Alas, Flint would eventually suffer a similar fate when GM decided to skip town, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’re coming to the really good part of Flint’s history, when the growth and good times seemed limitless. The horse and buggy era didn’t have many years left, and the city was poised to transform itself once again. This time into the epicenter of the automobile industry, the headquarters of the American Dream.
6
The Road to Prosperity
I made a surprising discovery as I blogged about Flint and immersed myself in its history for the first time. In the early days of the auto industry, my moribund hometown had been the gritty equivalent of Silicon Valley, a freewheeling city with go-getters eager to put their ideas on the line. A place where people sought their fortune. Billy Durant is a perfect example. The charismatic grandson of a local lumber baron, he dropped out of high school and sold cigars before he teamed up with his friend J. Dallas Dort to launch a carriage company with two thousand dollars of someone else’s money. By 1900, it was the largest horse-drawn vehicle maker in the country, if not the world. Durant was initially so skeptical of automobiles that he allegedly forbade his daughter to ride in one, but that didn’t stop him from investing heavily in Buick, one of the many manufacturers emerging at the turn of the century. Before long, Buicks were the most popular cars in the country.
A mesmerizing salesman, Durant believed in offering consumers variety and consolidating the gaggle of competing car companies. With that in mind, he combined Buick with an assortment of automakers and parts suppliers to form General Motors in 1908. Although based in Flint, GM was incorporated in New Jersey, a state that placed no restriction on the amount of stock a venture could issue, regardless of its actual assets. This allowed Durant to dazzle investors with his vision for the future rather than the company’s current reality.
Durant was not easily satisfied. After marrying one of the prettiest girls in Flint in his younger days, he divorced her when he was in his midforties to wed his twenty-one-year-old secretary. He overextended GM in his rush to expand the company and was forced out by skittish financiers in 1910. After teaming up with Louis Chevrolet, he managed to regain control five years later, only to get bounced for good in 1920. He was replaced by Alfred P. Sloan, who lacked Durant’s endearing panache and dapper style but relied on a shrewd, methodical management style that led to unprecedented growth. Undeterred, Durant moved to New York and made another fortune in the stock market, his latest obsession. After the market crashed on Black Tuesday in 1929, Durant, along with other financial giants like the Rockefellers, disregarded the advice of friends and bought heavily to show confidence in the market. He declared bankruptcy in 1936.
A crazy dreamer if there ever was one, Durant returned to Flint for one final venture. He opened an eighteen-lane bowling alley in 1940 and later combined it with one of the country’s first drive-in hamburger joints, creating perhaps the quintessential Flint enterprise. He thought bowling and fast food were the next big thing, but he never got a chance to see his hunch pay off. After suffering a debilitating stroke in 1942, Durant and his wife survived on handouts from members of GM’s early board of directors until his death in 1947.
I couldn’t help but like Durant, despite his many faults, as I read about his triumphs and failures. For me, he came to personify that hard-to-define spirit that Flint possesses, a certain exuberant recklessness that I wanted to somehow be a part of again. Durant’s approach to business may have robbed him of prosperity in the end, but he was a visionary whose ideas transformed Flint. By 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, GM had produced ten million cars for consumers and was well on its way to becoming the world’s largest corporation. In the process, Flint gained a reputation for plentiful jobs and good wages, causing the population to jump from 13,000 to more than 156,000 between 1900 and 1930. Finding a comfortable place to sleep was a real challenge for the new arrivals. “In the worst areas, like the notoriously overcrowded section known simply as ‘the Jungle,’ hundreds of families paid one dollar down and fifty cents a week to purchase tiny lots for their tents and tarpaper shacks,” wrote historian Ronald Edsforth. “Elsewhere, homeowners took in lodgers, while many rooming houses converted to double shifts, using every square foot for extra beds.”
Verne McFarlane and Leone Stevenson, my grandparents, were part of the influx. In my mind, they were always the picture of calm stability. I don’t remember seeing my grandfather in anything other than a suit or the well-ironed work clothes he wore on weekends. Their home was always spotless. They expressed the same disapproval of a neighbor’s uncut grass as they conveyed when someone appeared to be spending money unwisely. I didn’t think of them as particularly adventuresome, but on a visit to see my mom one Christmas at her cozy house in Florida, decorated with much the same furniture and artwork that once filled our old house in Flint, I learned that they fit right in with the spirit of the Vehicle City during the boom years.
Sitting on the indestructible couch where I had lounged as a kid, my mom broke out her meticulously maintained photo albums and filled me in on the family history that I’d never really known. My grandparents both grew up on forty-acre family farms in the northeast corner of Iowa near Maple Leaf, which no longer warrants a mention on state maps. My grandfather wasn’t meant to be a farmer, but he promised to help his dad for several years after graduating from eighth grade. Tall and lanky, he pitched for the local barnstorming baseball team and was known to participate in weekend wrestling matches. My mom showed me a flyer from one bout with his personal commentary written in neat cursive above his opponent’s name: “He got nothing but abuse!” Given my grandfather’s gentle demeanor and sense of humor, this was surely more of a joke than a boast. My grandmother was shy, smart, and good looking. She grew up with seven brothers and sisters in the house with three tiny bedrooms that her father built. After finishing high school, she taught in a one-room schoolhouse. My grandparents met at a dance called the Turkey Trot.
I had always assumed they were married in Iowa, but that was not the case. They eloped in the early 1920s and eventually made their way to Flint. They were in love, but that didn’t mean they abandoned the frugality imparted by their hardscrabble Scottish parents. They lived together but pledged to save one thousand dollars each before they got married, a lofty financial goal at the time. (Actually, it would be ambitious for many Flint families even today.) The fact that my grandparents had “lived in sin” for a short time was my first big surprise.
My grandfather worked at “the Buick” for a little while, but he was as ill suited to life on the line as he was to life on the farm. He soon started a small trucking outfit with a friend, but the entire enterprise folded when their lone asset—the truck—caught fire. My grandmother was not pleased with this development. She was more pragmatic than my grandfather and always acted as the family bookkeeper. After a few tries at other businesses, he gravitated to real estate, studying up and passing the licensing exam to buy and sell property.
My mom opened the cedar chest in her bedroom and pulled out the well-preserved, amazingly detailed financial logs my grandmother kept her entire life, tracking every penny made and spent. The dark green ledgers included all the real-estate commissions my grandfather earned, but they also listed the financial breakdown on dozens of houses he personally bought and sold. My mom told me that my grandparents had regularly purchased rundown houses with their own money. Grandma, using the carpentry skills she learned from her father on the farm in Iowa, was in charge of rehabbing the properties. A long-forgotten memory of helping her lay down a linoleum floor in the kitchen of a cold, empty house flashed into my head. We were both on our hands and knees, and she was teaching me how to measure out the tiles with a yardstick. She was a stickler for getting it right. I remember pulling up linoleum squares because they didn’t fit perfectly into a corner. My grandparents then resold