When Rubber Hit the Road

When Rubber Hit the Road

[electric guitar riff] [vocalizing] – Interviewer: Okay, Barney, can I have you say and spell your first and last name for me?
– Okay, it’s Bob Bernard.
B-E-R-N-A-R-D, also known as Barney.
– Interviewer: Perfect.
What’s one thing that you’ll never forget about working at Eau Claire’s tire plant?
– Barney: The employees that I worked with.
These people were family.
And the tire builders were only as good as their splicer, and their splicer was only as good as their tire builder.
They had to be a team.
– Randy F-U-E-R-S-T, Randy Fuerst.
– Interviewer: All right, Randy, what’s one thing you’ll never forget about working at Uniroyal?
– All the people that I met, and they were very nice, and they were great people.
If you made a friend, you had a friend for a long time.
The people are one of the things that I miss.
– Marilyn Tompkins.
I worked at Uniroyal for 27 years.
– Interviewer: Do you have a memory that stays with you throughout all these years?
– That I was glad to have a wonderful job.
[laughing] [ticking] – Judy Clark: The cloudy skies were fitting.
One of the darkest days in Eau Claire’s history.
– Reporter: After nearly 75 years of operation, it’s shutting its doors.
– So this is, without a doubt, your worst nightmare come true.
– He’s gonna try and get the company to reverse its decision.
Whether or not that’s possible, I can’t tell you at this point in time.
– And it hasn’t really settled in yet.
– Get outta here, you buncha… – I guess we’ll have to live with it.
– Governor, we’re gonna have to cut you off.
We’re losing our satellite time.
But thanks for joining us tonight.
We lost our feed there because we had limited time.
We’ll go on now.
[gentle piano music] – Dennis Miller: In 1991, January 6, the electricians had their Christmas party.
John Ahnefeldt, the plant manager, was there.
Times were slow at the plant, we knew that.
We asked him what he expected to happen, and his answer was he thought, well, maybe there’d be, like, a three-week layoff, which was okay.
We’ve been through this before.
We’ll survive.
Two days later, January 8, that following Monday, around 10:30, I saw the plant closing posted on the bulletin board.
– Darrel Wekkin: I came to work in the morning about 7:30, and 8:30, I got a call that we had to call an emergency meeting of the representatives.
Well, that got me very nervous because why would they be doing that after we’ve been having discussions for two weeks?
We’re good, everything was going.
– Arlene McAdam: Every day, we had a bulletin we put out.
The supervisors would get the information to me, and I’d type it all up, run it off, go out in the plant, and post it.
So, here we are up and, you know, going through the same procedure.
Came back after the holidays, and all of a sudden, somebody comes in and says, “Why didn’t you mention this?
I said, “Why don’t I mention what?
“They must’ve got out there at night and put up the bulletins.
I have no idea.”
– Jack Zais: It just was a shock, you know, kind of like a zombie world all of a sudden.
Nobody would want to talk about it.
They didn’t want to acknowledge it.
It hurt a lot of people.
– Doug Mell: We all knew at the time that this was cataclysmic.
I mean, there’s no question in anybody’s mind that, as far as Eau Claire was concerned, this was cataclysmic.
I didn’t have to tell people that this was an important story.
I mean, everybody knew.
– The demise of the Uniroyal Goodrich tire plant is not unlike a death in Eau Claire’s family.
– Judy: It has been a fixture in Eau Claire for nearly 75 years, providing livelihoods to generations of workers.
– Anchor: But the real impact, the real story here, is the people whose lives now are forever changed.
– When a big story happened, as a reporter, you get adrenaline and you’re like, “It’s a big story.”
But usually, there’s, a big story is usually bad news.
And so then you also have that gut punch of, “I know people who work at Uniroyal.
“I’ve lived here in this area my whole life, “and this is gonna be a tough one to not only report on, but also live in this community.”
– A well-kept secret– it doesn’t seem like anyone outside of the Uniroyal management knew this was coming.
– It was on the Sunday night after Thanksgiving, and I got a call from my boss that Michelin was going to want the plant closed, and they wanted us to make an announcement on the first Monday, you know, of December.
And that obviously bothered me, because, you know, Christmas was coming up, and I had a pretty good idea of what people would have to go through if they had that on their mind.
So I asked them if they could go back to the Michelin and ask them if they could put it off until after the first of the year.
Well, a couple days later, he called me and indicated that they, in fact, agreed to go ahead and postpone the announcement until, you know, the first Monday after we got back, you know, after New Year’s.
I mean, it bothered me for the whole month, and I just had to keep this inside of me.
I regret to inform you that the company announced today its plans to close the Eau Claire tire plant.
You know, when you take a look at companies, you know, the 10 largest companies in the year 1900, there’s only one that still exists, you know.
So companies are probably like people– they have a lifespan.
To be able to predict what’s going to happen five, ten years down the road is pretty difficult to do, no matter what you do in order to make things better.
– But the real impact is the people whose lives now are forever changed.
And let us not forget those who now face an uncertain future in our thoughts during the difficult days that lie ahead.
