A Last Survivor of the Orphan Trains, a Memoir by William Walters & Victoria Golden

Author:William Walters & Victoria Golden [Walters, William & Golden, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780999768518
Publisher: Orphan Books

Stubborn streak

The Marine Corps gave William an opportunity to become a manager, first of himself and then of other people. Dropped amidst the enemy on a Pacific island, he and other members of their small unit dispersed to carry out assigned tasks, the Corps trusting each man to work on his own and handle all threats that crossed his path. Later, in vanquished Japan, William oversaw certain civic affairs in the city of Miyazaki. Self-reliance, decision-making, and organization were skills that developed easily from a childhood spent figuring out how to survive. After he left the Corps, William’s job as a farm manager and a brief stint self-employed further encouraged an independent spirit.

That’s why later, when William, his wife, and three children fell on hard times and moved to California in search of work, he found it impossible to bend to a rigid mold.

It was the 1950s and the U.S. postwar economy was booming. A Ford factory in Long Beach, California, held promise; news came that they were hiring. William and his family moved from New Mexico to a rental house in Long Beach. The address was on Easy Avenue, which did not turn out to be prophetic.

Ford gave William his first experience working among a team of people in a union shop, and there lay the problem. Ford manufactured Lincolns in those days, and his assignment was to install Lincoln convertible tops on their frames. The first thing he didn’t understand was that he was supposed to attach the canvas only on his side of the car. His supervisor had neglected to explain this. When William reached to spread canvas across the entire frame, the guy working on the other side of the Lincoln threw his hammer at him. It missed, but William got the point. Okay, share the task; he could do that.

The next lesson was more difficult: Slow down. Until this time, he’d mostly held jobs where speed was an advantage as long as you did the work accurately. On the one job that had called for adherence to union standards, he had labored with only one other man in a relatively relaxed environment. Well into William’s second day at Ford, he found himself four cars ahead of the other men. It was suddenly quiet. William looked up from a convertible top to find that everyone else had stopped working. The other men sat down and refused to move until the lead man dealt with William.

“You’re making everyone else look bad,” said the man. “You’re going too fast. Back off.”

At lunch, no one sat with William. Comments tossed his way included “scab” and “union buster.” That was not his intent. And yet . . . he didn’t change. Couldn’t change. There was something in him. Not just independence, but strength of will. The two were linked. Early on, they’d preserved him.

He resumed work. This time he finished his side of the car, stopped, and waited for his co-worker to finish his side. The other men complained. Get in the rhythm of things, they said; don’t speed up and halt.

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