Janesville

by Amy Goldstein

  After thirty-four minutes and thirty-nine seconds, Sixteen Forty-Nine has ended, and everyone in the audience is on their feet, clapping hard. As the lights come up, Ann can see that many of these people on their feet have tears on their cheeks, and some are crying still. Finally, one woman in the audience says she’d like to ask a question. As she starts to ask, her sobs come back, so her question is down to a single word: “Why?”

   26

  Figuring It Out

  The year’s shortest days are nearing when Barb Vaughn, honors graduate of Blackhawk Tech, correctional officer at the Rock County Jail, begins to have trouble dragging herself out of bed. Morning after morning, she feels a weird dread. She dreads brushing her teeth, dreads eating breakfast, dreads putting on her khaki uniform, dreads driving down Milton Avenue and making the right onto Route 14 that leads to the jail.

  This dread is unfamiliar and perplexing. Barb knows she has handled plenty of tough stuff in her life better than she is handling this. Being a single mom to three girls. Working two jobs. Getting laid off from Lear.

  Deep inside, Barb understands what is going on. But the solid lineup of A grades that she earned at Blackhawk never came with a lesson in this. What are you supposed to do when the job for which you’ve invested two years of your life studying, the job for which you beat out four hundred people as desperate as you were for $16.47 an hour and state benefits—what are you supposed to do when that job is pressing you down into a depression?

  When she started at the jail in late July, two months after her friend Kristi, Barb was so relieved. With Mike just halfway through his Blackhawk courses in human resources management, at least one paycheck was coming in again. His stepmother, Judy, had been bringing over meals to save them money on food. Last year, Judy announced that no one really needed to be buying anyone Christmas presents. Now, maybe life would slide toward normal.

  Barb could handle her rotating schedule at the jail, shifts starting at different times of day or night. In the fall, she made it through six weeks at the criminal justice academy, with its pepper spray and restraining holds and the time she had to crawl forward on the floor while a role-playing “prisoner” clutched at her leg. Some days during those six weeks, Barb had to tamp down a question in her mind: “Is this really what I want to do?” Still, rough as some of it was, the academy was school. The academy classes were even held at Blackhawk. And Barb knows by now how to be in school. She came out the far side of the criminal justice academy with a state certificate that made her a full-fledged correctional officer.

  The dread began once she was out of the academy and back at the jail. At Blackhawk, her instructors had drilled into her that fighting with a prisoner was a last resort. She doesn’t know how to cope with some officers who seem to have a different style. But that isn’t the worst of it. The worst is feeling as if she is in jail.

  Kristi knows that Barb sometimes goes home and cries. She wonders whether Barb has enough toughness for the jail—enough toughness for the inmates’ taunts and the name-calling. Barb wants to believe Kristi telling her that, sure, it is a different world. That she just needs to give it a little more time. But the voice inside her—the “is this what I want to do?” voice—is getting louder. The morning dread is getting worse.

  Busy as he is studying for his own As at Blackhawk, Mike notices. He keeps telling Barb that he hates to see her depressed. And then one day, Mike says to her something so startling that she never would have dreamed he would think of it, let alone say it out loud.

  “Just quit.”

  If they lose their ranch house and their garden, Mike tells her, they can move somewhere cheaper. Being depressed is no way to live. “We’ll figure it out,” he says.

  Barb is seven years older than Mike. She is now scared as well as depressed. How can she give up $16.47 an hour, knowing that the odds of finding pay like this again are slim?

  All this time, since graduation in May and the jail job coming through in July, the studying fiend she’d discovered inside herself has not been quiet. It has been telling her to push forward, to keep studying until she has a bachelor’s degree. Of course, the degree that Barb has been planning to start working toward, at Upper Iowa University with a branch right at Blackhawk, is in criminal justice. But now Barb is learning something important about herself. From day after day at the jail, she realizes, she would rather help people who need help before they get into trouble, rather than guarding people once they’ve gone wrong. Social work is the bachelor’s degree that she wants.

