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Chapter 21

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Chapter 20: Designate Losers 

On the surface, things couldn’t have looked better for me in Walt’s studio. I was living up to his expectations and with the merit increase freeze he was actively campaigning to get me promoted. 

By 1981, of course, no modeler that Ford hired in 1977 was a rookie. Most of them had been promoted to A-modeler by 1980. Given that fact it seemed unlikely to me that I would remain an A-modeler much longer. It irked me, to say the least, that some people who should have known better still had a hard time accepting me as a modeler who belonged in a different class – Schiloff’s class of ’64. Phil Huszar of the ’64 class as well as Jim Blazack, Gene Whitney and Mike Wyman of the ’65 class had been Sculptors for years.  

The only black modeler from Schiloff’s school to rise to Sculptor was Cal Morrison. He was the second black Sculptor in Ford Motor Company’s history. George Rogers was the first. Neither of them made it in less than ten years. The average ranged from five to seven.  

Counting me, Ford had three other black modelers. Two of them, Charlie Leak and Lenis Hugely were hired in ’77. Charlie was seven or eight years older than I was. Lenis was about five years older. Like all of the six female modelers hired in ’77 neither of them had previous modeling experience. Both of them were hired before I was. The third black modeler, Charles Purnell, had been at Ford since 1969.  

I worked with Charles Purnell once on overtime soon after my transfer from Truck to Small Car in ’79. Charles worked in Interiors. McKinley Thompson told me that he had a reputation as a black militant and warned me to stay away from him, which was easy because I had never laid eyes on him. Some modelers told me that he was worthless. They said that he couldn’t model and he couldn’t get along with people. I was therefore not surprised that he was working alone.  

My first impression of him was not good.  

I didn’t see anything other than the way he wore his hair that could be construed as an indication of “black militancy.” He didn’t call me “brother” or anything like it. He didn’t shake my hand. He didn’t make small talk. He was all business and he seemed more harried than his one-man job appeared to justify.  I could see that he was as good a modeler as I was. The thing that rankled me was the fact that he didn’t see me as his equal. My God, I thought as he handed me a rough-cut Masonite template and “showed me” how to file it down the way I’d learned in Schiloff’s school fifteen years earlier. He’s doing the same thing to me that Ty Hervonan did in ’67 and Jim McBain did in ’77. He was treating me the same way that Harry Stickler and Dave Connelly were treating me in my new home studio, like a rookie. 

Only in retrospect did I see the dynamics that drove my unpleasant first meeting with Charles.  

It was common for any unfamiliar modeler who didn’t come into a studio with advanced billing to be perceived as a neophyte, especially a black modeler. Charles didn’t know my history and all the talk about the black modelers hired in ’77 was that we were all new to the profession. Like Calvin and I, Charles had remained a B-modeler for an inordinate amount of time. Charles made A-modeler the same time I did while the white female models[1] had been promoted to A-modeler in a quarter of the time that it took us to do it. Charles was under the gun to show that he was better than that. Assigning two people to do a one-man job in two hours of overtime was actually a handicap. Moreover, it suggested that he needed help. It was an impossible situation for both of us. 

I didn’t get the full measure of how bad things were for Charles until a couple of years later when I was working prove-out with Walt George…

By that time things were already looking up for me. For the most part, Strick’s top Sculptors treated me like a peer and gave me tips on what to do and when to do it to make Strick happy. When I went out for lunch one day and locked my keys in my car Dave Connelly came to my rescue. Lyn Elledge invited my boys and me to a pig roast at his farm along with his friends in the studio and everyone there treated me like a friend.  Jim Biando came straight to me with his ideas for improving the clumsy setup we used for modeling wheels and wheel covers. Mike Aloe was deferring to me with good humor on some of the jobs he had trouble with. In short, I no longer had to prove to anybody that I deserved to be treated like someone who knew what to do and how to do it.  

The engineers were treating me like a Master Modeler. Some of the stylists, who now called themselves designers, asked Strick for me to work on their designs – although I still ended up working mostly for Dave Turner. That may have had something to do with the fact that nobody liked to model for him and some of Strick’s top guns flat out refused to do it.  

