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Chapter 14

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Chapter 13: Fast-forward 

The layoff rumors at Chrysler intensified at the start of the new year. The calendar may have said January 1969 but for me it was starting to look and feel like November 1967. I loathed the thought of being laid off again, especially now with Nixon in the White House. My vastly improved home life, thanks to the teachings of Andrew Carnegie and the speakers at Alexander Hamilton pep rallies, gave me another choice. When it looked as though the hammer was about to drop at Chrysler I gave my two-week notice that I was going to quit.  

To make sure that I gave myself a clean break I gave away my tools. My coworkers threw a big party for me. One of the designers drew a terrific farewell card with a bunch of people waving good-by, telling me that they would miss me and wishing me good luck.   

I can save time with my career at Alexander Hamilton by summing it up in two paragraphs:  

It lasted about a year. It reduced me to poverty. It ruined my marriage. It gave me a firsthand look at how networks of influence work.  

Alexander Hamilton showed me that those networks rarely crossed racial lines. Where they did cross, the depth of penetration was shallow and populated by the same individuals who could afford to invest in long-term financial goals. Black circles of influence were extremely limited in the Detroit Metro area. When I broke into one of them I invariably discovered that a white agent or one of the two black ones in the company with more than a year on the job had already come and gone. 

I ended up in the regular Army in 1970. This time I got my jump wings. I served my time in Vietnam as a demolition specialist with the 173^rd Airborne Brigade. My time overseas was cut short by the return of my entire brigade to the States where it was absorbed into the 101^st Airmobile Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.  

Fort Campbell actually straddled the Kentucky-Tennessee border. The nearest town was Clarksville, Tennessee. I made the mistake of going there one time. The place had a well-earned reputation for being inhospitable to soldiers and downright hostile to blacks.  

I was still trying to hang on to my family, which now included two sons but it was a long distance off-and-on proposition with my estranged wife. During one of the “off” periods a fellow soldier named Smitty took me to Clarksville to meet a friend of his current girlfriend who was looking for sex; no love affair, no emotional commitments, just sex. He told me that she was good looking and that he had promised to bring her a guy who was looking for the same thing she was. Smitty did not tell me she was white so I foolishly took that omission as an irrelevant detail. 

We donned civilian clothes to “blend in” with the local citizenry and Smitty drove us to a trailer house where he introduced me to his lady and her, blonde, hollow-cheeked friend. The blonde’s scraggly hair and faded dress gave her a dirty appearance. She said hello to Smitty, opened the door and looked outside. Seeing no one she tuned back to Smitty and tore into him for not bringing her a man. Talk about a blind date…  

If there had ever been anything attractive about “my” date I couldn’t see it in her face, her body, her voice her personality or her attitude. I wanted to leave right there – after I punched Smitty in the nose, of course.  

Smitty nodded to me. It seemed to take forever for the light to come on in my blind date’s eyes. When it did, she looked a bit rattled. That didn’t last long. She glanced at her girlfriend who gave a little shrug to show that she didn’t care what the woman did or whom she did it with anymore than Smitty did. Neither Smitty nor his girl looked at me. 

As though things weren’t chilly enough as far as I was concerned, the next thing my blind date did turned down the heat another 40 degrees. She started eyeing me closely up and down with a growing smile that reminded me of a slave owner’s daughter eyeing her daddy’s property for a taste of forbidden fruit. She didn’t notice that I was eyeing her like she was a practice dummy for bayonet drill.  

If you guessed that our little encounter couldn’t get any worse you’d be wrong. She said, “Well, I am curious.” I saw a woman talking to a dog. 

I grabbed Smitty by the wrist and yanked him outside. No way was I going back in that kennel. I didn’t even want to think about it again. I’m writing about it now so that when you read the name Clarksville later on you’ll know what it meant to me apart from its reputation. When you read how I felt about women complaining of being viewed only as sex objects you’ll know why I was on their side.  

This sort of thing is not easy to write about because it takes you out of your comfort zone. When I was writing my first book I discovered that when I reached that uneasy place I was invariably where I needed to be to uncover the truth behind something far more important. 

Everyone knows that mind and body are integrally connected. You cannot lie to the systems of your body that govern your automatic responses. Sex is something that everyone can relate to. If you’re an average heterosexual male in close proximity to a sexually attractive female your body responds automatically to the degree that the situation dictates. If you don’t find her sexually attractive she might as well be another guy or a cactus plant, for that matter.  

