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Chapter 13

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Chapter 12: Culture  

My ’68 Summer Camp at Fort Leonard Wood was the final Summer Camp of my enlistment in the Reserves. The Drill Corporal celebration was one of the highest of the high points in my life. In five years I had gone from a Pvt. E-1 without a reputation for being anything special to a Sgt. E-5 with every member of a highly successful class I’d tutored honoring me for their outstanding accomplishment.  If I put all of my intermittent periods of active duty back to back it was a journey of success that spanned less than a year. 

I didn’t know of anyone in the 70^th Division who had risen faster than I had without becoming an officer. All of the other E-5s or higher had either completed a two or three-year enlistment in the Regular Army or re-upped after their six-year obligation with the Reserves. This wasn’t merely an ego booster. It was a résumé of organizational and leadership skills that I thought could help me to go farther sooner in my modeling career until I got a sharp jab to my ego and my résumé from a modeler in the National Guard working right next to me.  

The Guardsman, who was about my age, had no more experience than I had in modeling or the military. In modeling we were on the same pay level. In the Guard he was a staff sergeant E-6.  

At first I reacted with disbelief. Then I felt something uncomfortably close to envy. Regardless of how good I thought I was as a proven leader of men, this guy had documented proof that he was better. Yes, the thought did cross my mind that I could kick his ass physically if I couldn’t do it any other way, a thought that made me feel as stupid and small-minded as I had ever felt. 

It turned out that he had been activated during the 1967 Detroit riots as part of a tank maintenance crew with an open E-6 slot.  

Well, that cleared up my bruised ego and my irrational hostility toward the Guardsman. The difference between his E-6 and my E-5 had nothing to do with our relative leadership shills. I got mine by joining an Army Reserve Division and doing many difficult jobs better than anyone in the Division had done them before. He got his by joining a National Guard unit and being in the right place at the right time during the ’67 riots.  

While I was surveying the 50 caliber machine gun bullet holes on the outside of my apartment building, he was servicing the tanks that fired them. The difference between us wasn’t personal; it was historical, geographical and structural.

Historically, the 70^th Training Division drew its membership from the metropolitan area that included Detroit and its racially segregated suburbs. The armory where I signed up in ’64 and attended my first meetings was located inside of Fort Wayne on the bank of the Detroit River only three miles west of Downtown Detroit. African-American Reservists were rare but not so rare that you didn’t see a few of them in almost every company.  

The Michigan National Guard drew its membership almost exclusively from the rural parts of the state and the suburbs farthest from the cities with large concentrations of blacks. The nearest National Guard armory to my home was twenty miles away. My basic training company was made up mostly of Enlisted Reservist (ER) and National Guardsmen (NG). The balance came from various states as Regular Army volunteers (RA) or draftees (US). The Regular Army volunteers and draftees were ethnically diverse. A few of the Reservists were black. The National Guardsmen were 100 percent white, no Latinos, no Asians, no blacks.    

I saw the same pattern in my AIT (Advanced Individual Training) class and in the Basic Training company I was assigned to for the completion of my active duty in ’64. The ER, NG, RA, or US designation before their service number on the assignment roster in Basic and AIT told me their enlistment statutes.  

During the ’67 riots you could tell who was who by the fact that the National Guard was deployed on the Westside of Detroit, the Regular Army’s 101^st Airborne Division was deployed on the Eastside and the Reserves were not activated for duty. If you didn’t know that, you only had to look at them. The 101 troops looked like soldiers. They dressed like soldiers and carried themselves like soldiers. They were confident, well disciplined and they came in a variety of colors. Most of the NG’s I saw on the street looked like civilians in quasi-military dress. Some of them wore long sideburns and hair that draped over their collars. Some of them had their strips or shoulder patches sewn on the wrong way.  

