Janesville

by Amy Goldstein

  Linda took the test. It required her to insert pegs into a board. She was one of only about twenty in her six-hundred-member graduating class whose hands were nimble enough to get her hired. She started on August 1, and, even these forty-four years later, she can still remember being eighteen, slim with her dirty-blond hair cut short, and the pride she felt when people around town asked what she was doing, and she could tell them that she was working at Parker Pen. Being able to say that was an honor. It was a time when a prestigious Parker fountain pen or even a nice ballpoint was an especially meaningful gift around Janesville, because the giver perhaps had made it or worked with someone who had made it or, at the least, knew someone working at Parker Pen.

  Now that her final day, January 15, is arriving, it is hard for Linda—indeed, for many in town—to fathom that the name Parker Pen will soon remain only as a fragment of Janesville’s history.

  The Parker Pen Company was founded by a man whose life trajectory traced a perfect arc of the American Dream. George Safford Parker was born during the Civil War in rural Shullsburg, Wisconsin, sixty-eight miles west of Janesville. His family went back on his father’s side to a couple who had arrived in Connecticut from Dover, England, in 1632. Parker grew up on an Iowa farm, yearning to see the world. At the time he was coming of age, it was popular for young men with ambition and wanderlust to seek jobs as telegraph operators on railroads. He was a lanky nineteen-year-old when he arrived in Janesville with $55 for the tuition at the Valentine School of Telegraphy. Run by two brothers of that name, Valentine was the only telegraphy school in the nation that held contracts with railroad companies. Parker was an able student. When he graduated, he was pleased to be hired by the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad, until he learned that his job would not be riding the rails that traversed the American West, but holed up in a station in a backwater of South Dakota. So when Richard Valentine asked Parker months later to return to the school as an instructor, he jumped at the chance. Back in Janesville, he taught young men just a few years younger than himself and, on the side, was an agent for an Ohio pen company, selling fountain pens that his students needed in their studies to transcribe telegraph code. The John Holland Co. pens tended to leak, and Parker developed a specialty in pen repair and alteration. “It will always be possible to make a better pen,” Parker said in 1888, the year he formed the Parker Pen Company. He was twenty-five. The following year, he secured his first pen patent and, five years after that, another patent for the writing instrument that would catapult Parker into a company with an international reputation—the Lucky Curve.

  By 1900, his business had large contracts to sell pens to the federal government and a Main Street address for its four-story factory and sales office, before it eventually moved into a handsome, steel-frame factory along Court Street. As his business grew, so did a paternalistic generosity that Parker showered on his workers, typical of the welfare capitalism of the day intended to foster loyalty and ward off unrest. A clubhouse for employee parties. Camp Cheerio on the grounds of his summer house on the river’s bluff. A housing development, Parkwood, for company executives. By the 1920s, he was patron of the Parker Pen Concert Band, purchasing instruments for musicians if they needed help and furnishing company vehicles to convey players to concerts. He instructed the personnel in charge of hiring Parker Pen’s factory and office workers to check with the band’s director about the kinds of musicians he could use; applicants who could fill a vacancy in the band were to be given hiring preference.

  Parker satisfied his childhood yen to roam, traveling the globe to open export markets—the first in the Netherlands in 1903. When, after his death, the Arrow Park factory opened in 1953 on Parker Drive, it had flags outside from each of the eighty-eight nations in which the company was, at the time, selling pens. Parker wrote books about his travels, on the South Seas and China’s Yangtze River, and brought home an enormous ivory collection that he was fond of showing to friends, including the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

  Parker pens showed up at defining moments of the twentieth century. During World War I, the U.S. War Department awarded Parker a contract for a “Trench Pen,” with dry pellets that turned into liquid ink when soldiers in the field added water. In May of 1945, the treaty of German surrender that ended World War II in Europe was signed with a pair of Parker 51 fountain pens belonging to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, who held up the two pens for the cameras in a V for victory. At the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, a Parker pavilion sponsored the biggest international letter-writing program that had ever been undertaken. It featured an early “electric computer,” which could, within seconds, match a fairgoer with a pen pal of similar age and interests overseas. Uniformed women known as Pennettes, from Janesville and around the globe, handed out pens, postcards, and stationery.

  Two years later, the year that Linda was hired, George S. Parker II, a grandson of its founder, became the company’s president and CEO. He was the last Parker to run Parker Pen, and he presided over a long, slow decline as the market for high-end pens waned. In 1986, he sold the company to a group of British investors affiliated with a British firm based in a town along the English Channel, Newhaven, where Parker pens had been manufactured since shortly after World War II. Pen making continued in Janesville under the name Parker Pen Holdings Ltd. Then, in 1993, the Gillette Company bought out Parker Pen Holdings Ltd. Six years later, the pen business was bought out again, by Newell Rubbermaid—specifically, by an offshoot of its office supplies division known as Sanford Business-to-Business, which customizes pens for promotional purposes. So the final 153 workers, Linda among them, have been working for a company called Sanford, not Parker. They have no longer been making pens. They have been printing the logos of pharmaceutical companies and other businesses onto the sides of pens that were made overseas.

