From the McLaughlin Motor Car Company of 1907 to GM in 2019: End of an era as Oshawa Assembly winds down to close

End of an era for my hometown.

On Nov. 26, 2018, General Motors announced plans to “unallocate production” by December 2019 to Oshawa Assembly, which made the Chevrolet Impala; Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly, where the Chevrolet Volt, Buick LaCrosse and Cadillac CT6 are produced; Lordstown Assembly in Lordstown, Ohio, which made the Chevrolet Cruze compact; Baltimore Operations in White Marsh, Maryland; and Warren Transmission Operations in Warren, Michigan.

And now, December has truly arrived.

Unifor Local 222 is set to lose roughly two thirds of its membership due to the end of 112 years of auto assembly in Oshawa sometime next week. The McLaughlin Motor Car Company, incorporated on Nov. 20, 1907, began automobile manufacturing the following month in December 1907 – 112 years ago this month – in Oshawa, producing 154 McLaughlin-Buick Model F cars – called McLaughlins – with Buick engines that first year.

The last truck will roll of the assembly line the week before Christmas, as GM stops production in Oshawa of the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra full-size, light-duty trucks, the last of which were being shipped from Indiana for final assembly in Oshawa. The end of production will leave about 2,300 workers unemployed. Unifor Local 222 president Colin James says the local is re-evaluating its future and potentially downsizing from its union hall on Phillip Murray Avenue in Oshawa.

GM will continue to manufacture parts and employ about 300 workers people at its sprawling soon-to-be-very-underused Oshawa plant, stamping parts for GM and, potentially, suppliers. The automaker has made a 10-year commitment to build parts, such as quarter panels, trunks, doors and hoods at the plant. The company is also building a 55-acre (22-hectare) autonomous-and-connected-vehicle and smart technology test track on the Oshawa site.

I arrived to work at General Motors in Oshawa shortly before the halcyon days of the early 1980s when employment at GM in Oshawa would top out at more than 23,000 workers.

I spent the first of five summers, beginning in July 1976 as a Trent University-bound first year student, fresh out of Grade 13 at Oshawa Catholic High School, working in the very same GM Oshawa West Plant high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department that my dad, Bill Barker, had retired from the year before. Some of his buddies were still there; some I had heard about for years and met for the first time.

My dad worked as an hourly-rated employee for 32½ years before retiring in 1975. He was a proud rank-and-file trade unionist, a member of Local 222 of the old United Autoworkers of America (UAW).

In the fall of 1970, he walked the picket line for 3½ months in the second-longest strike against his employer since the Dirty Thirties. I remember it because I was 13 and in Grade 8 at St. Christopher in Oshawa at the time. He also walked the picket line 15 years earlier in 1955 in the five-month UAW strike against General Motors of Canada, the longest strike against the company.

While he wasn’t much fond of politicians of any stripe collectively, he did have a bit of a liking individually for Mike Starr, Oshawa-Whitby riding Progressive Conservative MP, and a federal labour minister in the Diefenbaker government for a time in the 1960s, but was truly fond of the man who defeated Starr by 15 votes in the June 1968 federal election, future NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who in his youth had been my parent’s paperboy for a time, delivering the Oshawa Times to the south-side of their rented Church Street red Insulbrick duplex, my first home.

Truth be told, my dad liked Ed not so much because of his NDP affiliation, although as a trade unionist that carried weight, but mainly because he saw him as a hardworking, honest politician; a kindred spirit, although my dad would have put it more plainly than that.

I well remember my dad’s General Motors’ ring, presented to him in 1967 for 25 years of “Loyal Service.” In fact, I have it now. My dad and mom, along with his co-workers getting their rings, took a GM-provided train trip from Oshawa to Toronto to the Royal York Hotel for dinner and the presentation by the company. After another five years of seniority in 1972, GM added a diamond to it for 30 years of service.

My first hourly-rated job was hammering large wooden crates together. It was just an amazing cavernous building that old West Plant with great big windows and wooden floors. I remember once going across the tunnel (or bridge, I’m not sure now how it was referred to) connecting the West Plant and the North Plant over Division Street. Later that summer, I hung rads in the “Rad Room” of the old North Plant across the street. My last summer job at GM was many years later in the Summer of 1992, working on the acid side of the Battery Plant.

The Canadian Automotive Museum was created in Oshawa in 1961. The city at various times has been known by mottoes that include “The City that Motovates Canada” and “The City in Motion” and, most recently, the “Automotive Capital of Canada.”

While my hometown of Oshawa is a lot bigger (and for that matter older) than Thompson, Manitoba where I live now, it was in many ways, at least as I recall it from growing up there, a lot like Thompson in being a working-class blue-collar town.

The men in my Nipigon Street neighbourhood – guys like Earl Kirkpatrick, Snow Willson and my dad – were often working six days a weeks, with overtime on Saturdays when they were on day shift. If they were on nights, they’d be busy flooding the Nipigon Park outdoor rink at 2:30 a.m. – after their eight-hour night shift ended and they went to bed – so us kids could skate the next day. That’s how I remember my dad.

Instead of going to INCO or Vale, as the company is now, and down into a mine, the men (and they were invariably men back then) I knew in the 1960s carried their metal lunch pails into the factory at General Motors to build cars and trucks. When they were leaving at the end of their shift, they punched the same clock they had coming in.

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William Marshall Barker: My dad would have turned 100 today

My dad would have turned 100 today. Sadly, he left us almost 30 years ago in 1989. My cousin, Sharon Seager posted this picture of her mom and my dad two years ago.

William Marshall Barker, shown here at right, beside his youngest sister, Norma, my sweet aunt, was called “Bill” by everyone who knew him (aside perhaps from my mother, Pat, who called him “William” on rare occasions, which never failed to get his attention), and my Uncle Bob Barker in Indiana, who always called him “Will.”

