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Chapter 9

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hapter 8: Mixed Signals 

It's not every day that someone shares with you his personal vision of committing genocide. Although Vic's chosen method of machine-gunning all the black people in the world with an endless belt of bullets needed a bit of refinement the fundamental idea stood on its own. We hadn't expected to see each other like this and there was nobody around but the two of us so there was no question of him trying to put on a show for anyone. Something in his voice when he told me that I was "all right" seemed to ring true and something in his face when he did his pantomime of a machine-gunner mowing down "niggers" also rang true.  

I cannot begin to tell you what an odd moment that was for both of us. This was nothing like Vic's "Welcome aboard," speech with a practiced racist remark tacked onto it. It was an unguarded moment of spontaneous revelation from start to finish. What was he trying to tell me? 

As it was with everyone else, there were more than one or two dimensions to Vic's personality. The bigot was one dimension. The liar was another. There was also the sportsman, the Master Modeler, the family man and the nice guy who just wanted to be liked. He wasn't stupid so he knew that his crass, impulsive, outspoken style of racism with me in the studio wasn't endearing him to anyone. If you've ever been around a convert to religion who couldn't help but to tell everyone from time to time how God wanted him or her to live you have an idea of how it was with Vic and the Klan. White supremacy was Vic Clark's religion and he was an officer of the Burning Cross "church."  

Being a Klan official gave Vic a valued identity and a sacred responsibility. Having me in his studio was a constant challenge to his vision of himself and his responsibility to the "white race." He didn't know how to label me. Unlike the Jews in Vic's head, for which he had one stereotype that he could expand or contract to fit any Jew – except for Jesus Christ –  "niggers" came in wide range of varieties.  

Vic's main objective in making racist remarks to me seemed to be an attempt to match me up to a stereotype that he felt comfortable with. I caught on to what he was trying to do our first day together and made a game of confusing him. I wasn't an ignorant "field hand" or a "black militant." I wasn't dirty. I didn't have a criminal record. I didn't play black music or sing black songs. I wore an ascot to work. I spoke standard American-English and I just smiled or looked at him blankly when he provoked me to violence. The only pimp he knew was white and he was the only buffoon in the studio with thick lips who bucked his eyes and acted "niggerish." When he flashed me a picture of a white Playboy Centerfold, I feigned indifference. When I showed him a picture of my bride-to-be, I think he was disappointed that she wasn't white.   

Like Vic and everyone else I knew fairly well, I had my share of character flaws. Vic didn't know it, but as long as he didn't call me the n-word, he was in no danger of having me smash his face in. Jackie Robinson, a former U.S. Amy officer and a fierce competitor, put up with even that. To this day I don't see how he did it. Although I was no Jackie Robinson, I thought of myself as one. If someone had made the right pitch to me at that time and Republican leaders as a group hadn't worked so hard to defeat the Civil Rights Act in 1965, I might even have made a good Republican.  

Like Jackie Robinson and other famous spokesmen for the Republican Party, I believed that I had the power to change racist attitudes by proving my individual worth. As long as Vic put me in the lineup, it was my responsibility to hit safely with enough regularity, to run the bases with enough intelligence and daring, and to play my position in the field well enough to be an asset to the team. Had I failed, I would have blamed myself. That's the biggest reason I now feel that one of the most dangerous creatures on earth is a black Republican.  

The Jackie Robinson analogy was all wrong. Black modelers were now playing on the same field as white modelers but we were being judged on special scorecards that didn’t count defensive play unless one of us made an error. Then the fielding average for all of us dipped. Our scorecards didn't count extra base hits, runs scored or runs batted in. If one of us hit a home run our collective batting average dropped a little. If one of us hit a grand slam home run his individual batting average dropped a lot. In a system like that, nothing you could do was going to put you in the Hall of Fame although your strikeouts could get you sent to the Minors.  

Vic wasn't out to get me personally but he was marking my scorecard with a determination to keep black modelers in general from succeeding at Ford. If he could have achieved that goal by making me an exception to special scorecard rule, I'm sure that he would have done it.  

I now believe that that was what he was trying to tell me in the back room with his "You're all right/mow'm all down" confession. That's why I now think that he never referred to me as a nigger. If he were afraid of being physically attacked he wouldn't have invited it so often. White supremacy was his religion. As a keeper of the faith he had a sacred obligation to keep black people in their place. It wasn't personal.  

