I WORKED AT THE LAKELAND TOOL & DIE PLANT from 1980 to 2002. Not this building. Not this exact site. The old Lakeland plant was on Foundry Road, about four miles from here, in a building that has since been turned into something else and then into something else again and that I drove past two years ago and barely recognized. The building I worked in is not the building I stood across the street from this morning.
But it is, in all the ways that matter, the same kind of building. The same height. The same purpose. The same story that a factory building tells just by existing in a landscape that did not have one before: someone decided that something should be made here, that there should be people making it, that the making of it was worth building an entire physical structure to contain.
I worked at Lakeland from 1980, when I was twenty-four years old and had just gotten married and needed a job that would last, to 2002, when the plant was acquired by a larger company and then contracted and then eventually closed, in the way that a lot of plants in the Midwest contracted and closed in those years, in the way that felt, when you were inside it, like something catastrophic and specific to you, and that felt, when you stepped back far enough, like a pattern the whole region was living through whether it wanted to or not.
I was fifty-six when I left. I have worked since then in various capacities: some quality assurance consulting, some teaching at a technical college, some time spent doing precisely nothing and finding that precisely nothing was worse than I had expected. I am sixty-eight now. My wife says I have been “looking for something to write about” since 2002 and that she is glad Rod Black finally gave me the column inches to do it in.
She is right about this, as she is right about most things. I have been looking for something to write about. What I have been looking for, specifically, is a way to tell the story of what that kind of work means — the making-things kind, the working-in-a-building-with-other-people-and-producing-something kind — in a way that goes beyond the economics of it. The economics of it are real and important. The loss of manufacturing work in this country is a real and important story that other, better writers have told more thoroughly than I could. That is not my story.
My story is what it felt like to stand at a machine for a shift and have it be the kind of thing worth doing. What it felt like to know the specific material you were working and have that knowledge feel like a skill that belonged to you in a way that nothing could take away even when the job went away. What it felt like to walk out of a plant for the last time, in 2002, and understand that the building was going to be there after you were gone from it but that what happened inside it was just: gone.