Made in America and Barberton, Ohio

Mom and Dad were always conscious of the country of origin of products they bought.  I can’t imagine it was a problem when they were children, or even young, married adults.  There wasn’t much money chasing any country’s goods in the 1930’s.  But the end of the world war produced a shift many weren’t noticing.  My parents did.

I was maybe seven or eight, standing patiently in O’Neils, one of Akron’s two major department stores, while my mother sorted through a table of rubbers and boots.  For those not past retirement age, we wore rubbers to school on rainy days, over our shoes to keep them dry.  I’ll bet more rubbers were left at school than any other accessory, proving to parents that leather shoes could survive to walk another day without being the encased in rubbers.

Mother was attempting to match up lefts and rights in the same size for some member of the family when she turned the rubber over and read the country of origin.  Japan.   She was outraged.  “This is the rubber capital of the world,” she said to no one in particular, “and these rubbers are made in Japan.”  She took her complaint to the department manager and we left without new rubbers for some child.

Listening to our parents we learned that with few exceptions foreign goods were inferior and even shoddy, and certainly didn’t keep people in this country employed.  Even the doll I got for my fourth birthday was made right down the road, in Barberton, which I knew then and now.

Amosandra doll

Sun Rubber Company

Barberton, Ohio

A few weeks after I was four years old I lay on the couch in the living room, drifting in an out of consciousness.  Neighbor women came and touched my forehead.  I looked up and the doctor was looking at me.  Then I was in the hospital and men and women in white uniforms were picking up needles longer than me to stick in my arm.  “This won’t hurt,” they said.  I knew they were lying and screamed.

The next time I woke up I was in bed with the little black doll, Maggie, I had received for my birthday.  I was glad to see her.  I was also starving.  Starving!  A large, white uniformed woman asked me if I was hungry.  Was I ever!  She would be right back with something to eat.  She returned with a tray with a selection of jello’s.  I could pick one.  I cannot eat jello to this day.

But, I had my doll baby.  Maggie and the bed and I were rolled to another part of the ward where I was under a window.  I could look across the street and see children playing at a playground.  I could also look down and see some work going on.   There was a large hole in the ground, and a black man at the bottom of the hole.  The other workers at the top were throwing bricks down to him and he caught them with his bare hands.  Pretty soon his hands were bleeding and the bricks kept coming.  I jumped up and down and screamed and screamed.  When people came I couldn’t make them realize what was happening to the man in the hole.

Then they took Maggie away and my parents were there to take me home.  I asked for Maggie and Mom and Dad said I’d get her back in a few minutes; she had been taken away to be sterilized, so she wouldn’t have measles germs on her.  Someone came in with Maggie, and she was white. The person with Maggie explained all the brown came off in the sterilizer.  I wouldn’t take her; it wasn’t my doll!  My parents may have brought her home, but I don’t recall ever seeing her again.

There was little sentimentality in our house.  Things happened, get over it, get on with it.  I was no longer interested in dolls and never had another one.  Even at four I could understand it would have been smarter to wash that baby with soap and water than throw her in a pot of boiling water.  That was just dumb.  I keep the story of the rubbers handy, but it’s become part of the story of the values of community that my parents understood.  As for the man catching bricks—I was another fourteen years understanding that one.  It could not have happened in the black and white neighborhood I grew up in and didn’t come back to me until I left my insular childhood world.

The eight inch stool from the projects

When my parents were married in 1942, they lived in “The Projects” in Barberton.  Dad worked for Babcock and Wilcox.  Before I was born he got a “work release” from B&W and took a job at Goodyear Aircraft.  It was the war; men could not leave jobs designated critical to the war effort.  Apparently the job he was going to take at Goodyear, electrical design on those big convoy blimps, was more important than ship boilers at B&W. 

Mom listed the address as 475 E 3^rd Street on her letter to Uncle Hank, but when I looked on Google Earth, it’s a square city block of brown earth and construction (or demolition) debris.  It looked fine when I lived there; I remember doors in rows in red brown brick.  Inside our door was the kitchen, stove on left, table on right, in front of the window.  When I was a baby I didn’t have a seat at the table, I had a swing.  It was squarish and white, a tray went up to get me in and out.  It was suspended from the ceiling by chains to each arm rest.  Anyway…

Babcock and Wilcox is in Barberton, or was, and Dad took the bus to work.  And home.  Coming home one day he found a piece of a packing crate.  The truck it fell from was not in sight, so he picked it up and carried it home.  He used the entire piece of wood to build a stool for me.

This  stool went through our household of four children, plus any adult use for an eight inch stool.  Mom would look at the top shelf of a cupboard and say, “Bring me the stool.”  Dad used it all the time.  Kids slid it around for balance. Kids used it to reach the sink.  And probably other things they shouldn’t. It came to my house and went through two more kids.  The feet look like they’ve been to a war.

I painted it blue one year to match the décor in Beth’s bedroom.  With no regard for all the original markings.  Something had been destined for Ford, from Conn.  After the kids left home, I got some respect and stripped it back to the original wood.

Back at mom and dad’s, meanwhile, there were grandchildren and adults who needed a stool, so dad built a couple more.  It seemed sufficient for a long time.  But then the great grand children began to arrive. 

When Jan and I quit weaving we turned our thread barn over to the guys for a workshop, and our brother Walt just jumped on that opportunity for a woodshop.  He built a monster workbench and has spent the last eight years making sawdust.  He built and sold hundreds of those eight inch stools.  Each grandchild has a personal stool with foot prints and hand prints and birth date and little inscriptions of love.  If Walt thinks someone is too short, they go home with an eight inch stool.  If you look like a special little boy or girl, an eight inch stool goes right in your car.

A couple of the current model.  That blue strip?  Mom invented that adaptation in order to get into a tall truck and pull the stool in behind her.  Guess someone needed to get into a tall truck recently.

My own eight inch stool is right under my desk, with my feet on it.  I hope that delivery made it to Ford.