Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove down to the guard shack instead of the office, because I wanted to talk to Vern Stumbo before anybody else did.
Vern is the man who stood inside that door while a floor manager told me I could sign or go out in handcuffs. Sixty-eight years old, twenty-two of them on that gate, and he did not say one word the whole time, and I want to be clear that I never held one second of it against him. A man does what he’s told and then he does what’s right, and those don’t always happen in the same hour.
I asked him for the property pass book.
Nothing leaves that plant in a bag or a box or a cooler without a pass. Yellow slip, three lines, signed by a supervisor and countersigned by the guard on the gate, and the stub stays in a spiral book behind the shack window. It’s been that way since 1988 because a man walked out with a case of bearings in a bowling bag and the insurance people got involved.
Tuesday night, 4:12 in the morning, one pass. A soft-sided lunch cooler. Carried out by a temp on her second week, signed off by a supervisor whose initials were not hard to read.
The floor manager’s own initials. He’d signed it walking to his truck without looking at it, the way he signed everything, because a pass was just paper to him.
And I’d seen that cooler go out. That’s the part I wasn’t handing him for free at four in the morning with a guard breathing behind me.
Vern photocopied the stub himself. Then he walked it into the plant manager’s office at seven-fifteen and stood there while the man read it, and when the plant manager asked him why he hadn’t spoken up in that office the night before, Vern said, “Because I wasn’t asked a question. I was asked to stand there.”
They found her in Marysville. She’d already quit and gone home to her mother’s.
She mailed the sixty dollars back the same week, in an envelope with a money order for two hundred more, and a letter that the plant manager read out at the Thursday shift meeting with her name taken off it:
“I watched them do that to an old man over money that was in my car and I did not open my mouth, and that is the part I cannot live with. The extra is not for the money. There isn’t enough of it for the other thing.”
Nineteen years old. I sent the two hundred back to her mother’s address with a note that said keep it and finish school, and I never heard anything more about it, and I hope to God she did.
The floor manager is at another plant now. He apologized to me in that meeting and it was a poor job of it and he did it anyway in front of two hundred people, which is more than a lot of men would manage.
They gave me my keys back and put me on as custodial lead. Vern got a plaque he keeps face-down on his desk because he says he didn’t do anything but hand somebody a photocopy.
Twenty-eight years of nights, and here’s the whole of what I learned. There is almost always a piece of paper. The trouble is that the men in a hurry are never the ones who read it.