Janesville Read online

  The pale blue house is barely a mile from the assembly plant. But it turns out that Mrs. Sheridan has never been a GM’er. She is an older mom, forty-six when the twins were born, and, since long before then, long before she kicked out the boys’ father while she was pregnant, she’s been running a day care. It has been a good business and has allowed her to raise her boys in comfortable circumstances. But lately the children have been leaving, one by one, and now her playroom is almost empty, because moms and dads have been hit by the recession, and it isn’t just because of General Motors. One dad is a carpet layer, another a plasterer, and they can’t get work, so they’re home during the day and can watch their own kids. “They don’t need me to baby-sit anymore,” she tells Deri, and breaks into tears.

  A thought leaps into Deri’s head. All the plant-closing talk, she realizes, is missing something very big. It isn’t going to be just the GM workers the Gazette keeps writing about who will be out of work. It’s also going to be the people at the freight yard who won’t be needed to unload parts for GM, and the little shops that won’t have enough customers because people stop buying in hard times, and the construction workers who already didn’t have houses to build, and the carpet layers and plasterers whose customers already couldn’t afford them. All these men and women who once made up a prosperous, flourishing workforce now at home with their kids, not needing Mrs. Sheridan, this nice lady who is hugging her again and thanking her for the mattresses and navy comforters and all the rest, including the donated purse Deri has brought for her with a gift certificate inside for Eagle Inn Family Restaurant a few blocks away on Center Avenue, because even people whose day care centers are dying in this economy deserve to get out to eat, at least once in a while.

  Deri wants to tell this mom what she is thinking. But she does not. Because her realization is upsetting, and even though she is a rookie at running the Closet, she already knows something important: better to let other people vent—lean on her with their anger, frustration, fear—without letting her feelings show too much. Better because, if she lets hers slip out, kids or moms like Mrs. Sheridan might feel bad that they have upset the teacher and stop confiding in her, and that would defeat the Closet’s whole purpose.

  So she keeps her thoughts to herself and lets Mrs. Sheridan thank her one more time. But as she gets back into her Pontiac Grand Am filled with presents, she can’t stop the words running through her head: Wow, we are in for a lot of problems here. The words still whirling, she checks the list of addresses and sets out to make her next delivery.

  Part Two

   2009

   10

  Rock County 5.0

  Mary Willmer has not forgotten the October night she came home to find Chelsea, her fifteen-year-old, crying in a circle with friends whose parents were losing their jobs, asking her what she intended to do about this situation. The answer begins to reveal itself in January. Just after the plant has closed, a tiny team starts to convene in secret once a week.

  They often huddle in the boardroom outside Mary’s office on the second floor of M&I Bank’s Main Street branch. John Beckord is there as president of Forward Janesville, the city’s business association, and James Otterstein as Rock County’s economic development manager. Sometimes a few others. And, of course, Mary.

  Their core question is as daunting as it is obvious: How to get the local economy out of its free fall? One obstacle, they quickly recognize, is that no one—not Forward Janesville; not Rock County; not the Janesville city government; not Beloit, the county’s second-largest city—has any real money to devote to a muscular economic development campaign.

  Amidst these weekly private discussions, John Beckord arrives at Mary’s office one day for a one-on-one chat. John is a pleasant, sandy-haired man with a mustache, a seasoned economic development professional who came to Janesville from Iowa eight years ago. Forward Janesville, he tells her, really wants to move ahead with this thing. It’s not just that the city’s main employer has left in the middle of a recession. Janesville has become a damaged brand, known now for being down on its economic luck. Fixing the brand—raising money from the local business community, marketing, keeping companies and winning new ones—will require a strong leader. It will be a big commitment. Point-blank, he asks Mary if she will do it.

  Mary has not seen his question coming and, when it comes, her doubts surface first. For all of its big talk, this little team has no concrete plan. Though she sits on Forward Janesville’s board, she is not exactly an economic development whiz. It all seems too hazy.