[gentle music] – Narrator: From above, Eau Claire, Wisconsin, resembles any number of mid-sized Midwestern cities– vibrant neighborhoods, downtown businesses, and a factory that closed its doors during America’s manufacturing decline, which, between 1979 and 2019, cost American workers over 6.6 million jobs.
Today, the city of 69,000 is a college town, a cultural center, and a health care hub in western Wisconsin.
It’s one of the fastest-growing cities in the state, but it wasn’t always.
[water flowing] The ancestral home of the Ojibwe and Dakota people, by the late 1850s, immigrants were drawn to the pine forests and fast-flowing rivers for one reason: lumber.
[tree cracking, rustling] By the 1870s, Eau Claire was a national leader in lumber production, later earning the nickname “Sawdust City.”
– Greg Kocken: By the mid-1880s, this was the fourth-largest community in Wisconsin, and this was really all thanks to the lumber boom.
But the boom would not last.
– Narrator: In 1915, Raymond Gillette, an entrepreneur from Michigan, arrived in Eau Claire with a new way forward.
The road to prosperity, Gillette determined, was paved in rubber.
– Greg: And I think he was a man of vision.
He saw opportunity in the Eau Claire community.
And so in 1915, he came here set to build a tire factory, and that tire factory took off.
– Narrator: In 1917, the Gillette Safety Tire Company completed the construction of its factory in Eau Claire.
It produced its first tire on May 23, 1917.
The Sawdust City became the Rubber City.
By the late 1920s, the Gillette Rubber Company found its niche as a mass producer of automobile, truck, and bicycle tires.
Daily production leaped to 12,000 car and truck tires, 2,000 tractor tires, 14,000 inner tubes, and 5,000 bicycle tires.
The prospect of steady employment lured workers to Eau Claire, including 19-year-old Magne Repaal of the village of Ridgeland, who, in 1927, left his father’s blacksmith shop for a job at the Gillette Rubber Company.
Repaal’s shifts lasted 13 hours and 15 minutes.
His hourly wage?
27.5 cents.
– Magne Repaal: There was no lunch period.
There was no rest period, there was no locker room.
The front door was locked when the last men reported for the shift, and you were completely at the mercy of your immediate supervisor.
– Narrator: Despite an earlier attempt to unionize, it wasn’t until 1932 that Eau Claire’s rubber workers began gaining ground.
That year, emboldened by New Deal legislation allowing for collective bargaining, Repaal and others began meeting in secret.
In October of 1933, Repaal and like-minded Gillette employees took action.
– Magne: We decided that they were going to meet with Ralph W. Hutchens, president of Gillette Rubber Company, and ask for recognition of our union.
If they refuse to recognize the union, then Leonard Berg would come through the tire department.
If he carried that 24-inch pipe wrench on his shoulder, that meant that Ralph Hutchens had recognized our union.
He was swinging a wrench alongside of his leg, that meant it was time for me and some other folks to start shutting off the tire machine.
Well, unfortunately, the wrench was swinging alongside Leonard Berg’s leg.
We shut down the tire department in a matter of a few minutes.
– Narrator: Despite the early setback, shortly before midnight, the company president and the local union president hashed out a one-page contract recognizing the union and bestowing it with negotiating power.
Originally known as Federal Labor Union 18684, by 1935, it became the United Rubber Workers of America Local 19.
A decade later, the union expanded its membership and name to become the United Rubber, Cork, Linoleum, and Plastic Workers of America.
– Back when it started, because of the way the common people treated union people like they were communists, unions meetings were in the basements under candlelight.
They were hidden.
I admire these workers.
They formed a union that gave everybody a voice.
– Overall, the country that I remember right after World War II, everybody says that they were tough years.
They struggled mightily.
And the way out of poverty was the manufacturing in the United States.
We had people who couldn’t read and write, but were very good at their jobs once they learned them.
But what it showed was that if you treat people with good employment and give them an opportunity to make a living for theirself and their family, they’ll go way beyond what’s needed to do their job.
And that absolutely came from organized labor.
– Interviewer: How do people view the unions right after the war?
– Cliff Chatterson: Oh, this was a strong union town.
– Interviewer: Why is that?
– They were able to get things for the workers that we were trying to take away from them.
Like, the rubber workers were very, very aggressive here in this town.
You know, it was terrible for a while.
We finally got it straightened out.
It gave this plant just a real bad name.
So the whole community was pretty well perforated with strikers and union hell-raisers.
– Interviewer: And that lasted until when?
– Cliff: Well, he shut this plant down.
Then it went away.
– Narrator: In 1940, the United States Rubber Company acquired a controlling interest in Gillette, though they had barely begun manufacturing tires before the plant was sold again, this time to the U.S. government.
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, factories across the country, including the United States Rubber Company’s Eau Claire plant, shifted production to support the war effort.
In May of 1942, construction began on the Eau Claire Ordnance Plant.
Three months later, the plant had transitioned from churning out tires to small arms munitions.
At peak production, over 6,200 employees, 61% of them women, manufactured munitions for soldiers overseas.
The munitions plant was so efficient that on June 17, 1943, Lieutenant Colonel Boone from the War Department visited the plant to award its employees the Army-Navy “E” Award for excellence in production.
