Obama comes to my hometown

When I was around 17, I spent a summer building recreational vehicles for the Skamper company. The plant was located on State Road 15 a half-mile north of Bristol, Ind., a town of 1,000.   If you drove north from there about two miles, you would hit the Michigan state line, and if you went just a little further, you’d reach Mottville, where as a kid I could drop in a canoe and paddle all the way back downriver to my house — or, if I wanted to go three more miles to the west, to Elkhart.

It was my first summer job, and I hated it with a passion. I was part of a crew that put the finishing touches on large camper trailers  as they came off the line. We hung sheet metal on the sides of each vehicle, starting at the bottom and stapling each sheet to the next in overlapping layers until the sides, back and front were covered. You had to handle the metal carefully, because it was easily crimped; when that happened, it had to be discarded, and that cost money.

My crew included a middle-aged woman named Georgia, who once announced at lunch that snakes will mate with carp, and “that’s why no white person will eat one.” There was Doug, a long-haired smartass a couple of years older than I who loved nothing more than making my life miserable. There was me, a long-haired smartass who didn’t like Doug. Finally,  there was Tim, a quiet, 30-ish guy with glasses who supervised us.

It was my first experience in a blue-collar setting. I was preparing for college, and it seemed everybody in the plant knew it and resented it, especially Doug. I refused to ignore his little digs and taunts, mostly about whether I had “gotten any” the night before. Of course I hadn’t, which made matters worse. It got so bad that one day we almost came to blows until Tim diffused the situation.

I nearly quit that job several times, but stuck through until the end of the summer, when I breathed a sigh of relief that, unlike Doug, I would not be spending the next 25 years hanging sheet metal on campers.

Tomorrow, President Obama plans to visit my home county, where companies like Skamper once created thousands of jobs for people like Doug and wealth for entrepreneurs who rightly anticipated the camper boom. But times have changed.

Elkhart once had one of the highest number of millionaires per capita of any city in the country. Companies like Miles Laboratories, which made Alka Seltzer, and band instrument companies like Conn and Selmer fueled the local economy in the ’50s and ’60s. Later, the RV industry stepped in to take their place.

Today, the camper business has crashed with the economy, taking jobs and wealth away from communities that assumed they would be there forever. Elkhart County, which cranked out RVs by the tens of thousands, now boasts one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates at more than 15 percent.

President Obama will probably speak about the toll our economy is taking on small cities like Elkhart. He’ll talk about his stimulus plan and how he’ll get the country back on its feet again. I wonder if Doug, Georgia, or Tim will be listening — or Henry, the three-fingered saw operator who once came to work so drunk he had to be driven home. Maybe they will be watching the president’s speech on television. Maybe they’ve moved on to other jobs and will be hard at work, trying to make ends meet for themselves and their families.

As I think about my first job,  I realize that time has tempered my opinion of those co-workers of long ago. I understand that if they could have been doing anything else, they probably would have been.  That the job I hated with a passion — the one I could walk away from at summer’s end — was a job Doug had to have.

So Doug, wherever you are — I know we’ve had our differences.  But, I wish you well in this most difficult of times.  And, OK, I’ll say it — I hope you’re getting some.