I saw one young Guardsman – with a loaded rifle – wearing his canteen slug low on the wrong hip by a brown leather cowboy belt. This guy had clearly not gone to basic training yet. He was standing alone on the southeast corner of Euclid and 14^th next to my apartment building. That’s where a nervous tank gunner had accidentally killed the little girl when someone in her room lit a cigarette and he mistook it for sniper fire.   The young private I saw on the corner the following afternoon looked so frightened that I was afraid of what he might do in a real or imagined emergency. He seemed to have no sense of any real danger he might face or that he might pose. When I approached him to quiet his visible anxiety he leveled his shaky rifle at me and ordered me off the street.

My little encounter with this dude told me why the civilian body count on the Westside was so high. If only ten percent of the Guardsmen were anything like him, it’s a wonder that more civilians weren’t killed. It’s entirely possible that he had never seen a black man before the riots in real life and that in this situation he perceived every black man he saw as a threat to his life. 

All of the Guardsmen that I saw during the riots were white. All of the Michigan National Guardsmen that I met in civilian life in the ’60s and ’70s were also white. I have yet to meet a black one. 

Structurally, the Army Reserves followed the same chain of command as the Regular Army from the privates to the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, the President of the United States. When a National Guardsman returned to his home unit after completing Basic Training and AIT his chain of command ran up to the governor of his state.   

The National Guard is a state militia. It owes its chain of command to the second article of the Bill of Rights to give each state the Constitutional right to its own army[1] as a 1789 concession to State legislatures that feared the power of a central government. Thus, history, geography and structure combined in 1967 to put what was essentially an armed Confederate army on the streets of Detroit until the President of the United States brought it under federal command. That is to say it was an army of white volunteers answerable to the governor. 

In 1968 the ’67 riots were, of course, recent history. Although the ’68 riots following Martin Luther King’s April assassination didn’t require a call-up of the National Guard no one could be sure that the Guard wouldn’t be called up until the summer was over. For all anyone knew at the time, the April disturbance was just a foretaste of what was to come. As the hot days of summer approached racial tensions mounted. That’s where things stood when I left for my final summer camp with the Reserves in July. That’s where they stood when I got back home.

Otherwise, life went on pretty much as usual. There were no police roadblocks or curfews, no unusual instances of arson or large gatherings of unruly youths. On the job we had the usual conversations about work related issues, the war in Vietnam, the economy, new movies, television shows and so forth. The difference was that the conversations tuned more often and more easily than usual to race.  

I can’t remember how the conversation I had with the Guardsman got started. He and I were working on the same instrument panel. He hadn’t been in the studio before I left for summer camp and his face was new to me. We were probably just having a little get-acquainted chat.  

At some point the subject of summer camp arose, which is how I learned that I was working with a National Guardsman. I saw no point in getting into my experience with the Guard during the riots. I couldn’t be everywhere and see everything so I didn’t feel comfortable about generalizing from that experience. I shifted the conversation back to me and to my progression through the ranks. I proudly told him how quickly I had made E-5.  

He looked puzzled, which puzzled me because I figured that he should know how difficult it was to make rank in a reserve component of the Army. In that respect I thought that the Army Reserves and the National Guard were the same. That’s when he told me he was an E-6. I wouldn’t even be eligible to go before an E-6 promotion board for another year. 

When I recovered my wits I asked him what his MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was. He rattled off a code name I didn’t recognize. When he saw the question marks in the furrow of my brows he told me what it was. I did not tell him about the 50 caliber holes in the wall of my apartment or my encounter with the young Guardsman.  I told him about the 50 caliber holes that turned the street light on the corner of Euclid and 14^th into Swiss cheese and asked him what that was about.  

The man didn’t seem at all affected by the bad reviews the Michigan National Guard had gotten in the national press for their performance in the riots. He was proud of his unit and his part in what that unit did. Our conversation was clearly going downhill. Though neither of us mentioned race per se at this point there was nowhere else for our dialogue to go and no way to cut the conversation short without leaving a scar on our future relationship.   

Both of us tread lightly on this fragile terrain, trying to work our way up to a more stable intellectual and emotional plateau. Gradually we got as high as ethnic jokes.  The entire concept was relatively new to me in that I couldn’t recall hearing one until I went to work for Ford only two years earlier and started hearing so many “polock” jokes. Back then, my entire vocabulary of ethnic slurs consisted of, nigger, kike, jap, honky, cracker, chink, wetback and greaser. I was so ignorant on the subject that I thought “greaser” was a putdown for Mexicans, Spaniards and Italians.  

