Company man

Calbert Wright

     When Calbert Wright began work at the Ford Motor Company's Chicago Stamping Plant in Chicago Heights in 1963, the factory was a noisy, smelly, smoky hellscape with a leaky roof. Working one shift imbued your clothes with what one veteran called "the Ford smell" causing wives to demand they strip down at the door when they got home.
     And it was hot: 100 degrees on the production line.
     "Ooh," Wright said. "No fans. Water fountains were rare, very rare."
     Plus Black workers such as himself were given the hardest duties.
     "The first month, I didn't like it," remembers Wright, 85, "I said, 'I'm not going to stay here'. They had us stacking steel. We couldn't touch no presses. All we could do is stack stock. They were trying to work us like Hebrew slaves."
     But stay he did.
     When Wright began work at the age of 23 at Ford, John F. Kennedy was president. Henry Ford still ran the business — albeit Henry Ford II, grandson of the man who founded the automobile manufacturer in 1903.
     Meaning that Wright, who still prowls prowling the floor today checking that workers on the line have enough parts to keep the robots busy — and takes taking their place when they go on bathroom breaks — has worked for Ford a little more than half the 123 years since the company sold its first car, a two-cylinder, two-passenger Model A, in red, the only color available, for $850 to Ernest Pfennig, a dentist on Clybourn Avenue.
     Wright had come up from Mississippi when he was 11, and his voice is rich with Southern drawl. He had an uncle at Ford's Torrence Avenue assembly plant, and got a job at Chicago Stamping.
     Why did he stay? 

     "There weren't jobs paying like this," he said, laughing: $1.40 an hour. "Big money."
     He had a wife, Thelma — now married 65 years — and an infant son to consider. And things were changing.
     "[Martin Luther] King, plus the union, made everybody be classified," Wright said. Conditions improved. He moved up from stacking steel. "That's why I stayed so long."
     Wright's 63-year tenure isn't even the longest of Ford's 177,000 workers — that would be Art Porter, 86, who joined Chicago Stamping in 1961.
     Their longevity is especially amazing when you realize how frequently workers change employers. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average worker at a private factory like Ford works 4.9 years before leaving.
     Wright has put in a dozen times that, and seen many changes.
     One of the biggest is automation. When robots were first introduced, in the 1970s, it wasn't clear whether they'd be a benefit.
     "They were throwing parts all over," Wright said. "They were dangerous. They couldn't control it. They were putting welds in the wrong place, blowing holes."

Better with robot help

     Gradually, the machines improved.
     "They got it right now," Wright said. "They come out better with the robots. They put the welds in the same place. When they manpower with a gun, they put one here, one there."
     Walking through the plant with Wright now, it's cool and almost quiet, except for the faint panoply of clanks and hisses. Only occasionally do you spy a person, shielded by machinery., evoking the quip attributed to Henry Ford: "Machines don't buy cars."
     "Them robots came in and knocked all those people out," Wright said. "Each line would have 18 people, Now they got three. When I hired in, they had 6,500 people in this plant."
     Now Chicago Stamping employs 1,100.

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