My name is Ray. I hired in at the plant on October 9, 1972. I was 21. I've been there ever since, most of it on the third shift, and on June 30, 2000, I'm going to walk out the gate for the last time with almost 28 years on the books and a pension. My daughter set up this page for me because she says I tell the same stories at every holiday and this way I can just hand people a card with the address on it. She's probably right.

I'm not going to name the company or the plant. If you're from around here you know which one it is, and if you're not, it doesn't matter. It's a big assembly plant that builds cars, and a lot of the fellows I work with have been there almost as long as I have. What I want to write down is what it's been like, because it's been a good life and it's about to be over, and the kids coming in now are walking into a different place than I did.

Quick numbers for the people who like numbers: 27 years this October. Roughly 4,000 nights on the third shift, give or take. Well over two million cars have gone past my station, and I've had my hands on a good share of them.

Third shift is nights. At our plant that's roughly 11 at night to 7 in the morning, with a half-hour lunch at about 3 a.m. that nobody calls lunch. I've been on it since 1979. I went to days for a stretch in the late 80s when the kids were small and Carol wanted me home for supper, and then I went back to nights, because I'm a night man. Some people are and some aren't. You know within a month.

What's it like? You sleep from about 8 in the morning until 3 or 4 in the afternoon, with the shades taped shut and the phone unplugged. You see your wife for supper and a couple of hours of TV. You leave the house when everybody else is going to bed. The neighbors think you're unemployed for the first five years. Christmas morning you've been up all night. On the other hand, there's no traffic, the shift premium is a few percent more on the check, and in the summer you get the whole afternoon. I've fished more weekday afternoons than most retired men.

The plant at night is a different animal. Fewer bosses, fewer visitors, nobody in a tie walking through. The same 900 or so people every night, so you get to know them. The coffee's terrible at 3 a.m. and everybody drinks it anyway. Around 5 a.m. is the hard hour, when your body wants to lie down and the line doesn't care. Then the windows go gray and you can smell the morning through the big doors, and you're done, and the day shift is coming in the gate with their lunch buckets looking too awake.

1972. When I hired in, the body shop was men with welding guns. Big hanging spot-welders on balancers, you grabbed the handles and swung it into the seam and squeezed and the sparks went everywhere. Everybody had little burn holes in their shirts. I started in trim, though, putting in door glass. The line moved about 55 or 60 cars an hour and you had your job and you did it, every car, all night. You learned it in a day and you got good at it in a month and then you did it for two years until you had enough seniority to bid on something better.

It was loud. It was hot in the summer; the fans just moved the heat around. You came home smelling like the plant, which is a smell of oil and paint and hot metal that I could pick out blindfolded. Guys smoked at their stations. There was a lot more drinking then than there is now, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But it was a job you could raise a family on, and I did.

The 80s. The robots came in around 1983 or '84 at our plant, in the body shop first, for the spot welding. Big orange arms in a cage doing what forty men used to do. A lot of people were scared, and a lot of people were right to be, because those jobs went away. What people forget is somebody had to keep the robots running, and some of the welders became those guys. I moved to chassis in '81, which is where I've been since: I put the front suspension together with the subframe, which by now they've changed the design of four times. Every few years they'd add a machine that took a piece of my job and then give me a different piece. The line never got slower. That's the one constant.

Now. The plant is cleaner and quieter than it was, by a mile. There's no smoking on the floor. A lot of the heavy stuff has a lift assist. You've got computers that scan the build sheet on every car and tell you what parts go on it, because you might build six different versions of the same car in a row. There's more attention to quality than there ever was in the 70s; back then if it left the plant it was somebody else's problem, and now they'll stop the line for a bad door fit, which I never would have believed. The young guys have it easier physically and harder in some other ways. I'll get to that.

I've been a member of the local since my first day, and I've been a steward on third shift in chassis since 1991. I'm not going to get into politics on this page, mine or anybody's. I'll just say what the union does in my department, which is what most people don't understand.