The trouble with Turner was that he drew tons of sketches but never followed through on them. He had a new idea for what he wanted every time he saw anything taking shape on the clay. The modelers complained that he gave conflicting instructions. The real problem was that he made the modelers look incompetent. “Add more crown. No, take some off. Make it stiffer. That’s too stiff. Make it softer. No, softer. Softer. Softer. That’s too soft.” That was Dave Turner.  

The trick was to understand that Turner either scraped his instructions a little piece at a time or tossed it out altogether without telling the modeler that he was doing it. It was like trying to read a long paragraph without punctuation marks. If you didn’t slow down and back up from time to time to see where he had changed direction you would find yourself following the wrong string of ideas. Often he would come back to the same designs without realizing it. The only way to keep up with any designer who changed direction as often as Turner did was to slow down.  

I thought I’d torn it with Turner when I was working on his mirrors.  

All over the studio there were models and parts of models I had done for Turner that he had sold to upper management, difficult jobs that other modelers had given up on. He kept looking for “a good modeler” to take over for me without seeing that I had taken over for the “good modelers” again and again with results that consistently made him look like a star. He had run through all of the “good modelers” with the mirror, one of the toughest jobs there is in modeling. There was no getting around what I had done for him in spite of his convoluted and contradictory direction.  

Instead of acknowledging that his earlier assessment of my ability was wrong, he told me that I did an outstanding job but added, “I’ve noticed that you have improved greatly over the past few months.   He said it as though he was paying me a complement – as though he hadn’t told me by inference that he thought I was a slug for the past two years.  

I leaped from my chair telling him what jerk I thought he was. Stunned and red-faced, he backed away.  Sure, I wanted to cave his chest in. Who didn’t? I took the incident to Strick before Turner had a chance to. Strick shrugged it off as a normal byproduct of working with Turner. I told him that I would prefer not to do it again and couldn’t imagine that Turner would ever want to work with me again. Strick shrugged that off, too. He said that nobody wanted to work for Turner but somebody had to. I was low man on the totem poll.  

A few weeks later Strick assigned me to lead the modeling of Turner’s Tempo front end with the help of a talented young modeler named Tom Truan. If Strick had wanted me to fail he would have tossed me into those Turner-invested waters with an anvil instead of a lifeboat. Tom Truan was a lifeboat. He had issues about his pay that he complained about and some people thought that he had a negative attitude because of it. I didn’t see it that way. He did great work and I thought that he had a right to complain about not getting paid for it. I listened to his gripes. He listened to mine. None of it was sour grapes. It was true. The merit increase freeze had frozen both of us at a low point in the pay scales. 

Designers sometimes passed on changes to any member of a crew. If Tom got it first he could have used it to make himself look good at my expense. The standard formula was to withhold information, give you outdated templates or bogus points and work like hell to give his job a finished look whether it was correct or not. When he appeared to be way ahead of you, he would tug the designer’s shirtsleeve and ask him to look at the job. Tom didn’t play that game. We shared information and worked together in every way we could as a team. 

Tom and I spent a lot of time on our knees and on our backs highlighting portions of the Tempo that only a man on his back under the car would see. We changed the number of bars on the grill, their spacing and their contour so many times that we literally ran out of iterations. At first we joked about seeing the same sections again and again until Tom decided to save his old templates and match them against Turners “new” sections. Sure enough, some of them were within a millimeter of each other. One “new” section matched an old template line for line. It would have been funny if it weren’t so maddening and so hard on our bodies.  

At some point we were going to have to clean up the model for final approval. Whatever we were doing when it was too late to make another change would be the final design. The more time we spent on roughing in ideas the less time we had to make a first class model. The only way to get around it was to slow down to a crawl with an eye on the calendar.  

If I had any doubts before about the counter-productiveness of scheduled overtime they all went away on that project. I stopped working overtime and Tom worked it only for the money. ALL of the work he did – all of it – went away within the first hour of the following day, often leaving us farther behind than where we were before the overtime. When we knew that we couldn’t continue making wholesale changes at night that would change the first thing in the mornings we simply stopped doing it when the show date said that we couldn’t afford to.  

