Pontiac Motor's First Carpenter Apprentice
I started out working at the Pontiac, Michigan location of Pontiac Motor Division (PMD) in 1963 and worked second shift on the car assembly line for the first year. November of the following year, they were taking applications for apprentices in the carpenter shop. I applied, and was one of the first carpenter apprentices to hire in to their shop. Another applicant hired in on the same day, and he was alphabetically higher in seniority, so basically we were both first apprentices, and both graduated from the school at the same time.
We did a lot of the stamping plant press metal foundations, putting large concrete foundations 14 foot deep in some of them. We helped to renovate a lot of the old buildings, like the old gun room where they used to test the machine guns they built there during the war. We turned it into an excellent testing department for testing parts that we built there in Pontiac. We put in a lot of the concrete forms for the roads throughout the division too. The first SPO plant was a part of PMD back in 1960s and we set up all the shelving for the parts storage, before the walls were completely put on the outsides. They established a bunch of satellite carpenter shops throughout the Pontiac plant, because it was so large and spread out.
Today there are just a few carpenters left there in that plant because they don't hire any more carpenter apprentices. The company, I guess figures it is cheaper to hire contract employees who have no loyalty to GM, but do the work just as well.
Saw many changes in the next 36 years that I worked there and I was in the Powertrain Division when I retired in 1999 and part of it was metal fab. Many name changes and car designs, saw them go from engineer designs to bean counter designs and plans that seemed to really hurt our sales. This is when all the GM cars started to look alike and they all used different division motors in all the different GM cars. After all I have seen and done there, it was a great place to work and it is really too bad the generations today don't have the employment opportunities that we had back then.
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