The lieutenant colonel credited the plant’s success to a single factor– the people, including 98-year-old Freddie Glass Jensen, believed to be the last Eau Claire Ordnance Plant worker alive today.
– I was 18 years old, just finished high school.
Went to the plant and got the job.
We were inspectresses.
We did a box of shells about this big.
They were the metal, the bronze metal, tips of shells.
And we had to inspect them for flaws or nicks.
And then we take a little scoop and bring ’em forward and look at ’em and then pull ’em down here.
And then we’d take some more and we’d look at ’em.
They were finished.
And we did that for almost a year, but I don’t remember it being boring.
I was probably dreaming all that time.
– Narrator: The iconic image of Rosie the Riveter inspired a generation of women to take defense industry jobs once held exclusively by men.
But Rosie wasn’t the only one who inspired.
– Well, I had my future husband in California, who wanted a picture.
So I had it taken, and it turned out really good.
And it was in the window of the photography shop.
Somebody saw it there, somebody important, and they, while I was working, came to see me.
It was somebody from the State, and they asked me if I would like to do, you know, take some pictures.
And this went in newspapers all over Illinois.
It was a recruiting picture.
But there were hundreds of the Rosie Riveters, different kinds, and they stepped forward to do their job.
– Narrator: By August 1943, once it was clear the country’s munitions needs were being met, U.S. Rubber repurchased the Eau Claire Ordnance Plant for the purpose of reconverting the facility back to making tires.
It was the first major industrial plant in the U.S. to reconvert back to its original product.
Upon repurchasing the plant, U.S. Rubber invested in modernizing their facility.
By 1951, the Eau Claire plant became the country’s fifth-largest tire factory.
By 1965, it was the nation’s third-largest tire factory.
Two years later, in 1967, U.S. Rubber would unify its subsidiaries under a new name, Uniroyal.
– Bill Hable: I could tell you every building– see, if you look at it, there was 19 buildings involved, but most were strung together.
And they were of different construction and different times.
I’m gonna go.
But I knew exactly how, when they were built, and how they were built and why they were built the way they were.
I worked for Uniroyal for 22 years.
My boss, original boss, was a guy named George Becker, and he had a certain philosophy of managing the plant.
He says, “You cheat and you do whatever you want, “but you gotta keep the keep the facilities up.
“If you let the facility run down, then that’s a good sign of getting rid of you.”
So his idea was that if you had to steal the money from some other project or something else, you kept the roofs from leaking, you kept the building in very, very, very good shape.
– Interviewer: What’s the secret to keeping a plant that old running the way it was?
– Bill: Good people.
[indistinct conversations] – Duane: Hey, Mr. President, Jack Wallace.
How are you this afternoon?
– I’m just great, just great, Safety Director Duane.
– Bill: It was a good place to work, a very friendly atmosphere.
You made more friends at a tire plant than you could anyplace else.
– Arlene: There were so many things going on that a person could take part in.
And then the women had a group up there, and that was in the office, called the Royaleers.
And that was a fun one to belong to.
Anybody could join it.
You know, it didn’t cost anything.
But they’d put on various parties, like Halloween parties, or they had a Christmas party and a summer picnic.
And then, of course, there was a trap team, and then there was the bowling and then there was the golfing and then there was softball and then there was the union-sponsored picnic.
And you’d just go over there, and they had free lunch, free beverages, and everything.
It was just a nice get-together.
– We had the beer tent, we had the ice cream tent, we had the food, and we’d have the fire department there.
We’d have the police department there.
And they’d show the kids the ladders and give ’em a ride in the fire trucks and police cars.
It was truly a day to celebrate what labor was meant for.
We always tried to do what was best for the guy that punched the clock for his health and welfare.
– Interviewer: Can I just have you say and spell your first and last name for me?
– Cleo, C-L-E-O, Janish, J-A-N-I-S-H. – Interviewer: All right, Cleo, what’s one thing that you’ll never forget about working at Uniroyal?
– Walking in the plant for the very first time.
I’ll never forget it.
I wore a dress, and they never– don’t wear dresses at Uniroyal Plant when you first came in, so I was kind of shocked.
– Interviewer: Was there a particular reason you wanted to work at, at that time, what was U.S. Rubber, in the ’50s?
– Jean Curt: That’s all I wanna do is get a job like my daddy.
– Interviewer: Was it unusual being a woman in the plant at that time, or were– – Jean: Not in the office.
That was women’s work.
Except we had two completely separate seniority lists, men and women.
– Interviewer: Were there men in the factory making the same wages, or was there a difference between what women could earn in the factory or in the office and what men could earn?
– Jean: Oh, yeah, the men made a hell of a lot more.
– Interviewer: Well, is that just part of the times, or do you feel you were cheated out of something?
– Jean: Well, I figure I paid ’em back when I freed all the pregnant women in the world.
– Kelly Curtis-Slaughter: My mom was pregnant with me in 1968, and she was 30 years old at the time.
She had already worked at Uniroyal for 13 years at that time, okay?
And in those days, in 1968, the not only expectation, but I think policy was that if a woman was pregnant, they needed to quit.
