Grace and Grit (16 page)

To keep my grief at bay, I parked myself on the sofa, ate too many potato chips, and spent hours watching QVC, mesmerized by each colorful purse or miraculous beauty product. I loved watching the live makeovers and listening to the callers; their voices eased my sense of loneliness, if only for a moment. Once something I ordered appeared on my doorstep, I sent it back or left it unopened on a stack in Vickie’s old room. It was the process of falling in love with the item, pursuing it through my purchase, and anticipating its arrival that gave me a sense of fulfillment, not the actual item. By the time that special piece that was supposed to make me feel good again arrived, I’d have lost interest. I’d have found something else I wanted.

At this time, I became debilitated by mysterious aches and
pains, even getting tested for lupus. Choked by my sadness, I didn’t know how to navigate through my grief or help my mother deal with hers. All I could do with any clarity was drive her—Edna didn’t drive unless it was a tractor—to the three grocery stores she liked. We certainly didn’t talk about our loss—then or ever.

The day I helped Edna sort through my father’s clothes broke me. Gathering his old work shirts, still tainted with the licorice smell of diesel fuel, made me miss him more than I ever had. I sat on my parents’ bed, a stack of his shirts in my lap, and buried my head in them, crying. Sitting on the same chenille bedspread my parents had used for as long as I could remember, my eyes swollen, my nose red, and gulping for air, I learned that the body sometimes tells us things the mind is afraid to face. Once I cried for the first time, I cried for weeks afterward, the phantom pains dissipating with my tears.

I
LASTED
a year in the glass house in the mill room. The male managers supervising the floor complained they’d been treated unfairly because I hadn’t worked on the floor like everyone else who went to the glass house, so I was transferred to the tube plant, an older part of the operation. Before I left, some of the union guys pooled their money and bought me a fourteen-karat-gold bracelet. I wore that bracelet every day, grateful for their kindness and consideration, until I somehow lost it.

In no time I was laid off for a week, able to return only as a worker, not as a supervisor, to run tire trials. I later experienced another layoff, this one for ten weeks, and was called back to fill in for a supervisor who’d had a lung removed. I was beginning to think I was in a pinball machine being played by a lousy player, ricocheting without any rhyme or reason.

In 1990, I was fifty-two years old and I’d been married thirty-five years, more than half my life. I had been at Goodyear ten years, not including the time I worked at Tyson. That year, I was
finally offered a permanent position replacing a supervisor in final finish on the second shift, from 3:00
P.M
. to 11:00
P.M
. Once again, unemployment and inflation were on the rise, and the conflict in the Middle East was heating up. Workers were afraid, and the mood at the plant was tense. A night after I disciplined a worker for not meeting production, some guys in a Trans Am with tinted windows followed me out of the plant. On the desolate two-lane highway, they rode my bumper, flashing their lights, and pulled up beside me.

I pressed the pedal of my six-cylinder Cutlass to the floorboard. Without any pickup, I went as fast as I could until I saw a house and pulled in to the driveway. The Trans Am eased in behind me, its lights shining in my rearview mirror before being switched off. I pressed the heel of my hand on the horn until they backed out. On the road again, I came across another section without any houses. The Trans Am’s headlights appeared from nowhere, shining in my mirror. If I’d been a rabbit, my heart would have exploded. I promised myself that if I survived, I’d buy a gun. A knife in my pocket was no longer enough.

They followed me all the way to my driveway. The next day I went to Lewis Carroll Jeweler’s, the only place in Anniston where you could leave your film to be developed, buy diamonds, and purchase a gun. I bought a gun.

I
NEVER
knew when someone would turn out to be an enemy or a friend. I first met Mitch, a training manager, during the EEOC investigation in 1982. One day while I was working alone in quality control, he approached me to say, “I don’t know how you work alone like this.” Throughout the years, Mitch did his best to support me, pushing the other managers to make me the female representative for management at the union hall even though they always chose one of the secretaries. It was men with attitudes like Mitch’s who helped me stay.

A couple of years later, in 1992, I was told to go see one of the plant managers. I thought I was getting laid off again. Instead, the plant manager, Sid, a pleasant, quiet man I admired for his good nature and fairness, informed me that I’d been chosen as one of four managers to start the radial light-truck division, where SUV and passenger tires would be made. I figured that Mitch had nominated me.

In the new division we ran a skeleton crew on brand-new machinery, a nice change from so much of the old machinery that looked like it was held together with duct tape. Not long after the announcement about my promotion was made, the top brass from Akron, Ohio, came to Gadsden to meet with the chosen four in the company clubhouse, where upper management entertained the big dogs from other plants and held exclusive receptions in the small cafeteria. That day my new supervisor insisted that I go home.

“If they go to the meeting, shouldn’t I?” I asked, referring to the three other managers, all male.

“No, you need to go on home,” I was advised.

I knew not to push and went home, but I wrestled with why I couldn’t go. I tried not to let it bother me too much, and I didn’t dare protest. I just chalked it up to the way things were done. I was getting used to the idea that no matter what good things happened for me at Goodyear, I was never going to be accepted into the boys’ club, and I couldn’t let my disappointment depress me when I’d received the honor of being chosen to run the newest division of the plant, the one that represented the latest in tire technology.

I experienced another glorious moment when Hector and I competed at the National Ballroom Championship in Miami and won. Right before I went onto the floor, I called home and Phillip happened to answer the phone. He was checking on Oscar, our fourteen-year-old miniature dachshund, whom Phillip had bought with his own money as a young boy. Sometimes I thought Phillip
loved Oscar more than he did the rest of us. Now Phillip sounded horrible. Oscar had died.

