Arrival and Insertion, 1953-62

The Flint Series, Chapter 3

William Sundwick

Flint grew rapidly in the early fifties. The 1950 Census pegged its population at about 163-thousand, but by 1960 it was 197-thousand. We all noticed it.

New neighborhoods, like our Ballenger Highway neighborhood, were adding single family houses, in ours mostly “ranch-style” (often called “ramblers” on the East Coast), at such a rate that services couldn’t keep up.

Schools needed to be expanded quickly. Since the nearest elementary school to us was over a mile away (no buses), four hastily erected prefab “primary units” for grades K-3 served as a stopgap.  These one room units, identical except for paint color, were in use until we moved out in 1965, when the new Anderson Elementary School finally opened in the neighborhood.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Elementary/Junior High School had been built on Chevrolet Avenue in 1928, only a few blocks north of the old “Chevy in the Hole” complex. This was the original dedicated Chevrolet and Buick assembly location, built in the teens. From 4^th grade on, I was deemed capable of walking safely the short mile from my house to the school.

It was a pleasant enough walk, except in winter when Flint became frozen tundra for four months.  I seldom had to walk alone, always accompanied by chums in my grade. It was a friendly neighborhood, with many kids my age.

We strolled down Winona Street four blocks to Mackin Road, then east on Mackin another five blocks. It was a big school compared to those one-room prefab primary units. There was a spacious playground, a gym, and a library.

My friends included Abe, who lived on Mackin Road – I stopped at his house each morning to pick him up, and we walked together. He was the elder son of Holocaust survivors who had somehow found themselves in Flint, moving from New York (Brooklyn?) a couple years earlier.

There was also Charles. He walked from his house on Begole Street a block away, and we would proceed from there. Some tensions arose later with Charles, as our world views took on shades of plant management. His dad was my father’s subordinate at Ternstedt.

My cousin John Sundwick, the youngest of my Uncle Bob’s three kids, was a year behind me in school, and lived only about four blocks away on Lavender Street; but, alas, our Elementary School paths never crossed, since school districts in Flint placed the boundary between Civic Park Elementary and Longfellow between us. Ballenger Highway was an insurmountable barrier to walking without crossing guards or lights, for kids our age. In Junior High, defined as grades 7-9, the “other Flint Sundwicks” lived in Florida, returning later to the Flint area.

In those frigid winter months, or on any rainy days, I remember rides proffered only by my own mother. Other moms didn’t seem to step up. Did they not have access to a car? In Flint? That’s possible, since there might not have been many two-car families in our predominantly working-class neighborhoods. Mom’s 1953 Chevy did yeoman’s service for seven years.

Michael Moore, in his memoir about growing up in Flint, “Here Comes Trouble” (2011), declared mid-century industrial Flint a relatively classless society. He wrote of living on the same block with doctors and lawyers, even though his own father was an hourly-rate assembly line worker at AC Spark Plug .  The same was true in my Ballenger Highway neighborhood – indeed, except for my own closest friends, I had no idea what people’s dads (and moms) did for a living. It was never a topic of conversation. And, even somebody as class-conscious as my mother, who put much effort into “social climbing” (allegedly for my dad’s career), would never say an unkind word about any of our neighbors, their income, education, or social status.

I learned later, in high school, that the Ternstedt people, except my friend Charles’ family, were ensconced in wealthier neighborhoods in town.

As the sixties arrived, our neighborhood was completed. The newest houses were somewhat larger and fancier than the originals like ours. Split levels appeared in the late fifties. And we learned that some people moving into them were part of a “professional” class, self-employed (especially doctors, tax accountants, funeral directors) – not necessarily reliant on General Motors for employment.

This change may have separated our neighborhood from the adjoining old Civic Park neighborhood, which was expressly built by GM for its workers in the teens and twenties. Despite the abandoned houses, vacant lots, and ghostly shell of an empty Haskell Community Center, a historical marker at Bassett Park, its former centerpiece, still stands to recognize this. Civic Park epitomizes the “old” Flint better than any other neighborhoods on the west side of town. It may symbolize the death of the city as well.

 I always noticed what kind of cars were in my neighbors’ driveways. Back then, people changed cars frequently, typically every two years. They all had a sense of loyalty to Mother GM, apparently reasoning they could secure their own paychecks by buying its cars. Almost always Buicks and Chevrolets, the specific model, equipment, etc. waxed large in my observation. But we were the only folks in the neighborhood with a new Cadillac every year, from 1954-1958, until Dad’s career flatlined after his first coronary. We immediately switched to Chevy.