  A dream, though, is no substitute for a paycheck. Miserable as she is, she cannot believe that Mike is right. Then one day, with Christmas coming soon, she suddenly sees her life in a new way. She sees that she spent fifteen years at Lear playing the game, staying somewhere she wasn’t happy, just because the money was too good to leave. Maybe she is too intelligent, too educated now, to play the same game again. Maybe toughness is recognizing what isn’t working in your life and fixing it.

  Scared though she is, Barb does something she has never done at any job since her very first job as a teenager. Without any work in sight or a clue what will happen next, she decides to leave. Barb turns in her Sheriff’s Department badge.

   27

  Bags of Hope

  Early on Saturday morning, a week before Christmas, Tammy Whiteaker hears a knock on the front door of the raised ranch that she and Jerad have decided is not worth trying to sell. Tammy answers and, to her surprise, finds on the steps a couple she has never seen before.

  “We have groceries for you,” the man tells her.

  Tammy’s surprise swells into something more, because the next thing that happens is that this husband and wife walk back over to their dark SUV—General Motors, of course—that they have pulled right into the Whiteakers’ driveway. They begin to pull out paper bags of groceries, ask Tammy where they should go, and bring them through the garage and into the entryway. It takes a few trips because the bags are full, and there are lots of them. Twelve in all.

  Tammy is in such shock that, after a small thank-you, she just closes the entryway door. By now, Alyssa and Kayzia have come upstairs to check on what is going on. And, if their mother has no clue as to the origins of this bounty that will fill their cupboards and refrigerator, the twins have an idea. Parker High and other schools, they have heard, now have something called Bags of Hope.

  Bags of Hope is a stand-in, of sorts, for the holiday food drive that Marv Wopat led for a quarter century until last year, when he had no choice but to face the fact that, with the assembly plant closed, the drive couldn’t go on. Janesville’s school system has decided to try to fill the void. The new version is carried out at a distribution center on the east side of town, instead of on the assembly plant’s loading dock. Bagging begins at 6 a.m., instead of at 4:30. But the basic idea—to provide struggling families enough to eat around Christmastime—is intact. Plus, schools around town now hold Bags of Hope fundraisers. One at Parker before Thanksgiving raises $269 by selling lengths of silver duct tape to students and teachers for the privilege of tying the principal to a brick column in the school commons.

  The volunteers include Mary Willmer, taking a break from the work of Rock County 5.0. On this Saturday morning, she is delivering bags of groceries with her fifteen-year-old son, Connor. At the last house on their route, the man who answers has several children who line up in a bag-carrying brigade. He keeps thanking and thanking Mary and Connor.

  “You don’t have to thank us,” Mary tells him. “Being able to do this means more to us than you can know.” Yet the man tells Mary that he does need to thank her because he never imagined that he would be on the receiving end and is so grateful. As they are talking, Mary glances over at one of the man’s sons, and notices tears rolling down his cheeks. And she looks over at Connor in time to notice his eyes welling up, too. In a flash, Mary is back to her own childhood, to the months when her father was sick with cancer and after he died. She is reminded
that you never know when one unexpected event will transform you into “the person on the other side.”

  For Tammy, it is one thing to know that Jerad isn’t making enough money anymore. But it is another to think of herself as part of a struggling family, a person on the other side. Opening her front door to find herself on the receiving end of an act of charity is, in fact, quite a role reversal. Tammy is a Christian. She is a regular at Central Christian Church and a doer of Christian deeds. She has gone on trips with church groups to Haiti for mission work. Charity is something that Tammy does for others. It has never before arrived at her front door in the form of an unfamiliar couple with a giving spirit and enough groceries to last until New Year’s. Charity has not been about receiving, even though the federal government is, by now, paying for Alyssa and Kayzia and Noah to get free lunches at school. Even though Tammy has become skillful at calling the kids’ teachers to ward off field trip fees that she cannot afford to pay. Even though her mother-in-law, on the periodic visits that Jerad’s parents make to their only living son and their only grandkids, now goes shopping every time and buys as many groceries as can be crammed into the kitchen. But strangers bearing a dozen bags, filled with bread and milk, chicken and Saltines, canned corn and applesauce, and that’s just the beginning of what is inside these bags—this is charity of a more explicit kind.

