Part X: The Way Mike Worked -- The Passing Parade

I can't remember The Retiree's name. He had worked in my division, Information Services, at Denver's Gates Rubber Company, before I arrived on the scene in 1983. He came by occasionally to visit the other old-timers. At 32, I was part of the younger cohort stepping into their shoes as they gradually marched off into the horizon. My parents' generation, the generation that weathered major cataclysms to give birth to many children and kick-start the post-war economy.

Sometimes The Retiree came for lunch at the corporate cafeteria. One afternoon, I came across him in the lobby. He recognized me, invited me to sit in the comfy chair next to him. We watched as the corporate parade passed. The Retiree gestured to a middle-aged guy he used to work with.

"Wanted to buy a sailboat and circumnavigate the globe," The Retiree said.

The guy worked in my department. "Did he do it?"

"What do you think?"

I thought no, he did not.

We chatted some more. He spotted a woman he knew. She walked over to say hi. "Hi," she said.

They exchanged pleasantries. He asked if she was still making fantastic cakes.

"Not as much. Julie moved back home with her two kids. I do a lot of babysitting." She seemed a bit embarrassed. When she went back to work, The Retiree explained.

"She made the cakes for employee birthdays. You had to get there early -- guys stampeded to the break room. Fights broke out to get that last piece of three-layer devil's food cake." He got a faraway look. "I still dream about it."

"That good?"

"Better. Yeah, she was going to open her own bake shop. But she didn't. One thing or another came up." He shrugged.

I sensed a theme developing.

"You know a lot of people," I said. "And their stories."

"People tell their stories all the time. You just have to listen." He paused. "What you pay attention to makes the difference."

Another guy walked by. We called him The Actor. He just played Sweeney Todd for a local theatre and got to murder a bunch of obnoxious people whose meaty parts were made into pies. He was talented and drank a bit.

"I worked with him for a few years," The Retiree said. "He went out to Hollywood for awhile. He probably told you that."

"Not a word."

"He had a few bit parts. Played a dead guy in a soap opera."

"So I work in the graveyard of broken dreams?"

He laughed. "Beware." With that, he took off, probably to take a nap. I went back to work to ponder my future.

The above conversation is fictional. You can probably tell because the exchange rolls so trippingly off the tongue. As if it were a scene from a play or novel. That's something a fiction writer can do when blogging. If I was trying to write, say, a memoir, I would have to let you know that I was reconstructing the dialogue because there was no way I could remember what was said verbatim more than 30 years ago. What I can do is recall the feeling I had when sitting in the lobby with The Retiree. Holy Shit, if I don't watch out, I could end up like this endless retinue of sad sacks going back to work in the rubber mines. On some days, I was already there.

It would be rare to find a kid that says he or she wants to grow up to write paeans to industrial rubber hoses. Yet, there are a surprising number of us who grow up to sing the praises of hoses or cars or computers or paper products. We want to be something else but, as the saying goes, a job, any job, pays the rent. In 1983, I was approaching 33, was married, and tired of living on a prayer. I wanted to land a job that entailed some writing, and that's when I began looking for jobs with big companies. 

At Gates, I did know The Retiree I quote at the beginning of this piece. I knew many of them. I photographed scores of retirement parties, took a lot of employee anniversary shots.  Lots of grip-and-grin shots of a VP  congratulating a union guy who had spent the last 30 years making radiator hoses in the deepest darkest confines of the ancient factory. The cavernous work rooms were loud and covered in carbon black, the ingredient that blackens your hoses and fan belts. It was everywhere -- on the walls and floor and machinery. It was in and on the machines. It was on the employees and their work clothes. When I ate lunch with my female coworkers, they always grabbed extra napkins so they could wipe the carbon black off of the seats less their dresses get streaked black. I followed their example until I noticed that the union guys watched us. We were literally trying to wipe away their presence. I was a writer supposed to know a metaphor when I saw it.

I eventually saw it.

