In Michigan: Goodbye, Dodge Main

By Barrett Seaman

Shortly past 8 a.m. on the first Friday of the 1980s, Wanda Paruch leaves her house on McDougall Avenue in Hamtramck, Mich., and sets out on the five-minute drive to work. Normally, she would make this trip three hours earlier, eat a cafeteria breakfast and start her job at 6 a.m. on the fifth floor of the Dodge Main Assembly Plant, putting glue on doors, cleaning out loose bolts and putting a plastic water shield and two pieces of felt into passing Aspens and Volares.

But this Friday there is no work. Around noon Thursday, a navy blue Dodge Aspen, No. 142 274, went by on its way down the jerky, rumbling assembly line as Dodge Main's last car. As it passed, small groups of instrument fitters, engine installers and wheel mounters cleaned up quietly and left. When the line finally came to a halt, nothing dramatic followed, no mass exodus, not even a final silence. Plant officials gathered around the blue Aspen for photographs, then drifted to the windows overlooking the Bismarck Gate to watch television crews clustered around departing workers, striving to capture their final mood--solemnity, or fear, or anger.

Today there is nothing to do but collect pay. Wanda Paruch, whose blond hair and broad pleasant face belie her 52 years, is only one of hundreds lining up early outside the gate on Joseph Campau Avenue, Hamtramck's main street, in the subfreezing, clear morning air. She waves to old friends as they drift off, feeling only an elusive, half-real sense of loss. Above her loom massive gray factory walls with their vast mosaic of windows, painted-over green, cracked and dirty. Only one of the four black smokestacks exhales into the sky. The railroad tunnels that run beneath the building are empty, and the moaning central paint ovens have fallen silent.

The closing of Dodge Main came a half-year ahead of the schedule announced last May by the Chrysler Corp., hastened by disastrously low auto sales throughout the summer and fall. But like the majority of the Dodge Main workers turned loose into the bleak Michigan winter, Wanda is not too hard-pressed financially. Under a company/union agreement, workers with the greatest seniority will have first dibs on jobs elsewhere. (Many may go to the Jefferson Avenue assembly plant, a nearby facility that will produce Chrysler's new front-wheel-drive small cars for next fall.) Wanda has worked at Dodge Main for nearly all of the past 31 years, and soon will qualify for a lifetime monthly pension of $770. In the meantime, she and all of her co-workers are guaranteed either unemployment benefits that can add up to 95% of normal take-home pay, or else Trade Relocation Act funds that pay up to $250 a week for workers whose jobs have been lost because of foreign competition. With Ford soon to close a plant in Los Angeles, Uniroyal shuttering an aging tire factory in Detroit and other auto industry closings announced or rumored, many will need such financial cushions.

Wanda has spent all her life in Hamtramck, which is surrounded entirely by the city of Detroit. Except during the war, she has always lived upstairs in the two-family, white frame house her immigrant parents bought for $7,000 in 1921. Since her husband died 16 years ago, and her father, Roman Lyjak, who worked as a body finisher at Dodge Main before her, died in 1969, Wanda has lived alone upstairs. Her mother, 82, lives downstairs. Wanda's brother, an inspector at Chrysler's Jefferson Avenue plant, comes around to help with the house. Many of their fellow Polish Americans have left Hamtramck, having earned enough in union wages at Dodge to afford larger houses in northern suburbs like Warren or Madison Heights --and, of course, a car for commuting.

For two decades, Hamtramck has been shrinking, partly as a result of the success of Henry Ford's notion that the workingman might one day be able to afford one of the cars he made. The town was a sleepy German farm community when Horace and John Dodge built a plant to supply Ford with axles, transmissions, steering gears and crankcases. By 1914 the two brothers were building their own cars at Hamtramck, and by 1928, when Walter P. Chrysler's automotive conglomerate bought them out, the Dodges had one of the largest and most complete car plants in the world.

Dodge Main made Hamtramck. Thousands of Polish families, following a trail of promises, booked passage on the ship to Montreal and came on by boat or rail to Detroit to dominate the plant's work force. "There was a time when, if your name didn't end in 'ski,' you couldn't get in here," says one plant official. Old World bakeries and sausage shops sprang up. Bars and beer gardens huddled around the giant factory to wet a thousand throats at shift change.

During World War II, 40,000 workers were turning out military vehicles, and after the war, 30,000 were still at work there trying to fill the nation's pent-up demand for cars. At the peak in the late '40s and early '50s, 55,000 people, most of them Polish Americans, crammed the pin-neat houses pinched together on 30-ft. lots along residential streets like McDougall, Yemans and Poland. Every morning almost the entire working population would trudge off to Dodge Main. Hamtramck was a joyous, clean, democratic, workingman's town that drew Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson and Jack Kennedy to campaign alongside proud mayors like Albert Zak, Joseph Grzecki and Raymond Wojtowicz. Robert Kozeran, the city's current mayor, remembers that at 9 p.m., when the factory whistle sounded to end the second shift, "If you were a kid and you weren't in your house, the cops brought you home," and there would be hell to pay from the old man.

Sometime in the 1960s, the plant began to lose its competitive edge. Dodge Main is eight stories tall, and that made it an anachronism. Chrysler was finding it more efficient to build separate, more highly automated plants all on one floor, to specialize in the various stages of production. While Dodge Main once housed its own foundry, sewing room and stamping plant, it now became an assembly plant. In a good year, like 1973, it could pour 511,000 cars out onto the second-floor inspection deck. But in bad years, which most have been lately for Chrysler, the plant cost a bundle. It had 32 freight elevators to carry people and parts from floor to floor. In winter it leaked heat from a thousand windows. Says a Chrysler production man, Jim Caton: "This place goes back to when coal was $2.50 a ton, when miners got $32 a week, versus about $70 a day now."

When Chrysler announced that the plant gates would close, the future of Hamtramck itself was thrown into question. Already burdened by a shrinking, aging population, the city suddenly faced the loss of $2.3 million in annual tax revenues--almost half the general fund budget. The municipal payroll has been slashed from around 500 to 200, leaving just 43 policemen and 40 firemen. "They used to take up a whole block on Joseph Campau marching in parades," recalls Mayor Kozeran.

A Washington consultant has been hired to find a future for both Dodge Main and Hamtramck. A symposium of academics and government officials gathered there last summer to exchange ideas. Some suggested turning the plant into a bus factory. Others thought solar panels would correct the energy losses. Still others said to forget about the plant and transform Hamtramck into a free trade zone or a tourist attraction, like a Polish-theme park. "What Hamtramck does," said one participant, Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin, "will be an example for the rest of the nation." Added University of Pittsburgh Historian Samuel Hays somewhat pessimistically: "It's almost as though you're seeing the death of the manufacturing city right here. And my point is: don't resurrect it. Why try to rebuild something that is gone?"

It's more emotional than rational," I answers Dick Lada, a Dodge Main employment supervisor. "Half the judges and attorneys in town paid for their educations working at this plant. I was born here. I've worked at this plant 15 years and hired thousands of people, many of whose fathers and grandfathers worked here. It's been good to a lot of people."

But the younger generation does not share that sense of obligation. Wanda Paruch's daughter Betty, 33, got her master's degree in humanities at nearby Wayne State University with the help of her mother's Dodge Main paychecks. Now she works as a secretary to a local psychiatrist. Most of her high school classmates have left, she says: "They settled into a lower-middle-class life in places like Warren and Dearborn." A case of upward automobility, perhaps. As Boorstin said, "The mobility that brought the people here is also the kind of mobility that, in American history, carries them elsewhere." --Barrett Seaman

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