Grace and Grit (10 page)

In 1979, I, too, faced a new opportunity at Goodyear, but my
first time inside the plant, I felt like I’d stuck my head in a barrel of hot roofing tar. No exaggeration. It smelled that bad, and I wondered, “Do I really want to work here?” The deafening machinery made my ears buzz, fumes from the curing pits almost choked me, tire-building equipment reared back like gigantic spiders on their hind legs, and machines called banburies, which looked like three-story cake mixers, spit out four-hundred-pound batches of black rubber marshmallows. Several times a day, from that day forward, I asked myself if I really knew what I’d gotten myself into.

For six months I trained in the plant’s various departments in the five main divisions: the tube plant, the mill, the truck side, the passenger side, and the radial plant. I marveled at the fact that I was working in a fifty-acre maze, with miles and miles of conveyor belts and daily reports about “near misses.” It would take only a second to lose your fingers in the tire machine if you placed your hands on a “pinch point”—the spot where the cutter, as sharp as a guillotine, did its slicing.

Lying in bed at night, I’d mull over the stories people told about the accidents that happened. One such story, in which a factory worker in the nearby Union City plant in Tennessee had suffocated to death when he was rolled up in a machine for two hundred yards, haunted me. I kept mentally replaying that moment when his father, who had been working the same shift, had to pull his body out.

After listening to stories like this, I thought I understood how quickly a machine could become a death trap, but the idea never really hit home until the day I had my physical at the doctor’s office, located at the back of the plant. As I sat waiting for my examination, two distraught men carried in their coworker who’d been caught in the mill, a machine that operates two gigantic rollers moving in opposite directions. The mill is so hot that it softens rubber into liquid to be extruded. I found out later that they’d heard him screaming but thought he was yelling that he was taking
a break. Instead, he’d been pinned between the moving rollers. I grew nauseous smelling his burned flesh. His clothes had melted into his skin, and his arm was hanging by a single thread of muscle. After that, I began each shift with a prayer that I’d leave like I came in: alive, and with all my body parts attached.

Despite the hazardous machines, I looked forward to each day, which was always different from the last. My squadron of five attended seminars and toured fabric mills and retread plants in Alabama and Tennessee. I learned how to prep the stock, build tires, cut hot rubber in the mill room, and withstand a sandstorm of white chalk in the tube room. I’d lug home thick training manuals explaining the process of making tires or managing a team of workers. I took test after test on every topic imaginable, learning the biographies of men such as the founding father, Frank A. Seiberling, who started the company in 1928, and P. W. Litchfield, president when the Gadsden plant opened in 1929—the same year that Goodyear became the largest tire manufacturer in the world. I was even held accountable for memorizing the educational background, religious denomination, and children’s names of the top brass in Akron.

As I studied the history of the company, I was especially moved by the strange story of Charles Goodyear, who discovered the vulcanization process for rubber but died penniless. What I admired about Goodyear was his determination and sense of purpose in developing a way to make a viable form of rubber. Until his addition of sulfur to the mix, rubber softened into a gooey blob in hot weather and hardened into brittle pieces in cold weather. He never gave up his search despite the odds against him and the fact that he was destitute, continually in and out of debtors’ prison. I admired his resilience but wondered how his family, who lived on the brink of disaster, endured the sacrifices they had to make. He never profited from his invention and died ignorant of how dramatically his efforts would change the future.

After several months of classroom time, I began working as a supervisor trainee in stock prep on the night shift with my mentor, Andrew, a bear of a man who encouraged me in every possible way. He gave me management books to read outside of work, and pushed me to become a member of an Anniston business club (where I would work my way up to becoming the first female president). His confidence in me helped quell my fears about the machinery and bolstered my nascent belief in my ability to be a good manager.

I was lucky I had Andrew to lean on. He warned me to choose my words and actions carefully. Anything could be twisted, and I didn’t dare joke with the guys. He’d remind me that half the people in the plant were related to one another somehow, and I’d better be careful whose feathers I ruffled or I’d pass those people on the way down.

