Janesville Page 5

  In this room in the Renaissance Center, no one mentions the parallel rescue maneuver that General Motors’ chief executive is attempting in Washington. Paul is aware that, as much as he has cultivated a relationship with Clarke, as much power as Clarke now holds over Janesville’s fate, Clarke’s own future—the future of the corporation in which this executive has spent his entire working life—could be on quicksand, depending on how events play out in Washington for the U.S. automakers in coming months.

  At least for now, Clarke’s power is intact. He listens respectfully. He says that GM will give careful consideration to Wisconsin’s economic incentive package. He does not say that GM’s decision to close the plant is final. For the rescue team, this passes for good news.

  Tim flies back to Madison in the governor’s private turboprop. Paul catches a flight to Milwaukee. As he does every Friday, he climbs into his Chevy Suburban, which he keeps parked at the airport, for the familiar seventy-mile drive home. The rescue team, he thinks, left no stone unturned. It did what it could. And yet he hasn’t any idea what will happen.

   7

  Mom, What Are You Going to Do?

  The other shoe drops, sudden as the first. On the second Monday in October, an executive from Detroit is back at the assembly plant, and the GM’ers lucky enough to still have their jobs are all called to another meeting eighteen minutes after the start of first shift. The company hasn’t yet figured out whether Janesville will get its new small car, but it has made another decision. General Motors is in more desperate shape than it was four months ago, when it gave the plant the 2010 death sentence. That was optimistic. Production will stop in ten weeks. Eighty-five years of turning out Chevrolets—poof! Gone. Two days before Christmas.

  News like this ricochets through town, and, over at M&I Bank on Main Street, it takes no time to reach Mary Willmer. Mary is community president of M&I, Janesville’s largest bank, and for weeks now she has had the unsettling sensation that, for someone in her position, the news could not be getting any worse. Four Mondays ago, she watched as Lehman Brothers, the storied investment bank, collapsed and filed the biggest bankruptcy case in U.S. history. Last Monday, the stock market crashed. By Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had plunged 18 percent, its sharpest decline in a single week. On Saturday, at a meeting in Washington a few blocks from the White House, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director warned that the fragility of financial institutions of Europe and America had “pushed the global financial system to the brink of systemic meltdown.”

  Mary knows pretty much everyone in Janesville who matters, and she knows that, for most people in town who do not happen to be bankers, these have seemed like remote events of a distant crisis. Today, the crisis is coming home.

  Mary understands the community, understands what this blow means. Closing in on fifty, she has been at M&I for nearly a quarter century, since she was hired into an entry-level position at the branch on the south side of town, right by the plant. Her customers were GM’ers or workers for suppliers. Her brother was at the plant his entire working life, a forklift driver until he was able to retire a couple of years ago. Her sister-in-law is still there.

  This sped-up closing is awful, no doubt, but it’s not just the GM’ers that Mary is worrying about. With Lehman Brothers and Wall Street falling apart, what about M&I’s future? Her bank, headquartered in Milwaukee, is the largest in Wisconsin, not just in Janesville. She knows that M&I is well diversified, less vulnerable than some. Yet she has been thinking lately that it would be a good idea to calculate the actual risk facing the portion of M&I for which she is responsible.

  With these twin pressures pounding inside her head all day—the plant, her bank—Mary is exhausted by evening when she gets home to the white Colonial she shares with her husband, an M&I mortgage manager, and their two kids who still live at home. Standing in the kitchen, she glances into the family room. Chelsea, her fifteen-year-old, is in there with some friends. Mary is used to her kids inviting their friends over to hang out in the family room with its cozy fireplace. But not like this. Ten teenagers are sitting on the floor in a big circle, no one saying a word. Some are crying. One of the criers is Chelsea.

  Mary walks into the room to say “hi” and quickly picks up that these kids cannot be consoled. The best she can do, she figures, is retreat to the kitchen and get them something to eat.

  The kitchen is expansive, with two pantries, hardwood floors, granite countertops, and a view of the patio and pool out back. Though Mary seldom mentions the fact in public, her life has not always been this plush. Her father was a Yugoslavian immigrant who dreamt of a Wisconsin dairy farm and reached his dream, so Mary grew up on a small farm in rural Whitewater. She was ten when her father’s cancer showed up and when he died four months later. Afterward, she and her mother lived on a fragment of the farm, poor as dirt for a time. It was during that poor period that they were grocery shopping one day when her mother pulled from her wallet a kind of coupon that Mary had never seen. When she asked what the coupons were, the answer—food stamps—brought a rush of such embarrassment and fear that she has never forgotten the moment. Years later, when she scraped together money to study finance at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, she already had decided that becoming a banker would be a way to serve others and protect herself. Just after graduation, she lost her mother, too, to a heart attack, but went ahead with her plan to move to Janesville, where she worked for three years in a real estate office while she waited to get hired by the bank. Through her long ascent to community bank president, she has become one of Janesville’s leading citizens—chairwoman of the Noon Rotary, president of the Citizens Advisory Council, chairperson of the United Way, Forward Janesville’s Woman of Excellence. Still, a place inside Mary has not forgotten the darkness of fearing that she and her mother would lose what little they had.