Mostly it's the small stuff. A fellow gets written up for being late and there's a reason, and I go sit with him and the supervisor and we work it out. Somebody's job gets changed so it can't be done in the time allowed, and we get it timed again. A guy hurts his back and needs a job he can do while it heals. The contract says how things are supposed to go, and my job is to know the contract and make sure it goes that way. Nine times out of ten it's settled in a conversation. The tenth time there's a grievance, and there's a process for that, and it takes forever, and sometimes we win and sometimes we don't.

The big stuff, the contract itself, the wages and the pension and the health care, that gets bargained every few years by people above my pay grade and voted on by all of us. I've voted on eight of them. Some I liked better than others. What I'll say is this: the pension I'm about to draw, the health care my wife has had while she raised our kids, the thirty-and-out that lets a man retire at 49 if he started young enough, none of that fell out of the sky. Somebody sat across a table and got it, and people before them walked a picket line for it, and I've tried to hold on to it for the ones coming behind me. That's all.

You spend eight hours a night, five and sometimes six nights a week, standing ten feet from the same people for twenty years. They're not friends exactly. They're something else that there isn't a word for. First names only, because they'd kill me.

Walt hired in three months before me and never lets me forget it. He's retiring in March, three months before me, and he won't let me forget that either. Walt has told the same joke about the foreman and the goat every night since about 1976 and it's still funny, which is a miracle of some kind.

Denise came into chassis in 1984, one of the first women in our department, and there were guys who didn't like it, and she outworked every one of them until they shut up. Now she's the one who trains the new hires. If Denise says you're doing it wrong, you're doing it wrong.

Big Lou runs the coffee pool. Twelve of us put in a dollar a week and Lou buys the can and makes the coffee at 2:30, and it's bad, and we've never once let anybody else make it, because it's Lou's coffee.

Marcus is the young one on my line, 26, two years in. Smart. Asks questions. Reads the contract, which almost nobody does. He's going to be a steward someday, and I've told him, and he says no, and he will be.

Frank passed in 1994, heart attack, at his station, 58 years old. There's a little brass plate on the post there that the company let us put up. Every man on third shift in chassis touches it on his way in. That's not a rule. It's just what we do.

Last day: Friday, June 30, 2000. As of today, September 24, 1999, that is 280 days, or about 195 working nights, depending on how the holidays and the model changeover fall. My daughter says she'll update the number every month. We'll see.

What I'm going to do: sleep at night, for one. I've been told it takes a year to get turned back around. Fish. Finish the basement, which I started in 1988. Carol has a list. There's a grandson due in February and I intend to be a nuisance. And I told the local I'd come in and help the retirees' chapter with the newsletter, which means I'll be back in that building within a month, and Walt already bet me twenty dollars on it.

What I'm going to miss: the guys. The 5 a.m. gray windows. Being good at something with my hands. Frank's plate. I won't miss the coffee, and Lou knows it.

Every fall they bring in a batch of new people, and every fall I say some of this to whoever's on my line. So here it is written down.

1. Show up. On time, every night. Ninety percent of the people who get let go in their first year get let go for attendance. Not for being slow. Not for mistakes. For not being there. The line needs you there.
2. Take care of your back and your hands. Use the lift assist even if it's slower. Wear the gloves. Do the stretches the plant nurse showed you, even if the old guys laugh. The old guys are laughing because they didn't and they know better now. I've got two bad shoulders and I'd trade them for a little embarrassment at 22.
3. Learn the job next to yours. Then the one after that. Seniority is what gets you the good jobs, but knowing five jobs is what makes you the one they can't do without when they cut a shift.
4. Read the contract. The whole thing. It's your rights and your rules and almost nobody reads it. Then when a supervisor tells you something that isn't in there, you'll know.
5. Don't blow the money. Your first full paycheck with overtime is going to look like more money than you've ever seen. It's not. A truck payment and a boat payment is how a man ends up unable to take a layoff or a strike. Put some in the savings plan from day one and pretend it doesn't exist.
6. Don't count on it being here forever. I did, and I got lucky. Plants close. Shifts get cut. Get some training on the side; the company will even pay for some of it. The fellows who took the tuition assistance in the 80s are the ones running the robots now.
7. Be somebody people can stand ten feet from for twenty years. That's most of it, really.