Even Andrew, who’d seen quite a bit as a supervisor, couldn’t begin to predict the crazy snafus I’d run into just because I was a woman. One night when we were short two people on the schedule after the race weekend at NASCAR, Andrew asked me to run the overtime clock. No big deal. I went upstairs and starting calling workers to see who could come in at 1:00
A.M
. On my next shift, the men I’d called cussed me like a yard dog. They wanted to be taken off the calling list. Their wives had pitched a fit when they heard a strange woman’s voice in the middle of the night. From then on, I handed the phone to the janitor, who’d give me a quick wink before he asked someone’s wife if he could speak to her husband in the dead of night.

W
HEN
I completed my training, I felt like I was on top of the world. The day I received my department assignment as a new manager, I sat in the conference room next to the other four trainees in my squadron. One training manager, a real hoot, warned us, “When you become a manager, it’ll be tough running your
departments. I’m the only one who’ll tell you the truth. Being a manager is just like falling off a cliff.” Since training had felt as unnatural as jumping out of an airplane, his remark didn’t surprise me. I appreciated his honesty and was ready to prove I had the mettle to be a good manager—to show that I could motivate my team and withstand the daily dissonance of deadly machinery.

I genuinely believed I could be an important part of Goodyear’s future, fostering a better relationship between management and the union, or “bargaining men.” Even more important, women in management were relatively new, and I was one of two women on my squadron—the other woman, Cindy, had been promoted from the union. The squadron represented a range of backgrounds. One of the men had come from shipping, another had worked at IBM, and the third worked as an assistant store manager at J. C. Penney.

I felt like a trailblazer. Both Andrew and the human resources manager had told me many times through those weeks that I had a bright future at Goodyear, and that meant a lot to me. I wanted to matter, and I was ready to fulfill these high expectations. If I could make it, then the door would open for more women to follow. I already knew all too well about the woman who’d gone through training the year before me and had quit soon after being assigned the night shift, a typical assignment for new managers. I wasn’t quite sure why she quit, but for whatever reason, I felt compelled to prove something on her behalf. As the roomful of rookies left following our last meeting together, I looked forward to the day when there would be more women joining me.

M
Y FIRST
job as supervisor was in stock prep on the third shift, from 11:00
P.M
. to 7:00
A.M.
, in the radial division. I knew from the beginning that being a female supervisor wouldn’t be easy, but nothing had prepared me for the daily hassle from both the union guys and upper management. One old-timer who’d been there for forty years was so enraged when I was made supervisor that he immediately
requested to be transferred to another department. Another old man flat-out announced, “I take orders from a bitch at home, and I’m not taking orders from a bitch at work.”

It wasn’t surprising that these men resented me; they’d never answered to a woman before. I tried to stay calm. I didn’t want the men to have something more to complain about by becoming too emotional. It would take a while for them to accept me, and I tried to rise to each challenge—even ridiculous ones, such as the time one guy insisted, “I bet you can’t find me a recipe my wife would like or doesn’t already have.” Maybe he was trying to prove I didn’t have the right stuff even at home, where I was “supposed” to be. I brought him a chicken and corn bread recipe, wishing he’d focus on what really mattered. He seemed satisfied.

While the men I supervised resented a woman being in a position of authority, some of my supervisors feared that I wouldn’t pull my weight. I had only been on the floor in stock prep a few days before one shift foreman took me out onto the back dock, where he thought no one would hear him. In a low voice, he grumbled, “I’ve got this other loser [referring to an African American worker], and now I have you, and you’re a damn woman.” He actually scratched his crotch, so I just focused on the Y-shaped vein popping out smack-dab in the middle of his forehead. “I don’t want either one of you. You’ll ruin my record, and I’m gonna get rid of both of you.” As far he and some of the others were concerned, I might as well have been a missionary in a strange land, trying to convert them to a new religion.

