REPLAYING AN OLD DEBT

Memory is a strange human facility. Why do we vividly remember certain experiences in the past but not others?

Of course, traumatic moments are memorable because they are accompanied by strong emotions. 9/11 as well as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassinations can’t help but be remembered. What I find surprising is the persistence of non-traumatic moments, moments that have a strong pull on the mind and heart but leave us wondering why these moments demand our attention.

About ten years ago, while driving north in Illinois, I saw the name of a town on an exit freeway sign. As I drove by, I remembered the summer I was eighteen and had a summer factory job in that town. For some reason, I resolved when I next passed that way to revisit the town and factory. I didn’t know why this town was calling to me, but I had a funny feeling that I wouldn’t discover the reason until I visited.

As I entered the town, I remembered little beyond the old railroad trestle and thought that I’d probably have to ask someone old enough to remember where the old telephone factory was located. But then I experienced a surprise. It seemed as if my car seemed to have a mind of its own. I turned left, then right, then drove straight ahead without knowing why until I seemed to magically pull into the factory’s parking lot.

I looked across the street to the factory, still standing, although it had been repurposed for a more modern need. Sixty years ago, my job in that factory was as a “runner,” supplying the women working at machines that stamped out the elements of the rotary phones we used back then.

My thoughts returned to what I learned that summer, that life for most women with only a high school education was hard. The woman would yell out to me or one of the other runners when they were running low on a part, and their yelling was loud and insistent. You see, the women were in an ongoing battle with the machines they operated, and the battle wasn’t a fair one.

The only way for the women to earn a bonus was to produce more phone parts than what the company determined was the acceptable rate. But if the women consistently beat the machine, the company management—all men—raised the acceptable standard rate, forcing the women to work even harder and faster to make five or ten cents more an hour. Every victory for the women was only temporary.

The end result was that the women’s battle to make a living wage had a profound effect on them physically. I could tell the women who’d been working there for ten or twenty years by the way their spines and arms were twisted and deformed by their battle with the machines. They could no longer stand or move normally. By conforming to the machines, the women ended up being deformed.

I’ve returned to the small town and the factory several times over the past decade, and I think I finally understand why I’ve felt called back to the site. When I was eighteen, I was aware of the plight of the women, but what I saw only made me grateful that a college education would offer me a different future.

It has only been through my visits over the last decade that I have finally understood what I owe those women. No, they don’t want my pity, but I think they’ve been waiting for my acknowledgement

and grief at the unfairness of their lives. And I’m sure they want something more than this newspaper column. They want me to be angry and actively engaged, confronting the fact that the majority of women worldwide are still trapped in oppressive systems that deform both bodies and souls.