The model we made was a jewel. We sold Turner’s design. We didn’t cheat. Therefore the design didn’t change in Feasibility, the tools didn’t have to be re-cut and the sheet metal and chrome that appeared in the showrooms looked like the clay and foil model we made in the studio…. 

Okay, so why was I still an A-modeler on the lower half of the pay scale? I asked Strick. He told me that Ford promoted modelers in large groups every so many years. He didn’t know when Personnel would decide to promote the next group of A-modelers to Sculptor because there were no set rules for the timing but he assured me that I would be one of them.  

Sure enough, when the next promotion list came out, I was on it. 

Happy day, right? 

Wrong. 

I learned about the promotion from a Sculptor in Strick’s studio who accosted me in the hallway leading from the old building to the new one.  

“Congratulations,” he said grinning broadly as he seized my hand to give me a hearty handshake. “I’m glad you made it instead of Purnell.” 

Made it? Made what? And what did “it” have to do with Purnell? I’d only met the man once and I couldn’t think of what kind of contest we might have been in that I wouldn’t have known about.  The Sculptor’s red eyes and slightly slurred speech told me that he’d taken a long, liquid lunch at Howell’s Bar.  

“What are you talking about?” 

“You’re a Sculptor.” 

“Huh?” 

“You made Sculptor.” 

“Sure.” 

“No shit. You’re a Sculptor, man.” 

“I’ll believe it when I hear it from Strick.”  

I believed it when I heard it from several other modelers, a designer and an engineer within the next two minutes. They congratulated me, shook my hand and told me how happy they were to hear the good news. Interspersed with those kind words were angry stares from some people who clearly didn’t think my promotion was good news. They were the bad guys. I knew that the issue with them was color. I didn’t expect them to be happy about a black man’s promotion. I expected better of the “good guys.” Three more of them said what the first modeler said. They told me that they were glad I got it “instead of Purnell.”

These guys were not under the influence of alcohol. 

There it was in black and white. By any rational standard Charles Purnell and I, two black modelers with over ten years of experience each, were overdue for promotion but there had to be room on the list for more than one of us. The issue was race. It was about the hidden relationship between Charles and me and it was big news in the Design Center.  

Everybody I passed in the hallway either gave me a handshake, a positive gesture of acknowledgment or an angry glare. I got it from people I knew and people I didn’t. They were all white.  In any given day you could walk from one end of the Design Center to the other without seeing a black person unless he or she was pushing a broom. In this hour of this day the solid wall of white faces hit me like a wall of flames.  

Me instead of Purnell. Me instead of Purnell. Me instead of Purnell…. 

What the fuck? Why not me and Purnell?  

I flashed on Ford’s poison pill offer that altered my career path so racially when I was at Chrysler and Ford’s call to me at AM along with the awkward dance with Powell, McBain and Bennie that followed… Oh yeah, now I get it! 

Not all epiphanies are good. This was a bad one. Now I knew absolutely that Ford was playing a numbers game with two black modelers named Charles Purnell and Jasper Garrison. It made a tactical error in giving me the poison pill offer in ’68 to keep me out and it corrected that mistake on paper by hiring Charles in ’69.  

My darkest suspicions were confirmed. With Sam Mayers getting out of modeling to become Ford’s first black stylist, bringing back Cal Morrison wasn’t enough. Ford needed Charles but it didn’t need to pay him what he was worth or put him in a position to reach the top of his profession. The class action lawsuit forced Ford to hire Charlie Leak and Lenis Hugely, two black modelers with no previous modeling experience to get the numbers right and to keep from hiring me. It just didn’t work. 

By hiring Charles Leak and Lenis Hugely Ford could guarantee that at least two black modelers would never become Master Modelers. There were too many experienced white modelers ahead of them with splendid track records and too few slots for Master Modelers. Ford had a special problem with me because of the poison pill offer, my ’73 application rejection in ’74 and the blatant racism attached to the poison pill and the application rejection. It had a special problem with my years of experience, my letters of recommendation from American Motors and my persistence in knocking on its door before the class action lawsuit was settled. Ford had other Vietnam Veterans with medals but none of them had an Army Commendation Medal or its equivalent from another branch of service that honored its best in performance and consistency.  

