit decided the way to make Oldsmobile a youthful and exciting car was to tell people it was a youthful and exciting car. Thus, they approved one of the most memorable and least effective slogans in advertising history: “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.” Produced by the Chicago ad agency Leo Burnett (let’s share the blame here), the ads starred William Shatner and Ringo Starr—celebrities who, like the Oldsmobile, had last been exciting in the 1960s—getting into their real-life children’s Cutlass Supremes. (Has anyone born after Babe Ruth left the Yankees ever owned a Cutlass Supreme? Seriously.)

  “My father drove a starship, so it’s only natural I’d drive around in something space-age,” Melanie Shatner said in a 1988 ad. “My Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, totally redesigned for the future. It’s powered by a fuel-injected V-6, monitored by an onboard computer. I guess some things are just meant for the next generation.”

  Ooooh, a V-6 engine. So much for the Rocket.

  (Star Trek: The Next Generation had premiered the year before, so Oldsmobile was trying to associate itself with the reboot.)

  “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile” became an eighties catch-phrase even more enduring than “Where’s the beef?” while reminding the world that the car was driven by exactly the kind of people its name suggested. Since not even baby boomers would buy Cutlass Supremes or 88s, Oldsmobile got rid of those cars altogether, replacing them with the streamlined Alero, Aurora, and Intrigue. (Oldsmobile’s general manager even suggested renaming the brand “Aurora.” When that didn’t fly, he just left the name off the cars.)

  The Alero was the good news that GM’s vice president had brought to Mayor Hollister’s office. When the first Alero came off the line, to the accompaniment of a high school band blatting “God Bless America,” Hollister was not only in the plant, wearing safety glasses and a hard hat, the city bought a car for the mayor and every cabinet member. GM had not publicly announced it was leaving Lansing, but all the workers knew, since no new cars were planned after 2000. The city paid for “LANSING WORKS—KEEPING GM” billboards on I-96, the highway every GM executive drove between Detroit and Lansing.

  The executive who oversaw the Alero’s rollout was so impressed he tipped off Hollister that GM was looking to build a new factory “for an unknown new project.”

  “Given the momentum you’ve developed, you ought to at least aggressively go after this, and not just be satisfied with the Alero,” he said.

  Even the GM vice president who had brought the bad news into city hall told Hollister, “You might have a shot at this.”

  Hollister’s engineer came up with a plan to build a new plant on the Grand River as the old plant was being demolished. GM wouldn’t have to buy new land and wouldn’t be responsible for cleaning up a brown-field. They took the plan to the office of Rick Wagoner, who was then vice president of North American Operations but would later become famous as the CEO who flew a private jet to D.C. to beg Congress for a bailout after the Wall Street shitstorm of 2008. Wagoner bought it. (Larry Dungey, my high school classmate who’d joined the army because he couldn’t go from high school to the assembly line, telling his shoprat dad, “You can’t just walk into General Motors today,” now worked in that plant as a fireman. His wife worked on the line for even more money, allowing them to raise their children in a vast suburban house.) Then the mayor learned that GM was looking for 1,200 acres, to replace Fisher Body and another nearby assembly plant. Lansing didn’t have 1,200 empty acres and could not have produced it by tearing down a blighted neighborhood, because Lansing didn’t have as much blight to offer as Flint or Detroit. So Hollister annexed a chunk of a rural township, out where the two-lane roads form squares, a mile on each side.

  While Hollister was persuading GM to stay in Lansing, he received a visit from a Leo Burnett executive who knew the community through his work on the “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign. The man owned the Sultans of Springfield, a Class A Midwest League baseball team, but was looking to move it, because the capital city of Illinois wouldn’t build him a stadium. Lansing built him one, on a vacant lot where the city had recently torn down its one-block-long red-light district, which consisted of an adult bookstore, a gay bar, and a used-record shop whose owner made ends meet by selling pot. (Lansing can only support so much vice.) Oldsmobile bought the naming rights to the stadium, and the owner christened his fugitive team the Lugnuts, supposedly in honor of the cit
y’s automaking heritage. (Most Lansingites thought the nickname was patronizing and insulting. I would have preferred the Shoprats; the mascot could have been a giant, bewhiskered rat in a baseball cap, Detroit Red Wings T-shirt, and sagging blue jeans, who disappeared after the bottom of the third, spent the middle innings in Gus’s Bar, and returned before the ninth inning to punch out. The adman was no marketing doofus, though. The Lugnuts cap, featuring a smiling bolt—a bolt!—became the bestseller in minor league baseball.)

