Kickapoo Valley has many Janesville connections

By KAREN PARKER | County Line Editor

When a radio announcement noted that a manhunt was on for Joseph Jakubowski, who had stolen multiple weapons from a gun shop in Janesville, I peered over the eggs and toast and commented to my husband, “Watch, this guy will show up in Vernon County.”

And just as the tourists return to canoe the Kickapoo on a tsunami of ice and beer, there he was, camped out by Readstown.

Told you so.

The connections between this area and Janesville are strong. At one time, if farming weren’t your thing, the best-paying jobs could be found at Badger Ordnance near Baraboo, Wis. And when those jobs went away after the Vietnam war, people went further down the road to Janesville, attracted by the jobs offered at General Motors.

You can take the boy out of the Kickapoo, but a surprising number never quite shook off the Kickapoo. They came back to visit family, to participate in the local American Legions, to buy summer places and ultimately to retire.

It would not surprise me that Jakubowski visited the area with a friend or knew folks who owned property in Vernon County. One thing is for sure: He was not a native. If he had been, he would have known this could be the worst place to hide. New faces stick out, and unfamiliar pickup trucks and cars rarely escape the notice of the locals. You can run, but you cannot hide.

The Janesville connection rings a note in my life as well. When I was a kid growing up in Monroe, Wis., many of my friends’ parents either worked in Janesville or at the Chrysler plant in Belvedere, Ill.

My two oldest brothers burned up the highway between Monroe and Janesville for decades. After serving time in the military, they signed on with General Motors and never looked back. Both retired before the closure of the final assembly plant in 2008.

This week marks the release of a new book, “Janesville: An American Story” by Amy Goldstein.

You may think that Goldstein, one of those East Coast media types, would be an unlikely person to connect with Janesville and GM employees. But, based on the excerpts I have read, you would be wrong.

Goldstein has been covering health care and social policy issues from Medicare to Social Security for the Washington Post for almost 30 years. Her six-year project included a two-year leave of absence from the Post to immerse herself in the lives of the people who absorbed the effects of the plant’s closing.

Throughout the book, she follows 55 people, documenting how they coped with the earthquake that upended their lives. More than 9,000 people lost their jobs just as the 2008 recession was ramping up.

According to the Washington Post, in a survey of Rock County that Goldstein conducted with UW-Madison, “More than one in three who responded had lost work or lived with someone who had. Economic pessimism lingered years after the recession itself. Attesting to the financial and emotional pain that losing work caused people, half said they have had trouble paying for food and nearly two-thirds reported strain in family relationships. Three-quarters of the people who responded, in 2013, said that the U.S. economy was still in a recession. Slightly more than half said their financial situation was worse than before the recession.”

Though those sorts of facts may make some people’s eyes glaze over, individuals’ stories are harder to ignore. In Goldstein’s book, we meet the husband and father who must leave his family to take work at a GM plant more than 1,000 miles away. There are no $28-an-hour jobs in Janesville to replace the one he lost.

Or how about the former GM employee who is horrified to see his teenage daughters use the money they made at Culvers to buy the family’s weekly groceries instead of saving it for college?

Rock County and Janesville have never recovered. Only about half of the 9,500 manufacturing jobs they had in 1990 remain, and the pay for those jobs is far less than it was at General Motors.

The United Auto Workers dwindled from 7,000 active members to 438 by 2012, with 4,900 retirees. To make money, the union started renting out its hall — once a heart of the community. But the future of what was once a huge Labor Day festival remains in limbo.

Donald Trump’s name doesn’t get a mention until page 292. But it is probably not lost on the reader that what Janesville experienced played a big part in swinging the state from Democratic to Republican.

There is no doubt that the Clinton campaign’s failure to address those who had experienced a profound and devastating blow to their lives drove electors to Trump, who was able to offer hope and a future that would bring about the return of the $28-an-hour job.

But here is what Goldstein wrote about the last day of the GM assembly plant in Janesville. Read it, please, and, tell me, will this come back? Really? Will it?

“At 7:07 a.m., the last Tahoe reached the end of the assembly line. Outside it was still dark, 15 degrees with 33 inches of snow — nearly a December record — piled up and drifting as a stinging wind swept across the acres of parking lots.

“Inside the Janesville Assembly Plant, the lights were blazing, and the crowd was thick. Workers who were about to walk out of the plant into uncertain futures stood alongside pensioned retirees who had walked back in, their chests tight with incredulity and nostalgia. All these GM’ers had followed the Tahoe as it snaked down the line. They were cheering, hugging, weeping.

“The final Tahoe was a beauty. It was a black LTZ, fully loaded with heated seats, aluminum wheels, a nine-speaker Bose audio system and a sticker price of $57,745.

“Five men, including one in a Santa hat, stood in front of the shiny black SUV holding a wide banner, its white spaces crammed with workers’ signatures. ‘Last Vehicle off the Janesville Assembly Line,’ the banner said, with the date, Dec. 23, 2008. It was destined for the county historical society.”

 

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