On The Job: Bill Dickerson, retired tire builder
Author’s note: Inspired by Studs Terkel’s “Working” (although I’m not suggesting I have his talent) and fascinated by work as a disabled person excluded from most jobs by my impairments, I have decided to occasionally give this column space to people discussing their work and am inaugurating a feature I will call On The Job.
On The Job: Bill Dickerson, retired tire builder
I started working for the B.F. Goodrich Company in 1946 about eight years before becoming a tire builder about ’54 or ’55. I started out working on “bias machines” that prepare fabric to use in building tires.
I asked to become a tire builder because it paid more. If it got hot outside, the factory got hot because there wasn’t air conditioning or cooling either. There were about fifty tire machines and the materials from different parts of the factory were brought to the machines where I built the tires. Mainly it was fabric, the plies in the tire. Most of the tires were four ply but some were two ply. We had beads and the tires had to be covered with bead covers. Tubes had to go in first. Later we went to tubeless tires with just inner linings. We always had to put on tread. That was the last thing we put on.
At the most, I could build 198 tires in an eight-hour period.
I don’t know that I liked anything about it except the money. That was work. Work is not something you enjoy.
It was piecework and the most difficult thing was building as fast as you could. If you didn’t meet your quota, you didn’t get your full pay.
I don’t remember anyone getting injured in the tire building part of the plant although there were injuries in other parts of the factory.
I didn’t like building larger tires too well even though you had to build fewer of them to meet your quota. I liked building the smaller tires more even though you had to build a lot of them. It seemed like I could finish my quota easier and be less tired at the end of the day.
The job could take quite a bit out of you.
You had to keep your mind on what you were doing. It was sometimes hard to some extent but you had to pay attention.
It was always all men where I was. I may have heard about other places trying women tire builders but they probably wouldn’t have worked out because of not having the strength even if they were strong women.
Some men didn’t work out because they didn’t develop the skills to build tires so they either quit or were moved elsewhere in the plant. I spent a lot of my time teaching other guys.
The plant closed down because they started making tires a lot cheaper overseas.
I didn’t do the job because I liked it. I did it for the money. That’s how I supported my family.
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Stumble It!
June 8th, 2007 at 8:44 am
What was it Joyanna said the other week. You’re born; you have a good time as a kid; you grow up and have sex and drink beer a lot; you die quickly and make some folk happy when you leave them a lot of money.
This guy was born; nothing to write home about as a kid; grew up and worked like a dog to feed his family; didn’t smile an awful lot; will die soon; poor. That guy and the one over there too. And that one. And ….