When you stub your toe a signal goes to your brain telling you that you have a certain kind of pain in that toe and you might cry out or do a little pain dance or both. If you find yourself in a life-threatening situation, your brain tells your body to pump out the fight-or-flight juice.  

I see myself in a life-threatening situation right now, December 18, 2002. At any moment I could receive a phone call, open an envelope or fall asleep and have a dream that will tell my heart to stop beating.  

You can train your mind to take conscious control of a surprising range of bodily functions that your may have thought were beyond your control. On the other hand, you could be consciously working on one thing while your subconscious is working on something else to tell your body what to do. That’s why I have to be as honest in these pages as I can be with the accumulation of subconscious material my mind has to work with to tell the whole story of my long struggle with Ford Motor Company. My life could depend on it. And I know I’m not alone. 

That “not alone” bit is the kicker. Some people have a strong sense of responsibility. I’m one of them. I probably I would have found a way to duck out of having sex with my Clarksville date even if she had seen me as a man and I hadn’t found her repulsive. Though my marriage lay in ruins, I was still married. Until I could be certain that the ruins could never be restored I was bound by a tangle of responsibilities to my wife.  

When I got out of the Army in January ’72 I tried to make another go of it with Rosemary. She had a place in the low-income Jeffries housing project near Wayne State University and was working as a nurse. I moved in with her and the kids, bought a junk car and looked for work while I waited for my paperwork to clear to get me into Wayne State. 

The Michigan employment office set me up with the Town and Country Security Company headquartered in a Southfield office building. The company’s two-room suite consisted of the boss’s office and a waiting area with six chairs and a table neatly stocked with uniforms, restraints, medallions, eves dropping equipment and none-lethal weapons.  

I was hired on the spot. The boss explained that a business in a black area of Detroit requested a black security guard. Town and Country didn’t have a black guard so he had to send a white one to the business until he could hire a black one. The boss said the man he sent had been on the job for a few days without complaint but he expected that to change. From what he said and how he said it I got the feeling that he had only assumed his client company wanted a black guard.  I got the feeling that he hired me because he anticipated a problem down the road with a white security guard in this particular location and he wanted to be ready.  

My employer said that I was going to be in the public eye so it was crucial that I “look sharp.” First, I had to buy a uniform. A black necktie was “very, very important.” No need to worry about the cost of the uniform. The company would deduct it from my first paycheck. If I was willing to put in enough hours and I got good reports on how I performed, my salary would rise quickly.  

While the other new hires and I looked over the selection of uniforms, grumbling about the wretched circumstances that brought us together, we learned that all of us were Vietnam vets. We had been sent to Town and Country by the State employment office where a worker warned us that the turnover rate was unusually high. It never occurred to us that the state would hook us up with a company that had figure out a way to get us to work nothing. We “happened to be” in the outer room of the office when a successful Town and Country guard rushed in to pick up his paycheck. He showed it to us on his way out to another assignment. Sure enough he was making one and a half times as much as we would be starting out with – by doing twice as much work. In my first novel I used him as my primary model for a black female washroom attendant called “Tiffy.” 

I was working a swing shift at various places when Rosemary answered the phone around 4:00 a.m.  It was my boss calling about an emergency situation. When Rosemary handed me the telephone he said something in a buddy-buddy tone about sympathizing with my desire to get back to that “white pussy.” It was such a rude, crude, over-the-top racist thing to say that I thought he had gotten drunk and temporarily lost his mind.   

What was the point in telling a crazy man that the woman who answered the phone was my wife, that she was black and that we were both asleep when he called? What did any of that have to do with a Town and Country emergency that required my attention?  The guard on the job that I was hired to do was not going to be available. The pertinent issue was whether I could take his place without my “very, very important” necktie. I’d lost mine in a real emergency the day before.  

My boss never heard the story because he got so angry when I told him I needed a necktie that he called me a “fuckin’ nigger,” told me I was fired and hung up. Had he heard the story he wouldn’t have believed it. It was so off-the-wall that I wouldn’t have blamed him….