I left the corporate world for academia in 1988. We sold our house that we bought with money from rubber writing. I could walk to work. Now, when I'm in Denver and I drive down South Broadway, I see that corporate HQ now bears a different company logo. Across the street, the massive factory is gone. After Gates abandoned it and it turned into a magnificent ruin, urban explorers made it their playground. Replacing it are rows of modern condo complexes for the new crop of college graduates eager for the Mile High lifestyle. They can catch the light rail at the hub at the corner, where the Gates garage once fixed employee cars at a reduced rate. The company clinic and grocery store are no longer there. "The song "16 Tons" says "I owe my soul to the company store. That wasn't exactly the case, as it was just convenient to shop at the company store. This wasn't Appalachia during the Great Depression. But it was the ending of a certain type of employment. Chris and I paid nothing for an emergency Cesarean and seven days in the hospital for mother and son. All the prenatal and postpartum appointments were free. A billion-dollar privately-owned company in a booming economy could be generous. Every employee's kid got a free gift at the annual Christmas party and rode the Lakeside rides for free at the summer picnic.

It sounds good. But Gates was already building factories in right-to-work states and overseas. The ranks of the URW were beginning to decline. A new health care plan was in the works and a fully-funded retirement plan was being replaced by a 401(K). I know because my department was tasked with explaining the changes to employees who weren't always appreciative when being lied to. The new century approached. Technology would save us all. The international open market would signal a new golden age. Reagan said so.

The first short story I wrote in my CSU M.F.A. writing workshop was called "Who Needs Fedder?" It concerned a young corporate guy who chronicles the travails of his co-worker Fedder when he quits the corporate softball team. He quickly became a non-person, like Doc Daneeka in Catch-22. The story seemed outlandish to my younger classmates. The older ones thought it said a lot about people they had known in the corporate world or in the military. The story was published in 1990 in Bob Greer's High Plains Literary Review in Denver. I never knew what my former Gates colleagues thought about the story as I lost touch over the years. Now they're all retirees like me, reminiscing about those glory days.

You can read "Who Needs Fedder" in my book of stories, The Weight of a Body. It's out of print, but I'll find the file and link it to this post. I will reread it, just to find out what this writer thought of his corporate career.

Life on campus, 1969 to the present

When I left the dog-eat-dog arena of corporate America in 1988 for the ivy-covered halls of academe, I imagined a long life of teaching and writing and pondering. Plenty of pondering. Never mind that my corporate pals sent me off with a cake and a real bullwhip as a farewell gift. "You’ll need the whip for the little darlings you’re going to teach," they joked. I could have said LOL but it was 1988 and that expression had yet to be invented. I just laughed and replied: “At least I won’t have to deal with you SOBs anymore,” using an expression that was sort-of acceptable in the guy-oriented workplace of the late-20^th century.

I learned several lessons during three years in grad school at CSU in FoCo, CO. If I landed a job as an academic, I would get paid peanuts for teaching five sections of freshman composition at a community college in East Jesus, Nowhere. I interviewed for jobs at universities, but my impending MFA didn’t stack up against all the young PhDs running loose all over the place. So I switched gears and got into the lucrative field of arts administration, a career I will be retiring from in 2016.

I have taught on a part-time basis over the last couple decades. Composition, yes, but also creative writing, business writing, memoir writing and so on. I’ve taught in classrooms and online, for community colleges and universities. My students have ranged in age from 18 to 85. I’ve enjoyed most of those experiences.

But deep inside of me resides a dapper gentleman who wears a tan blazer with patches on the elbows. He walks campus like Mr. Chips, saying good morning and hale well met to all the students who greet him as he passes. These young people are all above average and bound for careers where they will praise the lessons they learned under the tutelage of Mr. Chips, I mean, Mr. Shay. Maybe that’s why I can’t resist a walk around any campus I happen across. I wax nostalgic on campus, which is odd because I never really experienced an idyllic campus life. I’ve blogged about some of my college experiences and will blog more about them later. Let’s just say I seem to learn everything the hard way. Add to that the fact that neither of my children have let me live through their idyllic campus experiences because, well, they haven’t had those either. Still, my nostalgia remains about college life.

