LANSING, Mich. (AFX) - It is time once again to journey to the past.
And so, as they have for one afternoon each of the past 21 summers now, the old autoworkers flock to Moose Lodge 288 on the fringes of this car capital, collecting name tags at the door. For a few, treasured hours, this is an unlikely portal back to a sort of industrial Brigadoon.
They come nominally for the buffet lunch -- chicken or roast beef, your choice. They come to applaud the winners of the $5 door prizes and to claim the daisy centerpieces from the tabletops at afternoon's end. But the real reason they are here is to clasp shoulders, exchange handshakes, and to trade wistful tales.
When what was left of the Reo Motor Car Co. died 31 years ago, its sturdy Speed Wagons and torpedo-nosed Royale Eights, already collector's items, gained added currency as the last tangible artifacts of a golden time.
But the memories live on vividly here under the slow-spinning ceiling fans and faint fluorescents of the fraternal hall. At least the good ones do.
'There he is!' they greet each other. 'Hey, I know you!' comes the answer.
'You see that little guy over there? He reminds me of that guy on American Bandstand. Never changes,' one man whispers, pointing across a room of silver hair and stooped shoulders.
To hear former Reo employees tell it, they were the best of times. A time when bosses treated workers with respect, when products made them proud, when the men and women who drafted blueprints and wielded rivet guns cared for each other like family.
No sir, there's nothing like the Reo of memory anymore, they lament. The question, unspoken and perhaps unanswerable in the warm fog of nostalgia, is: Was there ever, really?
America's long relationship with the automobile and the motor industry is often described as a love affair. But it's much more complicated than infatuation, founded as much on deep-seated need as the whims of desire.
Today, with General Motors Corp. cutting thousands of jobs, with parts supplier Delphi Corp. mired in bankruptcy, and Ford Motor Co. struggling to find its way, Americans mourn all that we may be losing.
After all, it's hard to think of an industry and a product so intrinsically tied to our self-identity. And in a country vexed by the export of manufacturing jobs, there's good reason to remember that Big Auto's well-paid, secure legacy jobs delivered generations of factory workers and families to a middle-class life they otherwise could not have imagined.
But to appraise what is at stake now, it helps to take measure of what has already been lost.
And in the case of Reo, folks seem to have selectively set aside some of the less comfortable memories. They don't talk much about once tense face-offs between unionized workers and management; of exhausting, mind-numbing assembly work in a plant that broiled in the summer and turned icy in winter; of trying to get by after losing their pensions.
'Willful amnesia,' says Lisa Fine, an associate professor at nearby Michigan State University who has documented the history of the company and its workers.
But selective memory about America's autobuilding past is hardly limited to folks who worked at 'The Reo.' Instead, it may say something about all of us and the unique -- and perhaps, misplaced -- affection we still hold for the industry.
'The nostalgia is there,' says Sean McAlinden, a longtime observer of the industry at the Center for Automotive Research, 'but it might be for something that never existed.'
Jim Cataline was just out of high school in 1945, clerking in the meat department at the A&P for 45 cents an hour and waiting for the Eaton County draft board to call. In the interim, he took his parents' advice and applied for a job at Reo, where they both worked.
The following Monday, he reported for work at the sprawling red brick factory on Washington Avenue at pay more than double that of the supermarket job, and was given a badge with a silver stripe that allowed him full run of the place.
It was a heady summer for a 17-year-old kid, quickly introduced to a life at Reo that went well beyond the end of his shift.
'I remember the biggest party,' he says, recalling a July night 61 years ago when a crowd packed the grand columned clubhouse Reo erected for its workers. 'The name of the band, I think, was Bob Chester and the Coca-Cola Spotlight Band. And, of course, everyone had their own bottle in there and was mixing their booze and the Coke. The band was playing and everybody was dancing. This was bigtime.'
Stories like his fill a treasured chapter in Lansing's rich autobuilding lore. But few people beyond know such a company really existed.
Maybe they've seen Reo's logo of outstretched wings, heard of the little truck it initially called the Hurry-Up Wagon. But only because they were adopted as the name and symbol of a 1980s pop band. Mostly, Reo has been forgotten.
That hardly troubles Reo folks, who speak of it not as a company or a vehicle, but as kin.
'This is a family,' says Peggy Hadwin, widow of a former Reo worker. 'Always has been. Always will be.'
If Reo was a family, its patriarch was Ransom Eli Olds, best known as the creator of the Oldsmobile. Lansing's favorite son started the company in 1904, naming it with his own initials after parting ways with investors in his first venture, which was sold to GM.
By the late 1920s, Reo was booming. It employed 5,600, turned out flamboyantly stylish cars and dutifully utilitarian trucks, and marketed itself as a different kind of car company.
'If you could visit us at Lansing and spend a day or a week going through this big 40-acre factory, you'd learn more about Reo quality than we could ever hope to tell you in Reo advertisements,' the company preached in just such an ad, printed in 1917.
'For ... the Reo Motor Car Co. is owned and managed by home folk -- Lansing folk. No absentee directors control this business. Any problem, no matter how vital or trifling, can be, and is, decided right here and on the moment.'
Not all those decisions proved the wisest ones. Reo timed introduction of its luxury Royale as the Great Depression hit. The company staggered, and gave up cars in 1936 to focus on trucks. It was saved largely by the federal government's loans and wartime orders. It survived until 1975, when a bankruptcy judge ordered its liquidation.
For Reoites, there was little choice but to move on. Most found new jobs and adapted to new lives. But three decades later, as they take seats at the tables set for 114 that stretch the length of the lodge's main hall and back again, they retrieve carefully preserved memories of the Reo life, polishing them and displaying them for one another the way some folks do heirloom jewelry or silver.