Returning to the projects from a job, I stopped in a convenience store to pick some cigarettes. A ten or 11-year-old boy approached me, apparently because of the uniform, and told me that his grandfather had injured his head in a fall. I asked him if anyone had called EMS. His house didn’t have a telephone. That’s why he came to the store. He made the emergency call on the store’s pay phone and I drove him to his house in my ’65 Plymouth Barracuda P.O.S.   He led me inside. 

A man in his seventies was lying on a couch in the arms of a woman his age. A large gash on his grotesquely swollen forehead steadily oozed blood. I thought it was just as well that he didn’t seem to know what was happening. While he lay there semi-conscious losing blood, the older woman was sopping it up with toilet paper, being careful not to hurt him by touching the gaping wound in his forehead.  A woman in her mid-30s was running back and forth with reams of fresh toilet paper to help the older woman with whatever she was trying to do. Both women were weeping and wailing as though the man was as good as dead.  

I knew from my recent overseas experience that head wounds often looked worse than they were. All we had to do here was sit the old guy upright, put a pressure dressing on the wound and wait for the EMS. I improvised the dressing with a clean napkin and my necktie knotted over the wound to increase the pressure and hold it in place.  The bleeding stopped almost immediately.  

The paramedics arrived about five minutes later, checked the dressing and decided not to touch it. They allowed his wife to accompany him. His daughter pulled me aside while her son looked at me with embarrassment, thanked me and slunk away. That’s when I got the real story about the old man’s injury.  

The kid’s mother had a boyfriend. Her boyfriend started to push her around. Her father tried to protect her and caught his head on the edge of a coffee table on his way to the living room floor. The woman had nasty-looking bruises on her arms and neck. Not all of them looked fresh. Not all of them were fresh. The injury to her father was the last straw.  

The woman was telling me all of this because she made the same mistake her son had made with the uniform. She, too, thought I was a cop. When I finally got her to understand that I was only a rent-a-cop she asked me to take her to the nearest police station. I did. 

The kid was the only one in the family who could speak English well enough to be easily understood. The only language his grandparents understood was Lithuanian. His mother understood English but she couldn’t speak it well enough to carry on a coherent conversation. I had to tell her what I thought she was trying to say. She would then say yes or no until the message was complete.  

It took me so long to get the picture that I knew she would have trouble explaining herself to the police. I told her that I would go into the station with her. She resisted the idea. I couldn’t understand why. The longer we sat in the car trying to get past her reluctance the more anxious she became. Finally she indicated she didn’t want anyone to see her with a black man. She was afraid of what they would think.  

Had the woman been fluent in English and more sophisticated in her understanding of the culture she might have used more finesse in explaining her reluctance for me to accompany her. Had I been more sophisticated in the culture I would have agreed with her.  

Sure enough, when we got to talk to a police officer, he assumed that I was her boyfriend. He simply didn’t buy what I was telling him. He eyed me suspiciously. For a while it looked as though he was thinking about arresting me, only he couldn’t make sense of why I would beat the woman and come to the police station with her and tell a ridiculous story about some other guy beating her up. She had to straighten him out. She told him her boyfriend’s name, which was utterly unpronounceable to the cop and to me. She told him that the man was Lithuanian. She gave him his address. Finally the cop got the message. Finally I did, too.  

The entire sequence of events had been driven by one false assumption after another, except for the paramedic’s assumption that I was a Vietnam vet. He made his assumption based on what I did with the old man. The boy made his assumption based on my uniform. I didn’t really hear what the woman was tying to tell me in the car because I wasn’t really listening to her. I assumed that she was reading color into the situation that no one else would see because it obviously didn’t apply. I assumed that she hadn’t been in the country long enough to analyze the objective situation correctly when in fact she was right on target.  

My presence in the police station only confused the issue because it started a chain of assumptions that had to be broken before any communication could take place. The cop didn’t hear half of what I said because he wasn’t listening with his ears. He was listening with his eyes. 

The call from my boss at Town and Country couldn’t have been timed better to drive home the point. It was the punctuation mark at the end of my experience with the old man his daughter and the cop. Nigger, wasn’t just a name; it was a role with so many assumptions attached to it that you couldn’t go anywhere in American society without demonstrating that the name didn’t apply to you. You were guilty until proven innocent.

The Detroit Emergency Medical Service was part of the Detroit Fire Department. The paramedic who guessed that I was a Vietnam vet was also a Vietnam vet. Based on what I told him and what he saw when he arrived at the old man’s house he suggested that I join the Fire Department and become a paramedic. He said that the Department was looking for people who could respond to emergencies the way I did and my prior military service would be a big help.   