  Lansing needed a new identity, because in 2000, GM announced it would cancel the Oldsmobile after four more model years. The Intrigues and Aleros—the Oldsmobiles that dared not speak their names—attracted some younger drivers, but at the expense of senior citizens who had cherished the Cutlass, which was as roomy and comfortable as a pair of Sansabelt slacks. Exercising its exceptional talent for destroying its own market share, GM had alienated Oldsmobile’s most loyal customers without minting enough new drivers. By the turn of the century, Oldsmobile sold only 294,000 vehicles.

  When Olds’s death sentence was announced, I considered buying an Alero, just so that, for once in my life, I could floss the local whip.

  “Why do you want to buy an Oldsmobile?” my brother asked. “You won’t be able to get parts.”

  “Um, I think you’ve got it backward,” I told him. “They’re getting rid of Oldsmobile because its parts are the same as every other car’s.”

  I could get one cheap now. The last Aleros, which came off the line in 2004, have outlived their five-year warrantees and are sliding down the ownership ladder, to pizza-delivery guys and community-college students. (The Alero does have a big fan club at the Oldsmobile reunion. The collectors skip from the 1970s to the late 1990s. The aesthetic judgment of time has confirmed that Roger Smith’s Bravadas and Achievas were ugly as shit.)

  At the beginning of his term, Hollister had thought the Oldsmobile would outlive Lansing, at least the blue-collar Lansing in which he’d grown up. Instead, blue-collar Lansing outlived the Oldsmobile. When he left office ten years later, Hollister wasn’t the mayor who had lost GM. He was a mayor with two new auto plants and a baseball team.

  The Delta Township plant is five miles southwest of the ruins of Fisher Body, which it replaced. The old factories were built on rivers and lakes. This one was built on a crook in Interstate 69, the highway between Port Huron and Indianapolis. It sits among a grid of blacktops that trace the outlines of surveyed sections and bear the names of centennial farming families, German and Yankee: Creyts, Davis, Royston, Dunkel. After nearly a year of badgering GM publicists, I was allowed to join the slipstream of a factory tour organized for state troopers at a nearby post. I was the only visitor not wearing a blue-and-gray uniform, and the only one carrying a pencil.

  The Delta plant puts together the Chevy Traverse, the Buick Enclave, and the GMC Acadia—“crossover” vehicles, too big to be sedans, too small to be SUVs. In true GM fashion, they look almost identical: like fashionable basketball shoes, if basketball shoes were ten feet long and made of steel instead of rubber. The only distinctive feature was a rear window: trapezoidal on the Acadia, rhomboid on the Traverse and Enclave.

  Like all round-the-clock factories, the plant generated its own permanent day, from a constellation of lamps hanging from a ceiling higher than a barn’s. Because it has to last twenty-four hours, the light was far dimmer than the sun’s, so the enormous room had a feeling of gloomy isolation. And it was quiet. The vehicles moved from station to station on skillets—wooden slabs, like sections of a parquet floor, or tiles on one of those handheld games in which you shuffle the numbers around, trying to put them all in order. When the skillet reached one end of the room, it slid sideways and changed directions, so the assembly line juked all over the building. The skillets also allowed workers to ride along with the cars until their job was finished. One woman tossed owner’s manuals into glove compartments. A man in a Michigan State Spartans T-shirt (or maybe a Detroit Lions jersey—everyone was dressed in athletic memorabilia), grabbed a roof liner from a T-bar hanging over the line, swung it around, pulled it through the still-glassless front window, and bolted it in, while Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Refugee” played on his work group’s radio. The line moved at exactly one vehicle per minute, but the assemblers had so perfected each motion that the work seemed both tedious and leisurely, and more artisanal than industrial.

  Our tour guide was himself a refugee from Fisher Body. He’d hired in when auto work was as loud, dirty, and muscular as the cars it produced.

  “I go back to the Body plant,” he boasted. “When we had a sunroof, the low-seniority guy used to hold the body up while the other guys bolted it in. We’ve made a lot of improvements in ergonomics.”

  The marriage area is the section of an auto plant where the body is fitted over the undercarriage, just like gluing together a plastic model of a Ford Mustang. It used to be a violent consummation, a combination of lover’s leap and wrestling body slam. The body dropped from the ceiling and was sealed to its mate by big men with torque wrenches.