  Then, in a moment of unanticipated clarity, Mary glimpses the answer. The only way this campaign could succeed, she tells John, “is if we get our arms around this whole county. Not Janesville, not Beloit, but the whole county and really make a bold statement.”

  In many places, this idea would have been automatic. In Janesville, it is novel, verging on heretical. As long as anyone can remember, Janesville and Beloit have been, if not exactly enemies, then passionate rivals. Beloit is thirteen miles away, just above the Illinois line. It is a straight shot from downtown along Center Avenue, past the Job Center in the converted Kmart, and on down Route 51 until the Rock River stops meandering and the road follows the river right into Beloit. Close as they are, the two small cities have been worlds apart. The way that some towns have fevered sports rivalries, Janesville and Beloit have had everything rivalries. If you lived in one, you did not go out to eat in the other, or go shopping, or read the other’s local newspaper or listen to its radio station. Janesville has almost always been an overwhelmingly white community, with real estate redlining in its past. Beloit’s industry drew African Americans from the South as part of the Great Migration early in the twentieth century. But the rivalry has never been overtly about race. It has been about identity. And for the past decade, it has been about Janesville’s economic superiority. The Beloit Corporation began as an iron foundry just before the Civil War and grew into the nation’s largest manufacturer of paper-making machinery with 7,700 workers at its peak—more than the Janesville Assembly Plant. But it was sold and then went into bankruptcy and closed down. A fall from industrial glory to a toxic Superfund site. With all its good jobs, Janesville looked down on Beloit. But now, with GM just closed, Mary sees that Janesville and Beloit are in the same tough spot.

  And so her answer to John is this: Yes, she will lead this shapeless, nameless economic development campaign—if someone from Beloit is her partner. They toss around various names. They agree upon who would be ideal. This is how John Beckord comes to approach Diane Hendricks, one of the wealthiest self-made women in America.

  Diane was half of a Horatio Alger duo, but now she is a recent widow. One of nine daughters of parents who were dairy farmers, she was pregnant and married at seventeen, divorced at twenty-one. She was selling real estate when she met Ken Hendricks, a roofer’s son and high school dropout who at twenty-one formed his own roofing company. Together, they created ABC Supply Co., Inc. in Beloit—Ken having felt shunned by the Janesville business community when he was starting out. Over the years, the Hendrickses built ABC into the nation’s largest supplier of roofing and siding material. In 2006, Inc. magazine named Ken its Entrepreneur of the Year. They built a fortune—$3.5 billion, making him the ninety-first richest man in the United States, according to Forbes, by December 20, 2007—a year and three days before the assembly plant closed. That night, they returned from a business party, and, a few minutes later, Ken went to check on construction work on their garage, part of a transformation under way of their house into a ten-thousand-square-foot dream. The sixty-six-year-old roofer fell through a tarp-covered subfloor of his own garage roof. Diane found him, unconscious, on the concrete below. He died before dawn.

  Since then, Diane has run the company but retreated from many of her community involvements. At sixty-one, she is lean with striking eyes and flowing brown hair. She lives on a two-hundred-acre wooded estate with a small herd of deer, overlooking th
e river between Janesville and Beloit, in the home she completed after her husband’s death.

  Mary knew Ken more than she knows Diane, and she isn’t sure whether the recent widow would be up for a big, shapeless economic development campaign in the middle of a recession. But sure enough, once John Beckord asks, Diane is in.

  When Mary and Diane get talking, Mary is delighted to discover how much they agree. One of their central points of agreement is that, whatever this campaign will be, local businesses need to invest in it. “We are not going to wait for the government to come in and rescue us,” Diane is fond of saying. “We are not going to wait for GM to rescue us. We are on our own. Let’s get this job done.”

  They need to move fast to explain their ideas to the county’s business leaders and ask them to chip in. But first, they face a quandary: Should the initial meeting include businesses from both Janesville and Beloit, making clear from the outset this unorthodox mind-set of advancing the economic interest of all of Rock County through a single voice? Too much, too soon, Mary and Diane decide. They will start with Janesville.