Somebody at Ford had to tell me that a “polock” was a Pole because I had no frame of reference for the underlying intellectually deprived stereotype. Without that stereotype to guide me I simply didn’t get the polock jokes until I heard variations on a couple of them that I’d heard as “moron” jokes when I was a child. Once I understood that Poles were supposed to be stupid I understood the jokes.  

Instead of registering a blank face at the punch line I laughed politely for as long as I could stand to. When I couldn’t take it anymore I excused my self as soon as I heard the setup line or told the person telling the joke that I didn’t want to hear it. I made no exceptions. It didn’t make it better for me if joke-teller was a self-proclaimed “polock” any more than it would have made it better if a self-proclaimed “nigger” were trying to tell me a “nigger” joke. That only made it worse.  

The Guardsman didn’t understand my objection to ethic jokes. That could have been my fault because I didn’t tell him why I didn’t like them. So he told me one that he thought was funny and that he thought I would also enjoy. 

The Shadow was a popular radio drama in the ’40s and ’50s that started with man saying in a deep, suave voice, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows…”  

The untold story behind the show was the nationwide search that went on to find the man who could deliver those lines just right. The search ended with a colored guy who had a magnificent baritone voice and delivered his lines flawlessly every time. The music would come up and the colored guy would say, with perfect enunciation and inflection, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows….”   

On the big day of the pilot show, the music came up and the colored guy started his introduction brilliantly. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men… Then he got all excited and said, “The Shadow, he do.” 

For the record I have heard three ethnic jokes that cracked me up. A skinny white kid from Alabama told me the first one in AIT.  

What do you call a 300 lb. nigger with a baseball bat? You call him sir.  

My black friend Bob Thomas told me the other two.

A plane flying over the ocean developed engine trouble and started losing altitude. The pilot announced that the only way to keep the plane from crashing was to lighten the load. The passengers and crew tossed out everything they could find. When they had dumped the last seat the plain was still losing altitude. The situation seemed hopeless. 

Then a Frenchman jumped up, cried, “Viv la France!” and hurled himself from the plane.  

When that wasn’t enough to lift the plane, an Englishman cried, “Long live the Queen!” and he jumped out.  

The plain was still too heavy so an American jumped up, cried, “Remember the Alamo!” and tossed out two Mexicans.  

I heard Roger Daingerfield tell the same joke on TV several years later. I started laughing as soon as I saw where he was going. I heard it again in a war movie where an English soldier used it to insult an American. 

Bob told me the next one with a straight face. I didn’t see it coming. 

“Did you know that Yuma, Arizona got its name from a black man?” 

“No,” I said. “Really?” 

“Yeah. Back in the early days of the Old West a white guy and a black guy got in an argument. Nobody remembers what it was about. Whatever it was, it got so serious that the only way they decided they could settle it was to fight a duel to the death.  

“The white guy explained the rules. They would stand back to back with their pistols cocked and ready fire while somebody counted off ten paces. On the count of “ten” they were to turn and fire.  

“They took their places on the street back to back and stepped off to the count.” Bob counted, “One…Two…Three…”  

“On the count of five, the white guy whirled around and shot the black guy in the back.”  

Bob did a pantomime of the black guy lurched forward trying to clutch at the mortal wound in his back. “With his dying breath he said, “You ma… You ma…” 

Anytime someone tells a joke of any kind to a large audience you’ll see that not everyone in the audience finds it equally funny. Behind each laughing and unlaughing face is a story that tells you why. I know that Harry Finley, the nazi, and Vic Clark, the Klansman, that I started my career with at Ford would have found The Shadow joke hilarious. They would have seen no humor in the nigger joke. They might have laughed at the airplane joke or the Yuma joke but for different reasons than I did.  

