Word: hamtramck
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Shortly past 8 a.m. on the first Friday of the 1980s, Wanda Paruch leaves her house on McDougall Avenue in Hamtramck, Mich., and sets out on the five-minute drive to work. Normally, she would make this trip three hours earlier, eat a cafeteria breakfast and start her job at 6 a.m. on the fifth floor of the Dodge Main Assembly Plant, putting glue on doors, cleaning out loose bolts and putting a plastic water shield and two pieces of felt into passing Aspens and Volares...
Today there is nothing to do but collect pay. Wanda Paruch, whose blond hair and broad pleasant face belie her 52 years, is only one of hundreds lining up early outside the gate on Joseph Campau Avenue, Hamtramck's main street, in the subfreezing, clear morning air. She waves to old friends as they drift off, feeling only an elusive, half-real sense of loss. Above her loom massive gray factory walls with their vast mosaic of windows, painted-over green, cracked and dirty. Only one of the four black smokestacks exhales into the sky. The railroad tunnels that...