Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  The Flint Voice grew out of Moore’s next project, the Davison Hotline, a crisis center that counseled drug addicts, sheltered runaways, offered birth control advice, and fed the unemployed. Moore decided to promote the hotline with a newspaper called Free to Be, named after the seventies women’s lib album Free to Be … You and Me. Doug Cunningham, a college journalist who had met Moore when he walked into the University of Michigan–Flint newspaper office, looking to publicize the hotline, convinced him to turn Free to Be into a muckraking alternative newspaper, modeled after the Seed, the Berkeley Barb, and, of course, its namesake, the Village Voice. The first issue of the Flint Voice was published on December 10, 1977.

  Flint did have an alternative scene that included a free medical clinic, a food co-op, a head shop, and a used paperback store called Middle Earth Books. The Midwest was three to five years behind the East and West Coasts in developing a counterculture, so while the Voice was too late to chronicle the sixties, it was right on time for the eighties, a decade that would be far more important in Flint’s history.

  The Voice first made itself obnoxious to city hall with an article exposing the mayor’s use of municipal employees in his reelection campaign. The city’s ombudsman investigated and leaked a copy of his report to the Voice, which published it. Incensed by the leak, and determined to locate the loose valve in his office, the mayor ordered a police raid on the Voice’s publisher, seizing the plates from the offending issue. Employing his one true talent—making himself the locus of political outrage—Moore called every reporter he knew. Once again, he was on the CBS Evening News, and once again, he declined to testify before Congress, this time for a bill that prohibited police from raiding newspaper offices unless a crime had been committed there. The case was so well publicized that Moore received a phone call from John Lennon, offering to do a benefit concert for the Voice, as he’d done nine years before for MC5 manager John Sinclair (coincidentally, another Davison High School graduate). Lennon was murdered before he could make it to Flint, but Moore had already persuaded another world-famous musician to sing for the Voice: barging backstage at a Harry Chapin concert, he persuaded the folksinger to perform a dozen benefits. The shows raised half a million dollars, enabling Moore to buy a house for the Voice offices. (Moore had tried to get Michigan’s own Bob Seger, but the singer was “taking oxygen” after a concert and thus indisposed to meet with a left-wing newspaper editor.)

  After a series of layoffs throughout Reagan’s first term, Hamper finally achieved some career stability when Reagan decided his second term would be a great time to order “a shitload of Army trucks” from GM.

  “Ronnie needed a new fleet of death wagons,” Hamper would write. “It sucked, but so did starving.”

  With his love of punk rock and his surly attitude toward authority, in particular the authority of GM foremen, Hamper was the missing link between the Voice’s hippie pretensions and the blue-collar city in which it circulated. Moore’s father had worked at GM and arranged for his son to spend a summer on the assembly line. On his first day of work, young Michael drove up to the factory gate—then turned around and drove away. One of the contradictions in Moore’s career was that he wanted to be a voice of the working people … but didn’t want to work himself. Moore lived a bohemian existence on the $15,000 a year he earned at the Voice. Partly because of his niggardly salary, and partly because he fancied himself an internationalist who was above provincial loyalty to GM, Moore drove a Honda Civic. With Hamper as a contributor, Moore could have it both ways. At first, Hamper wrote gonzo articles moaning that local radio played too much AC/DC and “Stairway to Heaven,” and reliving a night at the Good Times Lounge, “Flint’s Most Dangerous Bar.”

  “There’s been an altercation of some sort just about every night I’ve been there and if the bouncers aren’t working on a commission basis, they oughta be,” Hamper wrote about the Good Times. “What this bar lacks in ambience, it makes up for in ambulance. I mean, the tooth fairy would go broke replacing lost teeth with half dollars out in the parking lot.”

  The article resulted in a libel suit filed by the bar’s owner—just the sort of attention Moore loved. Realizing he had discovered a proletarian Céline—the fantasy of every pamphleteer with a Joe Hill poster and a copy of Eugene V. Debs Speaks—Moore talked Hamper into writing “Revenge of the Rivethead,” a column about life inside GM Truck and Bus. Hamper’s writing allowed Moore to live a vicarious shoprat existence, while Moore’s editing/hectoring guided Hamper to the subject that would make him the most widely read wage slave of the late eighties and early nineties.