As things turned out, I didn't do as well as my black counterparts. Had I know then what I know now about Ford's black Performance Review system I would have done all I could to call the Studio Executive's attention to my work to counterbalance whatever Vic might have told him. I also would have put more emphases on identifying and practicing tried-and-true modeling formulas that wouldn't have hurt anyone instead of experimenting as much as I did – and striking out so often.  

The way I looked at it, you could always learn a formula, but to break new ground you had to do something that hadn't been done before. That was Emerson talking to me though his Conformity essay: "To be great, you must be a nonconformist," he wrote. I had no ambition to become a good modeler. I wanted to be a great one, a true Master Modeler. 

Learning the Ford modeling formulas early on had one big drawback that I recognized within my first few days on the job in Preproduction Interiors. Once you learned them, it was difficult to break free of them when the situation called for a slightly different approach. Watching Doug and Mack applying one of the formulas that I recognized, I noticed that there were several other ways they might have achieved the same result with less time and effort. I tried out all of those alternative methods. One of them worked. But the biggest payoff to my experiments was a profound understanding of why the other things I tried didn't work and why the Ford formula usually did. The operative word is usually.   

Experienced modelers can usually look at a job and know what to do to get the desired result. However, the complex geometry of some surfaces combined with their feasibility requirements could fool anyone. You start out one way and then make adjustments when you see that your initial impression was wrong. Beyond a certain threshold of experience it doesn't matter how good you are. It's the nature of the job itself. 

The first time someone who wasn't familiar with my job took it over when I couldn't be there for a few hours, I saw that he made the same diagnostic error that I did and didn't have time to correct it. When I got back, I saw that I was farther behind than I would have been if no one had filled in for me. I doubtlessly did the same thing when I filled in for someone else on overtime.  

Here was another pattern that took a long time and a broader view of the games within the game to see. The object of the overtime exercise was not to move the job ahead but to make it appear that every effort was being made to move it ahead. To Ford's way of thinking, more time and more bodies thrown at a job equaled more progress. It was a formula that worked in the plants so it looked good on paper.  

The studios to which I had been assigned were among the few that didn't work prodigious amounts of overtime. No problem for anyone looking for extra bucks or extra exposure. If you wanted to work overtime you could always find a studio that would take you. The best available modelers were preferred by the job leaders but anyone was accepted.  

The department Supervisor or a Master Modeler operating in that capacity would hook you up with a job leader, who filled you in on what had to be done. You'd spend a little time getting oriented to the job and then you'd go to work for the next two to four hours dismantling the bridges to success that it might have taken the regular modeler twice as long to discover and erect. I must have done a dozen jobs like that before I saw in the last few minutes why an "unnecessary" design element I had erased in the first fifteen minutes had to be restored.  

John Kellem and Benny Barbara, two of the Supervisors with the worst reputations among the modelers, were the easiest for me to work for. They gave me my first exposure to exterior modeling. 

Kellem was unfriendly by nature and harshly critical but his criticisms let me know where I stood every minute that I worked for him and were essential to my development. I learned as much in the few hours that I spent in his studio as I did in the many months that I worked for Harry and Vic. When he praised my work in the end, I knew he was sincere.  

The first time I worked overtime for Benny Barbara he startled me by asking for my opinion on the new Lincoln Mark I his studio was developing with its classic grill. Back then, new car programs had code names instead of alphanumeric designations. The code name for the Mark I was Lancelot. I wasn't trilled with the Lancelot but Benny was so clearly proud of it that I had to tell him something along the lines that I thought it did have a classic look. I was impressed with the superb modeling and told him so. He took that as an opportunity to lavish praise upon his "boys" and to tell me how disappointed he was that the company didn't make me one of them.  

When Benny finally put me on a job he made it a point to visit me from time to time to see how I was getting along, to make sure that I was comfortable and that I had everything I needed. He didn't pay much attention to the quality of my work. His focus was on the effort that I put into it and on assuring me that I had talent that would one-day pay off.  

