Boeing is not your salvation.
--From the preacher's sermon this morning
It was a Saturday afternoon around 20 years ago. I was at the home of a friend of a friend. The man worked for Boeing in Wichita, Kan.
This guy, whose name I don’t remember, lived in an upper middle class home nestled cozily in a country housing addition outside Arkansas City. He had a luscious green sprawling yard and a stylish rock driveway, all of which the man worked hard to make presentable.
There were tees set up in his lawn, golf bags filled with clubs, golf balls and I was all over that shit. The three of us guys bantered good naturedly over a few beers. It was a fun day.
He had two elementary school-aged daughters. They had a croquet set in the lawn and (I shit you, not) asked their dad if they could go to the country club that day. Obviously, it was a place they were familiar with.
My friend and I were in our early 20s, when visiting that Boeing worker. We’re in our early 40s now, and I hope that guy is retired. If he’s not, well, I remember that Fitzgerald’s line from The Great Gatsby when only four people showed up for the lavish, party giving millionaire’s funeral.
The poor sonovabitch
Last week, Boeing announced it will close its Wichita plant at the end of 2013, leaving 2,160 people without a job. Over the past two or three generations, the union backed aircraft industry of Wichita, Kan. has launched blue collar workers into the upper ranks of the middle class. Wichita is the Aircraft Capital of the World and Boeing has long been the Big Daddy of all the aircraft plants that comprised this aviation kingdom and built this city.
On both sides of our families, my wife, Maria, and I have family members who work or have worked for Beech, Boeing and Cessna. It’s a cultural DNA aspect of this community, steeped in hope and anxiety.
Oil to aviation boom
Wichita’s aviation history is descended from the discovery of oil in nearby Butler County. In 1915, a huge gush of oil was drilled on land three miles northwest of El Dorado. A few years later, the oil field was producing 29 million barrels of oil per day and eight refineries were operating within the county. Oil production in that field helped the Allies win World War I.
http://www.kansastravel.org/kansasoilmuseum.
Jake Mollendick, a Wichita businessman who struck it rich in El Dorado’s oil boom, invested his fortune into the neophyte airplane business. During the 1920s, his company employed Walter Beech and Lloyd Stearman, who later started their own company with barnstormer Clyde Cessna. By 1933, these men had all gone their separate ways – the result: Beech, Boeing and Cessna. http://home.iwichita.com/rh1/hold/av/avhist/wichita/aircap_x.htm The Depression years were terrible for local plane makers. Then in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt summoned the Wichita aircraft leaders to Washington D.C. and told them he needed 50,000 aircraft for the inevitable war that was brewing.
Military-Industrial magnet
Wichita employed around 600,000 people in its aircraft plants during WW II. More than 26,300 military planes were built in Wichita and production in the rest of Kansas made the state’s total output 34,500 aircraft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wichita,_KansasPresident Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, known as “Toot” worked as a night shift supervisor on the B-29 assembly line. http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/120104/boeing-closing-wichita-factory-b52-b29-kansasWar production transformed Wichita from a bucolic cow town into an urban center. The aircraft plants brought in further industry and thousands more workers, adding to the population of the city and the suburban towns that were also booming.
During the Cold War, Wichita’s aircraft industry, its employees and the community benefitted from the Millitary Industrial Complex. Periodic layoffs and labor strikes, over the years, have hurt the local economy.
The end of the Cold War, 9-11 and globalization have left the aircraft industry in Wichita more uncertain than ever. All the aircraft plants have cut back. Boeing -- if a person could hold on to a job there -- offered an excellent wage and benefit package. A Boeing worker told me a few years ago how there were people in his department who had earned master’s degree, but preferred to continue working at the plant because it paid better.
Also, two people from his department – distressed over being laid off – committed suicide.
No doubt conservatives are already using the Boeing closing as an excuse to bash Obama for cutting the Defense Dept. budget by $450 billion. (Winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and bringing our people home, I would say, is a good thing.)
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/story/2012-01-04/boeing-plant-closing-wichita-kansas/52377688/1 Naturally, the complainers will be the same conservatives who blame the president for the deficit, which they helped create.
Hit and Run
The state and community have rolled over and given Boeing a good time for decades. The company has benefitted from decades of industrial revenue bonds – more than $3.5 billion since 1979 – and has received $650 million in property-tax relief.
This past year, Kansas lawmakers moved heaven and earth to ensure that a $35 billion contract to build an aerial tanker for the Air Force went to Boeing and not a European competitor.
“If Boeing wins the contract, the company promises, it will create 11,000 jobs in Washington state and 7,500 jobs in Kansas,” the Lawrence-Journal World reported last Februrary. /http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2011/feb/17/senators-jerry-moran-and-pat-roberts-join-groupsu
Boeing gave verbal assurance that it would stay in Wichita, but apparently the company’s word isn’t its bond. State Rep. Jim Ward D-Wichita, called Boeing “a poster child for corporate tax incentives."
After 85 years in this town, Boeing bit the corporate welfare hand that fed it.
