Word: polished
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...POLISH TUNNEL...
...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 of their fellow Polish Americans have left Hamtramck, having earned enough in union wages at Dodge to afford larger houses in northern suburbs like Warren or Madison Heights -and, of course, a car for commuting...
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...
...workers were turning out military vehicles, and after the war, 30,000 were still at work there trying to fill the nation's pent-up demand for cars. At the peak in the 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...
...government officials gathered there last summer to exchange ideas. Some suggested turning the plant into a bus factory. Others thought solar panels would correct the energy losses. Still others said to forget about the plant and transform Hamtramck into a free trade zone or a tourist attraction, like a Polish-theme park. "What Hamtramck does," said one participant, Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin, "will be an example for the rest of the nation." Added University of Pittsburgh Historian Samuel Hays somewhat pessimistically: "It's almost as though you're seeing the death of the manufacturing city right here...