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Beneath all the glitter, Curtice is regarded by friends as essentially still the small-town boy who came out of Petrieville, Mich. He likes to watch the fights and The $64,000 Question on television, read the papers, hunt, watch the Detroit Tigers (the night games only). He puffs casually on Luckies, likes his Scotch and soda strong and unstirred. His idea of Saturday fun in Flint is a run through the Buick plant in the morning and a poker game with his City Club cronies in the afternoon. He lives in a relatively modest red brick corner house, with a three-car garage. In the garage: his wife's Buick Roadmaster convertible, daughter Dorothy Anne's Buick Century convertible, and his personal, flashy Buick Skylark convertible, now being hopped up with a new experimental engine and transmission.
Safe at Home. Flint is the world's most General Motorized city, and it says more about the state of the nation today than volumes of statistics. To begin with, the tricked-up Buick of the highest-salaried man in the U.S. is hardly noticeable among the bright new Buicks and Chevrolets along Flint's main streets. Flint is the home of the main Buick and Chevrolet plants, the Fisher Body, AC Spark Plug and Ternstedt Divisions (G.M. auto hardware).
There is a job in the Flint area for virtually anyone who wants one. Of a work force of 135,400, some 86,700 are employed by G.M. The 83,000 hourly employees draw wages averaging $109 a week—with some skilled oldtimers at the forge plants earning $10,000 a year. Flint has an automobile for every 2.8 persons, v. a nationwide average of one for every 3.7. Nearly 80% of the residents own their own homes, and 80% of the homes have television (even though 15-or 20-ft. aerials must be stuck on rooftops to pick up Detroit). Spending is heavy, but savings accounts are going up too. "People have got money," says President E. S. Mulholland of Flint's largest department store. "They feel safe."
Sitdown Strike. In 1937 much of Flint was sprayed by tear gas as the U.A.W. staged its first major sitdown strike, against G.M. Today most people agree that the U.A.W. raised Flint's level of prosperity by getting its members a bigger share of G.M.'s increasing income, just as G.M. managers raised the level by continuing to increase the income.
Management and employees are a little proud of the fact that G.M. was the first automaker to accept the labor-dispute umpire system (in 1940), first to hitch wages to the cost-of-living index, first to link wage increases to productivity. Last year G.M. lost an average (nationwide) of only three minutes in labor troubles for each wage earner. Today's happier version of the sitdown in Flint occurs when local U.A.W. leaders, G.M. brass and civic bigwigs sit down at a luncheon meeting to plot the Community Chest campaign.