Akron Life February 2022

HISTORICAL 330

AFTER WORLD WAR II, SOLDIERS CAME BACK AND WERE HIRED BY THE THOUSANDS TO WORK IN THE RUBBER FACTORIES. ONE OF THOSE SOLDIERS WAS JOE NIX, A 5-FOOT-3-INCH DYNAMO WHO WAS A STAR ATHLETE AT CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL BEFORE THE WAR AND NEEDED A JOB WHEN HE RETURNED, SAYS HIS DAUGHTER, PAMELA NIX. Pamela Nix: He got back from the war in November of 1945 and started at Goodyear in December.

He was a tire builder. He did a lot of physical labor. But he was also a strong leader and wouldn’t back down to anyone. He became a union representa tive at some point, and he wore an orange jacket so that other workers could recognize him and come to him with their grievances. The URW grew in strength as the rubber industry reached new levels in the 1950s and 1960s. There were many new innovations in tire building, with more automation creeping in. America was the leader in the auto industry and, subse quently, in rubber. But there was trouble ahead as civil issues and a sagging economy hit Akron.

in their own words: The Daughter

After 30 years at Goodyear as a tire builder and a union representative, Joe

notes that were griev ances. He’d give them to me so I could type them up one at a time. I sort of got to understand his job a little more at that point and realized he was pretty important. Most of the grievances were about being short changed. The manage ment would take some one off of a machine or from doing clean-up and make them do another job that was higher paying without giving them the money for doing that job. My dad was a union rep during the 1976 strike, and I remember that things were very tough financially at the time. I was already moved out of the house by then, but I remembered they strug gled financially then. I became a union rep resentative for UPS because of my dad. Many times, you were somewhat in between management and work ers. You could be caught in the middle of an argument. What he did always stuck with me and how he helped people.

Nix retired in 1979, not long before the last tire rolled off in Akron. Years earlier, he was a star athlete at Central High School, and team mates nicknamed him “Little Napoleon” because of his short stature and fierce deter mination. He enlisted in World War II, and when he returned, he immediately got mar ried and landed a job at Goodyear. His daugh ter, Pamela Nix, recalls her father’s experiences. “My earliest memories of my dad working at Goodyear were when I was about 7 or 8 years old. He would come home with ‘lamp black’ all over his work clothes. He was filthy dirty — and the smell. My mom had to hand-wash all of his clothes separately before putting them through our old wringer washer because they were so dirty. When I was in high school, I was taking a typing class, and he

I wanted to emulate him.” — as told to Brendan Baker

would occasionally come home with all of these handwritten

photos by Daniel Mainzer, Mainzer Photography

28

a k r o n l i f e . c o m | F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 2