The next big event in my career came in the Preproduction Interior studio when Tom Beubian assigned me to work one-on-one with the junior stylist on a console with a built-in TV screen for the rear seat passengers. The idea didn't catch on right away. Almost everyone thought that the concept was ridiculous and the stylist's Prism-color rendering was ugly. The first iterations of the clay model won no more converts to the idea than the first rendering did. The studio engineer flat out rejected it. The modelers, who now numbered six, not counting Vic, just laughed and said how glad they were not to be involved with it.  

Gradually, though, with new sketches from the stylist and better interpretations of them by me, the model began to take on a more pleasing shape. Even a non-production studio had to adhere to some realistic standards so it helped us with the engineer that the model's dimensions also began to fall closer to acceptable engineering parameters. If the idea caught on with upper management, it would have to be possible to take it to the next level. That's what the Preproduction Interiors studio was for.  

Now I was interacting directly with a designer, a draftsman and an engineer without aid or interference from anyone. I learned to anticipate problems with seat travel and component packaging and to avoid them. I became more fluent in the language of engineering and styling and more adept at feeding the stylist's personality into the design. If the draftsman asked for points on the model or a template to make sure that his drawing matched the model, I became more confident that the information I gave him would also match the feasibility requirements.  

In a relatively short time, sketches from the stylist became unnecessary. If he asked for "more chamfer" on a surface or to "take the curse off" of a corner, I could see what he wanted to see and make it happen.  A great aid to me in that respect was a book I happened across called Psycho Cybernetics by a plastic surgeon named Maxwell Maltz.  

Dr. Maltz discovered that a few formerly disfigured patients whom he had had fully restored still behaved as though they were disfigured. He investigated this strange phenomenon and discovered that they acted that way because they still saw themselves that way despite all objective evidence to the contrary. On further investigation he discovered that a person's self image was not necessarily the same as one that could be captured on film and that it was the self-image that determined behavior to a great extent.  

With Maltz's discovery of self-image psychology, came a related discovery that had to do with the servomechanisms that guide heat- seeking missals to their targets. As the missal started for its target the servomechanism inside would detect when it was off and automatically correct for the error. The corrections would become smaller and smaller until no more corrections were necessary.  

Maltz found that human beings used a similar goal-seeking mechanism for activities like groping in the dark for a light switch. The trick was to visualize the goal as clearly as possible, to see yourself accomplishing it and then to let your biological goal-seeking mechanism take over.  

Maltz cited an experiment involving three groups of people with no experience in shooting basketball free throws. They were all taught what to do. The first group practiced shooting baskets for 21 days. On the last day they had improved by 25%. The second group did not practice and showed no improvement. The third group practiced only in their minds. They imagined the weight and texture of the ball. They imagined shooting it at the basket and watching it go in. If they "saw" it miss, they corrected the mistake with their next mental shot. At the end of 21 days this group improved by 24%.  

The console project lasted about a month and a half. When I closed my eyes to sleep each night, I pictured myself as a self-confident pro admired by all and creating a thing of beauty. I made sure that I stuck to this ritual for at least 21 days. It became a habit, which I have never abandoned. It has served me well. 

A 21-day period, by the way, seems to be a magic transformation number. Maltz saw it with his plastic surgery patients. I saw something similar in Basic Training where recruits on a six-day training schedule didn't start to think of themselves as soldiers and act the part without having to think about it until somewhere around the fourth week.  That's when the reality of what I was doing in the sawdust of a hand-to-hand combat pit hit me with full force. If I didn't see myself as a soldier who could and would do whatever it took to vanquish my opponent, I wouldn't be much good in combat. Mastering any difficult task followed the same principle. 

Dave Orkoski, a stylist in the Ford Interior studio, never saw himself as a soldier. Like me, he was an Army Reservist but he never looked right in uniform. His collar brass was always crooked, his cap didn't sit straight on his head, he didn't stand at attention the way he was supposed to and his impression of a military salute was embarrassing to look at.  

I met Dave a year before I knew that I would be entering the field of automotive design. I was standing at a bus stop in the dead of winter after a Reserve meeting freezing by butt off. He stopped and went far out of his way to drive me home in his '64 T-Bird. Like Gib and my brother George the best one-word description of Dave Orkoski was, cool. He didn't need anyone to tell him that and he probably would have shrugged indifferently if anyone had because he was just being himself.  