You can’t separate communication from culture and history. You can’t separate human beings from culture or the history that formed the culture. We are creatures of culture. A particular culture tells us how to speak and how to listen, how to interpret what we see, hear, taste, smell and feel. It tells us what to value and how much we should value it. A given culture tells us tells us how we are expected to behave in a given situation, how we will be judged if we don’t conform and how we should judge others who do not conform.  

Why do most men dress like men and most women dress like women? Why do some men wear only suits and ties to work? Why do people in different parts of North America speak with different accents and different dialects? Why do most African-Americans in any part of the country use the same informal pronunciation and grammar? Why do most people in Quebec speak French? Why are some of them bi-lingual and why do some of them speak only English? The answer is culture. 

Culture tells us so much that we don’t have to have complete knowledge of a situation to form a complete picture of what’s going on. The humor in a joke, for example, comes from the words or pictures that flash in our heads with a sudden turnaround from what we have been led to expect. It comes from what isn’t said.  

The “Yuma” joke makes you laugh at yourself because it tricks you into thinking the word “motherfucker” whether you want to or not. It makes you laugh at yourself because you fell for the trick. But you have to know something about American history and black culture to get the full effect. In the “nigger” joke the laugh comes from the picture we see of the white man telling the joke with his eyes bucked like a “nigger” quaking in fear. If you didn’t know the history of the n-word, you might still get a chuckle if you recognized the joke as a variation on the six-hundred-pound canary (Where does a six-hundred-pound canary sit? Anywhere he wants) but it wouldn’t have quite the same impact.  

The Airplane joke isn’t really an ethnic joke unless someone other than an American is telling it for the clear purpose of disparaging Americans in general. The case of characters just leads you to believe that it’s going to be an ethnic joke. The American who tossed out the Mexicans could have been any color. He didn’t even have to be from Texas. He was just a guy who came up with a bullshit excuse to save his own ass.

You can change this light-hearted statement about human frailty in time of crisis to make the American a Scott who invents a fatuous excuse to toss out two Englishmen. However, if you make him a German who tosses out two Jews you’re making a heavy statement about Germans that can be funny only if you think that a German and a Nazi is the same thing. What could a German possibly say after the Nazi death camp experience to justify killing Jews?  

The Shadow joke has a special place in American culture. It’s the Jackie Robinson story with a disastrous outcome. In Robinson’s 1947 rookie year, he played baseball better than most white Major-leaguers did and conducted himself with more restraint and dignity on the field. Despite the fact that his skin was very dark and his hair had a decidedly Negroid appearance he didn’t seem to have a single character weakness that was considered by most people in the United States to be typical of “his race.”  He even spoke standard American English better than most white men did. He used the language the way white, middle class people from the Midwest and the West coast typically used it.  

These days most local TV news anchors and network announcers everywhere in the lower 48 talk as though they were born and raised in the white, middle class Midwest. That’s because radio, the mass medium forerunner to talking pictures and television, got its start in the American Midwest and drew its first large audiences mainly from the white middle class. That’s how standard American English and white, middle class Midwestern English became synonymous. It was the most common brand of English heard in the United States from coast to coast for the first half of the 20^th century.  

In the 1940s and ’50s no one had to say that a black man was highly unlikely to get a job as an announcer for a live radio drama show no matter how he sounded. The culture did the talking. The culture said that black pioneers in fields formerly reserved for whites were a big risk for the employers. There was no telling when they would revert to their primitive Negroid essence.  

The instant I heard the punch line of the Guardsman’s Shadow joke a hundred disjointed pieces of my life crystallized in a stunted vision of my future. I knew then that I wasn’t going back to the parachuting club because I just didn’t like the culture. I knew that I wasn’t going to reenlist with the Reserves because I wasn’t thrilled with that culture, either. Now that I knew I would always be behind the Guardsman as far as my leadership credentials outside of Chrysler were concerned I knew that I had to find another job culture to reach my highest potential. 

Enter Tom Baird, the man I worked with the most after the Guardsman…

Tom and I had been working side-by-side on the same interior properties for several weeks and sharing the same frustrations with our work and our family lives. He, too, had tuned down Ford’s recall offer in the fall of ’68 because Ford didn’t offer him what he thought he was worth. Whether or not he had been low-balled the way I had been wasn’t the issue with Tom although the practical effect was the same.  

