How They Met

My Mother was the oldest daughter of Coal Miners from Pennsylvania. They moved to Flint when she was five, looking for a better life. Or so I have been told. The brood also included another daughter and three sons. They were a rough family, drinkers and fighters. All of their leisure time activities included whiskey, beer and firearms.

Mother was hired into General Motors immediately after high school graduation. The family not being concerned with learning for women did not challenge her and she squeaked out a meager 1.89 gpa to graduate. Grandfather and Grandmother Edmonds did not expect her to ever marry. She was to be the old maid that stayed home and cared for them when old age took over. Most of her paychecks went into maintaining the household and buying gifts for her mother.

The household filled with chaos the night my Father arrived to take her out on a date. Not only was a man courting their cash cow, but he was twenty six years older than her, recently widowed and had two teenage children.

They met on the floor of the Chevrolet Stamping Plant on Van Slyke Road. Father ran a blanker. This press was fed by a large coil of steel, weighing over seven tons. Cycling up and down over thirty times a minute, the floor shook as it spit out the steel blanks used to form automobile fenders. In those pre-computer days, the control panel for the machine was a series of analog lights, communicating the status and condition of the press. 

The quirk with these machines was that it must never, under any circumstance, be stopped while the ram of the press was traveling up. If that error occurred, the press would stop its motion, yet the coil of steel would continue to feed into the side of the press and straight out the other side uncut. 

Mother, who recently transferred into this department was mesmerized by the blinking lights and who wouldn’t want to know what would happen if you pushed ‘THAT’ button.

She pushed it, the press stopped, the steel uncoiled into the aisle, she ran. Father, seeing this growing disaster quickly pushed the emergency stop button on the coil feeder.

A nearby supervisor, thinking he knew what happened appeared, telling my Father he was going to fire that so and so young lady. Father told him to go to hell, that the press obviously malfunctioned.

Later that day, he sought her out and aftering pointing out how he had saved her neck asked her on a date. The whirlwind courtship lasted three months and they were married. The ceremony was shunned by everyone in her family except her mother. 

Roy Richard
June 2024