News Summary

Workers at General Motors' Moraine Assembly plant rang out not just the old year but also a way of life last week when they left work and the plant closed.

It was the Dayton-area's last GM plant.

For those of us whose lives were shaped by General Motors, the closing provided a bittersweet reminder of the middle class prosperity forged by the company and the unions representing GM workers.

Dayton may have been a General Motors town, but it was not the General Motors town.

That distinction belongs to my hometown, Flint, Mich., about 60 miles north of Detroit.

Where it began

It's the city where William C. "Billy" Durant founded General Motors 100 years ago in 1908. Durant lost control of GM two years later, regained control but was tossed out as the company's leader for the final time in 1920.

He ended up running a Flint bowling alley where one of my uncles recalled talking with him. The bowling alley wasn't named after him, but Durant Elementary School, which I attended, was.

Fisher Body Plant 1 in Flint — now closed — was the scene of a sit-down strike in the 1930s that helped establish the United Auto Workers as a force that GM had to take seriously. My dad, three uncles and one grandfather all worked at Fisher Body.

My other grandfather worked at a Chevrolet factory in Flint.

Stories in the Dayton Daily News about the closing of the Moraine plant described generations of workers from the same family who had worked for GM, a story repeated over and over in Flint.

There is another part to the story, however.

Workers at GM plants in Dayton, Flint and elsewhere earned wages good enough to help their sons and daughters pursue other careers if they didn't want to go into the "shop" – as we called the GM plants. My cousin, who grew up just blocks away from Fisher Body, became a psychiatrist.

I became, for better of worse, a newspaper reporter. When I once complained to my dad about working "hard," he told me to quiet down. My job, he said, consisted of talking with interesting – for the most part – people and then writing about them. Working "hard" was keeping up on an assembly line or welding – two of the jobs he held.

Wages' ripple effect

Much is written these days about the generous wages and benefits GM provided its workers — mainly through collective bargaining — as though these were bad things. In Dayton, Flint and other GM towns, the wages and benefits at the factories had a ripple effect, setting the standard for other employers, public and private.

They certainly helped our family.

My dad's eyesight deteriorated and, legally blind, he retired on disability in 1965. His pension, along with Social Security and his savings, provided him with a good life until he died in 2000 at 91.

My dad and mom, a school teacher, were loyal to GM and the unions. They bought only GM cars, Chevrolets and Buicks. They shopped in stores with union workers and didn't cross picket lines.

They wouldn't recognize what has happened to GM today. But they survived tougher times and prospered. So can we.

Contact this reporter at (614) 224-1608

or whershey@DaytonDailyNews.com.