Well, my mom was going to be a single parent, and she knew she was gonna be a single parent.
In her mind, especially being the independent person she was, she’s like, “No, there’s a different way, and I need to keep this job.
“This is a good job.
This is a job that would help me to raise my child.”
– I managed to conceal my pregnancy and then took all my vacation time and had a one-month leave.
Came back three days after she was born, and nobody knew I’d had a baby.
I waited one year.
Nobody knew.
– Kelly: First, my mom took me to see my grandma, who didn’t know, and said, “I wanna introduce you to my daughter, to your granddaughter.”
– Jean: And when she was one year old, I went in and I changed my insurance, my beneficiaries.
I changed everything, and they nearly died.
– Kelly: She didn’t have to quit because she wasn’t pregnant.
There wasn’t a policy for somebody that had a one-year-old daughter.
She just totally– She wrecked that policy.
– Narrator: According to the 1967 pension, insurance, and severance pay agreement between Uniroyal, U.S. Rubber Incorporated, and the union, any employee with less than five years of service who is re-employed after voluntarily leaving the service of the company shall be classified as a new employee and shall lose credit for all that time out and all prior service.
Those with more than five years of service were eligible to regain credit toward pensions.
For many female employees, including Jean, the nuances of the agreement were unknown.
The policy did not meet practice.
– There was no questions, I mean, it was there.
Whoever originated it, I don’t know, but if you were expecting a child, you just automatically left the company.
When you left, that was it.
You could come back again, but, I mean, you didn’t– At that time, you didn’t pick up those rights.
– Interviewer: All right, I’m gonna have you say and spell your first and last name for me.
– Tom Frederick.
– Interviewer: All right, Tom, what is one thing that you’ll never forget about working at Uniroyal?
– All the great employees that I worked with and who worked for me.
I was always on management at Uniroyal, from the day I walked out of college, on a Thursday.
On the following Monday, I went to work at Uniroyal and worked there for 28 years, and I made lots and lots of friends.
Some of my best friends were employees that worked out in maintenance or in production.
They were my best friends.
– Narrator: Throughout the plant’s history, Local 19 continued to be a staunch advocate for its members.
– Bill: I’ve never been in a union.
I’ve worked with unions.
I’ve worked with good unions and bad unions.
And, in fact, I one time even worked in the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, plant for the atomic energy plant.
I got atomic energy clearance to get in there.
And that was the strongest union I ever ran into.
They– I picked up a screwdriver and was gonna– Two wires were put in the wrong place in the control system.
And the guy threatened to file a grievance against me.
– Narrator: Over the years, the union played a vital role in achieving wage increases and improving working conditions for employees at the factory.
Now, there were certainly tensions at time with plant management at different points, but the union also played a really critical role in helping the plant to expand and to be successful.
– Bill: I saw unions from all aspects.
I am not anti-union.
They have their place.
The reason I like unions is because it puts some organization into the relationship between management and union workers.
Bad unions are caused by bad management.
Good unions work when the management and the workers can get along and work together and solve problems.
– Narrator: One of the union’s most controversial decisions involved making financial concessions to Uniroyal in 1986, when Uniroyal merged with B.F. Goodrich to form the Uniroyal-Goodrich Tire Company.
The concessions continued, as they did in 1990, when Michelin acquired Uniroyal.
For years, Uniroyal employees gave a portion of their paycheck back to corporate.
They upgraded their facility, modernized their procedures, did all they could to make a case for their long-term survival.
– Anchor: While the plant may have been living on borrowed time, management and workers were doing their best to keep it operating.
– I mean, you don’t like it and you hate negotiating it, but you have to look at the bottom line.
We gave huge concessions.
– Do you feel betrayed after making all the concessions that you’ve made in trying to work with the company to keep it here?
– Well, I think, certainly, we do.
Certainly, we do.
You know, the corporate people can come in and tell us how they’re remorseful and all that.
They can get in the plane and go home.
We’re the ones that stuck here to face the battles.
And the single most devastating thing that you can do, outside of a loss of a family member, is to lose your income, your job.
– John Glenz: A lot of people blame Michelin for shutting down Eau Claire, which they did.
In my opinion, if they hadn’t, I think Uniroyal would have gone broke, and Michelin really saved them.
Saving all these people who are retired wouldn’t have what they’ve got now from Michelin.
– We were probably within probably just a few weeks of closing the doors.
If that had happened, there would’ve been a lot of serious problems, ’cause we had a major issue with our unfunded pension liability.
And what would have happened to people’s pensions is pretty hard to understand, you know, what that future would have brought.
But with Michelin coming along, it opened up a lot of opportunities.
We had a lot of people that took a retirement.
We had a lot of people that had the opportunity to move to different plants, and then a lot of people were able to find other jobs around the community.
So there was a big plus as a result of them, you know, buying the company.
If they hadn’t, those opportunities wouldn’t have been available for anybody to take advantage of.
– Bill: What makes a good worker is to realize and act accordingly, that the company’s gotta make money for you to make money.
And that’s where, a lot of times, a union steps out of bounds.
– Darrel: You can always say, okay, maybe we were a little too aggressive in some areas.
