Plant 14

Much of the action in my first book, Red Crush, takes place in a sprawling industrial complex devoted to every aspect of car production. At first glance, it is reminiscent of the Ford Rouge complex, which once took in raw materials—sand, iron ore and wood— at one end, and spit millions of Model Ts out the other.

The scenes are actually based on my time in the Pontiac Motor Division facility that fills most of the tract between Baldwin and Joslyn, south of Walton Boulevard. I was there in its heyday, between 1965 and 1969. At that time there was a foundry, an engine plant, an axle plant, a plating plant, a stamping plant, a Fisher Body plant and the final assembly line. I worked at one end, in Plant 14, while my roommate worked in the shaker room in the foundry, almost half a mile away.

Almost all that is gone.

Plant 14 is part of GM’s Metal Stamping Division. The last I looked, the final assembly line was a warehouse for forgotten technology. The foundry is a verdant pasture. GM Powertrain occupies most of the Engineering complex, which was nirvana while I was a student.

I haven’t been inside the complex for probably forty years. While I worked there, it was a nasty, noisy place thrumming with vital energy. Die lubricant covered every neglected surface. Automation air valves screamed constantly. The floors shook from the power of two thousand ton presses.

The plant produced everything from hoods and fenders to control arms. A pattern shop made die models. Die makers fabricated most of the stamping tools, including trials to make sure they could actually stamp out the parts as the Styling gods intended.

It was also a dangerous place. More than a few accidents claimed the lives of production workers and skilled tradesmen over the years. I participated in several jobs that frightened me, including working inside the baler, as I described it in Red Crush. Nothing ever happened, but the risks were real enough. Just going to work was dangerous. I lost more than half my hearing from the noise. I can’t imagine the effects of spending thirty years on the floor there.

Most of the people I knew there were nice. I never encountered any racial enmity or hostility because I represented management. There were some jobs I wasn’t permitted to do, like patternmaking, but that was probably a good thing. We wouldn’t want any sixty-nine Pontiacs staring back cockeyed because of my faulty handiwork.

During my time there I wandered through almost all the complex, except the Fisher Body side and the foundry. My roommate worked in the foundry shaker room that separated iron castings from their sand molds. He’d leave for work every morning in spotless jeans and a T shirt, and come home every night, looking like a coal miner. I had no interest in seeing where he worked, or how he got so dirty every day.

I knew pretty much every inch of the complex, all the tunnels, machining lines and assembly operations. I did everything from stamping parts and assembling cars to sweeping floors. I dabbled in die design. I breathed ammonia from weeks behind a racing blueprint machine. I slept in all the best toilets.

I’m sure my bosses were happy to see the back of me when I transferred to Styling at the end of my senior year.

My experiences there are fodder that has fed my fiction. I couldn’t set my stories inside GM, for fear of offending any of the people I knew. After all, the events in my stories are similar to things that actually happened. That’s what makes them plausible, but none of those things actually happened. An accident is only sinister if it isn’t actually an accident.