and confidante. “It’s difficult,” she said. “It’s sitting and listening to their anger, their disappointment, their fear. It’s listening, and saying: ‘Let’s take a piece of this at a time.’ ”
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r. Debbie Faubus-Kendrick, director of the Adult Education Center, said that trying to help people in their 50s figure out how to cope with losing a job they held for 25-plus years — and the prospect of finding another one in a world where even younger and more qualified candidates can’t find employment — is sometimes heartbreaking. She said that during the first round of layoffs, one older former Whirlpool worker came to a small, getting-to-know-you session at the center. The next week, Faubus-Kendrick said, she heard that the man had told his wife to ask his friend if she had any questions about what he was about to do, then went to his truck and shot himself. At press time, we were unable to determine whether that story was true or just an urban legend of the dispossessed; something former Whirlpool workers whisper to each other to remind themselves they haven’t hit rock bottom. “They break down and cry sometimes,” Faubus-Kendrick said. “They say: ‘What am I going to do?’ We try to find resources for them and get them pointed in the right direction. They say: ‘I haven’t been in a classroom in 35 years,’ and we’ll tell them: ‘You’ll be fine. We don’t expect you to walk in and know everything.’ ” She said that while most of the former Whirlpool workers she sees come to the center looking like “deer in the headlights,” they are soon able to fall back on what made them good at their previous jobs: punctuality, consistency, work ethic, the willingness to work as a team and lean on one another for support. She said that even after students move on to college, many of them show back up at the center, seeking reassurance. “This is a stepping stone,” she said. “It’s almost like we coddle them and
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LEAN ON ME: Crawford County Adult Ed Center Director Debbie Faubus-Kendrick.
protect them. They get the one-on-one. They get the attaboys they need. They get the warm fuzzies, and they get that we’re behind them. They’re not going to get that on a college campus.” With the economy so dire and her students destined to compete with just-as-qualified candidates who are less than half their age, Faubus-Kendrick said that the faculty at the center has to wear a lot of hats for the older students they see: friend, psychologist
aura Strange, 55, worked at Whirlpool for 29 years and two months, eventually becoming a coordinator on the refrigerator door line. Strange didn’t want us to take her picture, but you already know what she looks like — what grief looks like, what sleepless nights look like, what worry looks like. When we talked to her, she was mad, heartsick, always seeming to be on the verge of shouting. During our interview, when she mentioned that she’d at least be receiving Whirlpool insurance when she eventually does retire, she was gently informed by Howard Carruth and others that this was not the case because she was a few months shy of 55 the day the plant closed — the 55-year-old cutoff age being one of the quirks of the final compensation deal worked out between the union and the company. She and others at the table came close to arguing about it, with Strange insisting she’d been explicitly told by “the people upstairs” in management that she would receive company insurance upon retirement. Eventually, however, the realization that she’d been either mistaken or outright lied to seemed to wash over her. And just like that — poof — another dim spark of her hope was gone, before our very eyes. It was a horrible thing to witness. Her situation, Strange said, is almost unbearable at times. “The stress is unbelievable,” she said. “People say, pick something else and do it! That’s hard to do. I can’t go back to a factory. I tried one time, and I failed the physical. I have carpal tunnel. I have arthritis in my shoulders and in my hips. Going
out and getting another factory job is probably not going to happen for me.” Even as she tries to push forward with her education, Strange said, her time at Whirlpool is still holding her back. When she was young, Strange was a crackerjack typist, able to top 50 words per minute. “Now I can’t get past 20 because my fingers are so messed up,” she said. “My fingers just don’t work like they used to.” While Strange seems determined to press on, she knows, like the other folks from Whirlpool, that the clock is always ticking. It’s a common refrain: Who is going to want to hire any of them? “After two years of retraining that’s definitely not going to get me a job in this area that pays as well as Whirlpool, I’m going to go out there and try to compete at doing something I’ve never done before with kids who are fresh out of college,” she said. “They’ll want that same job, and if I were in charge, I would take the young person. In two years, I’ll be 57. I can’t retire, and I’m a long way from the Social Security line. What do you do?” “Too old to go start over,” intoned a woman sitting nearby, “and you’re too young to retire.” For now, Strange and her husband are living on her unemployment and her husband’s monthly Social Security check. She said she isn’t taking any kind of government aid other than what’s available through the Trade Adjustment Assistance retraining program, but she and others know ex-Whirlpool employees who have gone on food stamps just to feed their families. Just talking about that possibility seems like a humiliation to her and the rest, but there may well be a day when it comes to that for many of them. “Six or seven years ago, we thought that the people who were drawing government assistance were ‘those people.’ ” Strange said. “We had no idea we’d be ‘those people’ someday.”
BRANTLEY, CONT. From page 6 My mother’s death in Little Rock on the eve of Y2K didn’t offer a similar farewell opportunity. Here, apart from my house, she mostly frequented hospitals, doctor’s offices and nursing homes. (And, thanks to Ed David, she loved the chopped sirloin steak at The Faded Rose.) She also loved the sight of the city’s green hills and Knoop Park. Much of her ashes I’ve scattered there. But a final bit will accompany me to India. There 20
NOVEMBER 28, 2012
ARKANSAS TIMES
she spent the most momentous passage of her life. In the hazy world in which she marked her final days in Arkansas, she’d sometimes imagine herself in the Army again. Once, in a hospital bed, she believed herself on a train departing Calcutta and the attending doctor her commanding officer. This much is real: Without India and the genetic mixture it brought together — that tall Californian, that friendly Lousianian who loved newspapers — there wouldn’t be me. She talked for years of returning to see
the wonders of her time at war. Now a part of her will. I’ve written before about the house fire that hastened mom’s move to Arkansas. It destroyed her meticulous scrapbooks — packed with photos of troop ships, barracks, hospital wards, soldier boys, snake charmers and Indian monuments, foreign money and other relics. The few photos that I now possess she’d sent to her sister, who passed them back to me. No fire could erase the memory of a boy who pored over the
scrapbooks again and again, wondering if he would ever see those amazing things, particularly the huge white mausoleum in Agra before which his then-young future parents once stood. In a few days, he will.
Max Brantley posted this on The Arkansas Blog on Thanksgiving Day. He later reported, “Mom is at rest among the mums and marigolds in the garden of that colonial hotel.”