Akron Life February 2022

HISTORICAL 330

AT THE HEIGHT OF TIRE AND RUBBER MANUFACTURING, AKRON’S POPULATION

Daniel Mainzer was a corporate photographer for Firestone, and when he started his job, he had to take a tunnel below the street to avoid strikers. Mainzer: I started in the middle of the ’76 strike. We had to get to the club house where the photo studio was located, either by walking across the street or in a tunnel underneath the parkway. We took the tunnel because there were demonstrators on the street, and they were fairly hostile. Very aggressive. I didn’t think that the hostil ity between the two sides was resolvable when I was working there.

HAD SWELLED TO NEARLY 300,000

PEOPLE. ALMOST ONE THIRD OF THAT (75,000 PEOPLE) WORKED IN THE RUBBER FACTORIES

in their own words: The Photographer

IN THE MID-1960S. HOWEVER, BY THE

1970S, THAT NUMBER DWINDLED TO 22,000. THE OIL CRISIS CAUSED THE ECONOMY TO GO INTO A TAILSPIN. INFLATION HAD JUMPED DRAMATICALLY, BUT WORKERS WERE MAKING THE SAME AS BEFORE, SO IT WAS LIKE A PAY CUT.

Daniel Mainzer’s first day as a photographer at Firestone was during the 1976 rubber workers’ strike that included 22,000 workers from Akron. It impacted him so much that he wrote a book, “Akron’s Rubber Industry 1976-1987: A Personal Journey,” which can be found on his website, mainzerphoto. corporate photographer during a time of conflict. “I became acquainted with the contentiousness between workers and man agement practically my first day on the job. We had to take a tunnel to avoid the strikers. It was such a serious issue that it led me to document life in the plants and then the plants’ death. That’s what’s in my book. I found that the hostility was not resolvable when I was working there. … I think the management/union conflicts were instrumen tal, if not the single biggest reason, for them leaving. Another major factor that led to the downfall of the plants in Akron was the old buildings. They were built in the 1920s, four or five stories tall. They were built on a top-down struc ture, where raw materials com. He talks about his experiences as a

went to the top floor. Then they would come down through each floor. The last floor is where the tire is produced. … It was very inefficient. All the plants in the south were one floor, modern workflow. The companies were willing to invest, but they needed to have a workforce that would agree to allow them to tear the Akron plants down and build new ones. The unions refused to do that. So you have a lack of capital situation. The rubber companies had the opportunity to ditch these dated plants and take the whole shebang down south and get what they wanted. Firestone never did achieve that and ended up selling to Bridgestone. They couldn’t solve these problems. The rubber companies may not produce tires here any more, except racing tires, but research and devel opment at the Firestone Research Center is still on the hill. Firestone has a long tradition of bringing in chemists and scien tists. You take a rubber chemist who’s been at it for 40 years — these are irreplaceable people.” — as told to Brendan Baker

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