ABOUT QUESTING HEIRS 
Oral History and Genealogy Project

To complement yesterday’s post about Ford’s assembly plant in Long Beach, Gary Schwertley agreed to contribute to the QHGS Oral History Project by sharing memories of his father’s work at the plant.

“Memories of the Old Long Beach Ford Plant”

by Gary Schwertley

My dad, Don Schwertley, worked at that Ford plant in early 1946. He was a poor farm boy from Iowa who did well. In early 1941, recruiters from Lockheed Aircraft were in Omaha, Nebraska, right across the river from where my dad worked on his father’s farm. They were seeking workers to sign on for Lockheed’s Burbank, California plant. My dad went to an interview and got hired, so my parents moved to southern California in March of 1941. My dad worked at Lockheed Burbank until he entered the US Army for pilot training in early 1943. He was commissioned as an officer in 1944 and served in the Pacific Theater of war, separating from the army in early 1946. 

In 1946 jobs weren’t all that difficult to find, but those suitable for a separated officer pilot were. When my dad heard that Ford was hiring at the Long Beach assembly plant he signed on. By that time, my parents lived on Easy Avenue in a home that they'd bought the same year in Long Beach. Dad was assigned to the production line as a deck lid man. The deck lid is another name for the trunk or luggage compartment lid. He and another worker would spend their day hoisting steel deck lids into place on car bodies and bolting them onto the hinges which were already installed on the body. The car bodies were not yet installed on chassis (or frames); further down the line the finished body assembly was dropped onto the chassis assembly, basically completing the car, more or less. Of course installing the deck lids was done on a moving assembly line. Every motion in the process was timed, and workers had X number of minutes to do each task.

Workers on the assembly line at Ford Motor plant in Long Beach: image from L. A. Times Photographic Archive, UCLA Library

Okay, so far, so good. But wait—there was a catch. The luggage compartment opening that the deck lid was made to fit described a trapezoid shape. The men bolted the deck lid on, and swung it down into place to see if it fit right because it was slightly adjustable. However, occasionally there would be a car body coming down the line that had not been welded together properly and things were out of alignment. The opening of the luggage compartment might instead describe a parallelogram rather than the ideal trapezoid. The deck lid men had a hydraulic tool called a Porta-Power to jack the misshapen opening into approximately the correct configuration so the lid would (sort of) fit. This all took extra time. By the time they'd taken this remedial action and left the errant body to continue on its mechanical way, they had several “normal” car bodies lined up, and they’d rush to catch up. Not all of those car bodies necessarily got as many bolts into the hinges as they should have. They used heavy, pneumatic impact wrenches to install the bolts. Ford was known for paying assembly workers well, but my dad said you earned every dollar of it. He lasted six weeks on the assembly line, then quit. It was too boring, yet hectic for him. 

Where did he go from there? He wound up working for Ford again, this time at the retail level as a parts man at Culver Motors in Culver City. The VA had an apprenticeship program where they paid half a veteran’s salary at the place of employment and the employer paid the other half while the vet learned a civilian job. It was on that basis that he went to work at Culver Motors. He worked in parts for years. After Culver Motors, he worked at Freeman A. McKenzie Ford at 133 American Avenue in Long Beach, and for several other Ford and Lincoln-Mercury dealerships. After working in parts, he moved into service sales and management.

I have my own recollections of the Ford plant in Long Beach on Terminal Island. For one reason or another, when I was a child in the 1950s, my mother would drive across the Henry Ford Bridge, later the Commodore Heim Bridge, and of course we would pass the plant. Even at that time, you could see the effects of subsidence as the plant and its ground level were sinking as a result of oil extraction taking place underneath. The dock area where Ford-owned ships tied up and delivered parts for assembly had to be raised and reinforced as the land sank below sea level.

RESEARCH NOTE: If any blog readers have stories that they wish to share about themselves, their parents, grandparents, and/or other relatives who lived and worked in Long Beach, please contact the Questing Heirs Genealogical Society at our email address <questingheirs@gmail.com>. We will be happy to record your memories of days gone by so future generations will know what life was like in “the old days.”