But then, if you look at the other side, where has corporate management went from workers the last 40 years?
We get $2,000.
They get millions and millions off of our toil.
That’s not to say there weren’t a lot of good corporations, but if you watch the history about corporate– and you’ve probably seen it– it was always a little on the greedy side.
– Dick Green: This will be contrary to anything you’d ever learned from talking to a union person.
I’m a management person.
But you ended up, in Eau Claire, with some very inflated wages and salaries and benefits and so forth that I don’t know if it, in the end, spelled the doom for the plant or not.
– The greatest two things unions have done– and people should take notice, because we’re losing it– they made the common worker a first-class citizen, and then they corral all of us together and made us into the middle class.
It’s just great when you get workers working together in a union.
It’s greater when you get the union and the company working together.
– My name is Richard Spillman.
Started at Uniroyal April 15, 1968.
Anyway, I was there for 24 years.
I went to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for two years.
I come back to Eau Claire and I was a truck driver for a few months and then worked at Metz Bakery over here.
And then I got a job at American Phoenix and worked there for 21 years, the same place I worked for 24 years for Uniroyal, same Banbury area.
Time goes on, I’m retired, and my son works over there yet.
– Cleo: Well, when the plant closed, I went down in July.
My husband, Dave, didn’t come down until February.
So, when I had transferred down there, the manager had called me into his office, along with four other individuals.
And after leaving, we’re getting up after our meeting was done.
He mentioned, he says, “Cleo, could you stay a moment?
He says, “I’d like to talk to you.”
And I says, “Sure.”
He says, “I just want to tell you.”
He says, “We closed the wrong plant.”
And I said, “Thank you.”
And then I thought, “The damage is done.”
– Narrator: For years, Uniroyal employees and their families lived under threats of layoffs, strikes, and rumors of plant closings.
That fear became a way of life.
– Reporter: The first serious sign the Uniroyal plant was in trouble came in 1985.
A tire industry analyst said then the shutdown of the Eau Claire plant was merely a matter of time.
– We knew there was some overcapacity in Uniroyal-Goodrich.
We didn’t realize it to this extent.
– And then when you look at the plant, it was an old plant.
The other plants were newer plants.
But they didn’t look deep enough, in my opinion.
They didn’t look at where we were headed.
This plant that did– If they had kept it open, this plant would have– I think would have been unbelievable in another three, four years, ’cause the way we were going.
I mean, we were getting to the point where all these old adversarial relationships were gone.
Our productivity was just climbing.
Our costs per unit were going down, quality was going up.
I mean, everything was going in the right direction.
– We did change from 1988 to 1991.
We changed so much that I’m sure every worker here thought we made what we could call the corner, that we had job security.
That’s what we were thinking.
That’s what we really felt.
I often think, when I’m watching a football game, when the quarterback gets hit from behind, he gets blindsided, they call it.
I know that’s how I felt, and I’m sure that’s how most of the other workers felt.
– Interviewer: But you lived through the era of the rumors of the plant closing.
What were those years like?
– You got the feeling that it was all cry wolf.
A lot of people were totally terrified every time that another one of these things came up.
But I don’t think I ever realized how much I was going to feel a loss.
Like having your house burned down, and then, all of a sudden, it’s gone.
– Interviewer: Do you ever really understand the reason why?
– I just thought it was big business trying to smush away a little business.
– Interviewer: Do you feel that you should have been given an honest answer?
– Jean: That money that they kept taking out of our check every single payday that went to build up our radial, when they would– The radial stuff was in Japan or wherever it was, and still, they took the money out.
That was really hard to take, because we could’ve used that money.
A lot of these people could’ve used that to eat on, for heaven’s sake.
– Interviewer: In a way, you paid for your own closure.
– Jean: We did, yeah, we paid for our own closure.
Just like making you dig your own grave.
– Reporter: Foremost on their minds tonight, their futures, how they’ll feed their families, make the mortgage payments, and find a comparable job in a city with the lowest wages in the state.
– That’s about all– I’m kind of a pessimist, and I think– I’ve always thought you’d be about as well off in the horse and buggy business as you would be in the rubber tire business.
So who knows?
Life goes on.
Life goes on.
– But the hard facts are that there are 1,300 people without jobs, and it will be difficult, if almost impossible, for them to be absorbed back into the local economy.
Jamie Boll, he came back with that footage from Darrel Wekkin.
He had been able to interview him right after the news conference, and Darrel had tears in his eyes.
And we were watching that footage and all of us were just emotional, because we knew this was their livelihoods, and 1,300 people were going to lose them.
– I think, in my position, I have to go up there and try and tell the people that there is a tomorrow.
We’re gonna get up in the morning.
– Mike Schatz: It was a very serious moment for everybody.
Very sad for those directly affected.
Very challenging for the rest of us that, you know, were charged with trying to make the transition as easy as possible on these folks.
I know there’s lots of stories of people that had to– one of the parents had to uproot and actually move to another city where Uniroyal had plants for many years or had to commute back and forth from Eau Claire to that community.
So, you know, it had a big effect on families, and families are the backbone of any communities.