Here we are in the 20-teens. Life on campus seems more complicated than ever. And strange. I only know what I read in the papers and online and see on the TV news. Students, apparently, want campus to be a “safe place.” Free from racism and violence and sexism and all kinds of –isms. Damn. Campus is where learned about all of those because I ran headlong into them. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? The college experience is supposed to be about experimentation and freedom of expression and encounters with new and possibly dangerous ideas. You try on new ideas and experiences like a new outfit, and you can shed it willy-nilly and go on to the next thing. If you are too afraid of giving offense, you will probably be less willing to give it the old college try.

As a liberal, I gleefully criticize those on the right. They often bring up political correctness. In their eyes, political correctness prohibits their freedom of expression. They no longer can use the N-word in public or discriminate against LGBTQ people or call immigrants wetbacks or worse. I am politically correct by writing the previous sentence. Problem is, I am 64 years old and grew up in an era where we casually used all of those terms and practiced casual (and formal) racism. I’ve been in a steep learning curve ever since. The Civil Rights struggle caused thinking people to reassess their priorities and behaviors. The battle over the Vietnam War caused us to reassess the blind obedience to country we learned in the church and in Boy Scouts and ROTC. The women’s movement forced us men to look differently at relationships with the other 50 percent of the human race. In the West, we had Latino/a Power and the American Indian Movement. The sixties and seventies were hard on us white males, even those of us who weren’t Ivy League or Wall Street privileged. You could attempt to get out of changing by pleading that your forebears were poor white trash from Ireland and that your great-granddaddy didn’t own any slaves or kill any Indians. That never got me very far. White privilege is a real thing, like it or not.

I was impressed by the recent stand taken by the Mizzou football team. Nothing will cause white folks to stand up and take notice than threatening tailgate Saturdays at the old alma mater. Think about it. When I entered the University of South Carolina in 1969, the Gamecocks had not one black football player. Their first black athlete was future NBA star Alex English, the poetry-writing power forward from Columbia. He joined the basketball team in 1970. B-ball and football squads in the South are now comprised mainly of black athletes. Think of how much power they possess to determine the course of their universities. Is it PC when they flex that power? Isn’t power-flexing more of a conservative value? More reminiscent of corporate takeovers and police actions in third world countries than progressive politics? You’d think that The Donald and Bill O’Reilly would be singing the praises of the Mizzou football team. Flex those collegiate muscles, you middle linebacker! What better prepares you for a corporate job once those knees give out?

My collegiate dreams faded over time. A good thing too. I’m not sure how welcomed I would be if my Baby Boomer patriarchal self showed up in class smoking a pipe, wearing a corduroy blazer, carrying a bullwhip and barking out orders to my young charges. Not PC, Mr. Chips. Not PC at all. 

UW Prof Jeff Lockwood previews new book, "Living Behind the Carbon Curtain"

Jeff Lockwood

Who lives behind the carbon curtain?

I do. You do too if you're in Wyoming.

University of Wyoming prof and author Jeff Lockwood will preview his new book on the subject Saturday evening in Sheridan at the Powder River Basin Resource Council annual gathering.

Lockwood's book is Behind the Carbon Curtain: The Energy Industry, Political Censorship and Free Speech. The book won't be out for another year -- Lockwood's Saturday talk is but a teaser.

See Dustin Bleizeffer's article about this in Friday's Wyofile. Here's an excerpt:

On one level, the book is about a series of cases in which the energy industry has colluded with government in Wyoming to censor art and education. But in a larger sense, said Lockwood, Behind the Carbon Curtain is about something even more worrisome; it’s about how corporatocracy is rooted in the Equality State and throughout many levels of government nationwide. Corporatocracy is a term used to describe governments that are designed to serve the interests of corporations, and not necessarily citizens. A couple of examples of corporatocracy at work in Wyoming are the removal of Carbon Sink (the sculpture that offended coal industry interests) and the unofficially dubbed “Teeters Amendment” — a last-minute measure tagged onto the state budget bill that prohibited even the discussion of Next Generation Science Standards for its acknowledgment of man’s role in climate change. 

Read the rest at http://wyofile.com/dustin/uw-professor-previews-book-critical-energy-influence/#sthash.fhTLvQNs.dpuf