  “They had these guys looked like bodybuilders,” the guide reminisced. “When they retired, they didn’t have any shoulder muscles.”

  In this plant, the undercarriages rode to the site of their wedding on wheeled pallets equipped with global positioning systems guiding them to their upper halves, to which they were joined with twenty-four-volt electric wrenches. That didn’t even become possible until the 1990s, when the military began allowing its satellites to provide civilians with GPS. The only precomputer equipment carried over from Fisher Body was a three-wheeled bicycle with a wire basket, still the nimblest vehicle for delivering parts to the assembly line.

  We approached the end of the process, the CARE line, where gray-haired workers turned the ignitions and tested the windows. (The in-plant joke was that it stood for Crippled Almost Retiree Line. “Is this a high-seniority job?” I asked the gray-hair who invited me to ride in a Traverse as he drove it over a bumpy treadmill that simulated a rocky road. “Ohhh yeah,” he responded, grinning.) Our guide made a strange statement, coming from an autoworker.

  “If you have to build cars,” he said, “this is the way to build ’em.”

  If you have to build cars? Was this a more-than-thirty-and-not-even-out GM lifer who was probably driving his fourth employee-discount SUV admitting that Ralph Nader and the Critical Mass cycling movement were correct, and the automobile was nothing but an instrument of slaughter and environmental degradation, rather than the chariot of spatial freedom and economic advancement? Was our guide confessing that cars are a filthy necessity of American life? If so, in his confession was a boast: Delta Township was the only LEED Gold-certified auto plant in the world. Rainwater was stored in cisterns to flush the toilets. A quarter of the building materials were made from recycled content. The white polymer roof deflected heat, saving on air-conditioning.

  On the way out, our group gathered by the vending machines in the lobby. The state police sergeant, a taut man with a fringe of crew cut around his skull, had demanded to know why I was writing in a notebook. Now he told the GM publicist, “I just want you guys to know that we’re right down the road if things ever go sideways in here.”

  The woman, who appeared eleven months pregnant, looked startled. This was an auto plant, not a post office or a college campus.

  “Well, thanks,” she said. “That’s good to know.”

  The Delta Township plant built its first car in 2006. (Grand River Assembly, which took the place of the original Olds plant in 2001, is building the Chevy Camaro and Cadillac ATS, Esquire’s 2012 Car of the Year. The magazine began a four-page article on the compact sedan—designed to compete with BMW, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz—by writing that it “may be the most important domestic car since the Model T.”) If Delta matches the lifespan of its predecessors, it will build cars until the twenty-second century. But only two years after it opened, General Motors went bankrupt. The new mayor of
Lansing, Virg Ber-nero, feared he would be stuck with the legacy as the leader who lost the auto industry. Like Hollister, his predecessor but one, Bernero was an autoworker’s son. Bernero’s father was an Italian immigrant fruit peddler in Pontiac, but a drunk driver ran into his truck, ruining his back, so he could no longer hoist boxes of tomatoes and peaches. He went into an auto plant, where he oiled machinery and shoveled coal into furnaces. It was less strenuous than the fruit business, and it paid well enough to support a wife and five children, and even send them to the orthodontist and the state university. Bernero knew his family had joined the middle class when they stopped paying the doctor in produce and started paying with a Blue Cross Blue Shield card.

  In that ominous autumn of 2008, Southern senators were crowing over the demise of the auto industry and Mitt Romney—son of the auto company president who governed Michigan during its most prosperous decade—wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” Bernero was frantic. He had visions of Lansing becoming a brother in misery to Flint, a diorama to scale of Detroit. As a member of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, he called the executive director in Washington, D.C.

  “We need help,” Bernero pleaded. “The auto industry is in a panic mode here. It’s in a meltdown.”

  The director told Bernero the conference president, Miami’s Manny Diaz, did not consider the auto industry a priority for America’s mayors. Miffed, Bernero resigned and started calling the mayor of every city with an auto plant, North, South, East, or Midwest. He called Lord-stown, Ohio; Shreveport, Louisiana; Arlington, Texas; Youngstown, Ohio, recruiting enough colleagues to form the Mayors Automotive Coalition. They hired a D.C. lobbyist who helped them persuade Congress to set aside $740 million for the RACER Trust, which will clean up the properties GM left behind after its bankruptcy. (Cleaning up Fisher Body will cost $4 million to $5 million. The city would like to redevelop it into a green manufacturing zone, with high-tech businesses powered by wind turbines and solar panels.)