When I saw him for the first time at Ford it struck me that he did look right in a suit and tie. He looked like a pro. He smiled and asked me how I was doing. He recognized me from Summer Camp but when I tried to remind him of the time he rescued me from the cold he didn't remember. That was the kind of person I wanted to be. That was the picture of myself that I drew in my mind when I was doing my visualization exercises, confidence without arrogance, competence without pretence. It was every bit as important as visualizing the outstanding completed job.

The last thing I had to do before sending the clay console to the paint shop was to give it a leather texture and mask off the screen and parts that I would later foil to simulate chrome. That's what I was doing when the millwright in his clean tan smock drove in on his electrically powered property mover to take the model away.  Someone pointed him in my direction. He drove over to me in my green, clay stained smock, saw that the model wasn't ready to go and started up a conversation.  

He was an older man with thinning white hair, a ruddy complexion and an outgoing personality. He had been in the business for decades. I enjoyed listening to him talk about some of his memorable experiences in the Styling Center going back to the days when the building first opened. I was especially pleased with his admiration of clay modelers.  

I had to make one last cut on the clay and clean it up with a clay plane before I could finish masking the TV screen and the bezel around it. When I told him I was finished and offered to help him put the heavy model on the wheeled table he was towing he thanked me and started talking about the special precautions that had to be taken to move clay properties. Then he nearly floored me when he said, "This looks like a real console but it's only clay. If you're not careful…" 

Chuck Clayton heard him and did a double take. Conrad Gazenski, who I knew from Schiloff's school rolled his eyes and shook his head. I just blinked about a half-dozen times to assure myself that an evil scientist hadn't somehow replaced the millwright with an imperfect double.  

It was at that moment that I realized my self-image as a competent modeler with the model to prove it weren't going to be enough, not even for some of the good guys. This Ford millwright certainly knew that Ford clay modelers wore green smocks. He was looking at me performing modeler tasks in my green smock with several days worth of clay on it. How could he not know that this was my model? Yet, he simply could not make the connection between the model and me.  

Perhaps it donned on him later in the day or sometime that night that he had said something incredibly inappropriate. But all the while we were moving the model together and when he was driving away with a friendly good-bye wave, he never hinted that he knew what he had done.

You'd have to be a special breed of idiot not to know that race was at the root of the millwright incident. The Styling Center had been without a significant number of blacks in professional roles for so long that it was difficult for many old hands to get used to the idea that something was wrong with their normal way of seeing and saying things. Often I would round a corner in time to hear a racist remark or some portion of a "nigger" joke and get a jolt from the "good guys" who were making the remarks, telling the jokes or laughing at them.  

One guy made the mistake of calling Calvin Morrison a nigger to his face. Calvin hit him so hard in the chest that he ended up on the ground writing in pain and gasping for breath. The incident never got reported to anyone in authority. Nobody wanted to open that can of worms.   

It was a free country. People could say what they wanted to as long as they didn’t incite violence. Calling Calvin the n-word was, in my opinion, a clear incitement to violence. But the majority of racist cracks that were made on a daily basis didn't include that word. Sometimes they were uttered without malice. Sometimes honest people could disagree about what was and what wasn't a racist remark. And sometimes, the context of a situation defined what was happening, like Pvt. Hayes' use of the word "boy" on that particular day in Basic Training vs. Benny Barbara's everyday use of the same word.   

Wednesday, the day everyone in the Styling Center traded in his dirty smock for a clean one…. 

The line outside of the tool crib window was made up of fifteen or so men waiting to exchange their modeler green, wood shop and millwright tan or paint and plaster shop white smocks. One man toward the end of the line was stepping out of a pair of coveralls. That meant that he was a janitor. I was the only black person in line. When it was my turn to exchange my smock, the crib man took it and tossed it in the hamper. He got distracted by something that was going on behind him before he could give me a new one and asked me what color I needed. Somewhere behind me I heard, "Give him a pair of coveralls," followed by an explosion of laughter.   

I stepped back to see if I could spot the guy who made the remark. I didn’t recognize his voice. I quickly saw that I didn't recognize any of the faces of the men in line, either. Some of the men didn't bother to cut short their laughter. All of the rest were smiling – all, that is, except for the red-faced man with the coveralls.  

Later on I got to know the man with the coveralls. His name was Basil. He came in the studio to sweep up the big piles of trash left over from our preparations for a show. Tom and Mack got a big kick out of teasing him. I got a kick out of the unintentionally funny things that came out of Basil's mouth when he answered them, often to their chagrin, because most of their teasing went over his head.  