  “I could not make sense out of that place without writing,” Hamper said of the shop. “I had to do it. I had to get something out of it, because I kept thinking about the look on my dad’s face, my grandpa’s face, how they went through all those bland years of not having their say or anything, and I said ‘I’ve got to get something out of this besides a paycheck,’ and then I stumbled on Moore, and that was the perfect outlet that justified it. Moore wouldn’t let me get down or wouldn’t let me take any excuses. That’s his true gift, and this is what he does with editors or writers or cameramen. He finds people that are talented and he tells them, ‘This is what you’re gonna do.’”

  Moore made Hamper a celebrity years before he made himself famous. In 1983, the Flint Voice became the Michigan Voice, a statewide paper. I was a junior in high school that year, just getting interested in writing, and I’d pick the paper up at a bookstore in East Lansing, always looking for Hamper’s column among the nuclear freeze editorials and Moore’s seven-point plan for saving Flint. Newspapers weren’t supposed to be fun, but I’d call my friends and read them Hamper’s stories about leaving an Ernest Angley revival on a stretcher with a vodka drip, or learning the erotic appeal of Elvis impersonators. (“Tonight,” a fan told Hamper, “your wife’s gonna treat you like you’re Elvis!”) Alex Kotlowitz, a former Voice reporter who’d moved up to the Wall Street Journal, profiled Hamper in a front-page story on blue-collar writers. Harper’s magazine ran an excerpt from an article on rivet hockey, the factory time-killer of kicking rivets at your linemates’ shins. Then, the Today show’s Betty Rollin profiled Hamper on her “People You Should Know” segment, about members of the heartland herd who displayed talents ordinarily found only in New Yorkers. Hamper was hip to his own novelty, to the fact that editors reacted to a literary shoprat like John Gielgud hearing the Elephant Man recite the Lord’s Prayer. Esquire or Penthouse or 60 Minutes would call and say, “We were so surprised to see that someone who writes as well as you do …,” which Hamper translated as You know, we always thought you shoprats were such dumb shits and here you are, you have half a brain, and so we’d like to tap it. An auto factory was a microcosm of society, so Hamper knew he wasn’t the only autoworker who could write. Or build ships. Or water-ski.

  The Rivethead was sometimes compared to Cleveland’s Harvey Pekar as a working stiff–cum–social commentator, but Pekar’s eloquence was regarded as less of an evolutionary leap. As a file clerk, he was technically white-collar. Also, Pekar expressed himself in the lowbrow medium of comic books. Since the rivet-guns-to-typewriter shtick was his gravy train to fame, and since NBC News paid for drinks at Mark’s Lounge, Truck and Bus’s after-shift tavern, Hamper only half-resented the condescension.

  As Hamper’s fame as a writer increased, his fortunes as an autoworker became more tenuous. GM was using its failing sales as an excuse to get out of Flint, where the UAW had caused it so many headaches. The fact that Flint was GM’s hometown actually worked to its disadvantage. Plants built in the teens and twenties were at the end of their lifespans. Instead of replacing them, GM built new factories elsewhere and gave Flintoids a choice: transfer or layoff. When GM eliminated the pickup-truck line at Truck and Bus, Hamper was told that if he wanted to continue riveting tailgates onto Chevy Blazers, he’d have to do it in Pontiac, forty-two miles to the south.

  “I could have stayed put and
took my chances here in Flint,” he wrote in his column, “but this one unceasing vision kept coming to me, one in which I was cramming sugar paste into the ass-end of a cream stick on the graveyard shift at the doughnut shop while the repo-men were tap dancing down the boulevard with my end-tables and record collection in tow.”

  (Desperate to replace the auto jobs, Flint built a $13 million Hyatt Hotel and a $82 million amusement park. AutoWorld was a tribute to Flint in its prime, with an antique-car museum and a midway depicting downtown before plywood replaced glass as the most popular filler for window frames along Saginaw Street. Three-mile-an-hour buggies carried visitors through a tunnel where puppets put on a reenactment called “The Humorous History of the Automobile.” One trip was enough for most people to realize that AutoWorld combined the charmlessness of the postindustrial Midwest with Disney World’s appeal to the first-grade sensibility. The park closed after six months, with attendance less than a third of the expected one million. The Hyatt was passed among several chains before ending its career as a hotel in the 1990s.)

