There are ashes of industries left behind throughout the Rust Belt and once-thriving cities that are now in decay. While others were not so fortunate, Akron has survived and even thrived in the face of obstacles.
In the 1850s, the biggest enterprise in Akron was agriculture. That industry helped usher in what we would become most well known for — rubber.
The beginning of the rubber era was like a gilded age for this city. Much of the culture we have today comes from the people who worked in the rubber factories and the rubber barons’ massive fortunes. They are the results of the blood, sweat and tears of a diverse labor force.
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Daniel Mainzer Photography
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Daniel Mainzer, Mainzer Photography
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Pamela Nix, daughter of long-time rubber worker Joe Nix
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Daniel Mainzer Photography
It was good fortune that Benjamin Franklin Goodrich met an old friend in Jamestown, New York, a meeting that changed the course of history and the fate of Akron, a city that was a short train ride away.
Akron historian David Lieberth has been researching how the city became the Rubber Capital of the World, spending hours and hours combing through archives and old news clippings at The University of Akron’s library and the Akron-Summit County Public Library.
He notes that most people thought Goodrich saw a brochure about Akron on a train, but he found new information that proves differently.
"I just ran across this magazine in the library. It was called Topics, and it had a story written by a guy named James Braden in 1929. He had first-person interviews with people who knew how Dr. Goodrich came to town. There’s always been some confusion about that." – David Lieberth
B.F. Goodrich was from Jamestown, and he knew a guy named Clement Barnes, who had been a friend of his when they were growing up.
Lieberth: They met on the street one day in Jamestown. Dr. Goodrich said, How is your town doing? He knew that Barnes had married a woman from Akron and had moved here. Barnes said, You know, it’s a coming city. It’s only a few hours away on the train. You should come and take a look. So that is what Goodrich did.
When he got to town, Goodrich had a meeting at the bank in what is now the Everett Building.
Lieberth: There were 22 people and one law firm that got together, sometimes they call it 23. And they raised $13,600. That would be the equivalent of about half a million dollars today. Here’s the important part. Goodrich came here because he had the capital. He had a group of people invest in him. And with that $13,600, plus his own resources, he was able to get a building along the Ohio and Erie Canal which he could use for water supply.
By the early 20th century, Akron was leading the way in rubber. Rubber companies B.F. Goodrich, Goodyear and Firestone were well-established, along with General Tire and others later on. By the 1910s, Akron was the fastest-growing city in the country, Lieberth says. This was all because of the tire and rubber companies located here.
The rubber companies had made an unprecedented move, sending recruiters to West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and other southern states to find workers during the early growth period between 1910 and 1920, according to Lieberth, because they were in dire need of workers.
Lieberth: But the kind of workers they needed were strong men. When you look at the pictures of these early rubber workers, for example, you see them pulling tires by hand, and it took a lot of brawn, a lot of muscle to build a tire. They needed about 70,000 people to run all the rubber companies during that time.
As the auto industry took off, so did the tire industry in Akron. The town was busy and bustling as restaurants and businesses catered to rubber workers along Market, Bowery and Main streets for the big three (Goodyear, B.F. Goodrich and Firestone). But it wasn’t without conflict.
While there was plenty of work in Akron at the rubber factories, the working conditions were horrendous at best, according to first-hand accounts of rubber workers of the day (which you can listen to on Akron Stories’ website, akronstories.com).
It could be very physical and dangerous work, depending on the job. Tire builders worked their fingers to the bone on machines. They worked long hours in three shifts to keep up with demand. Worker disputes often flared up, but strikes were largely unsuccessful. If workers walked out, management would point to the line of people waiting to take their places.
Jack Hefner is a third-generation rubber worker who worked at General Tire in the 1970s and was a union president. His grandfather worked at General Tire for decades and was one of the people who helped create the United Rubber Workers union during the big strike in 1936.
Hefner: My grandfather worked at General Tire for more than 40 years. My dad also worked there for 40-plus years. But my grandfather was one of the people — there were thousands of them — that helped form a union back in ’36 during that big strike.
