Word: willow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...turn to for spiritual guidance. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton stayed in close touch with their hometown pastors after moving to the White House. Not long into his first term, Clinton also started scheduling regular meetings with Bill Hybels, pastor of a Chicago-area evangelical megachurch called Willow Creek. Three other religious leaders - Phil Wogaman, Tony Campolo and Gordon MacDonald - went to the White House for monthly prayer sessions with Clinton after the Lewinsky scandal, as impeachment began to weigh...
...announcement by General Motors that it will close its Willow Run transmission plant as part of its restructuring is being taken as a sign of how far the auto giant has fallen. Willow Run is, deservedly, a legend. But the lessons from its history are not entirely the ones usually drawn...
...Willow Run, almost on the edge of Ann Arbor, Mich., was built not by GM but by Ford, opening in April 1942. From the start, its job was to turn out B-24 bombers, the workhorse of the U.S. Army Air Force's strategic campaigns in World War II, unaffectionately known to its crews as "the flying shithouse." The plant took a while to get going. There was a shortage of local labor, which meant that workers had to be imported from Appalachia (Ypsilanti, a local town, became known as "Ypsitucky"). Mosquitoes plagued the site until Henry Ford imported...
...Willow Run is always trotted out as Exhibit A in the transformation of lower Michigan into the world's arsenal of democracy. It's a great story, and it's a true one; in 1942, GM took just two months to convert its Cadillac assembly line to one that could turn out tanks. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor buzzed with boffins working on government contracts, and in 1948, the campus had 21,000 students enrolled - or a fifth of the total number of students at every university in France. Two years earlier, a veteran editor of the Detroit...
...Detroit's golden age was very short-lived. Willow Run was never a massive success in peacetime. Henry Kaiser, who wanted to rival the Big Three, bought the plant, and in 1947 he employed 15,000 people there. But by 1953, when the plant was sold to GM, the number had dropped to 3,000. The city was already on its way to being the epitome of the Rust Belt basket case. In 1950, Detroit had a population of nearly 1.85 million; by 1990, it had fallen to just over 1 million...