Carl F. Thelin

SURPLUSED

            Those remarks that I foolishly made at the Christmas party made it obvious that I did not agree with the GM aggressive defense tactics. Many times, while working with the GM attorney who was preparing responses to plaintiff’s interrogatories and Requests for Production (RFP), I had my problem. I would propose a document that seemed appropriate. “No, we are not going to give them that. They did not ask the question exactly correctly to get this. Let it go”. One of the documents most requested was one that they had discovered in an index of report titles from the GM Proving Grounds. The title was clearly one that revealed that people there were concerned with “Handling problems”. The index of PG reports had the report number transposed, adding a superfluous digit like making the number like 110684. The real number of this damaging report was 11684. Since there were no reports numbered in the 100,000 range, I could tell, as could the lawyer, that a request for a report numbered “110684” meant that they had spotted the intriguing index title – which in fact would have made it obvious that the PG was warning of the handling problem two years before on-sale-date.

            In other cases, we also checked every request for any tiny fault in its language as a reason for not supplying it. Furthermore, I had gone within the Chevrolet Engineering Center building at the Tech Center to the office of any engineer who had been involved in the Corvair development. “Do you still have anything in your office related to the work on the 1960 to 1964 model Corvair?” If they did, I flashed the authority of the Legal Staff and took it. I made copies and sent them to the 14^th floor. So, when answering some requests that were defectively identified (in our squinty eyes) GM lawyers could say that we “had searched all the places where such documents would normally be found, and found none.” Of course. We had already moved then to the 14^th floor where the lawyers had some empty rooms. No longer would a search of the ordinary locations discover those reports at the Tech Center or Proving Grounds (managed by the Tech Center). My offices at Product Analysis were still secret, too.

            This kind of tactic obviously made me uncomfortable. The impression I made on the attorney, along with my “confession” at the Christmas party doomed me. In January, I was told that GM was having a downturn in business in 1967. Despite that I had earned a raise the prior fall, I was one PA engineer to suffer the needed Reduction in Force. They stripped me of my company car and my go-anywhere ID badge. I became a lowly draftsman in a large second floor drafting pool on the second floor of the main building. I had to be on my stool at bell-ringing in the morning and leave everything and go home at the bell- ringing for the end of the shift. No opposing lawyer would look for me there. Some the managers who knew me before my disgrace felt that this humiliation was too drastic and moved me to a smaller area with more interesting, but still trivial work. I was simply buried in the giant complex of buildings. 

          I wrote to Pete Estes, who was the Chief Engineer of Chevrolet. I complained about the treatment I got. Nothing happened that I could tell. I finally said to them that they could get rid me forever if I could leave with severance pay earned by my seniority. I got it. Sad. The bean counters and the lawyers ruined General Motors.

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