LIVING IN A FLYING COFFIN [R, 11-16-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter--LIVING IN A FLYING COFFIN [R, 11-16-23]

 

The father of our Iron Mountain friend, Lola, was killed in WWII. Her mother had three children and no place to live, so moved in with her husband’s bachelor brother. Even though there was no “relationship,” people talked, and the brother felt that to preserve his reputation [That was a real thing back in the 1940s.] his new family should move out. So, they did, except the only place they could find to live was in a glider left over from the factory there that made them.

There was a lot of ready timber in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, so for the first half of the 20^th century, it was the place where unique creations were made from wood.

First came Henry Ford’s Model T cars. Henry wanted to have a factory in the UP where everything was in one place. He had a foundry that used the iron ore mined right there to make the steel for his cars. He had a saw mill that made the wood parts for the cars, like floorboards. He had an assembly plant that put them all together. It would create three thousand jobs. He thought that Iron Mountain should provide all the infrastructure for his factory, like roads and water supplies, without cost to him. The IM city fathers balked. Henry was not one to dither with negotiations [which helps explain his support for Hitler] so he just had his cousin’s husband, a man named Kingsford, create a sister city to Iron Mountain, by the name of Kingsford, a city that would do as Ford insisted.  Interestingly, the Kingsfords never moved, always lived in Iron Mountain. We went by their house every time we walked grand-dog Ernie.

The “woody” Ford station wagons were made at that Kingsford factory, which was always referred to as being in Iron Mountain, even though it wasn’t. When you process a lot of wood, you end up with charcoal, and thus the Kingsford brand used by every backyard BarBQ expert. Like everything else, though, that starts out in a small Midwest town, that charcoal is now made in California.

After the Model T came WW II, and the need for wooden gliders, stealth airplanes, known as “flying coffins,” since they had no motors, and pilots had minimal control. They were made in the Kingsford Ford factory.

The war ended before all the gliders were finished, so, shamed by the town for living with her brother-in-law, Lola’s mother just moved her children into an abandoned, not-quite-finished glider behind the factory.

It turned out that living in a glider was even more scandalous than living with your brother-in-law. It made people face their own narrow-mindedness and lack of neighborliness. They didn’t like what they saw, and as we usually do, they blamed it on the victims.

“They live like that because they want to.” “Nah, nah, nah na na, you live in a glider.” “They’re not willing to work.” You know, stuff like that, even though the victims were finding a workable, albeit unusual, solution. But only certain solutions are acceptable in a self-righteous society.

I think my first reaction, when I heard Lola telling this story in a presentation at our Bay De Noc Community College-West LIFE group was, “Why hasn’t anyone made this into a children’s book?” Wouldn’t that be great? [LIFE = Learning Is For Ever]

Apparently, though, I got to thinking about that so much that I cannot remember how the story came out. Except I knew the little glider girl when she had become one of the smartest and most knowledgeable and articulate persons in Iron Mountain.

You can always turn the tables on small-minded detractors by taking the object of their derision and turning it into a really good story. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be able, when you are “mature,” to say that you grew up in a flying coffin? That’s what Lola did.

John Robert McFarland

The photo above is of the Kingsford Ford factory producing the gliders.