I
DIDN’T
say anything to Andrew or anybody else, imagining that these situations would fade away as naturally as fog burning off the foothills in the morning sun. I couldn’t turn to Cindy for support—she decided to go back into the union not long after becoming a manager. She’d been assigned to the mill room, where raw rubber is mixed. During the mixing process, lampblack (also known as
black carbon) is released. As fine as talcum powder, the lampblack seeps into every pore of your skin, making lungs bleed and sweat blacken. Cindy had such an adverse reaction to the chemicals that she requested to be transferred back to where she’d started.

I hoped I could talk to Barbara, a tough old bird who’d become supervisor of the tire room. In the bathroom one evening, I asked her how she handled the stress of being the only other female manager. She let a string of cuss words fly before she told me, “You can’t trust a soul,” and cautioned me that if I planned to stay, I’d better watch my back. Eventually she left, too; I assumed she’d had all she could take from the men.

A
S A
supervisor, I immediately learned to tune out all of the cussing. It didn’t take too long, either, for me to understand that I could never let my guard down. Whenever we were in the office together, one of my shift foremen—a tall, blue-eyed man named Donald—would grin and make the most inappropriate comments, without warning. Donald always dressed neatly and had a good-natured manner of speaking, so it sometimes took me a minute to register what he’d said. We’d be talking about work, and out of the blue he’d interject, “That must be one of them French bras you’re wearing, because it’s got those things up high and your nipples are showing.” Or he’d catch me retrieving a file from the file cabinet, and he’d observe, “If you kept bending over at the file cabinet, you might get something rammed in your ass that you don’t want. I know I could take care of that.” As his words sank in, I kept my head averted, shame spreading its red flush across my face, shock and embarrassment flooding my body.

After a few of these awkward moments, I learned to steel myself for his comments. When Donald inspected my department, despite the fact that it was spotless and in order, he’d say things like, “Goddammit, Lilly, this looks like a whorehouse.”

I wouldn’t flinch. “Really?” I’d reply. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to a whorehouse.”

I
CONTINUED
to give upper management the benefit of the doubt until the night in stock prep when I was overseeing the mills. When we ran out of stock on one of the machines, my supervisor barked at me, “Lilly, load her with that scrap rubber over there. The worst thing you can do is let her go down.”

The scruffy union fellow running the mill, who looked like he might as well have been on one of the FBI’s Most Wanted posters at the post office, shook his head. “If you put the scrap in this machine, both the caps on each end will bust, and it will be a real hard fix,” he said.

I didn’t believe him, and told my supervisor what he’d said. “Aw, hell, that guy don’t want to work. He just wants to sit on his ass,” was his response. So I did what my supervisor instructed me to do and made the operator load up the scrap rubber. I heard a loud explosion and was sick to my stomach. Sure enough, the mill was down all night. I knew I’d been taken by my supervisor. Throughout the night, as we struggled to get the mill up and running again, Barbara’s and Andrew’s words echoed in my mind.

O
NE OF
the other shift foremen, Stan, a bowlegged man who talked too quickly, didn’t try to trick me. He announced his suspicions of me loudly and clearly the minute I became part of his department. He warned everyone that I was keeping information about people in a little black book because I was “a member of the ERA.” (I carried a steno pad around with me to take notes and record information to keep from making mistakes.) By then I had been moved from stock prep, where I’d been for about a year, to final finish, where the tires go after they’re cured in the pits and have traveled on overhead conveyors to cool, passing into the
trimmer where the rubber tips are cut off. Once they reach final finish, if a tire is a blackwall, it goes immediately on the hook lines for two people to inspect by spinning and feeling for defects. If the tire is a whitewall, it travels to the blue paint machines to be sprayed so that the finish is protected during shipping. All of the tires are ground down by the force grinders to balance them out before being stamped and packed onto a truck for shipping.

In final finish, Stan never bothered to give me instructions on how to operate the machinery. There were several panels with some fiddly old wiring, so it took me a while to understand the mechanics; but the union electricians who saw me sticking with it helped me. One night when we had one mechanical problem after another, I called Stan onto the floor for help. He immediately blamed my rib dressers, threatening to send them home.