  But GM’s grandest “fuck you” to Flint was the closing of Fisher One—the plant where the Sit-Down Strike began in 1936. On December 10, 1987, the sixty-four-year-old plant produced its last automobile. The next day, over three thousand shoprats were out of work. More than one remarked on the symbolism of GM’s shutting down the birthplace of the UAW. Vizard, the autoworker-turned-labor-reporter, saw it as the endgame of GM’s half-century war with the union, which had been fought one strike, one grievance, at a time.

  “Why would you want to invest in a place where all they want to do is fight you?” Vizard asks. “There was open sabotage in the plants, even when I worked there. That was your power. If a foreman came along and screwed you over on overtime or a work shift, how do you get him back? You screw up his production schedule. Then it’s just a matter of time before you have someone else sitting in his chair. In the military, they called it fragging … who didn’t go along, who didn’t turn his head when the drug locker was open. Flint was so militant. They always referred to [the Sit-Down Strike]. They would always go back to fighting for dignity, for middle-class values, and we’ve got to keep up the fight. Flint had this entitlement mania, and it was because it was the birthplace of GM, and, essentially, the birthplace of the UAW. They had this sense of ‘We’ve always had GM, we’ll always have GM, and they owe us.’ It was a plant-wide, screw-you company mentality.”

  Class conflict was part of GM’s culture. The plants were built with separate bathrooms for hourly and salaried employees. Rebellious workers sometimes did worse than get a foreman demoted. There was a supervisor in the Buick Foundry who often made a sweep of the overhead walkways, searching for beds where workers napped. One night, a worker cut a hole in the steel mesh, concealing it with a square of cardboard. The nosy boss fell several stories, injuring himself permanently. After that, management didn’t try to stop sleeping on the job.

  STANDING IN THE COLD outside Fisher One that day, with a camera crew, was Michael Moore. The year before, Moore had shut down the Voice and moved to San Francisco to become editor of Mother Jones, one of the investigative magazines he’d been trying to emulate in Flint. It seemed like a perfect fit, since both had made their names as critics of the auto industry. His first issue featured Hamper on the cover. Moore gave the Rivethead a column and sent him to Chicago on a publicity tour. The new gig didn’t last long for either Flintoid. After six months, Moore was fired. Part of it was a clash of sensibilities with his sugar-daddy publisher, who was heir to a South African diamond-mining fortune. And part of it was an ego too large to fit into even Michael Moore’s roomy blue jeans. The narcissistic journalist had always been motivated by a need to take control of and take credit for every endeavor he was involved in. At the Voice, some of the veteran staffers called young volunteers “Moories,” because they seemed more devoted to Michael than to the paper. At Mother Jones, the staffers saw him as a “one-man show” who blew off editorial meetings and couldn’t meet deadlines.

  After he was canned by Mother Jones, Moore moved back to Flint, depressed and, like so many of his fellow Flintoids, unemployed.

  “Jesus Christ,” he told Hamper, “I gave up the whole paper and now I got no paper and no job.”

  “What are you doing now?” Hamper asked.

  “I think I’m making this movie,” Moore said. “Maybe they’ll show it at union halls, like on the wall. I’d like to videotape you for some of this.”

  “Whatever,” said Hamper, who was once again out of work—not because of a layoff, but because he’d freaked out on the assembly line. After nine years in the shop, Hamper suddenly hallucinated that he was trapped in a windowless room full of giant grasshoppers. Diagnosing a panic attack brought on by agoraphobia, a psychiatrist reassigned Hamper from General Motors to the Holly Road Mental Health clinic. Moore filmed his friend at a junior high school basketball court, discussing the crack-up. Moore planned to call the movie Dance Band on the Titanic after a line he’d used to end a Flint Voice story about AutoWorld. Hamper figured it would just be some Super 8 home movie about GM’s assassination of Flint, with Moore as the Abraham Zapruder behind the camera. But Moore was determined not to make a “dying steel town documentary,” or even a movie like Harlan County USA, which might win an Oscar but would play only at urban art houses hundreds of miles from its subjects’ homes.