Ford hired me because it had no choice. It. had not scrapped its racist polices. It had merely adjusted to the requirements of the law to manage them in different ways.  

One way Ford managed its black modelers to keep us below the white ones was by assigning us to different studios that were top-heavy with men who had consistently received the highest performance reviews. I wasn’t exactly sure how the P/R system worked in ’81. Only Ford Personnel had a good handle on that. I knew that black modelers were structurally disadvantaged but I thought Calvin and I could overcome it in the next ten years or so. Calvin had his plan for doing it. I had mine. I didn’t see how Charles Purnell, Charles Leak or Lenis Hugely could ever pull themselves out of the hole Ford had dug for them. 

Charles Purnell tried to address the issue by assembling the black modelers and designers for a meeting at his home with Bill Bowman, the black engineer who pioneered Ford’s aerodynamics program. Bill Bowman did not receive recognition or payment for his multi-million-dollar contribution to Ford and sued the company for one million dollars. He won his suit by anticipating what Ford was going to do to him, what Ford was going to assert and by documenting every transaction that applied to his claim. 

The subjective nature of evaluating a clay modeler’s performance did not lend itself to Bowman’s approach. We didn’t work on paper so there was no paper trail to follow and we couldn’t photograph what we did so there was no photographic evidence that we did anything. Our work entailed technical and aesthetic consideration that couldn’t be easily explained and so many people were involved in it that you had to be where the action was to know who did what and what it meant. You also had to be an expert in modeling, design or engineering with a good working knowledge of all three disciplines and how they related to each other.  

The bottom line for black modelers was that we were dependent on the Supervisors who wrote our performance reviews or the opinions of the Master Modelers that the Supervisors relied on to write them. The fact that Charles worked for McKinley Thompson for years didn’t help him because McKinley was the only Clay Modeling Manager who didn’t come out of the clay modeling ranks and there were no black Clay Modeling Supervisors. McKinley had to rely exclusively on his Master Modelers and none of them rated Charles Purnell highly.

For all I knew in 1981 Charles’ Master Modelers could have been right and my impression of him as a superior modeler could have been wrong, although I doubted it. A modeler had a lot to show to look good to another good modeler. Charles showed me more than enough in the two hours I worked for him for me to see that he was working at the level of a Sculptor. Where one was most likely to go wrong in snapshot evaluations like that where when they were negative.   

Every time I misjudged a modelers ability my false perception was rooted in my ignorance: I thought the modelers were going about their jobs the wrong way because I didn’t know they were following explicit directions to do them that way. I thought they were using the wrong tools because I didn’t know they had “magic tools” to do the job better than I could have done it. I thought they were bad modelers because I didn’t know they were simply having a bad day, a bad hour or a bad minute.   

Calvin developed a battle plan to improve his standing that involved notebooks full of times, dates and quotes from various people regarding his work. His approach wasn’t for me. There was no way I could do what he did and still have time to do anything else with two kids to raise by myself. I could see, though, that he was right in principle. The black modelers had two jobs, modeling and getting paid for it.  

My approach, which showed some signs of success, was to work smarter than anybody around me and to speak up at Design Center meetings in the showroom in front of all the top brass. The purpose of these meetings was supposedly to keep everyone up to date on what the Company was doing and to give us a chance to speak directly to management about the issues that were important to us. I listened carefully, made mental notes on who said what and what they implied, and then formulated hardball questions that spoke to critical issues they didn’t addressed. This was not new to me. I’d been doing it since I was in elementary school and I perfected the technique in Mr. Glovenski’s high school X-class. 

Most people who raised their hands to speak at large assemblies asked dumb questions or went off on tangents about things that had nothing to do with the presentation. Some of them fumbled for words, they mumbled or they spoke too softly to be heard. I asked concise, well-articulated and pertinent questions in a way that showcased my ability to crystallize complex issues and to hint at solutions that were supposed to be unattainable. I wanted to demonstrate the leadership trait of courage – the willingness to risk personal harm for a greater good. I didn’t care that most people thought I did it just to hear myself talk or that anyone who wasn’t brain dead could see that I was deliberately calling attention to myself. At the end of the day, all of the people in the audience and on the stage with high IQ’s would know that I was one of them.

