The Boob Tube

ED: Today we’re exploring the history of manufacturing in five objects. So far we’ve heard about porcelain, the musket, the birth certificate, and nylon stockings.

PETER: Our final object today is the cathode ray tube, also known as the picture tube. This innovation projected the image on a television screen. These tubes look like clear oversized Christmas lights, about the length of a hand.

BRIAN: Zenith, based in Chicago, became one of the country’s biggest manufacturers of televisions. There, in a Chicago suburb called Melrose Park, workers streamed into the Zenith plant every day, and they produced millions of those tubes there. Their livelihoods were built on them. But the lives of those workers were up-ended when Zenith’s plant shut its doors. In 2008, Ben Calhoun was a radio producer for WBEZ in Chicago. Though the Zenith plant had already been closed for nearly a decade, Calhoun tracked down its former employees and he recorded their memories of factory life.

PETER: We offer his documentary as a reminder of the lives behind not only Zenith’s picture tubes but all manufactured objects throughout American history.

WALLY KIRBY: My name’s Wally Kirby. I started in 1984. And when Zenith closed its doors in 2001, I was finally laid off after about 17 years.

NANCY KATOWSKI: My name is Nancy Katowski. I was there about three and a half years.

JOHN CUMMINS: My name is John Cummins. I worked there from ’79 till about ’98. The first time I went, I was 14 years old. My father worked there, also.

NANCY KATOWSKI: I was so scared.

JOHN CUMMINS: It was cavernous.

NANCY KATOWSKI: So big and so confusing– yeah, I would get lost.

JOHN CUMMINS: Easily a city block long.

WALLY KIRBY: An amazingly stuffed building.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Place was huge.

WALLY KIRBY: That’s when I finally got the idea of how immense the plant was, and I was actually awestricken.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOHN CUMMINS: When you went to work, it was like a city all on its own.

NANCY KATOWSKI: They ran it 24 hours a day, so it was neverending– packing tubes, packing tubes, packing tubes.

JOHN CUMMINS: The rhythm of the building seemed to be constant. And the people– you know, sometimes people would get a little bit behind. You’d see them speed up–

NANCY KATOWSKI: Go, go, go, go, go.

JOHN CUMMINS: –and have to work faster until they got caught up.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Constant motion.

JOHN CUMMINS: I was talking with another gentleman and he turned to me and he said, you know, look at the trucks that pull in and bring the glass in, and the trucks that pull out with picture tubes, and just think how many picture tubes they have to sell to keep all these people employed.

WALLY KIRBY: Maximum 3 to 3.5 million picture tubes a year. And that was running three shifts.

NANCY KATOWSKI: 24 hours a day.

WALLY KIRBY: 24 hours a day.

NANCY KATOWSKI: 24 hours a day.

WALLY KIRBY: Seven days a week, for all but maybe four weeks out of the year. That would be Christmas and New Year’s and the Fourth of July.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NANCY KATOWSKI: Very loud.

WALLY KIRBY: Very, very–

JOHN CUMMINS: Very noisy.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Very loud. There so much excitement.

WALLY KIRBY: For the most part, the noise level was probably real close to any EPA limit. You had to become accustomed to the noises.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Tubes busting, bells ringing.

JOHN CUMMINS: It’s like when you’re at home. Certain noises just become secondary.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Just used to it.

WALLY KIRBY: Every piece of equipment in there had its own personality. They all looked the same. They all looked like as if they should be the same. But they weren’t.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Different. Like, you know, when they put the glass on top of the–

JOHN CUMMINS: Hundreds of machines.

NANCY KATOWSKI: It was momentum, though. It was constant sounds.

WALLY KIRBY: And you’d know where you were, even if you had your eyes closed, because you would hear those particular noises. It was more or less the heartbeat of the building.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Like if there was, like, doors opening and closing, like– tch, tch, tch, tch.

JOHN CUMMINS: Ssssst.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Boom. Tch, tch, tch, tch. Robotic-like. Tch, tch, tch, tch.

WALLY KIRBY: You’d know when something was blowing up.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Ba-boom! It would be so loud! You would– half the building would shut down.

[ALL MAKING MACHINERY NOISES]

NANCY KATOWSKI: That would be the sound.

JOHN CUMMINS: But when they shut down, it was like walking through a ghost town. You could almost hear a pin drop. And it was hard to believe you could go from one extreme to the other.