– Narrator: Making tires could be difficult and monotonous and grueling on the body, but as many confirmed, the pay and benefits made the work worth it.
It was enough to raise a family and then some.
– Family is important.
I learned that from my grandpa and my mother and dad.
They come through the years of the depressions and all had like 10, 12 kids, and they survived.
I wrote my dad a letter when the plant was going down and I says, “Don’t worry about me, because the teachings “you have given me will get me through this life.
“Because of the sacrifices you made, we’re gonna do okay.”
– I often think the days on Taylor Creek– that’s where we lived when I worked at Uniroyal– that was the best time in my life.
When my wife was home, the kids came home, and if worst came to worst, I’d work a little overtime, but we could make it up on a check.
And life was so sweet.
We had two acres of land.
And I had this little wagon, a two-wheel wagon, you know, and we had two kids, and they were really young.
And I’d have a couple of the neighborhood kids in the wagon as I started to mow, and at first, I’d pretend it was like a circus ride.
We’d go up and down the hills, and I’d make the sharp turns.
But by the end of the time when I was done, they were sleeping.
And these memories are so vivid to me today.
And, you know, I just wished that’s the way life would’ve panned out.
But instead, we had to leave them two acres on Taylor Creek.
We moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and life was never that sweet again.
– Well, when Michelin closed the plant, my mom was eight months away from retirement, so she was able to take a transfer to Fort Wayne and finish out her retirement, so she got a pension.
If she had not had the pregnancy, that wouldn’t have been an option for her.
She would have just been let go, like so many other employees, and without a pension.
So it ended up being this, like, really significant thing in her life.
– Cleo: When the plant closing was announced, we were in shock.
We had just built a house, I’d say, about five years in advance, and having to leave that and our friends and realize that, “Hey, maybe I can get another job.”
Well, all these other employees are trying to do the same thing.
But yet, our daughter was gonna be a freshman in high school.
Since both of us worked at Uniroyal, we had no choice.
Michelle– she really took it hard and she cried, because she had made the cheerleading squad, or pom-pom squad.
So she was so excited about that, and to take that away from her, but I sat her down and put all our expenses, our utilities, and what unemployment would’ve covered, you know, wouldn’t’ve covered it.
So I says, “Michelle, if I even get a $10 job and Dad gets a $10 job, we aren’t gonna make it.”
We all cried.
If I had to do it over again, I don’t think I would ever pull my daughter out of school here.
She hated me…
Excuse me.
Hated what we did to her.
– Steve Christianson: I worked there in two parts.
The first time was three years long, and then there was a big layoff that lasted almost two years.
And in that time, things were really tough in the area.
And it got to the point where I couldn’t find a job anywhere and I was actually out walking the highways looking for aluminum cans to try to put food on the table.
I don’t know if you remember that.
– Jerrika Mighelle: No.
– Okay, well, it was tough.
And then– Well, at that point, we had six children when that happened, when I was laid off.
You know, then I had to go give plasma.
– He would always have that thing on his arm.
– So, there’s 300 needles-plus went in that arm, so… – I wonder how much you gave.
I wonder if we can measure it in gallons.
– It was over 300 times.
– Wow!
– I mean, I did what I could.
– You did everything you could to make ends meet.
As I was listening to you talk, Dad, I was remembering the moment, the day when you found out you got the job.
When we were living in Chippewa Falls, I was, I guess I was 7 years old.
We had just moved there.
– Steve: Yeah.
– Jerrika: And I remember feeling like the whole house was lit up and excited, like, in a way that it had never been lit up and excited before.
– Steve: Really?
Wow.
– Jerrika: And I just felt, “Wow, this is really important.”
And then I remember when it ended.
And so, I was 11, but I remember coming home and it just was the opposite feeling in the house.
Just heavy, sad.
There were lessons to learn.
Like, I didn’t wanna struggle like I did in my childhood.
What can I do?
What can I do to make sure that isn’t me?
I dove into my dreams instead.
I became a dreamer and I was like, “How can I make these dreams real?”
I started my art journey through poetry.
That began my musical journey was that.
And I don’t know if, without that struggle that we grew up with, that I would even have any inspiration to be the artist I am.
I learned once that a poet is a speaker of the times.
They are the people who relay what is going on in the world right now, especially not just in the world, but they’re talking about the people, the people, us, the ones who are feeling and living the struggles of life.
– Narrator: Following the 1991 plant closing announcement, Jean Curtis wrote a series of poems meant to capture the poignancy of plant life.
She posted her poems to the plant bulletin board, where they could be read by all.
But she never signed her name, only her badge number, 10569.
– Interviewer: So, why did you turn to poetry?
– Jean: I’ve always been in poetry.
– Kelly: She’s always written poetry.
She wrote poetry in her Christmas cards.
She wrote poetry for people whose pet died.
She wrote poetry to me when I was growing up.
But this whole Badge 10569 series was just such a beautiful way to capture this collective mourning that everybody was feeling.
– Especially in the first poem that I wrote, “A Name, A Number, A Face,” that’s all I could think about is walking down those halls.
And I’d seen this person every day, but I didn’t have a clue what their name was.
– Interviewer: Could you read this for us on the tape, please?