The payoff came when Personnel decided that it needed to change the Performance Review form and selected a few people from each department in the Design Center to make suggestions. I was one of the people selected. This, I knew, was where the biggest problem lay for African-American’s to get the recognition we deserved. There were too many categories and the way they were named and described gave a false impression of what they meant. I now knew that Satisfactory Plus meant unsatisfactory, Satisfactory meant unacceptable and Satisfactory Minus meant that you were a short step away from being fired. Unsatisfactory meant nothing. If you got one, your walking papers came with it. 

You can’t improve upon Excellence so it seemed to me that the Outstanding category should go, along with Satisfactory Plus and Satisfactory Minus. In practice, you could only be excellent, exceptional, satisfactory or unsatisfactory. You could get ahead only by being excellent or exceptional. You couldn’t keep your job unless you were at lest satisfactory. In short, the company could eliminate much confusion and resentment with its P/R system just by making it simple and honest. 

Honesty wasn’t on the agenda. I suspect that the company’s real aim was to discover what percentage of its employees could see the deception and the ramifications of that deception in the form as it was written. Ford’s subsequent action suggests that a very small percentage of us did. 

Ford gave us seven performance categories that we could not change. The new form gave new meaning to a category called “Excellent Plus,” which most of us had never seen. The effect, of course, was to lower the value of Excellent to what it used to mean to be Satisfactory Plus.  

I was now a slug until proven otherwise. I could hope that my E would be upgraded to EP but there were no guarantees. Not even the O’s were safe. As I talked to modelers who told me that they were O’s my understanding that they got them over several years did not appear to be true. I talked to many of them and all of them said they had always gotten O’s. None of them seemed to realize that the “new” EP rating would make them vulnerable to downgrading. For some of them the EP rating wasn’t new. However, the most vulnerable group were the E’s. If no more than a third of Ford’s GSR personnel remained E’s, the company would save a bundle in merit increases.  

A new suspicion was beginning to form in my mind. What if the race game that Ford was playing with the black modelers was part of a much bigger strategy to reduce its GSR salary payroll costs across the board?  

In the Design Center alone it was easy to see how Ford doubled the effect of keeping black modelers artificially low in our pay grades by doing the same thing to an equal number of white modelers or more. The appearance of racial discrimination goes away and salary costs go down. The effect would be multiplied with the influx of female modelers if their initial rise was as far as the company intended to let them go.  

The trouble with speculation like that is that you can’t prove what hasn’t happened yet. Maybe the white women would continue to make rapid strides, the black men would be joined by black women and all of us would go where our talents led us. That scenario made the most sense – if the company realized what it would be getting by recognizing the true value of its workers and paid them accordingly. Why wouldn’t they? 

Ok, so I was naïve. I assumed that the company’s rating system really was designed to measure the value of all its salaried employees from top to bottom. I didn’t learn until ten years later that only Ford management was assessed that way. The general salary roll had a predetermined number of slots for the only ratings that mattered for merit increases and promotions, regardless of what they were called. In the Design Center, all three of those slots in modeling, drafting, engineering and design were open to some white males. The bottom and the middle were reserved for white women and black men.  

Through the first half of the ’80s the Design Center had only two black designers, Sam Mayers and Nehemiah Amaker. It had two female designers. Both of them were white. The five black modelers were all men. The seven female modelers were all white. Over the next fifteen years the company would have a maximum of six black modelers on its payroll at the same time – all men, and eight white women. Keep in mind that for every female and African-American a white male modeler had to be designated to balance the books without regard to his contributions and potential contributions to the company’s success.  

Had there been no blacks or women the designated number of O’s, EP’s and E’s would not have changed. Most of the white modelers never caught on to how that setup worked. Many of them resented every raise and promotion that the blacks and the women received believing that our success came at their expense. But some of them did understand that an unfair system hurt everyone who wasn’t pre-designated to succeed.  