When Basil didn't come in, a black WW II vet named Andy Walker took his place. Andy started working for Ford the year I was born. He was the kind of guy who commanded respect by his very presence in or out of coveralls. He was easy to talk to. He had a good sense of humor and nothing went over his head. Even Vic spoke to him with respect. It was inconceivable to me that anyone wouldn't. Andy became the second man at Ford that I incorporated into the character aspect of my vision of the modeler I wanted to be.  

Another black man who had a profound impact on the way I saw myself as a modeler was McKinley Thompson, the Clay Modeling Supervisor in the Feasibility studio. Feasibility shared a tiny wash basin room with Preproduction Interiors. That was the room where I met him one afternoon when I was cleaning up to go home. McKinley could afford not to take Vic Clark seriously and he didn't. To McKinley, every outrageous thing that Vic said and did was a source off amusement. McKinley's, "How is Vic treating you?" question became a running joke. 

I'd heard of McKinley Thompson and didn’t expect him to be as openly friendly with me as he was since he never dropped by to see me on the job. The thing that made such an impression on me was the mere fact that a black man, even though McKinley was a little on the light side, outranked all of the Master Modelers in Ford Motor Company. If he could go that high before the Civil Rights Act without being an Uncle Tom, I reasoned that there was nothing but me to stop me from rising to Master Modeler, the level below his that I aspired to.  

One thing about McKinley that should have given me warning was that he came to Ford with the aspiration and the qualifications to become a stylist. That would have put him on an executive career path to mahogany row. As the Modeling Supervisor he was as high as he could go. As the head of a non-production studio, he had the least amount of prestige. You had to be an insider to know things like that. The public's only views of the Styling Center were rare, superficial and deceiving. 

Around Easter of 1977 Ford sponsored a special TV presentation of the movie The Robe with only three commercial breaks. If you saw any of those ads, you saw me and most of the other black professionals in Ford Styling. Sam, who had recently become Ford's first black stylist, wasn't filmed. Ford's other recently hired black stylist was filmed in an engineer's lab coat. The Styling Center's engineers didn’t wear lab coats.  

The Detroit riots of 1967 erupted on my first day home from my annual two weeks of active duty with the Army Reserves. I lived within three blocks of where the rioting erupted. Because of all the fires, the National Guard's indiscriminate shooting, the utility shutoffs and the police blockades it took me another week to get back to work.  

Walking into the Styling Center, I got the feeling that the same evil scientist who had turned the pleasant millwright into a jerk had turned over half the people in the building into Harry Finley. I'd feel their eyes and then I would turn and see them staring at me.  

I thought that the guys in the studio would be glad to see that I was unharmed given the high body count of black people Detroit. I expected them to be bursting to ask questions about my experiences. Chuck Clayton, the senior stylist, Milt Goodman and Vic Clark did burst into happy grins when I walked through the door. Chuck and Milt did pump me for information they couldn't get on radio and television about what I had seen in the riot zone. Vic asked questions about things like how many TV sets I'd stolen. Conrad wasn't there. Everyone else seemed to have trouble looking me in the eye.   

Milt appeared terribly shaken. When he got me alone he told me that it was because of what happened in my absence. He told me that Vic had become increasingly irritated by having to work with "a nigger, a kike and a Polish Catholic."  He had given Milt and Conrad an especially hard time. When the rioting broke out Vic was as happy as Milt had ever seen him. He got on his soapbox and said, "See, I told you…" What troubled Milt was his observation that nobody was laughing at him now and some guys were actually listening to him – and agreeing with him.  

When news about the rioting ebbed, things in the studio got back to normal. Everyone started treating me like I was a human being again….  

I was knifing in a line on a clay headrest. I could see Vic in the backroom writing. When he finished, he walked over to me with a four-page form in his hand and told me that I was going to Ford Interiors. He said that before I left, he wanted to show me the Performance Review he had just written for me. He handed me the form filled out in longhand, telling me that it would be typed up later if I had no objections to it.  

Object? Hell, I was elated.  

A Klansman had written only good things about me. He went so far as to write that I would "one day be an asset to the company." He gave me, a rookie B-modeler, not merely a Satisfactory but a Satisfactory Plus! What was there to object to?