(My grandfather told me) management would walk you over to the window and let you look at the guys out there in line wanting a job, ‘So you need to go back and do more.’ They were working the hell out of the workers. And multiply that by thousands of guys (and gals) working in the rubber shops around Akron. Then when President Roosevelt came into office, he gave workers the right to organize. And it just went from there.
The 1936 strike was a turning point for rubber workers in Akron, who had had enough and wanted their voices heard. Management didn’t think they needed to make any concessions.
My grandfather said that there were so many strikers — thousands of rubber workers — that the line started at the intersection of Case and Market and went all the way up past the clocktower and past the Goodyear headquarters, masses of people going all the way across the street. The sheriff and some Akron police officers came from downtown, from Market Street to bust up the strikers. But when they got to that intersection, they looked up the hill and saw how many there were. So they just turned around, went back downtown. (My grandfather) said it would have been a bloodbath on both sides.
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 representative 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, subsequently, in rubber. But there was trouble ahead as civil issues and a sagging economy hit Akron.
At the height of tire and rubber manufacturing, Akron’s population had swelled to nearly 300,000 people. Almost one-third of that (75,000 people) worked in the rubber factories 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 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 clubhouse 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 hostility between the two sides was resolvable when I was working there.
Hefner says that despite all the struggles, working in the rubber industry was pretty good while it lasted.
Hefner: General Tire turned out to be a damn good company to work for. At most of the rubber shops in Akron, during the ’60s and ’70s, you had your flare-ups and your strikes, but working conditions were not that bad. They were good places to work.
The unions made progress over those years with safety and OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) being started. We had a powerful rubber worker union here in Akron and around the country. … It wasn’t a deathtrap to work in the industry.
The unions could’ve been more flexible.
We had some ridiculous rules that the companies would every once in a while want to tweak or get rid of. But the unions were very stubborn. It took years to gain those rules, and they weren’t going to just fold on some of them right away. But it did hurt. It just gave the companies more ammunition when they finally started exiting Akron, to throw that out there and say that the union wouldn’t work with them.
They weren’t wrong in some instances. But everybody knows that the real reason they left Akron is that they didn’t put any money, or very little, into equipment and modernization of the facilities. They ran them into the ground. And when it came time to expand or get new equipment or new plants, they headed south where the unions were not strong.
As Hefner concludes in his Akron Stories interview, “Akron took a lot of blows during that time, but still, we survived.”
Like a Phoenix rising, Akron has found its way in the 21st century. The renaissance of downtown in the 1990s, starting with Canal Park and Inventure Place, then Lock 3, has influenced people to come back to the heart of the city as they once did. While Goodyear and Bridgestone/Firestone are still here in some capacity, the soul of Akron will always be rubber.
In their own words:
The Daughter
Daniel Mainzer Photography
Pamela Nix
After 30 years at Goodyear as a tire builder and a union representative, Joe 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 teammates nicknamed him “Little Napoleon” because of his short stature and fierce determination. He enlisted in World War II, and when he returned, he immediately got married and landed a job at Goodyear. His daughter, 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 would occasionally come home with all of these handwritten notes that were grievances. 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 management would take someone 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 struggled financially then.
I became a union representative for UPS because of my dad. Many times, you were somewhat in between management and workers. You could be caught in the middle of an argument.
What he did always stuck with me and how he helped people. I wanted to emulate him.” — as told to Brendan Baker
In their own words:
The Photographer
Daniel Mainzer Photography
Daniel Mainzer
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.com. He talks about his experiences as a corporate photographer during a time of conflict.
“I became acquainted with the contentiousness between workers and management 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 instrumental, 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 structure, where raw materials 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, with 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 anymore, except racing tires, but research and development at the Firestone Research Center is still on the hill. Firestone has a long tradition of bringing in chemists and scientists. You take a rubber chemist who’s been at it for 40 years — these are irreplaceable people.” — as told to Brendan Baker