WALLY KIRBY: The conveyor system there was pretty much the lifeline of the process.

JOHN CUMMINS: 13 to 15 miles of conveyors.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Throughout the whole building.

JOHN CUMMINS: I guess you could basically get on one conveyor and take a ride all the way to the other end of the plant.

WALLY KIRBY: The conveyors went up and down different levels.

NANCY KATOWSKI: They would turn the corner.

JOHN CUMMINS: The carts turned and–

NANCY KATOWSKI: Up and down and around in a U shape, and come back, and–

WALLY KIRBY: Safety baskets had to be put underneath all of the conveyors, because–

NANCY KATOWSKI: I guess picture those baskets.

WALLY KIRBY: Glass being like glasses, glass breaks.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Oh, constantly. Tubes are breaking all different areas of the building.

WALLY KIRBY: By the time they were ready to be put into a TV set, they were in the 80- to 85-pound range.

JOHN CUMMINS: They called it an implosion. Since it’s a vacuum inside, it explodes in.

WALLY KIRBY: Heat was a vital process to producing a picture tube. Many times the glass level was well over 400 degrees.

JOHN CUMMINS: And if the ceiling leaked–

WALLY KIRBY: There was leaks in the roof.

JOHN CUMMINS: And just–

WALLY KIRBY: If a raindrop–

JOHN CUMMINS: One drop of water hit that tube–

WALLY KIRBY: These tubes would shatter, just like glass would normally shatter if it’s hot and cold. We’ve all done it with Pyrex type ware.

JOHN CUMMINS: Sometimes you’d get a cascading effect. One would explode, and it would set the one off next to it, and the one down from it. So you’d hear one explosion knowing that moments later, you’d hear two or three more.

WALLY KIRBY: And because of that, it would rain glass– very nice big pieces of glass that can cut you pretty good.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOHN CUMMINS: The hazards that I personally faced–

NANCY KATOWSKI: Right, like the asbestos? They told everybody that there was no asbestos in the building.

JOHN CUMMINS: You know, there were some chemicals that we were using to clean certain things. And then after using them for a year and a half, you were told, well, we can’t use that anymore because it’s a suspected carcinogen. Well, what about the year and a half that I used it?

WALLY KIRBY: It’ll kill bacteria and [? life. ?]

NANCY KATOWSKI: Hydrochloric acid.

JOHN CUMMINS: And you’d see people get cut.

NANCY KATOWSKI: You know what I mean? You knew that there was acid in there.

JOHN CUMMINS: And I remember getting some on my finger one time and then watching as the skin literally turned white.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Containers, and they’d say, “Danger.”

JOHN CUMMINS: Your skin would be bleached for one or two days.

WALLY KIRBY: There’s a couple horror stories I have.

I could’ve killed that guy.

And there was four days that I ended up spending at home with eye patches on.

I seen a guy take off his index finger.

Creams and salve.

He wasn’t the only guy that lost a finger.

Bob’s head was caught in the machine.

Screaming.

A steel plate in his head, reconstructing that side of his head.

Six, seven times a week, the ambulance would be there from Melrose Park, to do something for somebody.

BRIAN: You know, you hear the reports that other countries are being industrialized and they’re– their standards of protection aren’t as high as ours are or were, and what are those people dealing with today?

By the time I left, they were trying to fully automate the plant.

NANCY KATOWSKI: They brought in 10 new robots. Big yellow robots.

JOHN CUMMINS: And that was their way of making the company profitable. Didn’t work out that way, though.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Person was way more accurate. And several times we’d watch, and it would just bust tube after tube after tube after tube. And we’d go, oh! What a waste.

JOHN CUMMINS: I was out of there before they actually said, well, this place is going to close down as a production plant.

WALLY KIRBY: So that was a pretty gruesome day. The people, some were crying. Didn’t want to leave. I certainly didn’t want to leave there.

JOHN CUMMINS: It was just strange to see someplace that you had spent 20 years just kind of get up and move.

WALLY KIRBY: It was easier just to let everybody go.

JOHN CUMMINS: We’re going to take our business elsewhere.

WALLY KIRBY: It was pretty overwhelming, all the families.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Grandfathers, sons.

WALLY KIRBY: Brothers, sisters.

NANCY KATOWSKI: Grandsons.

