I thought I was handling the stress, keeping my work life and home life separate, but I wasn’t. I’m ashamed to say that I’d been flaring up at home for entirely too long, and even in public, like the afternoon I was at the mall with Vickie picking up a pair of dance shoes. When I realized that the shoes hadn’t been dyed the right color, I was so nasty to the man behind the counter that he called security. Now, during family vacations with Vickie and the grandkids, my body fell apart and I’d be sick in bed. I couldn’t even enjoy my two grandsons—Will was already ten, and Ross, born five years after Will, was growing up fast. I’d tried to keep my promise to myself to be involved with the grandkids, but on our annual beach trips I’d collapse. And I was tough on Charles. Nothing he said or did made me happy.
BUT SOMETHING greater was going on. I understand now how the mistreatment of women can ruin their health and affect their family life, but instead of directing my anger at Goodyear, I lashed out at people who didn’t deserve it or turned my frustrations inward. Literally. My body had been telling me what I didn’t want to face. The job wasn’t worth the suffering, but I wasn’t ready to admit defeat. I told myself that the good outweighed the bad.
I convinced myself that I’d had many productive years at Goodyear. It just depended on who my supervisor was and what department I was in, but the doctor’s words when he’d given me a checkup rumbled around in my mind, refusing to leave. He’d insisted that I scale back at work or I’d find myself right back in his office with possibly something worse to deal with. That concerned me. I’d always seen myself as a lifer at Goodyear, working thirty years, knowing when I retired that Charles and I would have the security of full medical coverage. I also had to build up as much retirement as possible to live on and reduce the debt we’d accumulated owning a home, buying cars, and paying for college.
Confined to the hospital bed with the TV turned to silent, I watched Charles sleep in the chair beside me, comforted by his presence. I still admired his broad shoulders and strong body. When we were in the waiting room right before I was called back for surgery, I caught the silhouette of a tall man talking to my doctor down the hall. My heart jumped at the sight of this handsome man. It was Charles. After all these years, I could still feel the same giddiness I felt as a schoolgirl.
We’d been through a lot together, and I was distressed about how much time we’d spent apart. He’d been more than patient with me. Too patient, probably. I felt like I’d abandoned him at times, leaving him to raise the kids alone. The truth was, I’d neglected those who cared about me most. Sometimes, going to work had been easier than dealing with the messiness of family life. If Charles hadn’t been a Baptist, he and I would have probably divorced during those impossible years when the kids were teenagers.
Shifting my body trying to find a comfortable position, I hoped the pain medicine would kick in soon. I watched the silent image of Murphy Brown flitting on the screen across the room and reached for the control to set the bed higher. The searing sensations the pain pill hadn’t dulled washed over me.
My body was telling me something, and I needed to listen. I needed my life to be different now, but what if it was too late? I prayed it wasn’t.
AFTER THE surgery, I returned to work the last week before the plant closed on Christmas Eve, as it always did for the one-week holiday. Often when workers returned from a medical leave they were given a lighter load, and Eddie assigned me to work in one of the offices with Sharon, a secretary. Before this, I’d spoken to Sharon only in the mornings when I was coming off the night shift and she was starting her morning routine. I didn’t know her well, but I knew she’d been at Goodyear much longer than I had.
Working with Sharon all day, I learned that she’d been a supervisor for eight years before she had to quit the night shift and take on less responsibility. She had been a single mother with a small child, and when her daughter’s caregiver died of cancer, Sharon had to change her work routine. She told me she’d been approached several years earlier to return to being a supervisor.
“Why didn’t you take the offer?” I asked, surprised that she was still a secretary.
“I did. I couldn’t say no to thirty-two hundred dollars a month. And I was told I’d be given raises in the future to get me even with the men’s salary.”
“What happened?”
“I started working in the tire room, but I should have known something was up when I got my first paycheck and it was exactly the same as what I’d been making as a secretary.”
“What did you do? Go talk to somebody about it?”
“At first, no. You know how things are. I hoped for the best and kept on working.” She looked past me through the office window. I turned to see what she was looking at, a group of night supervisors huddled together, talking. I half expected them to put their hands together and do a group hurrah before running out onto some imaginary field. I turned back to Sharon.
“You were in same area I was when I was in the tire room. How many associates did you supervise?”
“Fifty-two men.”
“That’s a lot of builders to deal with.”
“I know. I also had the truckers to deal with and had to oversee inspection, but some of the old-timers are really good, and then there are some who will fall asleep right there at the machine. I had this one guy who’d wander off on break every five minutes.”
“Tell me about it. It’s like herding cats at times. I had this one nest of people, and I had to time them when they went to the restroom and when they went to eat. Sometimes I’d follow them with my stopwatch to make sure they didn’t disappear forever.
“The guys were the least of my problems. My paycheck never changed. And the worst part was the guys on the floor probably made more than I did, and I was their supervisor.”
“So what did you do?”
