Thomas Greene was the five hundredth man hired at the General Motors Cranston stamping plant. It was fall of 1956, and word had spread fast—down Route 23, through Chillicothe and Waverly and Portsmouth in Ohio, and on down through Kentucky and West Virginia, the manpower providers for the Ohio and Michigan auto industry. To Olive Hill and Somerset, Hazard and Pikeville, Flattop and Redbush and Louisa in Kentucky, and over to West Virginia to Fort Gay and Williamson, Welch and Logan, and Matewan and Vulcan, and down along the Big Sandy, and then the Tug River to Bluefield, and all throughout the Cumberland Plateau, where men were used to the harshest of all work, coal-mining, word had spread when the hiring began. Automotive drove the migration, but if you didn’t get on at the car factory, there were steel, tires, appliances, all waiting to be made or built up north.
Thomas was lean and strong and smart, as were most of the men coming north for work. Word traveled fast from relatives already there. He had heard from an aunt in Matewan, who had heard from Crazy Jack. “They’re hiring Monday, fifty men, but you got to be here in line.” A few would show up on Saturday night with blankets and a box lunch fixed by the wife or Mom or Sis or Grandma, and their sober vigil for the opportunity of a lifetime would begin. By late Sunday night, the last slots had been filled. Thomas Greene was 37th in line when the processing began Monday morning.
The men were herded through the executive parking garage along folding tables with chairs set before them, and they filled out paperwork. On either side of them were the automobiles they would be making, and most of the men had never seen so many beautiful cars in one place. Even the dealerships down home usually had only two or three new models on hand. There was a black Cadillac Eldorado Brougham and a new ’57 Chevy convertible, bright red with a white top, an Oldsmobile with the Rocket V-8, a classic Roadmaster Buick, and a big, blue Pontiac Bonneville with the new 347 cubic inch engine. Not a man there failed to take a few moments off the task at hand to look at one of those babies and imagine himself behind the wheel with his wife or girl, prompting the guy in charge to bellow every few minutes, “Keep your eyes on the paperwork, boys, not on the cars.”
The guys that couldn’t read and write very well were helped along by the folks in the white shirts, and Thomas thought that was a mighty fine thing—not penalizing a fellow because he couldn’t read. He was further encouraged by the lieutenant at the end who, after glancing over page one of Thomas’s application, said, “Army Infantry, hey? Welcome aboard. That was some rough going in the Ardennes.” The lieutenant gave a relaxed salute as he linked Thomas’s unit to that part of the action in 1944. The nation was not so far away from WWII that one’s service record was not an immediate source of respect.
“Yes sir. But we got her done.” A few minutes later, Thomas was thinking what a fine and friendly place this was going to be to work, when his name was shouted out. Oh, no. He turned to the reject table where several other men had already gone and been shown the way out. “Yes, sir. No, sir. 1941. Yes, sir.”
The lieutenant came over to the table. “What we got, Ed?”
Ed had overheard the earlier conversation between the two vets and said, “Well, Lieutenant, seems this fellow’s been in some trouble,” and he shrugged towards Thomas.
“Sir…Lieutenant….”
The lieutenant took the application and glanced over it again.
“Who started it?”
“They did. Donny, he was the sheriff’s son, he said something rude to my girl.”
“What’d he say?”
“He hollered, ‘Fuck her. I did.’”
“It’s not a felony,” the lieutenant said.
Thomas Greene got the job. After a few minutes of safety training, Thomas’s group of ten was led out to the factory. The place was like a thunderous cave, with welding smoke, oil mist, and concrete dust as thick as fog in the air. Sirens from the cranes wailed away, motion everywhere as men not only made the car parts, but finished the plant construction. Thomas Greene had never seen a picture of insanity, but if there was one, he was sure he was looking at it.