We did have two cars still, and a garage for them. Did the neighbors talk, when my dad courageously switched to the lowest-priced “stripped down” Chevy in 1958? My mom was embarrassed, and she told us as much! I had grown fond of the Cadillacs, too, but looking back I now understand my dad’s rather powerful social statement. Why did we care, really, about the Caddies? Did it matter what the neighbors thought?

My world changed when I entered Flint Central High School for the 1962-63 school year. It was the Harvard of Flint public high schools, the oldest (1923), situated near the Flint College and Cultural Center. And, all I had to do to get there was live in its district, which included a narrow swath on the west side of town (perhaps drawn for racial gerrymandering or integration?). It also included the “East Village” neighborhood – home to Flint’s old money, and intellectual elite.

It was a new world, indeed. Eventually, it led to a strong desire to escape! 

Disaster Strikes: The Beecher Tornado, 1953

We Move to Flint in Its Wake

The Flint Series, Chapter 2

William Sundwick

F5 tornadoes are rare in Michigan. The most destructive category of storm on the Fujita Scale hit Flint in 1953, one of the ten worst on record in the U.S. There was no warning system in those days. On June 8, at about 8:30 P.M., the killer storm descended on a densely populated community on the north edge of town, Beecher Township. It was part of a violent freak weather pattern that had been ravaging a big swath of Michigan and Northwest Ohio, extending even into New England. But nowhere that summer was there as destructive a storm as in Flint. There were 116 fatalities, over 800 injured; 340 homes were flattened. Fatalities and property damage from a single tornado would be exceeded only in 2011, in Joplin, Missouri.

The whole city was placed in a state of emergency. The storm was a character-builder, much as the 1936-37 Sit Down Strikes were in this UAW town. People remember it. Survivors tell their children and grandchildren about it. Flint received an “All American City Award” for its disaster response.

The storm’s path extended along Coldwater Road, from Clio Road in the West to Dort Highway in the East – nearly the full length of that major Northside thoroughfare. Beecher High School was in its path, its gym destroyed. And, in addition to nearly 500 homes, the brand new, not yet operational, Ternstedt GM Plant was also in the path. Miraculously, the new plant, built to replace the original Detroit Ternstedt Division plant, destroyed by fire, was not heavily damaged and its opening delayed by only a few weeks. A. W. Sundwick moved his family (wife and one six-year-old boy) from Dearborn, and began work in Ternstedt’s process engineering department, as planned, by July.

Our house was not in the storm’s path. We were about to move into our new construction “ranch type” house in the developing Ballenger Highway neighborhood, perhaps four miles further south,  and west.

It would be years before the Beecher community could rebuild. But fortunately for the rest of Flint, rapid growth was widespread. Postwar prosperity for General Motors meant prosperity for Flint. To the historic original Buick, Fisher Body, Chevrolet, and AC Spark Plug facilities, which collectively employed tens of thousands of mostly unskilled hourly workers, now were added more Fisher Body and Chevrolet plants on the west side of town. And, on Coldwater Road, the Ternstedt plant.

Ternstedt had split from Fisher Body in 1948, as strategic GM product planning focused more on chrome hardware. Electroplating that chrome was the name of the game at Ternstedt. The Electroplaters’ Society quarterly journals on our living room end table were serious professional reading for my father, who became head of process engineering in Flint, and an engineering consultant for the Division (there were other Ternstedt plants in Ohio, New Jersey, and Syracuse). He would sometimes travel to the other plants – typically flying from Flint’s Bishop Airport. My mother kept reminding me that Dad had a very “responsible” position, and that’s why he was often gone.

She said that’s why he often showed signs of stress in his dealings both with her and me. The rest of the family blamed his 1956 heart attack on that stress (although we later learned that he had a congenital heart valve defect which just caught up with him at age 49). He survived that first heart attack, and a second one ten years later. But the first one flat-lined his career, the second one forced him into medical disability retirement, and Mom and Dad left Flint for sunny Florida – never to return to Flint, me neither.

Many in Flint did not fare as well as us. Still, thanks to the Sit Down Strikes in the thirties, the UAW had been recognized and thousands of workers, most with families to support, were generally able to sustain a secure middle-class existence through the fifties, sixties and seventies. But, each in our own ways, we all dealt with the stress of something ominous hanging over the city, something beyond our control, with no real warning system in place -- much like that ugly green-yellow-black cloud that moved over Beecher Township in June,1953.