George Green had a clear vision of what was at stake for everyone. His brother-in-law was laid off with me in ’67 and got the same poison pill offer that I got in ’68.   George told me that Bennie Barbara, a man I trusted, persuaded Personnel to give his brother-in-law the poison pill. Bennie did not what him to come back although he had never worked for him. He simply didn’t like the way the man looked. He called him, “…that slow walking, slow talking, pipe-smoking son-of-a-bitch.”

My participation in the P/R revision wasn’t a total bust for me. My name was now on a relatively short list of GSR employees that our Personnel department called on for every committee that came up.  I was the token black guy.  

Design Center Personnel chose me along with eleven other people to meet for one hour with Ford’s Senior Vice President Lou Ross. He was making stops as various facilities around the country to share his concerns and observations with us and to listen to ours without the filter of middle management. Our group was supposed to be a cross-section of GSR people from Design, Modeling, Engineering, Administration and Fabrication. Most of us were smarter than average and we weren’t afraid to speak our minds. The latter consideration seemed to be the most important. Those of us who weren’t exceptionally bright were exceptionally outspoken and tended to say what most of us only thought. 

The Fabrication Department consisted of the paint, plastic, wood, metal and trim shops where fabrics were sewn on trim panels, seats, consoles, etc. One man from the Metal Shop represented the entire department. Two secretaries represented Administration. Joe Warren represented engineering. There were four designers and four clay modelers. Two of the modelers, Jim Biando and I, came from the same studio. A designer named Ron Steffie also came from our studio. Lou Ross had his secretary with him and a man from Ford Personnel who took notes. Metric from our Personnel office stood by the door. 

The instant I walked into the conference room and saw the long table with Lou Ross and his Personnel guy sitting at the head of it I knew that we were in for more of a lecture than a two-way exchange. 

The cigar-smoking VP started in by telling us that the Escort, the world’s best selling car, was costing the company 300 dollars per vehicle to build. A few weeks earlier in an all-Design Center assembly, Ford executives told us that the Escort was costing the company 400 dollars per vehicle. Neither figure made sense because most of the “cost” was in new plant and equipment that the hot sales were rapidly paying for.  

Lou Ross then pointed to the high wages paid to American autoworkers as another crippling cost factor. That didn’t make sense, either, because increases in productivity offset the cost in wages and there were countless ways of increasing productivity. The biggest barriers to increasing productivity were long lead times and managerial obfuscation at every level starting in the Design Center. 

The top item on the agenda was Ford’s competitive position in the auto industry. Lou Ross talked about strategies to maintain our number-two position relative to GM. He talked about the growing threat from Japan, particularly with Toyota and its new Mercedes-class Lexus and Infinity. Ford had nothing comparable to a Mercedes because of a deliberate strategy to take as much cost as possible out of every vehicle we made. He talked about Toyota’s redefinition of the word “quality” in automotive design with its emphasis on tight fit and finish issues and attention to details that American automakers overlooked.  

We listened patiently until the Senior VP told us that customer satisfaction with Ford dealerships was a bright spot in the company’s operations. That’s when our eyes started to roll.  With fifteen minutes left on the clock, Lou Ross let the troops speak. 

The VP’s comment about how wonderful our dealerships were was so foreign to our experience that we had to let him know. Bill Wight spoke. The rest of us nodded. Ross blew us off. Perhaps our concerns were local. They did not apply to the rest of the country… Next question. 

Ron Steffie: Why don’t we have a car to compete with the Lexus? 

Lou Ross: It costs too much… Next question. 

Joe Warren: Wouldn’t we do better if our cars didn’t look so much alike?

Lou Ross: No… Next question. 

The next question was mine as well as most designers and modelers I talked to before the meeting: Why are we following GM trends and Toyota trends instead of setting our own?  

Ross gave a formula answer then abruptly changed the subject and ate up the clock with double-talk. 

Lou Ross: GM and Toyota are the industry leaders in blah, blah, blah…  

Jim Biondo: Why strive to be number two? Why not number one? 

Lou Ross: Well… Blah, blah, double-talk. 

Ron Steffie: I don’t understand. Why not number one? 

Lou Ross: Well…Blah. 

Joe Warren: Why not number one? 

Lou Ross: Well… Perhaps that’s something we should look at.