  It is that private, fearful place that Mary can still touch when Chelsea comes into the kitchen, sobbing, and tells her that half of her friends in the family room have a parent losing a job. Including the father of her best friend, Erica.

  As she watches her smart, sensitive daughter in tears, Mary knows that Chelsea cannot see the scared farm girl who discovered that, without food stamps, there wouldn’t be enough to eat. She knows that Chelsea is seeing the banker and leading citizen who can always be depended upon to come up with a solution for the community.

  “Mom,” Chelsea implores her. “What are you going to do?”

   8

  “When One Door of Happiness Closes, Another Opens”

  The June floods have receded, and a National Emergency Grant is pumping federal money into temporary paychecks for mud-scraping, muck-removing, foundation-rehabilitating public works projects. So, over at the Job Center, Bob Borremans’s focus is now laser-pointed where he’d expected it to be all along: on the autoworkers.

  All well and good that the governor and his rescue committee are trying to salvage the General Motors plant, Bob thinks, but, even if they succeed, new products do not start rolling along retooled assembly lines overnight. In the meantime, with two days before Christmas getting closer and closer, thousands of people are facing the imminent reality of their final day of work. And with the plant’s second shift gone since July, thousands of people are out of work already. Nearly a year into the recession, empty jobs are not lying around to grab. People don’t know where to turn. Bob feels the weight of their anxiety, their aimlessness.

  Having long prided himself on staring down problems, though, Bob is pleased with a move he already has made: creating a guide to all the resources in town that can help people who have been thrown out of work, or who will be soon. He felt a take-charge satisfaction as he and some of the Job Center’s staff started contacting the leaders of organizations across Rock County to ask permission to include them in the new guide. Organizations that dispense help with job training, consumer credit, housing, health care, literacy, food, bouts of depression, bouts of
addiction, bouts of domestic violence—two hundred far-flung, help-offering organizations in all.

  He’d gotten this idea while attending a conference in Washington not long before, from a breakfast conversation with a woman who ran a job center like his. Her East Coast community had had massive layoffs, which prompted her to create a help guide. This was the kind of advice Bob likes—practical and levelheaded. He’d felt sorry for her community, so much less lucky than Janesville had ever been or probably ever would be. But he stored the conversation in his mind.

  And now that Janesville’s luck was slipping and he’d brought out the idea, it seemed useful to include in the guide, along with the listings of help-offering organizations, some tips on trying to cope emotionally with having a good job cut out from under you. So on page A8 of the guide was a box with the heading, “What to Do After a Layoff.” The box had fourteen bullet points, the first of which contained a crucial antidote to lost-job paralysis. “Don’t Feel Ashamed,” the heading of this first bullet point said. “Being laid off is not your fault.”

  And scattered through the guide were words from Americans renowned for the challenges they confronted. A quote from Abraham Lincoln: “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.” And from Helen Keller: “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”

  The help guide for laid-off workers was finished by fall. Bob was pleased. At once inspirational and handy, it was in the tradition of Janesville’s good-government response to adversity—the same tradition that, seven decades before, had tamed a potentially violent sit-down strike, transforming labor strife into a nocturnal downtown parade.

  As it happened, the act of checking with all these helping organizations produced an important ripple effect. The United Way of North Rock County—whose parking lot had been the scene of spawning carp months before—and leaders of other organizations urged Bob to take a much larger step, to form a coalition to stand together in response to the mass layoffs.

  An excellent idea, Bob thinks, to coordinate the help givers, to maximize their power and efficiency. Having been around town for so many years, Bob knows who he needs if this coalition is going to make a difference. He needs Sharon Kennedy, the vice president of learning at Blackhawk Tech. He needs the right people from the county’s school districts and public libraries. As he is sending out his invitations to form this new coalition, Janesville’s politicians in Washington and Madison hear of these plans and ask to be part of the solution—most of them Democrats, but also an aide to Republican Paul Ryan. This aide puts forth the idea of bringing in a team from the University of Michigan, which has worked as consultants to two dozen other Midwestern places knocked off their moorings by disappearing jobs.

  So, late on the afternoon of December 10, Bob is at the maiden meeting of Collaborative Organizations Responding to Dislocation—CORD, as it will be known—listening to a presentation by a guy from Ann Arbor named Larry Molnar, a researcher and economy-building coach at the University of Michigan’s Community Economic Adjustment Program. Molnar is talking up the advantages to Janesville of working with his program, the advantages including guidance on how to make the most of six hundred government grants that exist for the purpose of helping economically distressed communities—plus a personal introduction to people who are federal and state arbiters of which communities deserve that money.

  As he listens to this presentation, Bob—a realist, a pragmatist, a sixty-year-old guy with sardonic humor—is sensing a tinge of hope. The assembly plant will close in thirteen days. Sure, General Motors will leave behind a crater. But, he thinks, the Job Center and the assistance from Ann Arbor and the banding-together help dispensers he has assembled just might be pulling ahead of the trouble.