  With the British Parker Pen and then Gillette and finally Newell Rubbermaid’s Sanford B2B, more than a name was surrendered. Gone, too, was the relationship that workers had with a local, family-run business and that the family that owned the business had with the community in which its workers lived.

  Inside Arrow Park when Linda was hired, there was no mistaking the factory’s family feel. Girls followed their mothers into Parker Pen the way that boys followed their fathers into the GM assembly plant. The work had seasonal ups and down, with pens in high demand for gifts as graduation season and Christmas neared—and sometimes temporary layoffs in between. Parker sent women home, too, when they were pregnant and hired them back once their babies were a year old. Linda, married at twenty and divorced five years later, did not have children, so her seniority was uninterrupted.

  Late every Friday afternoon, just before Linda and everyone else went home for the weekend, a song came over the loudspeaker:

  May the good Lord bless and keep you

  Whether near or far away . . .

  Listening to the song, Linda felt every Friday that the Parkers cared about her. Even before the song, Fridays were special, because that was the day that workers dressed up a little more and that some departments had their check pools, with everyone kicking in a dollar and betting on the last digits on their paychecks.

  And there was never an employee birthday without a cake or a Christmas season without a smorgasbord. The Parker Pen employees created two cookbooks of their favorite recipes. Every day, break time began with the arrival of a woman who wheeled a coffee cart through the factory, with fresh hard rolls and squares of cheese, and sometimes even baked apples and donuts, depending on the season. To encourage exercise, the company gave a walking award, and employees strolled the grounds at lunchtime until their miles earned them a charm shaped like two tiny feet. Managers understood if a worker had to stay home with a sick child. And once a year was Family Day, when husbands and children toured the plant and everyone could take home a pen—a Jotter ballpoint or, once it was invented in 1982, a Vector rollerball. In the summer, Parker Pen sponsor
ed its company picnic at different parks around the county, including sometimes at Thresherman’s Park, with free rides on a model steam engine train and fresh sweet corn from a nearby farm set into a cattle trough and cooked in the engine’s steam. And there were elaborate Parker Pen floats for Janesville’s Labor Fest parade, with the float in 1994 constructed right at Arrow Park, where workers tucked blue crepe paper into a long cylindrical frame of chicken wire to look like a giant Jotter, commemorating the fortieth anniversary of one of Parker’s most successful writing instruments.

  For years, Linda bowled in one of the Parker Pen leagues. In the summer, she played on the Parker Pen golf league. Working at Parker was about philanthropy, too, with a Charitable Giving Committee of workers who, each year, were selected to decide which of the many social service organizations in town deserved $5,000—sometimes $10,000—that the company’s annual budget allocated for good works. Managers encouraged workers to do their part. Linda raised money for the Humane Society.

  She had been hired into the department that made the fountain pen’s nibs—solid gold for their durability and smooth writing feel. Over the years, she moved to the department that inspected for quality control and then to the stock department, which, once she got there, she felt was her calling because it drew on her orderliness and allowed her the freedom to move throughout the factory. As long as Parker Pen was still in the Parker family, almost no one quit for a different job.

  It did not occur to Linda to leave even when Gillette took over and the blessing song stopped coming over the loudspeaker on Friday afternoons. When the song stopped, she felt like just a factory worker, one of 650 at Arrow Park by then, none of them special anymore. She was still doing her stock work on January 19, 1999, the day that a corporate man from Gillette arrived and announced that the company was closing Arrow Park and told everyone to take the rest of the day off and come back the next morning for a few more months, until their jobs would end.

  The last day of making pens was the Friday before Memorial Day that year. Before then, some of Linda’s co-workers had to take all the little pen pieces and glue them to wooden boards in the correct sequence, to be shipped to Newhaven in Britain so that workers near the English Channel would know how to assemble properly the pen models that no longer would be made in Janesville. Before Arrow Park closed, Linda and others in the stock department had to crate up and send free shipments of surplus pens. They were mailed off to a pen factory in California, a loyal department store in New York, and other distant destinations, until a little delegation of stock department workers asked their bosses whether some of these pens could stay in town, going to the food pantry, ECHO, and the Salvation Army and even Janesville schoolkids, because who wouldn’t want a nice Parker Pen? Finally, it was down to a few beautiful ballpoints, in sterling silver, which were going to be shipped away, too, until one of Linda’s co-workers marched into a supervisor’s office and said, given that the stock room women were among the last still working at Arrow Park, shipping pens after production had stopped, didn’t they deserve a silver pen? On their last day, Linda and the others each got one.

  By now, Linda was fifty-one and single and needed a job. She had never thought of working anywhere else. So, when the new owners, the Sanford B2B division of Newell Rubbermaid, said that they needed sixty-five people for the logo-imprinting on pens made elsewhere—working in a manufacturing space, much smaller than Arrow Park, on the north side of town—she applied. The sixty-five workers were handpicked and, as she had when she graduated from high school, Linda felt honored to be chosen.