Flint: Lumber to Carriages to Cars

The Flint Series, Chapter 1

William Sundwick

 When I arrived in Flint, Michigan at age six, the city, incorporated in 1855, had already established itself: first as a hub for the central Michigan lumber industry, then earning the appellation “Vehicle City,” then as the manufacturing center of the largest auto maker in the world. To clarify, that nickname on the iconic iron arches over North Saginaw Street signified horse-drawn carriages. Flint had become the nation’s foremost manufacturer of such “vehicles” by 1900, thanks mostly to the Durant-Dort Carriage Company, and Flint Wagon Works. 

William C. Durant and J. Dallas Dort were the driving force behind the city’s growth in those years, capitalizing on an auspicious lumber trade across the natural fords of the Flint River, and onward south and east. The raw materials for wagons and carriages thus were readily available.

With the success of his carriage empire, Durant embraced risk. Some would call him a speculator. Both he and his partner, Dort, became eager to move into the nascent “horseless carriage” field.  They would need the right contacts for capital and mechanical ingenuity. Durant reached out to secure both. Investment capital came from New York, and he found ingenuity closer to home, in Detroit. Specifically, from David Dunbar Buick, who had tried building cars, but was less than successful as a businessman. Durant rescued him financially and moved production to Flint. Durant tirelessly promoted what was now his Buick automobile, made at the original Durant-Dort carriage factory in today’s “Carriage Town” – the oldest Flint neighborhood. His angle was safety, becoming a public concern in those early horseless carriage days. It worked. By 1909, Buick had become the best-selling car in the U.S. (outperforming Ford, Oldsmobile, and Cadillac).

The amazing success of Buick in those early years may have gone to Bill Durant’s head. He started negotiating with his Detroit and Wall Street contacts to purchase other car makers. Some of his carriage-making executives, like A.B.C. Hardy and Charles W. Nash, were also pushing hard for more internal combustion powered vehicles. General Motors Corporation was chartered in 1908. It was Durant and Dort’s baby. Corporate HQs were right next door to the Durant-Dort Carriage Works factory. Nash would leave Durant to form his own brand, Nash Motors, in 1917.  

GM continued to grow – not just in Flint, but also Detroit. And Canada, too, under a partnership with R.S. McLaughlin, who, like Durant, was the largest carriage maker in his country. Durant acquired Buick competitors Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and Oakland Motors. All these brands were retained, following Durant’s strategy to offer many different cars for different tastes at different price points.

Unfortunately, his next acquisition, Chevrolet, was not so successful at first.  The car was fine, but Durant’s holdings in Chevrolet were leveraged out of his control by partner McLaughlin -- Chevrolet briefly became a Canadian make. By the mid-teens, however, Durant had bought it back, and Chevrolet was pulled into the Buick orbit – made in Flint. But, by 1921, Durant was gone again, starting his own Durant Motors (in Flint) which survived until the crash of 1929, when Durant left the automobile business for good.

Despite the slowdown in automobile production during the Depression, Detroit and Flint saw huge numbers of immigrants from the Deep South (both black and white), as well as even more depressed areas in Northern Michigan. My uncle Bob was the latter. He married into a family with deep roots in the Flint area, although he was a new employee at the AC Spark Plug plant on the east edge of town. By the time I arrived in 1953, they were already the “Flint Sundwicks.”

Rapid population growth in an era of declining demand for its products caused serious social tensions in Flint. This tension led to the famous Sit-down Strikes of 1936-37, credited by many labor historians and the Left as the beginning of the modern union movement in the U.S. (which should now be called the “post-war industrial union movement of the 20^th century,” since unions are in decline in the 21^st century).

It’s easy for somebody who grew up in Flint during that post-war glimmer of labor prosperity and rising expectations to romanticize the place where it happened, as well as the times. Were the strikes started, or abetted, by communists? The historical record is vague on this – since many of the interviews with participants were collected during the McCarthy witch-hunting era. People involved, if connected to left organizations, were often reluctant to admit it. My own experience during high school in the sixties tended to foster a romantic view of communist agitators manning the barricades (in Flint’s case, guarding their machines) – they were my heroes, whether they really existed or not.

In my imagination, those strikes set the stage for the Flint that I knew. 

Something new!... The Flint Series, six posts will appear in Warp & Woof over the next couple months. To whet your appetite, here's a dynamite video shot in 1936 at "Chevy in the Hole," Flint -- before the Sit Down Strikes!