Oldsmobile History Center, 1986-2004. Chapter 1

I was there

I was there...

The Beginnings

In 1953 when I came to Oldsmobile as a GMI student, I was amazed by the immensity of the facility. What really impressed me were the very old buildings in the center of the plant. Several of the original early 1900’s buildings had just been torn down a few years before I arrived. Old wood buildings 16-A, B & C, built in 1912 as our second assembly plant, were used for the parts warehouse storage. There were a lot of old, old parts, and maybe even a few Curved Dash fenders stored there. There were some really interesting nooks and crannies in these old buildings.

I eventually started working in the Plant Layout Department that would be my initial working assignment when I graduated in 1957. There I found old plant maps, plant photographs and a lot of material on various personnel and plant doings. The department asked me to organize these and file them away. This really sparked my interest in the early history. I also was assigned to develop the annual area report. This document detailed the use of every square foot of space in the plant for the accounting department. It also got me out into the plant everywhere.

So this would be the start of my collection of material about the plant and the people in the facility. I kept adding material to it each year as things became obsolete. Eventually the collection grew into many file cabinets of material and got so big it had to be stored in several locations including the adjacent stacker crane for production materials.

Unbeknown to me, Helen Earley in the Public Relations Department was also collecting advertising materials, catalogs, production data, photographs of cars and events. Her materials were also stored in several closets and small rooms in the Administration Building. Helen had started during WWII and had been doing the same thing I was doing except on the product. People did not really have any interest in saving all this material. One of the Olds General Managers had told everyone to get rid of all that old stuff. Luckily, a few employees like Helen decided to save our old history.

Helen and I ran into each other during the 60’s special events and plant activities for anniversaries and plant tours. We decided to collaborate on a series of historical articles for Olds 75th anniversary in 1972. We thought it would be nice to write the real Oldsmobile history some day. But we were both working for a living and our jobs were not to write books. So it would have to wait.

Helen Earley & Jim Walkinshaw in the History Center

During the late 70’s, Robert H. Mooney, General Manufacturing Manager, asked me what I had stashed away on history. I pulled out a bunch of old plant photos and told him of our desire to make “A Book”. He agreed to allow me to hire a recent Olds retiree, John Sawyer, to go out and dig up materials at various libraries and museums. This doubled the material we had collected.

He would continue to ask how the collection and “book” was coming as time went along. He had an interest in preserving our history. Unfortunately, in June 1979, Mooney died. We lost our champion although Ken Knight, Director of Manufacturing Engineering at that time also shared Mooney’s enthusiasm for history.

After completing several major facility projects, I decided to retire in 1986 as GM was reorganizing. Helen followed in 1987. We shook hands, formed Earley Enterprises and offered the company to manage the archives, answer queries from the public and write the ”book”. Phil Workman, Olds PR Director, found us a place in the GM Training Center on the north side of Lansing. We moved all of the two collections to that site. The materials came from 13-14 locations and occupied about 450 square feet of space. We had 40,000 photos and about 100 five drawer file cabinets full of material.

Helen would answer phone calls, letters and was very busy doing that part of the task. I started to catalog the materials in a new computer we had gotten. I also started writing the “book”. I thought that it would take a year or so. I got a new MacIntosh computer and off I went. Well at the end of a year I had only finished one chapter. I told Helen this is going to be a long, long process.

Another photo of Helen Earley & Jim Walkinshaw in the History Center

Somewhere in here, I happened to be attending a retirement party for one of the friends I knew and Ken Knight was there. He wanted to know how the book was coming and impressed on me the necessity of finishing it since the Organization was changing rapidly. I told him I would. Two weeks later he too died. I couldn’t believe it. We had lost a second champion. It must have been some kind of omen or directive. I was determined to finish the book.

James R. Walkinshaw