I put in my application with the Fire Department the same day I was fired from Town and Country.  

I passed the written tests but flunked the physical. The examiners told me that it because I had a back tooth missing on the top and bottom of the same side. The fact that Detroit had damn few black firefighters in 1972, if any, was supposed to be a coincidence.  

By a similar “coincidence” in 1968 my brother had been rejected from the Detroit Police Department when he got out of service because he wore glasses. The fact that he had been a military policeman didn’t count. The thing that got him in two years later was a tip from the eye-tester. He told him to get a pair of contact lenses. He added, “That’s what the white boys do.” 

My brother suggested that I join the Detroit Police Department. I struck out there because my timing was off. The department had given up its no-glasses-for-black-applicants policy but the city just wasn’t hiring cops. The black suburbs weren’t hiring any cops and the white suburbs weren’t hiring black cops.  

Meanwhile I got accepted into Wayne State University. Unfortunately, the tuition that the Army was supposed to pay Wayne State got locked up in a bureaucratic snafu. I had to drop out of school in the second quarter of my enrolment when I came home from school and the door was bolted from the inside.  

I stayed with my mother for a few weeks until I got a job as a high-low driver at a place called U.S. Industrial Glove where used gloves were mended, laundered and sent back to the plants they came from. The first two weeks I was there I worked in a two-man department where I saw a way to dramatically increase the efficiency of a cumbersome paper rolling operation. The supervisor let me try it. It worked. One man could now easily do the work of two. The high-low job was a promotion.  

One of my Leaders at Chrysler in ’68 and ’69 was now a supervisor. His failed effort to bring me back to Chrysler early in January of ’73 can be summed up in the words of his fellow supervisor when he mentioned my name in a meeting. The other Supervisor said, “We’ve already got our quota of niggers.” I found that out later. I found out much, much later that Ford rejected the clay modeling application I reluctantly submitted in Dearborn at the end of the month for the same reason.  

In 1969, after Ford gave me the offer I couldn’t accept, it hired a black modeler named Charles Purnell in my place for less money and a lower rung on the seniority ladder than I would have had. From the moment Ford hired him, his professional fate and mine would be inextricably interwoven although we wouldn’t meet for another eight years.   

My ’73 visit to Ford was not a total waste. Joan the receptionist managed to get in touch with Nehemiah Amaker. He was now a stylist. He met me in the lobby wearing a snappy suit and tie and quickly brought me up to date on Sam, Calvin, Frank Mendolia, Vic Clark and Harry Finley. He doubted my prospects of getting back into Ford with my old Master Modelers still around to influence the decision. Buzz about affirmative action, however, spawned rumors that GM was starting to move black modelers through its farm system into the GM Tech Center and American Motors was under pressure to hire anyone with modeling experience. From what Nehemiah heard, my best chance was with AM. 

American Motors did hire me – as a token, just like the black Personnel woman who took my application and the black receptionist in the lobby of the Design and Engineering studios.  I was the first black professional to cross the threshold of American Motors Design and Engineering. 

How did I feel about it?  

When Air Force General Chappy James received his fourth star a year or so before he died in 1978 a white reporter asked him how it felt to be America’s first black four-star general. He quoted his mother saying, “There are two kinds of black professionals in America that we shouldn’t have to talk about, the first and the only.”  

That’s how I felt about being AM’s first black modeler. General James was naturally happy to have reached the top of his profession just as I was to have a decent paying job. It should not have been a big deal for any African-American to take any job that he was qualified to do. The black talent had to be there before we came along just as it had been in professional baseball before Jackie Robinson came along.  

Yet, resistance to the ’64 Civil Rights Act was so persistent and so transparent that conservative Republican President Richard Millhouse Nixon did not hesitate to sigh a Congressional bill calling for affirmative action to correct it. We were still in two wars, a hot one and a cold one. The mere appearance of government tolerance for bigotry in capitalist America hurt both war efforts, not to mention the U.S. economy. 

Everybody knew that when General James was asked about being “the first black…” he was really being asked how he felt about being given a “racial preference” because of affirmative action. The unspoken question was whether or not he honestly felt that he was the most qualified man for the job or simply the beneficiary of a racial “quota” policy. He was more diplomatic than I was when white people asked me the same stupid question. I usually said, “That’s a stupid question,” and left it at that.  