  And yet Tammy decides that, given their situation, she will be happy about these groceries and not embarrassed by them. Last summer, Jerad quit the bad-pay, bad-hours job he’d started a few months before at GOEX. He’d found another job—a bad-pay job that he likes better in the warehouse of Patch Products, a toy and puzzle maker in Beloit. Patch pays him $12 an hour—48 cents less than GOEX. But he likes the work, the people, and the hours. If money were everything, he tells himself, he would have stayed at General Motors and taken a transfer. Patch is a company he could imagine staying at, except that his job has a big flaw: no health insurance. Which has been fine during the extra six months of GM insurance that he claimed by signing the buyout papers but will, starting New Year’s Day, not be fine at all.

  Tammy doesn’t know who put her family’s name on the school system’s food drive list. But on this December morning, gazing upon her twelve Bags of Hope, she decides that any day when groceries show up at their house is a good day.

  Part Four

   2011

   28

  The Ambassador of Optimism

  On the first Tuesday of the year, Mary Willmer is in a cheerful mood. This morning, the Gazette has published a guest column she has written in hope of setting the proper tone in Janesville for 2011. The column is featured in the upper right corner of the newspaper’s Opinion page. It reminds people of the efforts Rock County 5.0 has been making to lift the local economy, but the message is less about strategy than about state of mind. “We need to be proud of our community,” Mary has written, “and we need to all be ‘Ambassadors of Optimism.’ ”

  This mantra about being an ambassador of optimism is an idea that Mary came up with during the early weeks of Rock County 5.0’s existence. She was concerned that, in a manner contrary to Janesville’s can-do spirit, she was hearing around town a lot of we’re-falling-apart negativity. She first talked about being ambassadors of optimism to the 5.0 leadership team, telling them that they needed to embrace the credo that Rock County is a wonderful place with an improving economy. And then, she told them, they had to move the optimism outward. No one has tried to move it outward more than Mary herself. She has mortified her daughter, Chelsea, now a Craig High School senior, and son, Connor, a sophomore, when they go out to eat and she walks up to complete strangers in restaurants and starts her pitch about what a great place Janesville is to live and work. Mary believes that it is her mission to live this faith and that, if she does, her faith will become infectious and others will become optimists, too. She even walks into the hotels just off the Interstate and asks front-desk clerks to talk up the good things about Janesville to guests checking in. So it seemed only natural to Mary to write her guest column, spreading the ambassadors of optimism gospel to the Gazette’s readers.

  Seeing her words in print is not the only reason that Mary is pleased. She got home late last night from downtown Madison, where she was because Diane Hendricks snagged her a ticket to the inaugural ball of a governor who is, Mary can see, as determined to set a new tone for Wisconsin as she is for Janesville. Diane, the Beloit billionaire who is the co-chair of Rock County 5.0, is a major contributor to Republican causes and candidates, so it was no surprise that she had tickets. The ball was at Monona Terrace, Madison’s “dream civic center,” as its architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, envisioned the dramatic, curved expanse jutting over the lake. Mary had fun watching the state’s new first couple show off the results of their recent dance lessons, starting off the dancing with a song that Frank Sinatra used to croon: “The Best Is Yet to Come.”

  Mary watched the dancing just hours after Scott Kevin Walker had taken the oath of office that made him Wisconsin’s forty-fifth governor. It was a splendid ceremony, the north gallery of the State Capitol’s ornate rotunda bunting-draped for the occasion. Four previous governors were in attendance, plus the outgoing Democratic governor, Jim Doyle, shaking his successor’s hand. A Boy Scout troop from Walker’s hometown of Delavan leading the Pledge of Allegiance. A brass band playing the fight song, “On Wisconsin.” And, in a curious touch for the inauguration of one of the nation’s most incendiary social and economic conservatives, the Notre Dame Academy swing choir from Green Bay preceding the oath taking with a medley from Hair, the tribal-love rock opera of the 1960s counterculture that premiered on Broadway when Walker was four months old.