  The winter night they choose will be the first time that Mary has road-tested this fledgling vision for reviving Janesville’s economy to find out whether the business establishment of her community will stand behind her. The evening is a fundraiser. It is a gamble. It is crucial, Mary knows, to Janesville’s future. She is terrified.

  Forward Janesville occasionally has gatherings at the homes of local business leaders. For this evening, the co-president of Bain’s Farm and Fleet, a friend of Mary’s, offers her imposing home on the river’s bluff. It is an ornate home with high ceilings, a classic European feel. It is here, at tables in two rooms, that a sit-down dinner is served to more than two dozen businessmen and women. The “aircraft carriers of the community” is how John Beckord regards this gathering. As the dinner ends, he begins the evening’s formal program. Then it is Mary’s turn.

  By the time she speaks, the barely born, public-private, Janesville-and-Beloit-together campaign that she and Diane are leading has a name: Rock County 5.0. Five key strategies. A five-year plan to heal the economy. She sketches all this out, placing more emphasis on how critical it is than on how difficult it will be. She and Diane take questions. Finally, the moment in the evening arrives at which Mary discloses the fundraising goal: $1 million. She announces that M&I Bank—her bank—is pledging $50,000. Though she eventually will contribute much more, Diane says that ABC Supply is pledging $50,000, too.

  Mary waits. Will anyone else come through?

  The room is silent. The entire idea, Mary fears, could die right here in this living room.

  At last, one hand goes up. It belongs to the chairman of JP Cullen, the area’s most successful construction firm, which has had so much work at the assembly plant over the decades, work that it will now lose. With a hand raised, others go up, one by one.

  The gathering is breaking up, and Mary is thrilled and overwhelmed. She needs a minute alone. She opens the door into an elegant bathroom. She stands there, shaking, nearly sobbing with relief, on the other side of the door from the business leaders of Janesville who have just put faith and money behind this new hope—this Rock County 5.0 that is still taking form. If this evening hadn’t worked out, she had no Plan B. But now, looking into the mirror, Mary tells herself, “We are off and running.”

   11

  The Fourth Last Day

  Machines ripped out. Assembly lines ripped out. Workers ripped out. It is April 10, Mike Vaughn’s final day at Lear Corp. For almost two decades, Lear has been Janesville’s largest supplier to General Motors, manufacturing the seats for every vehicle that came out of the assembly plant. Founded outside Detroit in 1917, the company eventually merged with a business formed by the inventor and businessman William Lear, who developed a car radio, the 8-track tape, and the Learjet. It has two hundred locations in three dozen countries. In Janesville, the assembly plant has been Lear’s only client, their fortunes bound together.

  Now Mike stands in the doorway, taking a long look into the shell of a factory.

  Inside this space, he met his wife, Barb. With their wages combined and overtime, Lear gave them a nice, six-figure life until her job ended last summer—$22 an hour suddenly gone, though Barb welcomed a reprieve from the assembly line and sped back to school. They were managing. After today, though, they will go from one income to none.

  Inside this space, too, Mike has been shop chairman for UAW Local 95, representing a workforce of eight hundred Lear union brothers and sisters. This responsibility made Mike the third generation of Vaughns to have been a leader in the UAW local. His grandfather Tom came to GM from a lead mine and worked at the assembly plant for thirty and a half years until he retired. His father, Dave, started at the assembly plant at nineteen and stayed thirty-five years until he, too, retired.

  At forty-one, Mike is a plainspoken man with close-cropped dark hair and an earnest manner. He had applied to General Motors right out of high school but never got the call, so he went to U-Rock for a year. Feeling unfocused, he left for a cook’s job in the Mercy Hospital kitchen. General Motors still wasn’t hiring, so eventually he followed his brother, DJ, into Lear. He started on general assembly and became a relief operator, filling in on jobs throughout the factory, and then he trained other people to be relief operators. By 2000, he’d already been involved in the union for a few years when he left the assembly line, under the time-honored labor tradition of “release time,” to represent 250 workers on first shift. Four years later, his fellow workers elected him chairman of the entire Lear bargaining unit. He handled grievances with management, made sure everyone knew the factory policies, represented Lear workers in the local—just as his father and grandfather had done, the union a sheltering presence.

