UNIROYAL TIRE MANUFACTURING PLANT AND R&D
When I escaped from Chevrolet, a job was waiting for me. Uniroyal was the producer of most of the tires purchased by General Motors. They were, in fact, the maker of the so-called Tiger Paw Wide Oval tires specified for optimum handling on the rear-heavy Corvair and the front-heavy Olds Toronado. I had worked on the Toronado, and been involved in defense of the Corvair, so Uniroyal knew of me and trusted me. By golly, I liked the work of a tire research engineer in their R and D. There were not many mysteries for me about the subject of suspension design but I had little idea of just how many dynamic variables made a tire good for what ever you wanted. Here research was really a process of discovering things that could make a tire good or bad. I thought I was hired because of my recent background in litigation, which also involved studying the new (in1967) Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards that applied to tires. That required me to explain, to Uniroyal managers, what GM was offering to the feds as proposed tire safety standards. It sounds odd that I had to do that. US tire companies were accustomed to making tires according to the recipes (specifications) given to them by the chassis engineers at the auto companies. That was the opposite, I learned, of the way it was in Europe. For instance, Michelin, Pirelli and Dunlop tire companies designed radial ply tires the way they deemed best – then told the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) car-company engineers what to do with the cars to make them work well with those superior tires.
The whole US tire industry had been sent down a blind alley by the US OEMs, who were not satisfied with the standard bias-ply tires of the time, but did not want to pay the high premium for the European radial ply tires. The car companies had this strong NIH factor. At the demand of the OEMs, all five (then) of the big US tire makers began to make a hybrid tire called the bias-belted tire – a conventional bias tire, made on the same equipment as we always did, but with a few nearly-circumferential belts under the tread. These were not truly radial ply tires because we need to make them exactly like Michelin did, with all new manufacturing equipment. These BB hybrid tires stunk. There was a terrific struggle within R&D to determine how to make those tires truly round structurally and well balanced. We tried hard, but could not do it. Tire companies used weird band-aids to hide the awful vibration and not-good handling of the bias-belted tires. Tire wear was not much better either. This was awful. Our work was not like real research and development. We were devising desperation quality-control fixes day after day.
Uniroyal was not a happy place for a safety-minded guy after all. Beside tire quality unhappiness, I had another problem. During 1967 and 1968 there was growing unrest in the US about the conduct of the war in Viet Nam. This proved to be incendiary tinder for unrest in central Detroit. I lived in a suburb of Detroit – out North near 20 Mile Road – in a town called Sterling Heights. During the summer of 1968, my family often went to Stoney Creek Lake where the kids could play in the water and on the sandy beach. As Ramona and I sat on a blanket, we looked to the south to see clouds of white and black smoke. Downtown Detroit was 27 miles south of us. Those flames were from food markets and other shops in the black ghettos burning as the 1968 Detroit race riots began.
The commute from our home to Uniroyal was about 25 miles of winding through metropolitan Detroit, no matter which of several routes I could use. All the routes took me through areas where National Guard trucks and tanks parked at intersections, ready to assist the police and fire fighters. We frequently heard gunfire nearby while in the Uniroyal offices. The Uniroyal plant was on the shore of the Detroit River, a bit northeast of the downtown center of the city. It was across the river from Belle Isle and it’s wonderful city park. The tire factory was dirty, smelly, grubby and dark. Employees had to park outside the plant along the curbs because there was no room within the factory grounds. Uniroyal was southeast of Jefferson Avenue, a street that separated the factory from some nasty black slums. How nasty? One morning as I was walking into work, I passed a house where a black man was sitting on the steps of his front porch. He had his head in his hands and I could hear him sobbing. I stopped and approached him carefully and asked “Is there anything I can do?” He looked up and said, “I am crying because I feel so bad that I cannot get my kids out of this G__D___ neighborhood.” I understood his frustration. Detroit had then an unofficial but de facto apartheid. Actually, his home was two blocks from East Grand Avenue. That street separated his neighborhood from the Grosse Pointe lakeshore suburbs of Detroit. Except for Dearborn, most other Ford auto company execs lived in the Pointes, along with the older Mafia families that benefited from the proximity to Canada via bridges and tunnels. Believe me; no black kid ever went across that avenue to mess with the mob homes or cars.
The buildings housing the Uniroyal office and tire factories were old all-wood multi-story black structures smelling of rubber and pine-tar. Old timers told me that the buildings had been condemned before World War II, but were spared for production of tires during that war. We were still working in those fire traps with oil soaked wood floors and flammable materials everywhere. In the basement of one of building located close to the river, I discovered a truck sized tunnel that disappeared to the east. Older employees knew it was a damp and muddy path leading under the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario. No one dared to go find out where it came out in Canada, but we guessed it would be a Prohibition era booze warehouse.
I liked working with tires at Uniroyal but hated working in downtown Detroit. Buffalo seemed like a safer place to raise a family. Where to go now? Auto safety was still my focus. A laboratory in Buffalo, New York had worked with General Motors by providing some expertise during the work defending the Corvair lawsuits. I was familiar with names of their scientists who were writers of major books and magazine articles concerning automobile handling. Late in 1968, I sent a resume to them on a gamble that my career would be if interest. It paid off. Ramona and I and our three kids could leave the ever-dangerous Detroit race riots and go to New York state – driving across Canada from Windsor to Niagara Falls to Buffalo and CAL. We got there in January 1969.
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