Word: hamtramckers
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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...
Wanda has spent all her life in Hamtramck, which is surrounded entirely by the city of Detroit. Except during the war, she has always lived upstairs in the two-family, white frame house her immigrant parents bought for $7,000 in 1921. Since her husband died 16 years ago, and her father, Roman Lyjak, who worked as a body finisher at Dodge Main before her, died in 1969, Wanda has lived alone upstairs. Her mother, 82, lives downstairs. Wanda's brother, an inspector at Chrysler's Jefferson Avenue plant, comes around to help with the house. Many...
...decades, Hamtramck has been shrinking, partly as a result of the success of Henry Ford's notion that the workingman might one day be able to afford one of the cars he made. The town was a sleepy German farm community when Horace and John Dodge built a plant to supply Ford with axles, transmissions, steering gears and crankcases. By 1914 the two brothers were building their own cars at Hamtramck, and by 1928, when Walter P. Chrysler's automotive conglomerate bought them out, the Dodges had one of the largest and most complete car plants...
Dodge Main made Hamtramck. Thousands of Polish families, following a trail of promises, booked passage on the ship to Montreal and came on by boat or rail to Detroit to dominate the plant's work force. "There was a time when, if your name didn't end in 'ski,' you couldn't get in here," says one plant official. Old World bakeries and sausage shops sprang up. Bars and beer gardens huddled around the giant factory to wet a thousand throats at shift change...
...late '40s and early '50s, 55,000 people, most of them Polish Americans, crammed the pin-neat houses pinched together on 30-ft. lots along residential streets like McDougall, Yemans and Poland. Every morning almost the entire working population would trudge off to Dodge Main. Hamtramck was a joyous, clean, democratic, workingman's town that drew Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson and Jack Kennedy to campaign alongside proud mayors like Albert Zak, Joseph Grzecki and Raymond Wojtowicz. Robert Kozeran, the city's current mayor, remembers that at 9 p.m., when the factory whistle sounded...