Over the mountains: My journey to Canada.: Ch 34: Life goes on.

Our house was now too small and we decided to look for a bigger home. Sue wanted to open a home daycare so we needed house with special features. Why a home daycare? She used to work in the Goodyear Plant in Collingwood, in the Hose Department. One of her tasks was to move a reel of hose with a small hoist. The hook of the hoist broke off and was sent to the Maintenance shop to fix it. It came back welded together but the weld didn’t look very strong. When Sue complained about it, she was scoffed at - what does a woman knows about welding? Before long the hook broke and the falling reel crushed the palm of her right hand. “The thumb is dislocated” said the First Aid man, “I will fix it” and he yanked on the thumb. “Go home and put ice on it, you will be all right”. The next day the whole arm was swollen. The doctor treated it as a minor injury, not realizing that the nerve controlling the movements of her hand was permanently damaged. She couldn’t go back to work and was eventually put on the Workers’ Compensation.

This house has a lot of potentials

But Sue wasn’t the kind to sit at home. She went back to school and took an Early Childhood Education program in a college. She was going to open a home daycare.

We put our house on the market and spent many evenings walking around Collingwood, looking at houses for sale. We were disappointed; we couldn’t see any that were suitable. However there was one house that we liked. It was located on a quiet street close to Sunset Point Park. It had a big yard, long driveway, and in the back was a large room that could be made into playroom. We looked at it from the street many times, but there was one problem, it wasn’t for sale. Then one evening, as we were doing our walkabout, the house greeted us with a “For Sale” sign. We took Sue’s friend Ted, who was a builder, to have a look. Inside, the house was nothing to brag about: worn-out floor, a small and old kitchen, and three tiny bedrooms in the attic. “The house has potentials” said Ted, “I would buy it”. So we made an offer and it was accepted on my birthday.

We spent the next year renovating the ground floor. An old house usually has some surprises and we were not disappointed. Under the worn-out plastic tiles was a pine floor.

The inside the woodwork was painted in colors that reminded me of the last ship launched in the Collingwood Shipyard - and it wasn’t my imagination. We found out later that the previous owner had worked in the shipyard as the foreman of the paint shop. When we stripped off the paint, handsome woodwork was found underneath.

Lunch time at the daycare

The walls of the bedrooms in the attic were patched with small pieces of drywall put together like a big puzzle. Behind the drywall we discovered stacks of old newspapers used for insulation. I was surprised when I started to read the headlines. “GERMAN ARMY DEFEATED IN STALINGRAD”, “THOUSAND BOMBERS RAIDED BERLIN” and many others. Now we could date when the bedrooms were last renovated. In the war time, building materials were scarce and newspapers and pieces of discarded drywall were handy for a small renovation. While our own renovation was going on, Sue was operating the daycare. Every day when I came home for lunch, the kids were waiting for me. I had to sit down, they lined up, and I had to bounce them on my knee with the Czech version of “This is the way the Lady Rides”.

Sue’s friend Ted became our building contractor and we watched with a little anxiety as the attic roof was completely torn off. For the next stage, a new second floor was framed in, at which point we had a little problem. Large tarps were stretched out over the bare floor, just in case it rained over the weekend. Well, it wasn’t rain that came down but absolute downpour. Despite soaking the floor and ceiling below, the damage was minor. When the construction was finished, we had a large upper floor with three bedrooms for the kids and a master bedroom with a large deck.

Meantime there were big changes happening at my employer, LOF Glass. The company had closed its oldest and biggest plant in Toledo and rumor had it that more plants would be closed because the corporation was on the verge of bankruptcy. One day there was an announcement that a new CEO had been appointed and he was coming to inspect our plant. The staff got to meet him and everybody was impressed. He was a black man, down to earth, and he shook hands with every employee at the meeting. Everybody was relieved, things were finally looking up. A few years later there was a terse announcement that the CEO had resigned. There were many rumors why but eventually we learned the truth. He and couple of big shots from the company had bought natural gas wells in Texas and were selling gas to LOF at inflated prices. The corporation was still going downhill in spite of shutting down two other plants in Toledo, but then came a lucky break. A Japanese company, Nippon Plate Glass [-NPG], bought a 50 percent share of LOF to gain entry into the American market. The newly combined companies announced that they were going to build, as a joint venture, a glass plant in Louisville, Kentucky that would be the most modern plant automotive glass plant in the USA.

A delegation from Collingwood was sent to see the new plant and to learn how things were done the Japanese way. At the gate we were greeted by a big sign. “SMOKING NOT PERMITTED ON COMPANY PREMISES”. It was a long way from the gate to the plant doors so an unlucky smoker had to drive outside the gate for a smoke. We were impressed by the equipment and the production lines. Japanese men with clipboards were everywhere taking notes. In the big cafeteria the Japanese were sitting in one corner talking together, while in the other corner were sitting hourly paid [American] employees.
We struck up a conversation with a couple of guys. “How do you get along with the Japanese?” One, obviously a smoker judging by his stained fingers replied. “Not worth a shit. We beat the fucking Japs in the war and we are not going to take any orders from them now. If they want something they have to talk to my foreman”. Not taking any orders from Japanese, fifty years after the war? Very strange. But it wasn’t just an idle talk. There was a lot of friction between defeated Japanese and victorious Americans, and as explained to us, the plant had an unnecessarily convoluted management system. There was one Japanese and one American for every management position, from the plant manager down to the lowly production foreman.
Obviously this 50/50 deal between LOF and NPG wasn’t working too well and soon the Japanese company bought out the rest of LOF Glass. The old, all American management was fired and the Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company that had been making glass in the USA for some hundred and fifty years was gone forever.