“After a couple of months, I asked about it and was told, ‘We’re working on it.’ So I kept thinking my next paycheck would be right. About a month later, when it wasn’t, I asked again when my salary increase was going to take effect. I was told the same thing. A couple of weeks later, I went back. You wouldn’t believe what I was told then. I was informed, ‘You’re crazy as hell. We can’t give you that kind of money.’ ”
I’d heard some bizarre things come out of people’s mouths, and I knew how Sharon must have felt when she heard those words. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘That’s right.’ I was crazy as hell. Crazy as hell to keep doing what I was doing for the same pay. That’s when I came back to this office.”
“That was the best thing you could have done under the circumstances. You couldn’t have kept working in the tire room the way things were.”
“I know. I was offered a twenty percent raise, but that still meant I was nowhere near the base pay for a manager. And just last month they said, with the ticket being down, I’m on the list to be laid off.”
There wasn’t anything comforting to say about that.
Sharon opened her desk drawer and pulled out a pack of gum. “I really need a cigarette.” She unwrapped a piece of gum and put it into her mouth. “If I’m laid off, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
I could see the toll working at Goodyear had taken on her. Sharon was naturally tall and thin, but it looked like she’d lost a lot of weight recently; her khaki pants hung loose around her hips when she stood up.
The door opened and one of the morning supervisors walked in, eating a doughnut. “Morning, girls. What you got for me today?” Flecks of white icing fell on Sharon’s desk as he peered over her shoulder at the list of shift workers.
Sharon rolled her eyes at me and handed him his report offs, a list of absent workers.
“Rick’s laid out again?” he said with his mouth full while he scanned the sheet.
“Yeah. I don’t know how long he’s going to be out, but I got Dave to come in for him. And we have a floater to cover any gaps.”
“Appreciate it. You girls be good now a
nd don’t get into any trouble today.” He winked, closing the door and joining the other supervisors still huddled in conversation.
IN SUCH a short period, I didn’t have a chance to get to know Sharon very well, but I sympathized with her. Just the nature of the manufacturing work is hard enough on both men and women, and most people retired with a slew of ailments—back problems, pulmonary issues, heart disease. As one of my young tire builders told me before he quit, “This place is a death trap, and I don’t plan to die here.” Which was worse, a fatal mistake with the curing press or a slow disease from the toxic chemicals? I don’t know. I do know what he couldn’t understand, being so young: Goodyear gave families the ability to make more money than anywhere else. For most people that meant being able to send their children to college, breaking the cycle of disadvantage for the family, and that was worth the risks.
For others, like Sharon, the toll was becoming too great.
ON JANUARY 1, 1997, back in my regular department, I worked the start-up shift, from 5:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. I was glad when my shift was over. It’s always a scary proposition to coax a cold machine up and running, especially when the guys are just as reluctant to start producing after a long holiday of lazing around. I wasn’t in great shape myself. I still had a hitch in my giddy-up, as they say, from the recent surgery. I’d come in early to make sure the department was in order, and I could feel my lower back protesting that it wasn’t used to my standing on the concrete floor for so long.
After our morning managers’ meeting, Eddie asked me to step into his office. “I need to see you,” he said.
When I saw the HR manager already seated, I thought, Oh, my word, this will be some evaluation. Eddie had sent me a self-evaluation form in the mail while I was at home after my colon surgery. Charles had driven me to the plant to return it, and I hadn’t heard another word about it. I’d seen the other managers being evaluated while I was working in the office and figured Eddie was waiting until the first of the year for mine. Different managers evaluated us at different times of the year, and these evaluations were sporadic at best. I’d probably had no more than ten in almost twenty years. The few raises I’d gotten were communicated to me on torn slips of paper with the percentage written on them. I hadn’t been evaluated or given a raise since my performance award, an 8 percent raise, in December 1995.
The HR manager got right to the point. I was being terminated.
“We’re experiencing severe cutbacks, and plans are in the works at corporate to phase out the entire Gadsden operation,” he explained in the solemn voice of a well-rehearsed funeral director.
Before I could digest his words, Eddie chimed in, “Your performance has been poor this year. One of the lowest of everybody’s.”
My shock was replaced by a sense of guarded alarm. “How can you say that when I’ve never been evaluated?”
“We have your other evaluation that another manager did,” Eddie replied.
“You mean the year I was given an award? That was my best year.”
“No, I’m talking about Jeff’s audits.”
Great. The audits Jeff had lied about when he evaluated me. “You know my record’s not that bad. You’ve seen my guys wear their gear, and you know my machines are always running.”
“I don’t know. I only know what I see written on these audits.”
I could feel my adrenaline rising, and I wanted to argue and fight back. I had been out of the loop for a while now, being excluded from managers’ meetings and not receiving some important memos. I clenched my toes inside my hard boots and repeated, “My record’s not that bad and never has been.” I tried to tell Eddie that not only were the audits wrong but that Jeff had started his nonsense again, and wanted me to go get a drink with him after work. Though I couldn’t help but wonder if something was pathologically wrong with Jeff, I didn’t dwell on his inappropriate remarks, knowing how precarious my position was at the moment.