  For eleven years, as the sixty-five workers grew to 153, Linda continued to do stock work, becoming a stock lead, which meant that she supervised and stocked, too. A muted camaraderie returned among the workers who remembered the Parker days. Her pay, right around $18 an hour, was among the highest. So it was fine, until last August 19, when, without warning, the top Sanford guy in Janesville came out onto the plant floor. He set a wooden crate upside down for him to stand high enough that everyone could see him. He announced that the corporation had decided to close the plant. Just as Gillette had done eleven years before, he told everyone to take the rest of the day off.

  At Newell Rubbermaid’s corporate headquarters in Illinois, a decision had been made a month before to close the Newhaven pen-making factory in England. Then, on this August day, a corporate public relations manager issued a press release. The Janesville plant, it said, was a casualty of excess capacity. A factory in Mexico, doing the same kind of logo imprinting, could take on all the work. “This decision is a response to structural issues accelerated by market trends,” the press release said, “and is in no way a reflection on the highly valued work performed by our Janesville employees over the years.”

  To Linda, it isn’t structural. It is personal. Close to a half century of her life. She is about to turn sixty-two, old enough to collect Social Security after the severance pay she would get if she left now. So, although she could stay while this manufacturing space is taken apart, as Arrow Park was taken apart years before, she decides to move aside. Let someone younger than her eke out a few more months.

  Her departure, just as this year is beginning, counts as a layoff, not a retirement. And so, for her forty-four years, she does not get even a retirement cake.

  It hurts at first, after all the birthday cakes and the Christmas smorgasbords of what used to be such a friendly, family-feeling factory back in the Parker Pen days. But now she is at peace with this uncelebrated leaving.

  She is ready to leave, because she does not want to do what some of her co-workers will do during the next few months. Like them, she has been offered an opportunity to be paid longer if she were willing to fly to Mexico and train workers there. Linda has given training over the years, and she knows that she has a knack for it. If she were being asked to train someone in Janesville, she would, naturally, say yes. But to train someone in Mexico—Mexico!—to take over her job? After her forty-four years, she doesn’t have the heart for that.

   20

  Becoming a Gypsy

  Just get going, Matt Wopat whispers to himself. Go. He is in his Sierra pickup, in his garage, merely a few feet from the open doorway to the laundry room where Darcy and the girls are crowded together. He watches them as if in a picture frame. They’re crying. They’re blowing kisses his way.

  He sees his daughters turn away from the doorway. He sees Darcy, as if she can’t take it anymore, wave a last goodbye and shut the door. He is alone, fighting tears himself. He’s tried hard to sound reassuring, to convince them that everything will be fine. Now he wonders how persuasive he’s been, because, frankly, he isn’t sure he believes it himself.

  A twist of the key in the ignition, and Matt feels the aging truck’s familiar idle. His hand drifts to the gear shift, but he can’t make himself shift into reverse. And he knows why.

  A weight is pressing on him, the kind of weight that presses hard on a man who is on the cusp of his fifth decade when he discovers that doing everything right is not enough. Not enough to live by Plan A, as his father has done, and his father-in-law and his uncle, and the thousands of men a couple of generations back who counted their days and months on the assembly line until the years added up to thirty, and they could retire. He came up with a Plan B, learning to climb utility poles, just in case the assembly plant fails to reopen, even though his dad, Marv, still insists that it will. Plan B isn’t looking good, either.

  By this Sunday afternoon, March 7, seven months have gone by since Matt began to study electric power distribution—finding himself in the throng of out-of-a-job factory workers who pivoted to Blackhawk Tech. Peculiar and embarrassing as it had seemed at first, he made peace with the nightly ritual of spreading his schoolbooks on the kitchen table after dinner, along with Brittany in twelfth grade, Brooke in ninth, and Bria in seventh, all four of them doing their homework and him sometimes even asking Brittany for help with his math. A good example, he felt he was sett
ing for his daughters—an example of working hard and making the best of a bad situation.

  His main instructor, Mike Doubleday, had grown up on a farm that grew corn and soybeans in Clinton, a small town fifteen miles southeast of Janesville, and, after high school, he had taken over the farming because his father had gotten hurt. His farming days, though, didn’t last long. He went to Blackhawk as a student in the same program in which he is teaching now, then found a job building and repairing power lines for the town of Evansville, twenty miles to the northwest. For fifteen years, he was an apprentice and then a journeyman lineman until he heard that the college needed an instructor to help with the backlog of people wanting to become linemen like him. The change appealed to him. Mike had been teaching for only a year by the time Matt arrived, but he already had an instinct for predicting, a few weeks into a semester, which of his students were going to succeed, which would drop out, and which were the middling ones who could go either way. In Mike’s view, Matt had what it took to succeed. Like most of the guys, Matt had trouble with the algebra formulas for electrical theory. But he hung out with five other GM’ers in class, including one especially good with the math, until they each worked out the solutions. Matt impressed Mike as honest and straightforward, a hard worker who wasn’t outgoing but wasn’t afraid to ask questions when he didn’t understand and was eager to help other guys if he grasped a concept first. Plus, his roofing experience gave Matt some background that would come in handy. He was going to make a good lineman somewhere, Mike felt pretty sure.