Sam Vasquez and Willie Ballard

     Farmall retiree Sam Vasquez of Silvis shows a calloused workingman’s hand, and with his assertive, piercing voice he counts off the only time he didn’t put in during 35 years at the plant.

     “I want to tell you, them five fingers there, I never missed five days of work in all them years.”

     Nearly 40 years after retirement, the “still healthy” WWII veteran wears a red IH jacket and hat as he sits with a few fellow retirees — who between them put in more than a century at the long-vanished Rock Island plant — playing cards at the UAW Hall in East Moline, a weekly ritual. There are also business meetings and occasional potlucks with families. Sam keeps the IH flame going locally, organizing reunions and providing information on legal efforts to keep retiree benefits coming.

     Retirement sits well with these men, thanks in no small part to the security of ongoing health benefits provided by International Harvester’s main successor corporation, Navistar — a long-standing commitment zealously guarded by the UAW. After the card game, they easily reminisce about the work, friends made, families raised, occasional union struggles.

     “International was good to me,” says Willie Ballard. “I have no regrets working there. I started there when I was 19 years old. I put 32 and a half years in there.”

     Willie lives in rural Port Byron, where he’s from, and like many Farmall employees who made the commute from country to town for factory work, he kept some land under cultivation. He loves outdoor work, he says, but the stable income and benefits working for IH made it worthwhile to submit to indoor labor.

     “I started October 18, 1963,” Willie says. “I’ll never forget that. And I tell you, I had a family, I had six kids, I raised them. (International Harvester) was real good to me. That’s a good company. I bought a farm, I bought 39 acres through them. Bought a house. They was real good. International was a good company to work for.

     “We had a Farmall credit union then. We’d go there, and they’d let us have the money. If you was a good worker, and didn’t miss no time, you had good status with the company. You could get anything from the Farmall credit union. And like I said, I bought 39 acres and a house and raised six kids through them.”

     Willie hired on soon after graduating from Riverdale High School.

     “First I started off in the foundry, chipping and grinding wheel weights,” he says. “I worked in there until the foundry closed in 1967 — they shipped it to Memphis. Then, throughout the years, I went out in the shop, assembly. Eleven years I worked in tool grinding, a skill trade. Thanks to the good lord, the company was good to me.”

     Sam goes back further — he hired on in 1944. Not long after starting, he took leave for Army service, including combat in the Philippines. When he returned to Farmall, he worked straight through to retirement in 1981. He mostly worked on the motor assembly line, and he became a union steward, helping ease tensions and conflicts between workers and supervisors when they’d come up.

     Sam remembers the change in International Harvester’s union representation, in the early to mid-1950s, from the leftist Farmworkers Equipment union (which in 1947 had aligned with the Electrical workers union to form the FE-UE) to the UAW. That struggle, and the strong Quad-Cities role in it, is recounted in depth in another chapter. A disastrous strike in 1952 and Cold War politics weakened the position of the FE-UE, and the UAW was voted in to represent most IH employees by 1954.

     Some saw it as a stronger choice. Sam Vasquez saw a hat.

     “I got to tell a little story about this,” he says. “I was always outspoken in this motor assembly line. There was about maybe 80 or 90 people worked down there, maybe a few more, and the guy come up to me one day, and they were campaigning for the UAW, and he said, ‘We want you to join us.’

     “I mean, I didn’t know one from another as far as I was concerned. And I said, ‘Well, give me one of them caps.’ They had a little UAW-CIO can cap. Like these (points to his IH cap). They didn’t have very many then — only baseball caps. And I said, ‘get me one of them, and I’ll join you.’ And he gave me his.”

     He chuckles.

     “I took a stand on that side of that issue — because of the cap — and I was with the UAW. I used that to paint with.”

     Sam remembers how the union rivalry gripped the community. 

     “I think that election was in ’53 or ’54, right in that time. And there was quite a conflict in the churches and everywhere else, stressing about the election. A lot of people got involved in it. And of course the UAW come out ahead, and thankful we got that.”

     After that was decided, union members came together for their common interests, as Sam remembers it.

     “The same people that were FE-UE, when the election came up for UAW, a lot of them same people became UAW people. They were still union people. Only a different name.”

     It all sits comfortably now for Sam and Willie, perhaps belying some of the stormy newspaper headlines over the years of struggle between the unions, and between the unions and International Harvester. Sam says the grievance mediation he did as a union steward was “mostly minor issues” that were often resolved without his help.

     “Really, it was never big problems. Everything was moving pretty good. The country was really moving in manufacturing after the war. So these were good years, all them years, because they needed all this stuff. All of sudden, you had a market for everything. 

     “All the industries was booming. Of course if one boomed, then the other boomed, then the stores had more, then your restaurants had more, and the bars. If you walked out of that main gate, there was about three or four bars up and down the line, you know, and for lunch a lot of them would go out to the bars and have their lunch.

     “That guy told me, he had that little restaurant, he said when John Deere goes on strike, he said I noticed it right away. People ain’t coming in here to patronize my place to eat. So a lot of that goes hand in hand. If one is doing good, the rest are all doing good.”

     Sam and Willie say the union made concessions when times were tough for the company, such as in the early 1980s. In a late contract, the union negotiated a “master recall” provision, that gave senior Farmall workers the right to go to other facilities of International Harvester or its successor companies. They could take seniority with the company with them to the new city, which didn’t always sit well with the locals.

     Jim Kerr, a former Rock Island city alderman and longtime Farmall employee, said he was offered a chance to work in Louisville with the plant closing imminent. “You’re taking those people’s jobs, and they’re down there with them Louisville baseball bats?” he said, laughing. “It didn’t sound like a good combination to me. I bypassed that.” Instead he took up a second career as a security guard at the East Moline Correctional Center.

     Willie, who had 24 years in, went to work at the Navistar plant in Springfield, Ohio, after Farmall closed.

     “When the plant closed in 1985, we was on the master recall list. That’s one good thing the union got in that contract, the last negotiation they had, we got the master recall language. That means for any other plant can hire anybody — but you have to have it from Farmall, the plant that closed. Good thing we got it.

     “When we went into Springfield, Ohio, that was a young assembly plant up there. We took a lot of seniority with us in there. We assembled semis, school buses, UPS. Navistar International. They’re producing a lot of trucks up there. Last I heard they was hiring.

     “I tell you, International was good to us. They paid for my expense to relocate to Springfield, Ohio. I worked nine years there. Then I came back home. They been good to me, man.”