American Motors advertised for one experienced modeler. I was the first person to put in an application and the only one who met all of the qualifications. With a count of zero black modelers, stylists or engineers, federal law gave AM no choice but to hire me. Ironically, this was the same law that permitted Chrysler and Ford to reject my ’73 application because Chrysler and Ford no longer had to guess at a number that the feds would find acceptable.  

James Brooks called me at American Motors to tell me why I had been rejected at Chrysler. Brooks was angry. He had gotten together with the modelers who knew me when I worked there and they had assured him that they would back me if I sued. That included the supervisor who told him what had happened and hooked me up with AM. I understood why Brooks was so insistent that I file suit against Chrysler. The supervisor’s  “quota of niggers” remark brought into the open what had been going on below the surface in Chrysler all the time. It was something that I could take to court for the benefit of others. It exemplified a Chrysler policy of racial discrimination in at least one key area of the corporation. 

My responsibility to others extended to everyone who could be made to suffer for supporting me. Even if they were willing to take that risk for me and for the greater good that my case would serve – if I won the case, I couldn’t let them take that chance. Too much depended on the supervisor. His moral integrity and strength of character to follow though on his word wasn’t enough. You had to know him to know that his word could be trusted. In the end it would be only his word against other supervisors who were sure to call him a liar. You had to know them to know that their word could not be trusted.  

More and more I’m coming to believe that racism is still the force it is in American culture largely because most people just don’t know the whole story. They are isolated from the mechanisms or racism in institutions like Ford and Chrysler. If I’d known what Ford was doing with Charles Purnell and me in ’73 and I had the documents to prove it, I would have sued Ford. I would have done it with confidence in an all-white jury.

To most Americans a racist institution is an atavistic organization like the Ku Klux Kan, founded on the principle that some people are created a rung or two lower on the evolutionary ladder than others. They don’t see racism in institutions primarily concerned with raising children, worshiping God or making money. Prejudice? Perhaps. Racism? No.   

As human beings we recognize that racial prejudice exists. As Americans, we also like to believe that individual effort and persistence can overcome anything, including racial prejudice. According to this view, achieving the American dream of rising as high as your talents will take you all boils down to you, the individual, like Joe Louis in the boxing ring or Jackie Robinson on the baseball diamond. The level of success you achieve in the land of opportunity is up to you.  

In an earlier chapter I mentioned a struggled modeler at Ford named Felix DeRose who couldn’t read a scale or model a lick. Felix was one of the most open, fare-minded and likable characters I’ve ever met. Ironically, his views on race provide the best example I have to date of the kind of thinking that allows institutional racism to flourish.  

Had Felix been a top automotive executive or just some guy in Personnel with a little clout, color would not have been an issue in hiring or promoting in his company. Although he’d been raised in Dearborn he’d seen all kinds of men in Korea in all kinds of situations and he couldn’t see where race had anything to do with what they did or how they did it. Officers acted like officers, Noncoms acted like noncoms and enlisted men acted like enlisted men. He thought that racism was idiotic. But he didn’t believe it was the problem for black people that they imagined. 

“Sure there’s discrimination” he said. “It’s stupid ‘cause it hurts the companies that do it. That shouldn’t mean anything to you.” 

I did a double take and asked him to explain.   

Felix shrugged. “You just have to do a little more than I do.” He said it as though there was nothing wrong with that, as though he would do the same thing if he were in my place. “Where I might have to knock on one door to get a job you might have to knock on…four. That’s all.” 

When Ford laid off Felix and me in ’67 I had only one door that I could knock on. He had two. While I was knocking on doors in ’73 that should not have been closed to me in ’68 and ’69 he was piling up seniority. 

Felix went to AM along with Chuck Clayton. His Ford experience was a big plus regardless of his Performance Review, which couldn’t have been great. With a passable amount of talent, a show-business flair and a great line of BS he became one of American Motors’ highest paid modelers in four years time. He learned on the job and became what he pretended to be before anyone who wrote his checks wised up to what he was doing. The fact that they never wised up was a source of endless amusement to Felix, Chuck and the other modelers who knew his game. 