  When the time came for the gubernatorial inaugural address, Walker’s main campaign promise—to create 250,000 private sector jobs—was front and center. “My priorities are simple: jobs, jobs and more jobs,” the brand-new governor said. Directly behind him, seated in a chair next to a glass case containing an 1848 copy of the Wisconsin constitution, Janesville’s congressman, Paul Ryan, applauded with all the rest.

  Walker is a firebrand. He railed in his campaign against state taxes, spending, and regulation. But in his inaugural address hours before the ball, he said that he is not the governor of one political party, that he is the governor for all the people of the great state of Wisconsin. By nightfall, however, it already was plain that not all the people of Wisconsin are for the governor. As Mary and Diane watched Walker in his tuxedo gliding across the Monona Terrace floor with his wife, Tonette, in her glittering taupe gown, about 350 progressives were a few blocks away at the historic Majestic Theatre, listening to live bands at an alternative party they were calling Rock the Pantry. The progressives—of which Madison has many—chose their party’s name as a dig at the governor. The name was meant to draw attention to the fact that profits from the $50 inaugural ball tickets were going to help defray Walker’s campaign expenses and to support the state Republican Party—unlike Doyle, who had used the profits from his two inaugural balls for charity, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Wisconsin. To show up Walker replenishing the GOP coffers, the Rock the Pantry organizers are giving their own ticket revenue to the Second Harvest food pantry and the Wisconsin chapter of Feeding America.

  This dig at the governor on his inauguration night was the start of a year of anger. The anger builds soon in Madison, but not only there. It builds in Janesville, tearing at the town’s trademark civility. As the year goes on, Deri Wahlert is singed by part of the anger—a part that the governor stokes against public employees, including schoolteachers. Paul Ryan is singed by a different part of the anger—a coalescing movement called Occupy that lashes out at economic inequality, at politicians aligned with business interests. This morning after the inaugural ball, when her column appears, Mary does not realize that she is about to be singed, too.

  The anger that rises against Mary is local. It rises because she has neglected to notice a basic fact: talking up
a town to people who can still afford to go out to eat, to travelers checking into the Hampton Inn or the Holiday Inn Express, is not quite the same as telling everyone who reads the Gazette that the only thing they need to do for the economy to recover is to become an optimist. And telling them this near the start of a month during which Rock County’s unemployment rate, even two years after the assembly plant shut down, stands at 11.2 percent. Not the same at all.

  Mary is slow to sense the anger rising against her. She ignores readers’ online comments in the Gazette. But Chelsea and Connor do not ignore them. And they report to her things like: “Mom, eight people just totally blasted you.”

  Once they clue her in, Mary feels stung. This bitterness feels personal, her hard work for the community’s improvement and her good intentions getting shot down by people she doesn’t even know. This is tough on Mary. Painful. But soon she notices that, the greater the volume of angry comments, the stronger her resolve. All this cynicism about optimism is stiffening her resolve because, she realizes, she is a role model. Her kids are watching her, and her team at the bank is watching her. This is, she decides, a real opportunity to show them what leadership looks like.

  Coward’s corner. That is how she begins to describe the cynicism about optimism by people who do not attach their names to the Gazette’s online comments or its call-in phone line.

  “I am an ambassador of optimism,” Mary tells herself. “I am not going to let them get to me.”

  Two weeks and a day after Walker is sworn in, Mary stands with Diane just inside in the entrance of ABC Supply, Diane’s company, awaiting the new governor. He is setting off this morning on a tour of the state’s borders, the purpose of which is to affix new rectangular plaques to the bottom of wooden “Welcome to Wisconsin” road signs and to snap the governor’s photo next to each one. The plaques say OPEN FOR BUSINESS, a slogan signaling Walker’s intention to lower taxes, lessen regulations, and otherwise create a hospitable climate for what he and some other Republicans have started calling “job creators.”