  But by this spring day, Mike has had responsibilities that his father and grandfather never imagined. He helped to prepare an application to the U.S. Labor Department to get certification for Trade Readjustment Allowances—government help for workers hurt by foreign trade—for the bargaining unit of a plant that was, in stages, going away. And as each wave of his union brothers and sisters lost their jobs, he stood alongside them. For this reason, today feels like Mike’s fourth last day.

  The first of those last days was fifteen months ago, when several dozen second-shift workers were laid off. It had seemed a routine enough layoff. Over at the assembly plant, production was being slowed because of the weak SUV market, so General Motors didn’t need as many of Lear’s seats. Mike sat with the first unlucky round of workers in human resources meetings as they were given their layoff slips. He made sure they were told everything they needed to know about unemployment benefits and COBRA health insurance and training opportunities. He answered their questions from the union side. He was present for them on their final day.

  His second last day—the same day over the summer that a shift went down at the assembly plant—stole the jobs of half of Lear’s workers, ones who had been there for up to fifteen years. This time, the frightened job losers included Barb. By then, GM had said it would be shutting the assembly plant, so he knew it was only a matter of time before his own paychecks would disappear, along with hers. It was raw shock. He felt it in his gut.

  The third last day was on December 23, the date the assembly plant closed. This time, the job-losing Lear workers included Mike’s brother, DJ, who had long ago encouraged him to apply. As this day neared, though he hadn’t done it for the two previous last days, Mike walked through the plant, meeting with small groups of his UAW brothers and sisters to say a personal goodbye. There were, at this point, 371 goodbyes to say, so he spent a few days talking to as many as he could, telling these men and women he represented that they must try to remain positive and remember that they were proud people, smart and hardworking. “You have to make the best of what comes next,” Mike said over and over, “and start formulating your plan.” Barb was, he knew, trying to make the best, with her high school
equivalency diploma and her criminal justice studies at Blackhawk Tech. Still, as he spread his plan-formulating message around the plant floor, he sometimes cried.

  As he went through all these goodbyes, Mike understood that it was not just Lear Corp., which would file for bankruptcy that summer. Not even just Lear and General Motors, which had always been resented by many workers at the suppliers in the area for having the best pay and vacation benefits, even though amalgamated UAW Local 95 included them all. General Motors was resented but acknowledged as essential, because, if not for the assembly plant, a lot of other jobs wouldn’t have existed and, now that GM was closing, jobs were disappearing all around town. Two days before Christmas, the day that GM and Lear stopped production, so did the 159 employees of Logistics Services, Inc., a warehouse that sequenced parts and delivered them to the assembly plant. So did Allied Systems Group, whose 117 workers suddenly stopped hauling GM vehicles to car dealers through the Midwest. And nearby in Brodhead, seventy workers at the Woodbridge Group stopped making the foam to be delivered to Lear, where it was stuffed into seats for GM. Woodbridge’s other ninety-nine workers would be laid off when that factory, too, closed by spring. No, it wasn’t only GM and Lear that, by February, pushed up Rock County’s unemployment rate to 13.4 percent.

  As these thousands of workers were losing their jobs, and Mike worried late at night about what would happen to them all, he carried around another piece of knowledge: When the fourth last day arrived, it would be his turn. As shop chairman, he was allowed to stay on with a small maintenance crew and a few forklift operators, just fifteen in all. Each weekday from after Christmas until two days before Easter—Good Friday—he watched as this little crew took apart the plant, piece by piece, assembly line by assembly line. A little more gone every day, until now it is empty, which is pretty much how Mike is feeling inside.