It wasn’t funny to me. With Felix’s credentials I never would have seen the inside of Ford Design. If some miracle had interceded to get me there I would have been fired for incompetence long before the layoff. Felix could get a clay modeling job at American Motors in ’67 because the company needed modelers at his presumed skill level and there was no reason not to hire him. AM didn’t need a reason not to hire me. The unwritten “signs” in the grapevine said that that my kind need not apply.  

You know why the grapevine in the American auto industry is the best why to know what’s happening inside of a company when you know how different people in a company are linked to people on the outside. From the outside you know people who work there or people who know people who work there. They know the culture, the power players and the personalities. An official company document will tell you whatever an official company document is supposed to say. It will not tell you about an unethical or illegal company policy that everybody in the place learns in time through osmosis. The grapevine will.  

When you are employed at a car company as small as American Motors you get to see why the automotive design grapevine works so well.  

AM’s only exterior studio was just a little larger than Chrysler’s International Studio. It had two working bridges, one of which was a wooden antique, and a total complement of twelve modelers, including me. One of those modelers, a man in his 40s named Jerry O’Donald was a job shop employee who had worked briefly for Ford on a contract job. I’d met him originally in Vic Clark’s studio where I met Chuck Clayton. Another modeler named Chuck Beudreu had worked for a company in Indiana that made trucks and snowmobiles. He was the man who got his inspiration to become a modeler from the picture he saw in Parade Magazine of the truck that Sam Mayers and Frank Mendolia made in Paul Schiloff’s school. I would be seeing him again at Ford in ’77.  

The Jeep studio and the Interiors studio had about a half-dozen modelers each. Bob Jamison, who worked with Felix at Ford, was in the Interiors Studio. I would be seeing Bob again almost twenty years later as a supervisor for a small company contracted to do a specialty job for Ford.

A short, fat, nasty ex-wrestler named Mitchell ruled the Wood Shop like the Sheriff of Nottingham. He acted as though the shops tools were his personal property and he alone was competent to use them. He had one frail, nervous-looking man working for him. Mitchell didn’t even let him use some of the power tools. Mitchell made the rest of us practically beg to get him to do anything he didn’t feel like doing and often maneuvered the modelers into verbal confrontations that borders on fisticuffs.  

The Fiberglass Shop had a supervisor and three workers, Elmer, Eric and Chuck Jones. All of them had wanted the job that I got. Elmer refused to shake my hand and Eric looked as though he was sorry he did when Elmer cult loose with a diatribe about a nigger getting a job that paid more money than he made. Eric smirked and nodded his head. Elmer eventually calmed down enough to apologize for his language and to explain that he didn’t have anything personal against me. He was just upset with the government for giving a black man a special preference that he couldn’t get because he was white. He called it “reverse-discrimination.” I’d be hearing a lot more of that in the years to come. 

Instead of assuming that I knew nothing about modeling, Chuck Jones asked me how I broke into the business. I told him. He then asked me to critique a clay model car that he was working on in his spare time. It showed definite promise. It also showed a lack of knowledge about tools and techniques that would give it a professional look. I gave him an honest critique, one of my “magic tools” and showed him how to use it. I would be seeing Chuck Jones again as a modeler and a friend at Ford.  

A stern-looking woman in her 50s named Helen was the Trim and Color Department until she hired a young, inexperienced, unfriendly assistant named Bonnie. I would be seeing Bonnie again at Ford.  

My Studio Executive was Bob Nixon. His boss was Richard A. Teague. If you want to know why most of AM’s cars looked so funny in the ’60s and ’70s, don’t blame Bob Nixon or his four stylists, who were actually quite talented. Blame Dick Teague. He dictated the designs. I would meet his son Jeff at Ford in the early ’80s. Jeff is responsible for making the ’86 Taurus station wagon so stylish that a lot of people who would not have thought of buying a wagon bought his wagon just for its looks.   

I knew everyone listed in AM’s table of organization for Design. Engineering was separate. I walked in the Engineering area one time and beheld a sea of white, male faces. I once heard a rumor that AM had hired a black engineer. I never heard his name or saw his face. I had to know only one receptionist and one person in Personnel to know everything I needed to know about that. The black receptionist saw everyone who came and went. She saw no black vendors. The black woman in Personnel confirmed that the grapevine had been right about AM’s tacit hiring policies in design and engineering. From an inside perspective you had only to open your eyes and look around to see it.