On the dance floor, for a moment before the music started, I wondered if I could shake my sadness over the unexpected news. But once I heard the upbeat rhythm of the music, I felt soothed. As I danced, I saw reflected all around me in the mirrors a different Lilly from the one who’d started her lessons so long ago. I saw a woman swirling in her black-and-white chiffon skirt, one whose swept-up hair was no longer a bleached-out blond but dyed a golden yellow, who looked like she owned the world. This woman relished the way her body moved. I felt that same sense of expansiveness I had as a child swimming in Nancy’s Creek, flipping under the water, my body spinning, exploding with a powerful rush to float in peace until I crashed to the surface for air.

We placed first in all three categories: the tango, the waltz, and the East Coast swing.

I
N THE
radial division I worked with one supervisor I admired. He set an example I wanted to emulate, beginning our meetings by asking us to state three positive things about our previous shift. No matter what department I was in, though, the first thing I did when I went to my car was look around to make sure everything was okay—plenty of times managers had found their tires slashed. I’d never experienced vandalism to my car until I had to discipline several workers in a short period of time. The guy I wrote up who talked too much told me, “Lilly, I hate this job,” and eventually quit. When I caught another guy sleeping on the job and wrote him up, he looked at me, exasperated, and asked, “Damn, Lilly, management doesn’t want you around, so why are you hassling me?” He received a three-day suspension and threatened to make me pay for it. I bought a gas cap that locked. I didn’t want sugar poured into my tank.

That wasn’t enough. Soon a screw as big as a thumb was stuck into the side of my tire. Shortly afterward, when I walked to my car at the end of my shift, it was covered in about a gallon of tobacco juice. Once I had that cleaned off, my windshield was cut out with a glass cutter, leaving one side intact to ensure that when I drove over a bump, it would collapse on me.

I didn’t let these tactics keep me from disciplining someone if necessary, but I entered a whole new territory the day I drove to Birmingham after work to a doctor’s appointment to check on my chronic stomach ulcers. My car was driving funny on the way there. After my appointment, I couldn’t get it started. A mechanic towed the car to the shop, inspected it, and asked me, “Have you made somebody mad?”

“Well, that’s hard to say.”

“In all my thirty-two years I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“What’s that?”

“Someone’s tampered with your gear cable. Without it, you have no power steering or brakes. If you’d driven on the highway much longer, you could have been killed.”

I told my boss, the business center manager, Eric, a slender, neat man who’d once played college football, but he merely commented, “You’re getting paranoid.”

But the vandalism didn’t stop. My fenders were slashed and my car keyed. I went to Eddie, Eric’s boss and next in seniority in upper management in my area. He said he’d look into it. I refused to leave his office until he promised that I could park my car next to the security guard’s office at the gate. Only then did the vandalism stop.

A
T THE
end of this stressful year, in December 1995, Eric, who sometimes confided in me about how hard it was for his wife, a pharmaceutical rep, to work in an office full of men, handed me a piece of paper while we were down on the floor working. “This is
going to be a great Christmas,” he said with a smile. Written on the note was the biggest pay raise I’d ever received: I’d earned the Top Performance Award, an award I’d had no idea existed.

In the sixteen years I’d been at Goodyear, I’d received only a few raises after the change from cost-of-living increases to merit-based raises in the early eighties—one year earning all of $61 more per month. The highest raises I’d received throughout my career were those I received before I complained to the EEOC in 1982.

I thanked Eric and placed the torn paper in my pocket. A few months earlier I’d asked him how my pay ranked among my peers. Eric drew a circle representing minimum to maximum pay and put a line through the middle of it. “You’re right below that middle line,” he said. The reason I was so near the middle rather than lower was my attitude and enthusiasm. My lack of tire knowledge compared with that of the builders who’d been promoted into management held me back, but if I continued the way I was going, he told me, that would soon change. I would find out much later that I wasn’t even being paid the minimum salary for the area managers.

I wasn’t surprised I hadn’t known about the Top Performance Award. Everything at Goodyear was top secret. Politicians and school groups touring the plant weren’t allowed in the tire room, as if some student or schoolteacher might actually figure out how the tire machines operated and tell another company. So it was nothing unusual in offices with glass walls for a manager to slide someone a piece of paper with the amount written on it whenever anybody got a raise.

I was thrilled to receive the Top Performance Award but perplexed that not a word was printed in the company newsletter about this honor. That was okay with me—I wanted to keep a low profile. The last thing I needed to do was provoke envy among my coworkers during tough economic times.

The one time I had made the company newsletter was in a story entitled “Lighthearted, Lightfooted Lilly,” highlighting my winning competitions in ballroom dancing. I became something of a star in many people’s eyes, and remained so for as long as I worked at Goodyear. Some folks at Goodyear even started taking a dance lesson or two themselves. For many, my greatest performance at Goodyear had nothing to do with tires.

—E
LEANOR
R
OOSEVELT

A
FTER FOUR
years as a supervisor in the radial light-truck division, in early spring of 1996, I was moved to the section of the tire room in the radial plant where the automatic radial full-stage (ARF) machines build tires. I continued to supervise the building of the smaller radial passenger tires on the older, more challenging machinery. The tire builders, according to the specifications logged into each machine’s computer, assembled the components—the liner, ply, bead, chafer, belt, and, finally, tread—onto a steel drum. Then an elevator carried the uncured, or “green,” tires on an overhead conveyor belt winding along the walls under the ceiling to the curing presses, where they were cured before they moved on to final finish.