DETROIT - Vacant streets, vacant buildings, and vacant looks in the eyes of hard-working people who have had their livelihoods erased or threatened: This is downtown Detroit in the first week of June in 2009.
The Tigers are playing the Red Sox at Comerica Park and the Red Wings - God bless 'em - are skating toward another Stanley Cup in Pittsburgh, but it is impossible to be in Detroit this week and not feel the pain and the fear that grips this region more than any other in America.
While the Red Sox were enjoying a day off just a few blocks from General Motors's world headquarters Monday, the automaker filed for Chapter 11 in Federal Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan.
This is big news across the US and around the world. Here, it is the only news. It is the realization that the impossible has happened. A way of life is gone, probably forever.
"We actually had a team meeting about it," said Tigers manager Jim Leyland, who grew up in Perrysburg, Ohio, where he had a job cutting windshields for GM cars. "I told the guys, 'This is not a year to not run out ground balls.' We get a check every two weeks, and there are people who just found out they ain't getting a check. We've got to pinch ourselves and realize how lucky we are."
GM was founded in 1908 and became the world's biggest carmaker by 1932. In the "Happy Days" of the late 1950s, GM owned half of the US auto market. Michigan assembly lines cranked out millions of family wagons, pickups, and cool cars with big fins. It was American muscle on parade and we were a nation of two cars in every garage.
In Michigan, GM was the embodiment of the American dream. You could get a job at the plant, work there your whole life, raise a raft of kids who could go to college to East Lansing and Ann Arbor, and you probably had enough left over for a summer cabin up north.
Hall of Famer Al Kaline, who came up to the Tigers in 1953, said, "People never expected to be worrying about losing jobs, losing homes, or having to return cars. If you were part of GM, that was the place. We used to say that if GM went under, the whole country would go under."
They also said, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country."
Now the crumbling of the biggest of the Big Three tells Michigan that nothing is safe.
Monday's announcement means a loss of 21,000 jobs at 14 plants nationwide. Michigan's share is the elimination of seven plants and almost 9,000 jobs. That comes on top of 140,000 manufacturing jobs this state has lost since 2004. A GM American work force that once numbered almost 400,000 will be reduced to less than 40,000 workers by the time the closures are carried out. It touches everyone. Even big league ballplayers.