  In Bob’s view, the shackle of big GM paychecks bred complacency and tethered people to the assembly line for thirty years or forty—for an entire working life, even if they hated the work. With CORD just born and so much grant money on the horizon, Bob believes, catastrophe might prove to be unbidden opportunity to help people find the work paths that would have suited them all along. Sure, people will need to retrain for this new work, but that’s his specialty, and he can help them go back to school while waiting for jobs to emerge on the far side of this recession.

  The Job Center together with the rest of CORD, Bob believes, can help Janesville’s job-losing autoworkers discover their latent dreams.

   9

  The Parker Closet

  Deri Wahlert is worrying that some of her students will have strange, sad Christmases. It is mid-December, three months since she talked her principal at Parker High into letting her start the Parker Closet. As a social studies teacher, she hadn’t exactly planned on the Closet, but it had seemed more and more an inevitability ever since she had, her first year at Parker, found out the secret of why a junior named Sarah in her first-period class was late to school and losing weight. One day, Sarah confided to Deri that her mother had taken off, leaving her with her little brother in an apartment without electricity or enough to eat. Deri told Sarah’s guidance counselor and a few other teachers, and they began to collect food and clothes for Sarah. And it occurred to Deri that there must be other kids who could use a helping hand.

  This business of helping was vintage Deri. She had been barely a teenager when her father got the virus that left him paralyzed. He was in his forties and resented having to stop working a few years later, and her family couldn’t afford it, with even his careful savings and Social Security disability checks not adding up to his lost salary. The Americans with Disabilities Act was just a year old when he got sick—new enough that wheelchair ramps were rare on sidewalks and into restaurants and offices. Deri remembers the stares and the rumors that flew in the small town of Fort Atkinson where they lived: Did he have AIDS? No, it was just an unfortunate, ordinary virus. It taught her that even a middle-class white guy and his family could face injustice.

  Early on, she began to look for people and places that could benefit from her empathy: a friend in high school who would go on to the Wheelchair Olympics, vacant lots that needed cleaning up while she was in college at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. A professor once told her that she belonged in the ’60s with her hippie passion for righting wrongs.

  When she graduated, she was committed to working toward a greener world and felt lucky to be hired by an environmental consulting firm, until the job ended after a few months. Eventually, a college friend pointed out that she was qualified for substitute teaching. She quickly sensed that she had found her calling, so she got a second degree in history and another in secondary education and landed at Parker High for her first full-time teaching job the fall of 2006, before anyone was talking about plant-closing troubles. Deri kept in her mind and spirit a favorite poem in which a wise man notices a young man standing along the shore, tossing starfish back into the sea. The shoreline is miles long, the wise man points out, and there are too many starfish to save them all. And the young man, tossing another into the ocean, past the breaking waves, replies to the wise man: “It made a difference for that one.”

  So Deri made a difference for Sarah and started watching closely enough to notice a few more kids coming to school hungry and tired. Lately, she was noticing kids from families that used to be middle-class until a parent lost a job. At the start of this school year, Deri’s principal gave her a spare storage room two doors down the hallway from her social studies classroom, #1151. So the Parker Closet became a reality, with twelve students who ducked inside, when their friends weren’t looking so that nobody else would know, to comb through donated Rubbermaid bins for toothpaste or used jeans or cans of soup.

  Now, with Christmas and the plant closing soon, it has hit Deri that some of her Closet kids might not get presents at home. And as she has begun to line up special donations—the Big Give she is ca
lling this aspect of her project—she asked a freshman named Trent what he wanted and was absolutely floored by his answer: a mattress. A mattress? “What about the one at home?” she asked, trying to keep the surprise out of her voice. That thing was older than him, Trent told her. Thin with coils poking up, and saggy. It hadn’t been bad when he was smaller, but now that he was growing, he sometimes couldn’t sleep at night because it hurt. And when she asked what else he might like, something that would feel like a real present, his answer was, “Can you have something for my mom, too?”

  Deri’s mind was still sliding around the fact of a Parker High freshman lying awake because of a shoddy bed when she bumped into Trent’s twin, Mason. She told him about his brother wanting a mattress for Christmas and asked his opinion. When he said, “Definitely could use new ones,” she thought, “Oh my God. How am I going to get this?” But Deri found a store willing to donate two mattresses, even had them delivered. Then she figured she might as well scrounge up some bedding to go along.

  So, after school one afternoon, she lugs a bulky pile out of her car and up to a neat blue ranch house. Two pillows. Two navy blue comforters. Matching sheets and pillowcases. She rings the doorbell and finds herself standing in a playroom of this house where Trent and Mason live with their mother, Sherry Sheridan, who at this moment, though they’ve never met before, is pulling her into a very large hug. And as long as she’s wrapped in a hug from this mom who seems so grateful and already has offered her something to drink as if she were a real guest and not a thirty-year-old teacher on a mission after school, Deri feels she shouldn’t leave right away but should ask a little about their lives.