For Dick Lundy, Reo is the place he quickly grew up. It was 1964, and Lundy, not long out of college, was working in a special group designing trucks for the U.S. Army fighting in Vietnam. Thanks to a special phone line, officers in Saigon would call the plant, asking for help in remodeling the trucks to fend off the Viet Cong.
Lundy's group responded, devising steel plates to bolt underneath the trucks after the rebels planted explosives beneath the gas tanks. When the guerillas fired from the jungle into truckbeds filled with rows of U.S. soldiers seated facing one another, they drew up a new way to flip the benches around.
'We had to fix it in the field because people were dying,' Lundy says. 'It gave me confidence. It told me what I was capable of, my imagination. My inner self.'
For Harry Sayles, a former welder, Reo is a story from 1972, when the inside of his home was devoured by fire. It deprived Sayles, his wife and two children of clothes, shelter and security -- at least until co-workers at the plant took up a collection. What, he asks, would they have done otherwise?
'It was things like that that kept it family,' he says.
Cataline remembers it much the same way. More than 30 years after his life at Reo ended, he leads the way through the thick summer must, deep into his garage and a black three-drawer file cabinet rescued from the plant. It is filled, top to bottom, with bits of what used to be copies of Reoitems, the company newsletter. Brochures. Hire slips. Letters.
His wife, Ethelda, teases, calls him a packrat. But Cataline, now 78, isn't just holding on to bits of paper.
'Yeah, Reo,' he says, with a sigh and a smile. 'It was our whole life at one time.'
There was another side to Reo, too. It's the unabridged version, the one oldtimers don't talk about so readily. And although the place closed years ago, its factory jobs were in many ways much like the ones today's autoworkers describe.
'I got off the line as soon as I could,' says Noel Johnson, now 68, who hired on at Reo installing gas tanks on truck, after truck, after truck.
Back then, Johnson and his co-workers recall, there was little in the way of safety procedures or equipment. In an old plant, jerry-rigged for a new age, workers on the line stooped and ducked as steel baskets loaded with parts rotated overhead. Johnson points to the crease etched in the skin between his eyebrows, a scar left by one of those baskets when the factory worker, preoccupied with trying to catch up with the line, turned around too quickly.
'You're doing the same old humdrum every day, every moment doing the same thing and you've got to work at a fast pace because the line doesn't wait for you,' he says. 'It just keeps on moving.'
Working on the line required tolerance of both discomfort and tension. Older line workers wouldn't show new hires how things worked for fear their jobs would be taken. The roof had so many holes that the men hung buckets from the ceiling, with hoses funneling the water that gathered out the windows. The water they didn't catch each time it rained buckled the creosote-coated woodblock floors.
'It leaked like a sieve. It was cold in the winter. Part of the building didn't have any heat in it. But still it was a great place,' Sayles says.
Such statements perplexed Fine, the professor who interviewed scores of the workers for a book, 'The Story of REO Joe.'
The people she spoke to described a Reo with virtually no conflicts between unionized workers and management, she says. Then she went back to the old documents and found a long, bitter record of such tensions.
One series of wildcat strikes stretched from 1942 to 1946 -- more than 50 slowdowns, sitdowns and walkouts. Some workers railed at the company's attempts to time their jobs and pay them by the task rather than by the hour. With the war on, many of the women who had been hired to work on the lines complained that they were being paid less than men for the same jobs. In their last strike in 1951, workers stayed out more than a month.
Yet when Fine suggested to workers they include a sentence about the labor struggles on the historical marker being made for the factory site, the suggestion was ignored.
'They shut out the bad things that they didn't want to remember or didn't choose to remember,' she says.
It's not that workers are being untruthful. As the din of laughter, conversation and clicking silverware fills the Moose Lodge on a Tuesday afternoon, a few acknowledge that life at Reo did not end well. When the company went under, most lost virtually all of the pensions they had been expecting. There were some -- the older among them -- who struggled to find work. There were many divorces, a few suicides.
But that is not the Reo they've chosen to preserve. To do so, after all, would expose the sharp edges of reality, removing the comfort of an experience best viewed through the blurred prism of time.
And so, with the sheet cakes from Sam's Club served, the prizewinners' names called, and a new chair of the reunion committee chosen, the Reoites head for the door. Only a few linger, eager to recount what made it special, until finally just two remain on the folding chairs under the mounted antlers.
'See you next year, Marv,' Peggy Hadwin calls to Marvin Coy, as she makes her way out of the room, leaning on her quad cane for support.
'OK,' Coy says, 'I'll be here.'
Drive too quickly down Washington Avenue now, and it would be easy to conclude that Reo was a dream.
Little remains to testify to the fact that thousands once built vehicles and lives here. There's the historical marker alongside the curb, a mural of the plant painted on the side of a largely boarded-up building, and the presence of the Speedwagon convenience store up the street.
But down a hallway at Lansing Sanitary Supply, which now occupies part of the former factory site, Butch Ellis has created a small shrine to what was.
Walking down that hall, Ellis -- whose grandfather, sister and uncle worked at the plant -- stops before an old black-and-white photo of the factory floor, marveling that none of the workers wore safety goggles or gloves, and many were coated with grease. He smiles, recalling that the uncle who lost his pension when Reo closed, talked frequently about how it was a wonderful place.
By the time Ellis and a few other business owners rediscovered the site in the early 1990s, he recalls, there wasn't much left. But on a telephone pole out front, some unknown soul had nailed a large rectangle of plywood, with this handpainted epitaph: 'Reo Cars & Trucks Built Here, 1905-1975.'
Below it, someone had posted a smaller sign, a postscript.
'Try to Remember,' it implored.
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