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Wanda has spent all her life in Hamtramck, which is surrounded entirely by the city of Detroit. Except during the war, she has always lived upstairs in the two-family, white frame house her immigrant parents bought for $7,000 in 1921. Since her husband died 16 years ago, and her father, Roman Lyjak, who worked as a body finisher at Dodge Main before her, died in 1969, Wanda has lived alone upstairs. Her mother, 82, lives downstairs. Wanda's brother, an inspector at Chrysler's Jefferson Avenue plant, comes around to help with the house. Many of their fellow Polish Americans have left Hamtramck, having earned enough in union wages at Dodge to afford larger houses in northern suburbs like Warren or Madison Heights —and, of course, a car for commuting.
For two decades, Hamtramck has been shrinking, partly as a result of the success of Henry Ford's notion that the workingman might one day be able to afford one of the cars he made. The town was a sleepy German farm community when Horace and John Dodge built a plant to supply Ford with axles, transmissions, steering gears and crankcases. By 1914 the two brothers were building their own cars at Hamtramck, and by 1928, when Walter P. Chrysler's automotive conglomerate bought them out, the Dodges had one of the largest and most complete car plants in the world.
Dodge Main made Hamtramck. Thousands of Polish families, following a trail of promises, booked passage on the ship to Montreal and came on by boat or rail to Detroit to dominate the plant's work force. "There was a time when, if your name didn't end in 'ski,' you couldn't get in here," says one plant official. Old World bakeries and sausage shops sprang up. Bars and beer gardens huddled around the giant factory to wet a thousand throats at shift change.
During World War II, 40,000 workers were turning out military vehicles, and after the war, 30,000 were still at work there trying to fill the nation's pent-up demand for cars. At the peak in the late '40s and early '50s, 55,000 people, most of them Polish Americans, crammed the pin-neat houses pinched together on 30-ft. lots along residential streets like McDougall, Yemans and Poland. Every morning almost the entire working population would trudge off to Dodge Main. Hamtramck was a joyous, clean, democratic, workingman's town that drew Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson and Jack Kennedy to campaign alongside proud mayors like Albert Zak, Joseph Grzecki and Raymond Wojtowicz. Robert Kozeran, the city's current mayor, remembers that at 9 p.m., when the factory whistle sounded to end the second shift, "If you were a kid and you weren't in your house, the cops brought you home," and there would be hell to pay from the old man.