– Jean: Sure.
“A Name, A Number, A Face.”
– “Some of you just were a number or a name.”
– Jean: “I knew some by face, that’s all.
“Some had a smile, a quick hello, and some wouldn’t speak in the hall.”
– Kelly: “Some wore suits, Some wore bibs, some dressed with lots of class.”
– Jean: “Tall and short, fat and thin, all sorts of people I’d pass.”
– Kelly: “Hairy ones and balding ones, crinkled curls and straight.”
– Jean: “The styles of each were different, “but we all shared the fate.
And now the game is over, we’ll all find new careers.”
– Kelly: “Perhaps to never see that face we worked with all those years.”
– Jean: “Why would I miss a guy I knew as only a name or face or a number that was hers alone when we all leave this place?”
– Kelly: “Damned if I know, but I am sure I will.”
– Jean: “And I’ll hate the empty space “that once was filled with a number or a name or familiar face.”
– Kelly: “So best of luck to all who go now, blown like a lost balloon.”
– Jean: “As we prepare for the final act, “those left shall follow soon.
Badge 10569.”
– “10569.”
[gentle music] – Hi, I’m Robert Hagman.
– Interviewer: What’s the one thing that you’ll never forget about working at the tire plant?
– The family feeling.
Everybody cared about everybody else.
Today’s society, that’s– I think it’s a given that it’s not the same, I don’t believe.
It’s more of the computers and people working out of homes and that.
They don’t have the close contact with fellow workers that brings on the camaraderie.
And that is really, I think, appreciated.
I think society needs it.
I think society needs to go back to the good old days, in some respects.
– Narrator: On June 26, 1992, the Eau Claire tire plant’s final day in operation, plant employee Clarence Murrell was approached by a fellow employee who asked if Clarence had his trumpet handy.
Clarence confirmed that he did.
“Bring it out,” the employee said.
“Play ‘Taps’ for the last shift.”
As the workers exited the building, Clarence performed the somber song.
At its conclusion, he packed up his trumpet and left the plant for good.
[“Taps” playing] – So, here’s a loaded question.
What about the future?
– Narrator: By late June of 1992, the Uniroyal plant, once the engine of the city’s manufacturing, stood shuttered and silent along the Eau Claire River.
Whether or not the space would ever be used again remained unclear.
Following the city’s unsuccessful attempts to attract a major manufacturer, in August of 1992, Bill Cigan and Jack Kaiser, local father and son business partners, doubled down on their community, purchasing the 1.9-million-square-foot former tire plant and converting it to a multi-use, multi-tenant complex.
– We’re betting on two individuals who had no experience of this level.
I mean, they were successful businessmen.
There’s no doubt about that.
Giant space to fill.
And then the challenge that Jack and Bill faced was proving to people that this was a place that you could do business.
– Well, look at it today.
Look at it today.
Jack Kaiser has the last laugh.
– Mike: If it would’ve had a grocery store, it would’ve been a place you would’ve never had to leave.
I mean, it had housing, it had daycare, it had work, it had food, restaurants.
I mean, it was like a community within a community.
I mean, it’s just a remarkable story of how two individuals, with the help of the community, could turn something that, you know, everybody thought was probably going to be a real dilapidated building that sat there as an ugly reminder of our job loss, actually turned around and shows how a community can do it.
– The major thing is they probably have about as many people now working in the plant as we had as Uniroyal, you know?
And I think the best part of it is there are a lot of different companies.
I think there are over 100 different companies.
They really don’t have to worry anymore about one big company leaving, okay?
There might be a few companies that go out of business or shut down or move and go someplace else, but the probability that all those– all 1,200 people are gonna be out looking for a job at one time, you know, no longer exists.
– Narrator: Eau Claire’s Uniroyal legacy also lives on by way of Royal Credit Union, which today has 22 offices and over 280,000 members throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota, though, in 1964, was originally founded exclusively for Eau Claire’s tire plant employees.
– Charlie Grossklaus: My first office was in the plant, over here in the shipping area.
We had five employees.
It was formed by the union.
The union wanted a place for people to save money, be able to borrow.
It worked out pretty well.
It was their source of funding.
They were able to borrow from us for car loans, you know, home loans, recreational vehicles.
So, money was taken out of their paycheck on a regular basis and deposited into an account for ’em that built the organization.
Well, there were, for years, there were rumors about them closing this plant for one reason or another, and we started preparing many years before to expand our membership so that if they did close the plant, we were there to serve those members that they had for years.
When we got the notice that they were gonna close the plant, we notified all our members, told them that we were there for ’em.
If they needed to come on in and rewrite the loan and lower the monthly payment, whatever they needed, we were there for ’em.
I can’t remember one loan that we lost from a Uniroyal employee at that time.
The union members of Uniroyal made it possible for RCU to be what it is today.
There’s no question in my mind, they started us.
They supported us.
– We knew downtown needed work, and so about 2001, the city did a major study on their downtown.
And they came back with hundreds of recommendations after they met with the community and everything.
And, of course, one of them was to start using the riverfronts.
All our buildings faced away from the riverfront.