My dad would have been 100 today if he was still alive. He died in 1989.

He was the finest man I’ve ever known. His word was his bond. I never knew him to tell an untruth, which is simply remarkable. He never equivocated. He was always straight forward, meaning what he said and saying what he meant.

He worked at General Motors of Canada in Oshawa, Ontario, his hometown, as an hourly-rated employee for 32½ years before retiring in 1975. He was a proud rank-and-file trade unionist, a member of Local 222 of the old United Autoworkers of America (UAW).

The men in my Nipigon Street neighbourhood – guys like Earl Kirkpatrick, Snow Willson and my dad – were often working six days a weeks, with overtime on Saturdays when they were on day shift. If they were on nights, they’d be busy flooding the Nipigon Park outdoor rink at 2:30 a.m. – after their eight-hour night shift ended and they went to bed – so us kids could skate the next day. That’s how I remember my dad.

I spent the first of five summers as a university student, beginning in 1976, working in the same West Plant in the high-seniority Completely Knocked Down (CKD) department my dad had retired from the year before. Some of his buddies were still there; some I had heard about for years and met for the first time.

My first job was hammering large wooden crates together. It was just an amazing cavernous building that old West Plant with great big windows and wooden floors. I remember once going across the tunnel (or bridge, I’m not sure now how it was referred to) connecting the West Plant and the North Plant over Division Street. Later that summer, I hung rads in the rad room of the old North Plant across the street.

There are other memories, of course, which I haven’t quite got around to writing about yet. Like how he used to take me tobogganing in the winter at the Oshawa Golf Course. Or before I had a driver’s licence, pick me up after the third period of Oshawa Generals games, where I sold pop and hotdogs when I was 14 and 15 at the old Oshawa Civic Auditorium. That’s where the two of us would go together many winter Friday nights to cheer on our hometown Junior B Oshawa Crushmen, especially our neighbour, Scott Willson.

While my parents came a bit late to the appeal of pizza, I do recall my dad heading out on the occasional Friday night when some of my Nipigon Street friends, perhaps Mike Byrne and Paul Sobanski, were over, and dad coming back with a box of Mothers Pizza from Simcoe North, the first and only Mothers in Oshawa at the time.

Before that, and well into the 1970s anyway, my dad still picked up fish-and-chip dinners for us on Fridays after work, first at Paul and Helen Plishka’s Rose Bowl Fish and Chips at the corner of Bond and Prince streets, and later Pat and Mike Volpe‘s Pat & Mike Fish & Chips on Hortop Street, as well as from the H. Salt, Esq. Authentic English Fish and Chips franchise on Simcoe Street North in Oshawa, where we also enjoyed their fish and chips. Haddon Salt had operated his fish and chips store in Skegness, in the northeastern corner of England, before moving to the United States and, along with his wife, Grace, opening their first shop in Sausalito, California, under the name of Salt’s Fish & Chips in 1965. Pope Paul VI’s proclamation of Paenitemini (Apostolic Constitution On Penance) on Feb. 17, 1966, allowed episcopal conferences to permit Catholics in their jurisdictions to substitute some other penitential practice aside from abstaining from meat on Fridays, a practice which had been in force in the universal church since Pope Saint Nicholas 1, also known as Saint Nicholas the Great, in 851, so dad was in no hurry to abandon eating fish on Fridays, especially Halibut. I was nine years old, growing up in Oshawa, Ontario, when all this came to pass in 1966.

Instead of going to Inco or Vale and down into a mine or working at the surface in a refinery or smelter, the men (and they were invariably men back then) I knew in the 1960s carried their metal lunch pails into the factory at General Motors to build cars and trucks. When they were leaving at the end of their shift, they punched the same clock they had coming in. Every time I hear Men of the Deeps sing Rise Again or Working Man, my union resolve deepens just a little bit more.

In the fall of 1970, he walked the picket line for 3½ months in the longest strike against his employer since the Dirty Thirties.

While he wasn’t much fond of politicians of any stripe collectively, he did have a bit of a liking individually for Mike Starr, Oshawa-Whitby riding Progressive Conservative MP, and a federal labour minister in the Diefenbaker government for a time in the 1960s, but was truly fond of the man who defeated Starr by 15 votes in the June 1968 federal election, future NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who in his youth had been my parent’s paperboy for a time, delivering the Oshawa Times to the south-side of their rented Church Street red Insulbrick duplex, my first home.

Truth be told, my dad liked Ed not so much because of his NDP affiliation, although as a trade unionist that carried weight, but mainly because he saw him as a hardworking, honest politician; a kindred spirit, although my dad would have put it more plainly than that.

My dad had a Grade 8 education and wasn’t much for reading. I don’t think I ever saw him read a book, other than maybe to consult the odd one for some factual information. His idea of leisure was to work with his hands at carpentry or upholstery, and he built me, the reader, several fine custom-size wooden bookcases, with a larger than normal shelf sometimes for oversized books.

My non-book reading father, however, made time every day to read the local daily newspaper, and from 1983, when I began working as a newspaper reporter, until his death in 1989, quite likely read every newspaper story I wrote during that six-year period, and, as I learned only after he died, would often point out my byline in the Peterborough Examiner to shopkeepers and acquaintances in Bridgenorth, a small community just outside of Peterborough on Chemong Lake, where he lived from 1980 to 1989.

That man, an ordinary man by the measures of the world, yet an extraordinary man of character by any measure, was my father.

Bill Barker. Born on July 13, 1919. Gone from this earthly plain to his true home, but never forgotten by those of us who knew him here. My dad.

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