What I knew about my own salary was enough for me to relate to Tom’s situation. Declining an offer of less pay than I was already getting at Chrysler was my only rational option. By then I had three quarters of the time at Chrysler that I had at Ford without a trio of bigots to chart the course for the rest of my career. My Leaders at Chrysler were nothing like Harry Finley, Vic Clark and Ty Hervonen. Ford’s offer itself could only have been designed for me to refuse because of the inferior position it put me in with respect to everyone I would be competing with for advancement. The other guys would be returning as B or B+ modelers. Ford’s offer to me told me that I would be returning as a B-. 

In a few months my combined modeling experience at Ford and Chrysler would be enough to move me up from B-modeler to A-modeler at Chrysler. As long as I stayed out of Chrysler Exteriors where it didn’t seem that any black modeler stood a chance, given Calvin Morison’s experience, it was at least possible that I could one day excel at Chrysler.  

When the Ford callback was complete, it became increasingly apparent that those of us who hadn’t been given an acceptable offer were no longer being valued as highly at Chrysler. It was hard to tell what was going on at first because the entire Interiors workload slowed down to the point that hardly anyone had much meaningful work to do. Gradually the difference began to tell in a variety of little ways that culminated in my first Chrysler Performance Review. I got a good review but not good enough to guarantee a substantial raise or an early promotion. 

I’m sure that race had nothing to do with it. I’m sure that my performance didn’t have as much to do with it as my Supervisor Larry Birdwell said it did. He gave me high marks for everything except detail work. The only thing I could attribute that to was the time we worked together for a few hours on a radio face project that I had trouble with. That didn’t make sense, either.  

My problem was with the soft Chrysler clay. The only way you could do detail work with that kind of clay was to apply special techniques that I wasn’t familiar with to certain parts of the job and fake the rest with a solution of alcohol and turpentine. I asked Birdwell what to do and he showed me. That was that, problem solved. Why then did Birdwell remember only the problem and not the solution that he showed me?

As soon as layoff rumors began to circulate I got my answer. The modeling supervisors were under pressure to limit salary increases. If they didn’t have an excuse to do it they had to find one. Failing that, they had to invent one; thus, my  “deficiency” in doing detail work. 

Birdwell’s modeling secret was that he didn’t waste time the way I did trying to get more out of the medium that it could deliver. He worked a notch or two below the detail I was striving for because that was the best anyone could do. The flaws I was trying to avoid didn’t apply to his radio face because he simply washed them away along with some of the finer detail that I was vainly striving to get. He could accomplish all of that not only because he was very good at what he was doing but also because he was in charge. 

Had I been in charge of the radio face project I would not have used clay. Ivory soap would have been better. When Gordon Westlake first showed me around the various Highland Park studios there was one little cubbyhole where a couple of guys did nothing but small detailed work. They used a kind of hard jeweler’s wax that allowed for finer detail than anyone could have gotten out of the standard Chrysler clay. It would be more than twenty hears before I could apply what I learned on that project to an important program that cut across every automotive product line in a large automotive company.  

Meanwhile… 

Tom Baird and I were feeding off of each other’s discontent for a long time when he began to change. He seemed happier. His home life was improving and he was thinking out loud about getting out of clay modeling. One day he told me what accounted for the change. The way he described it, it sounded like he had gotten a part time job selling insurance. It was hard to believe that he would so much as consider giving up modeling to become an insurance man. The way he described his new venture it was more than that. I found that easy to believe. 

Tom worked on me for a long time. He sold me on an insurance policy with a large investment component. Eventually he opened me up to the career potential of working for the company that sold the policy, a new company called Alexander Hamilton.  

In short order I was attending meetings where inspirational speakers told stories of how they became wealthy by selling the product I just bought. They were sold on the power of positive thinking. They were sold on the policy. They were sold on the company, its spectacular growth, its astounding potential and its friendly, supportive, family oriented culture. Alexander Hamilton’s culture sold my wife and me on the company.