The trends that were happening in the world were how to not just recruit companies, but use your resources of people, and how do you attract people?
If you recruit people, then you have a workforce here.
Building on our assets, using the rivers, bike trails, investing in the arts, music, all those things that you and I want in our community that make it the quality of living in a community.
– We had to go and look at communities that had been successful.
Dubuque, where that was a real rundown area, and they revitalized their downtown.
La Crosse here in Wisconsin.
Vancouver, we looked at that.
We said, “Hey, how can we redevelop our downtown and make it more active?”
That’s the lesson we learned, and we hope that we send a message to other communities to do the same thing.
Use your nature that is provided to you.
– I think there was a realization that we needed to be more forward-thinking than we were in the past if we were gonna come out of this.
Well, my personal opinion, and I think a lot of people would agree with me, it would’ve been really, really hard to do what was done, for example, in the Phoenix Park area, with both the park and, obviously, eventually RCU and Pablo and everything else that’s happened downtown, without the closing of Uniroyal.
Now, that’s not to say that closing Uniroyal was beneficial, because a lot of people were hurt very badly.
But in the end, we have a much more diversified economy, I think we have a much more forward-looking city than we would’ve had, and we also have a realization that Eau Claire can’t go it alone.
– Judy: It all came together, and there’s so many people, too, that really brought this together, all the people that we talked to at that time.
And you got a great sense that maybe this wasn’t going to be the death knell to Eau Claire.
There’s gonna be a resurgence here.
[rousing music] [pensive music] – The people are one of the things I miss.
– These people were family.
– The camaraderie and the people and… – All the wonderful friends there and people and… – All great people to work with.
– The people.
[“Hand of God, Pt.
1” by Them Coulee Boys] – Last night, I felt the hand of God Pull me from the parking lot And set me on the open road to you On the way to my salvation I pulled in to the roadside station And bought myself a sixer of some booze And I am not a drinking man Maybe I was thinking that I could handle all the courage I could hope With my tail between my legs I swore you’d never see me back I was a broken man, but I never felt so bold Yeah, I was broken then, but I never felt so bold Yeah, I was broken then, but I never felt so bold [rousing piano and drum music] [gentle music] – Narrator: Following the reunion, and 31 years after the plant closing, the filmmakers reached out to Michelin for a statement for the film.
Uniroyal and Michelin North America released the following… – I believe corporations have to prosper, but they also have to take care of the ones that do the labor for ’em.
Eau Claire was blessed to have the plant, not because we were Uniroyal workers.
Because of the vibrant things that we did to enhance the community.
We made it a good place to live.
– What was Uniroyal?
It was the biggest factory in Wisconsin between Milwaukee and Superior.
In 1948, in the Labor Day parade, the truck that Uniroyal had in the parade read “World’s Most Modern Tire Plant.”
In the 76 years that it was here, it built over 500 million tires.
Five hundred.
Now imagine what you could do with 500 million tires.
You could lay them at the equator, the widest area on Earth, and it would go around the planet over seven times.
So, what was Uniroyal?
Something that we should never forget.
– This has been my theory– “It is what it is.”
I’ve had that sign for years.
And you may as well accept it, because, my God, it isn’t gonna change no matter how you look, so you may as well look forward and see what’s out there.
There is life beyond Uniroyal.
It’s teaching the people that the end of a era isn’t really the end of your life.
– There are so many losses in life, and when you’re in it, I think you sometimes can’t quite see there.
It just seems like, “This is going to end, and I’m done.”
And then you realize after, you know, time, you have to give yourself healing, you do the right things, you keep taking the right steps forward, and then you do have life beyond.
– Some of us made peace, and some of us didn’t.
I tend to look at the good years rather than the bad years.
They provided us with a lot of good income.
We raised a lot of families, built a lot of schools, a lot of churches, a lot of money went into the community.
We had people on the city council.
We had people on the police forces.
So we were the viable part of the community.
I do think we should have survived.
I still think that today.
But hindsight don’t get you very far.
– Doug: I think the larger story is that when something like this happens, obviously, you have to get over the shock, but you gotta do that real quickly and you have to pull everybody together.
It can’t just be a city effort.
It just can’t be a county effort.
It can’t be a state effort, it can’t be a business effort, it can’t be a higher education effort.
It can’t be, you know, nonprofits.
Everybody has to be at the table.
– Greg: But change is inevitable.
How communities respond to change defines the identity of that community.
And Eau Claire has a powerful story of adaptation that really resonates with people in this community and beyond.
– Mike: You know, I just noticed through my career that be prepared for changes.
Community is gonna change.
People’s likes and wants are gonna change.
And we were able to take advantage and have some vision of that, what it could look like.
[uplifting music] – Everybody can’t be doctors and lawyers and judges.
You know, there has to be somebody to do the other things.
And it’s okay not to be an electronic technician.
You know, everybody can’t be one.
So take satisfaction out of doing something constructive, and hopefully we’ll still maintain a better way of life than any of the other guys.
I think we have to teach our history and learn from it and go on.
[humming] [“Over and Over” by Jerrika Mighelle] You said it wouldn’t be easy But I tried anyway Now I am bruising And I fell where I lay