A Set of Coasters

Ten years ago today - January 17, 2013 - we lost our grandmother. She was 82.

For as long as I’d been alive, she lived on 22nd Avenue in Rockford, between 4th and 5th Streets, along a short stretch of boulevard where you’d never expect boulevard. It was a white house. Not a big house, but in my memory, also not a small house. It was a perfectly average house. It will forever be my idea of What A House Looks Like.

National Lock was founded in Rockford in 1903. Believe it or not: they manufactured locks! Plus associated hardware like door pulls and door strikes. If you want to read some about the company history, here is a good background page.

The factory was at 18th Avenue and 7th Street. It’s still there. I’m not sure what they do there anymore, but if you’ve ever wanted to get a feel for the Rust Belt, head to the corner of 18th Avenue and 7th Street. It’s as good a place to start as any.

My grandmother was an eminently practical person. You’d be eminently practical too if you grew up with 13 siblings in the hill country of northwest Alabama.

She had spent literally years attempting to give away some of her possessions, not that she necessarily did a great job of it. She had given me a fancy glass bowl a decade earlier. Here’s the thing: She didn’t use it. If she used it, she’d still need it. And most things in the house were like that. She was, after all, eminently practical.

She started working at National Lock some time before I existed. I have no clue what exactly she did there. She didn’t talk about what she did. That’s just not how conversation flowed on 22nd Avenue.

And yet she owned that home. It was possible for a divorced woman in her 40s with little experience to do that then. National Lock might not have paid her a fortune. But they paid her a fair wage. Because she was a member of the union. UAW Local 449.

There were a handful of small things I took from the house that day. Eminently practical things. With my grandmother, the practical and the sentimental were necessarily the same thing.

Literally, I took a couple of flyswatters and a bunch of clothespins. I’m not exaggerating. I mean that practical. I also took a stack of Rubbermaid cups. One of them I use today to scoop ice. One of them sits on the edge of the bathtub. THAT PRACTICAL.

I also took one thing which, albeit practical, was not for a practical purpose. Four things, actually. One set of four things:

Four metal coasters commemorating the 75th anniversary of National Lock.

At the time these coasters were cast in 1978, my grandmother worked at National Lock. I remember that after the company laid her off in the early 1980s she went and worked at MetalCrafters. When she was laid off there, she was never able to get another job. She was still in her mid-50s and couldn’t find decent work. That’s what it was like in Rockford then. That’s what it’s like in a lot of places in America today.

But she was able to get by. She’d been able to buy the house on 22nd Avenue. And she was… thrifty. Economical. Practical. She had air conditioning but wouldn’t turn it on. I went for 40 years thinking she’d never had air conditioning!

I remember the coasters being out. They were, well, practical. I remember putting Coke cans on them. But they were more than just practical. They represented something she had been proud of. As a working woman in the 1970s, she had not just been a worker. She’d been a respected worker. A union member. Her gender didn’t deny her that. Her accent didn’t deny her that. In retrospect, it’s so easy to imagine what it might have been like for someone who profiled like her to get a fair shake. For a while, at National Lock, in the union, she got that.

Gran was not the type of person to bring attention to herself. She would cringe at reading something like this about her. (The next morning, of course, she’d tell the mailman all about it.)

She was not a philosopher, though I suspect if pressed she would have had fine philosophy to dispense. From time to time perhaps politics might have been discussed, but that wasn’t her thing either. Her interests were in gardening, her grandchildren, and, naturally, Elvis.

She keeps popping up in so much of what I read. So much of my understanding of economics, industry, urban affairs, rural affairs… they’re rooted in informal lessons from 22nd Avenue.

All of them, all of the time? Maybe not all of them, all of the time… but let’s be perfectly clear on this point: You’re damn right I’m pro-union. Admittedly it can be easy to lose track of that sometimes, working in technology instead of a factory.

Today, though, I was reminded of that day, and that last visit to the house, and what I found important enough to bring home.

Gran, we still miss you terribly.