When Music Fades

The muscle of America is in its blue-collars workers, the kind of people Walt Whitman wrote about 135 years ago when he celebrated the music of their labor.

I remember his poetry because my father lived by brawn and sweat, and a lot of my relatives still do. The melody of their toil is never far away.

They work on production lines or on loading docks and come home with their backs aching but their souls intact from a good day’s labor.

Their environment is noise and steam and the glare of welding torches, the clang and hum of machinery still providing music fortissimo in the factories of production.

I’ve listened to that kind of music most of my life, and I still do, but it grows discordant and less joyful under the deepening influence of recession.

That’s what got me into an unemployment office out in Canoga Park the other day, where music and dignity die quietly in the hushed environment of people out of work.

There’s pain there, my friends, and a quality of despair among those who wait in long lines to sign up for unemployment checks or to ask about whatever jobs are available.

And there are ironies in abundance when thick-armed men who wrestled tonnage for a living are told they could have a job tomorrow if they were only genetic disease specialists or clinical lab technicians.

“What about me?” I heard an unemployed foundry worker ask. “What kind of work do you have for me?”

The woman at the window just shook her head.

I ended up hanging out at the unemployment office after a conversation with Dennis Dalrymple at the UAW office across from the General Motors Plant in Van Nuys.

A friend kept telling me about Dennis and how he had his own show on public access cable television and was fighting to keep the GM plant open.

The company announced last year it was shutting down the local plant in August, one of 25 GM facilities that will eventually close its doors, putting 74,000 men and women out of work.

Dennis is 54 and has worked at the Van Nuys plant for 16 years. For the past two years he’s had a kind of talk-interview show on cable trying to upgrade labor’s image.

On one show, he had the guys in Local 645 dress up in tuxedos and discuss American labor while Rossini overtures played in the background . . . telling the world that labor knows music other than the drumbeats of production.

A Bronx-born Irish Catholic, Dennis was raised in a working-class family. His daddy used to take him to union meetings when he was 10 and tell him someday he’d understand the value of collective bargaining.

He does now. That’s why he’s got the show, which he writes as well as produces. Being in a spotlight is nothing new, by the way. He tried stand-up comedy for years and will say with a quick smile he’s bombed in the best clubs in town.

When GM announced it was shutting down his plant, Dennis began using his show to drum up interest in turning the big factory into a manufacturing center for mass transit.

He’s had politicians and transportation experts on his show who say the idea is a good one and they’ll back it.

“It’s going to happen,” Dennis will tell you. “I feel it in my bones.”

Maybe so. But what’s important here, I think, is that the guy is working 20 hours a week on his own time to try to make a miracle happen.

It isn’t just his job he’s trying to save, Dennis says. He’s an electrician and can always find work.

It’s the other guys, the 3,000 or so at the plant, whose standard of living has bought them homes and campers and good vacations, elements of comfort that will vanish like smoke in the wind when GM shuts down.

“What’s going to happen to their American dream when the work ends?” Dennis asks. “I’m doing it for them.”

There’s a kind of music to that too, orchestrated by people who think about each other when the chips are down and the game is ending.

That was on my mind when I stood across the street from GM and stared at its parking lot.

The plant is shut down for a couple of weeks and the lot was almost empty, and I said to myself this is the way it’s going to look all the time.

There’s nothing sadder than a workplace gone dead.

I was in that kind of mood when I stopped by the unemployment office in the Valley and listened to the muted sounds of desperation.

As I watched men and women without jobs struggle for composure, I found myself hoping against all odds that Dennis Dalrymple’s dream would come true, because if it doesn’t, the music Walt Whitman heard will go completely sour.

And then it will be gone altogether, and the silence will swallow us all.