JOHN CUMMINS: Not only my dad, I had an uncle. I had a couple of cousins.

WALLY KIRBY: That was a big-time hurt for these people. It was a big-time hurt for me.

JOHN CUMMINS: That our manufacturing base, which is what helped bring everybody’s standard of living up, was slowly declining.

WALLY KIRBY: Little bit of resentment and a little animosity towards– I– I don’t know who to blame here. I don’t think it’s society, per se, or just the growth of technology. I don’t know. I– I have some mixed emotions on that.

JOHN CUMMINS: Where do we help the next generation come up?

WALLY KIRBY: We have grown past being an industrial nation.

JOHN CUMMINS: Is it going to be strictly just a service industry?

WALLY KIRBY: It’s hard for me to see that the three-piece suit is doing the same thing. It’s not doing the same thing. It isn’t the same thing. So our opinions and our values can’t be the same thing. They have got to have changed.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NANCY KATOWSKI: We go to the store, we buy it off the shelf, we put it in our living room, and we watch it. But there was so much more involved. There were so many lives that went through to make that tube.

JOHN CUMMINS: I look back at some of those days and think, where would I be today if I were still working there?

WALLY KIRBY: Probably the best teamwork type situation that I’ve ever had to be in. You knew who you could depend on, and you didn’t question them.

JOHN CUMMINS: I guess what I’d want to say is that a lot of people put a lot of their lives into that building. I mean, the picture that’s being drawn in my mind right now is like there’s ghosts there. Even though we go and we work someplace, and we come home and we live our lives, maybe we leave just a little bit of ourselves everywhere we go, you know? And each job that you go to, it changes you in some way, or molds you in some way. I think it’s because we do leave a little bit of ourselves in those places.

PETER: Those were the voices of Zenith factory workers Wally Kirby, Nancy Katowski, and John Cummins. That piece was produced by Ben Calhoun in 2008 for WBEZ in Chicago. He’s now the station’s vice president of content and programming.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ED: You know, hearing that story of Zenith and connecting it back to the story of Eli Whitney and interchangeable parts kind of makes you wonder how much the story of manufacturing is the story of interchangeability of places and of processes, and even of people. Is that too dark a view of things?

PETER: I don’t think so, Ed. There’s another way to frame it, though. Interchangeability can be seen as mobility. That is, everybody has an equal chance to get that factory job that may be opening up someplace. And I think the big fact of American industrial history, until fairly recently, was that there were plenty of jobs. And compared to Europe and Britain particularly, factory laborers made a good living.

BRIAN: So Ed, I think it’s important to remember the reason that people are interchangeable today is for 100 years, we’ve been distributing all this stuff all over the world. The rise of international trade is an important part of this interchangeability story.

I want to make just a simple point about interchangeability in the 20th century. That’s the interchangeability of roles– that people who make stuff are also seen as the people who buy that stuff. Workers are considered to be consumers as well. Their roles are very interchangeable.

ED: So Peter, you’re our specialist in taking the really big picture of things. How far have we moved from the days of porcelain and 18th century America?

PETER: Well, I think we’re still there, in some ways, Ed. On the one hand, interchangeability is associated with mobility, dynamism. It’s what has made America great. On the other hand, we’re not making much anymore, in that sense that you make a country great. It really refers back to the idea of being able to make the very best things– the best porcelain. Because we have made a great country, what will we be making in the future? And that sense that the whole world can do what Americans once did best– well, that, I think, is very upsetting for many people. What is the future of the producer in the modern post-industrial world?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BOBBY DARIN: (SINGING) The world is full of beautiful things, butterfly wings, fairy tale kings, and each new day undoubtedly brings still more beautiful things.

ED: That’s going to do it for today. But head to our website and let us know what you thought of the show. While you’re there, share your stories of local legends for our Halloween special about the history of horror. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org. Or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

PETER: This episode of BackStory was produced by Andrew Parsons, Brigid McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek, and and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Melissa Gismondi is our researcher. We have help from Sequoia Carrillo, Emma Gregg, Aidan Lee, Liz Macaulay, and Peyton Wall.

BRIAN: BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by the Shiacon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment, and by History Channel– history made every day.

ANNOUNCER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy Compton Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Peter Onuf is Professor of History Emeritus at UVA and Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

ANNOUNCER: BackStory is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.