  So how did a movie about an auto company shutting down factories in a city most Americans couldn’t find if it were on the front of their hand became the highest-grossing documentary of all time? To answer that question, you have to answer another question: Did Flint become famous because Michael Moore lived there, or did Michael Moore become famous because he lived in Flint?

  Moore’s self-promoting qualities, which had been on display ever since high school, helped make the movie a hit. Only an overconfident egomaniac would run for the school board at age eighteen. Likewise, only an overconfident egomaniac would become such an important character in his own movie that it wound up being titled Roger & Me. Woody Allen is the only other American director whose on-screen persona is so central to his work. At the time, it was unheard of for a documentarian to make himself star, but, as Moore’s old coeditor Doug Cunningham observes, “Michael has to be personally front and center of anything he’s involved in.” For Moore, it wasn’t enough to put his name on the movie; he had to put his face on it, too. Moore’s gift for social climbing also paid off when he enlisted the help of Kevin Rafferty, director of one of Moore’s all-time favorite movies, the early-eighties nuclear-freeze propaganda piece The Atomic Cafe. Rafferty was a Harvard graduate and nephew of Vice President George Bush. Moore had introduced Rafferty to a tribe of southern Michigan neo-Nazis for his follow-up feature, Blood in the Face, a documentary on white supremacists. In exchange, Rafferty spent a week in Flint showing Moore how to operate a camera and later set him up in a New York editing studio.

  If Moore had spent his twenties in Boston instead of Flint, he might have obeyed Rafferty’s advice to not put himself in the movie. But Flint had been the last city in the United States to get its own PBS station, and Moore had gone broke trying to run an art cinema in the early eighties. (He finally gave up and drove to Ann Arbor to see John Sayles movies.) So he understood that what Flintoids wanted to see was a morally satisfying comedy, with himself as the protagonist and GM chairman Roger Smith as the bad guy. Moore was just as calculating and ruthless an investigative journalist as any of the 60 Minutes crew, but as a Flintoid, with a nasal, uncosmopolitan accent and a figure developed at Angelo’s Coney Island, he could present himself as a clueless but sincere buffoon who thought it was okay to walk into GM headquarters and ask for an interview with the chairman. (To people outside Michigan, at least. Voice readers knew that Moore knew better.) Throughout the movie, Moore wore an “I’m Out for Trout” baseball cap borrowed off Hamper’s head. Moore borrowed some of his absurd tone from Hamper, too. It was Hamper’s idea, first f
loated in “Revenge of the Rivethead,” to invite Roger Smith to Flint for bowling night. Hamper also provided the segue for the movie’s blackest humor, describing the moment he turned on the radio during the drive home from his factory crack-up and heard the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Moore used the song as a soundtrack to a Parade of Homes tour of Northwest Flint’s most distressed residential properties.

  Roger & Me is not an honest movie. Its central premise—that Roger Smith refused to grant Michael Moore an interview about the Flint plant closings—is bogus. According to Roger Rapoport’s biography Citizen Moore, Moore conducted a fifteen-minute interview with Smith at a press luncheon in January 1988, while he was shooting Roger & Me, then pressured one of his collaborators to deny the meeting ever happened. Part of the Flint Voice’s mission statement went like this: “We believe the commonly accepted notion of objective journalism is bullshit.” Roger & Me has less in common with the muckraking of Upton Sinclair than it does with the bitter satire of another Midwestern iconoclast, Sinclair Lewis. Substituting Flint’s Saginaw Street for Gopher Prairie’s Main Street, Moore tried to make fools of the burghers and boosters who had been his enemies when he’d sat on the Davison Board of Education and edited the Voice. Moore sneaked his cameras into a country club where unemployed black people were working as living statues for a Great Gatsby party. When Flint’s smart set dressed as gangsters and paid to spend the night in the new county jail, Moore filmed the event. His interviews with famous folks who dropped in on Flint—Anita Bryant, Pat Boone, Miss America, and native Flintoid Bob Eubanks—were all embarrassing to their subjects, whose square celebrity dated from the days when GM was still a wealthy enough paterfamilias to support Flint in the manner to which it had become accustomed. The movie was framed as single combat between a fat everyman with a microphone and an arrogant CEO—a storytelling device as old as Theseus vs. the Minotaur—but really, it was Michael Moore vs. a small-minded small town, a role he’d been playing for nearly twenty years.