“I trust Jeff is doing his job the way he’s supposed to. As far as your job, we would have told you in November when we notified everyone else, but you were on sick leave,” Eddie said, ready, it seemed, with an immediate response to any objection I might pose.
“Why not tell me in December when I was back for a week?”
“I didn’t want to ruin your holidays.”
I started to ask another question, but Eddie waved his hand across his throat in a gesture to cut me off, so I stopped.
“We’ll talk in a minute,” he said.
When the HR manager left, Eddie said, “Don’t worry, Lilly, I don’t have anyone to replace you. You’re not going anywhere.”
That’s just the way it was. You were told one thing, and another happened.
Eddie sent me to meet with the “outplacement counselor” right after that meeting anyway. During our conversation I was exhausted, and not much the counselor said sank in. I was hoping I could take Eddie’s word that I wasn’t being let go, so I wasn’t very open to dusting off my résumé and meeting her again at her office in Anniston to start another job search. Exasperated by my lack of interest in her help, she blurted out, “Why in heaven’s name do you want to work for a company that treats you like this?”
It seemed pretty clear to me. Regardless of what the audits said, I was good at my job; I enjoyed it. Times were challenging, and it wouldn’t be easy to find another well-paying job. Did she really think that at this juncture in my life there was something else out there besides being a greeter at Wal-Mart that would be an option? In the end, no matter where you go, you’re shoveling the same scattlepoop from the barn, so after all the good and the bad I’d experienced, I certainly wasn’t going to give up now. That would have been insane. I wasn’t a quitter.
“You be here on the first and fifteenth of each month, and you’ll see why I stay. I need to keep building my retirement.” I was sixty years old. Goodyear was my career.
The following months I was on a constant roller-coaster ride, wondering if Goodyear would deliver on its plan to lay me off, but I stayed where I was. Another supervisor had a heart attack, and I split his shift, in addition to my own shift, with another manager. No more mention was made to me of my being terminated, and when I brought it up, I was told the same thing: There wasn’t anybody to replace me, and there was no more mention of the plant closing. I worked more overtime that year, 1997, than in all my years there.
That meant, of course, that I didn’t have time to enjoy Charles’s retirement. He’d dreaded retiring, and when Fort McClellan offered to extend his position for two years as they prepared to close the base, he jumped at it. When he did retire, he threw himself into helping Phillip, who’d experienced his own ups and downs in the real estate industry, with some good years and some bad enough that I’d save the ketchup and mustard packets from fast-food restaurants for him. Now he was managing several apartment buildings, houses, and a historic bed-and-breakfast in Anniston.
Charles and Phillip hadn’t been very close over the years, and Charles looked at the opportunity to help Phillip manage his properties and run a small company he bought that manufactured taxicab lights as a way to build a better relationship. But as financial pressures bore down on Phillip, he became difficult to work with, his mood swings growing more unpredictable. Charles stuck it out, though, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t thrilled when he had to go knocking on apartment doors to collect rent or evict someone. That’s not what I’d envisioned for his retirement, but I was still so consumed with hanging on at Goodyear, despite the doctor’s concerns, that I wasn’t focused on Charles.
BY THE time the temperature had soared into a typical pattern of high nineties with little rain in sight that summer, my patience had begun to wear thin. Sometimes it was the small things that got under my skin most. In the tire room, everyone on my crew had been awarded a silver NASCAR racing jacket emblazoned with Goodyear’s winged-foot logo for keeping the waste in the department to a minimum. Goodyear provided special tires for many of the
race cars—the plant in Akron had its own speedway for testing them. With NASCAR so close by and all the guys such big racecar fans, the jackets were a big deal. Turns out the jacket ordered for me happened to be an extra-large. It might as well have been an overcoat. The guys couldn’t quit laughing when I tried it on. I wore it once or twice and didn’t say a word, but the slights added up, each as surprising as the unexpected shock from a paper cut. I gave the jacket to Charles. It was even too big for him.
I wouldn’t say anything about something like the lovely jacket, but I did ask Eddie about his e-mails addressed to “Boys.”
“Don’t you realize you have something besides a boy on your team?”
“Lilly, we have work to do, and discussing this is a waste of my time, your time, and the company’s time.”
“Well, that’s not how I see it. Did you ever think it’s unfair that you’re singling me out like this because I’m the only woman?”
The next time he sent a memo, he wrote, “Boys and lady.”
Only a few days after that he cornered me alone in a small conference room and said, “Lilly, your production numbers are down again. You’re not getting the job done.”
I didn’t see a shred of paperwork or one printout with figures to prove what he was saying. “Show me the production numbers and give me two weeks; I’ll correct the problem,” I said. He held a folder and a clipboard in his hand but didn’t look at either.
“The problem is, two other area mangers are telling me they’re pulling your weight.”
“That’s simply not true. Show me the production report and give me time to fix it, and you know I will.”
“I can’t do that.”
I was tempted to grab his folder and see what he had in there. “Well, I can’t fix a problem if I don’t know what the problem is.”
He sat down, his voice lowering as he placed the folder on the table. “You’re just like me. You just keep coming back for more. You can’t help it, can you?”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
Grace and Grit Page 13