Speaking of Rubber (1951)

Yep, that's me. A retired rubber man. No, not the stretchy circus kind of rubber man. Me, I'm the kind of rubber man that was born, fed, and educated in a rubber town. Worked most of my life in a rubber factory. Now retired. Feeling good. Enjoying life. Some fellas when they retired moved away, but not me. No, sir. I kind of like this rubber town. Lived here a long time. Know most everybody. Take George Smith there. Knew his whole family. Went to school with his father. And Bill Hausknecht. He started working in that hardware store the year I got to be foreman at the factory. Yeah, Fitch is a nice town. I could tell you the name and job of almost anybody you see around the place. Except the kids. Can't keep track of all the kids. So many of them. That one. That boy there, the one with the bike. That's my grandson. Age 13. Present occupation? To get through his first term in high school. Ambition? To grow up. Got a great future to grow into like any other boy in the town. The whole country for that matter. But Jimmy doesn't think about it yet. He just pedals around free to turn his handlebars and ride down any street he chooses. Doesn't think much about what's going on inside that busy rubber factory. Though someday he might earn his living there like his father does right now. Like I did. Like a lot of fathers and sons do in this town. But that's up to him. Yep. He's free, all right. And he doesn't even know it. That's the way it should be. He'll grow up. Find out. Hi, Gramps. Hi. Well, did Bill have the tax? Here you are. Special safe delivery to grandfathers. We go anywhere. Much obliged. I was almost out of it. Foam rubber, huh? Yep. You going to cover all the chairs over in this stuff, Gram? Most of them, I guess. In time. Boy, Gramps, you're sure bugs on rubber. Well, you're sure bugs on baseball. Yeah. But I thought when you retired from something you were supposed to forget about it. Well, you can and you can't. But after 40-odd years, rubber still fascinates me. You know, it's an interesting thing, rubber. You said. Let me show you something. Now watch. You see that? In foam rubber, the air goes right through. Yet in that inner tube over there, the rubber is airtight. Now, take this rubber pipe stem. It's hard and strong and it won't bend. Yet uh this rubber band will stretch and snap right back again. And then uh take this rubber sponge. It'll soak up water. Yet that raincoat over there, the water will run right off of it. Hey, this is pretty springy stuff. Oh, I got something springier. Yeah, well, let's see it, Gramps. Well, uh you go upstairs and bring me an egg. An egg? Yes, a nice raw one. Huh? Go on. Go on. You deliver anyway, don't you? Okay. You're thirsty, aren't you? Yeah, sure. Have one yourself. You know, I guess I'm pretty dumb about rubber. Company makes things out of it right here in town. You know all about it. I never think of it. Well, I wouldn't worry about that. When I was your age, I didn't know much about rubber, either. No reason to. Give me a hand with this, Jimmy. We'll finish this thing up. That's it. Now hold that tight. And then I went to work for the company. Yes, I took a look around. Made up my own mind. Went to work for the rubber company. And after a while I began to find out about rubber. What it was. The thousands of things you could do with it. Saw how the industry had to be big to fill the demand for rubber products. About a thousand rubber companies in this country, big and small. Saw a lot of scientists and engineers working on rubber. Figuring out ways to make it do more things so people could use it more. Help them to live better. More rubber people use, the more we had to make. So that meant more people like me running more machines. Thousands of people making something that other thousands of people need and want. That's what business is. People. Small business or big business. It's people. It all seemed kind of exciting to me. So I stayed. You might say I worked in rubber and retired on it. Well, there she is. Now let's get her back where she belongs. Don't forget the egg. What are you going to do with this thing? You'll see. Pretty good. Hey, this is pretty good. How about the egg? Oh, yeah. Yeah, wait. Important things, plantations. Those are rubber trees. Thousands of them. Planted just like an apple orchard. Only more work cuz they used to be a tropical jungle here. They had to build roads, bridges, and railroads, plant the trees, wait for them to grow. It's a good thing they did cuz wild jungle trees never could have supplied all the rubber the world demands today. No, sir. And plantations gave the scientists a chance to grow a better grade of rubber. There's a worker there tapping the tree. Cuts off a shaving of bark. Those white drops are rubber. Liquid rubber, they call it latex. Just a drop at a time, that's the way we get rubber from a tree. Now you see why the plantations have to be as big as they are. And why it takes so many people and so much equipment and machinery just to get the rubber ready to send halfway around the world so we can go to work on it. Well, that's natural rubber. Remember the time when you and Dad and I went through the synthetic rubber factory? Sure. Remember what it looked like? Well, uh uh Well, Gramps, that was 3 years ago. I was only a kid then. All I can remember is a lot of tanks and pipes. Yep. Tanks and pipes and pumps, all working and mixing up different chemicals making rubber. Remember they told us synthetic rubber is made from two chemicals? Well, let's see. One of the two chemicals is made from either crude oil or alcohol. Call it butadiene. The other stuff is styrene. Comes from coal tar. They add a few more chemicals and the whole batch goes into a kind of pressure cooker that heats them, stirs them, mixes them, and we have synthetic liquid latex. Most of it's turned into dry rubber. Gets pressed into 75-lb bales ready to be made into a lot of things. You know synthetic rubber's a kind of Well, it's a sort of American production miracle. 1942, the enemy had most of our rubber trees. During the war, you need rubber. So big business and the government got together, developed synthetic rubber, built a whole new industry. Something that ordinarily would have taken 20 years did it in 2 years. Wow, they worked fast. They had to. You need a lot of rubber during a war. One of the most necessary things there is. Gramps, if you hold that egg any longer, it's going to hatch. What's that? What are you going to do, Gramps? Now, I guess your grandmother wouldn't approve. Let's go in the kitchen. For what? For what? I don't get it. Yeah, this is much better. What goes on? Now, just put those bottles on the table and stand over here. Now get ready. Now catch. No, no, Jimmy. Get back. Get back. Now you ready, Jimmy? Now catch. Hey! Can I uh Sure. Sure, go ahead. Go on. Go on. Get back there and throw it. Now, get back there. Okay? Right. Hey! The egg didn't break on the rubber, it bounced. Well, I told you it was springy. I'll say. What kind of rubber is it? Cellular rubber. It's a new kind of rubber with nitrogen blown into it. Makes it absorb shocks. May save lives in accidents. Oh, brother. What won't they think of next? Well, Jimmy, they keep thinking of lots of things because rubber by itself isn't much use. Just like flour if by itself wouldn't bake you a cake, rubber by itself wouldn't make you a useful rubber product. Take a bale of natural rubber, for instance. First thing you know, sort of giant meat grinder chews the rubber, softens it, gets it ready for processing. Different rubber products have different recipes, but they all start out the same way. Got to be mixed. One way is to put the rubber and the chemical compounds into a Banbury mixer. Or you squeeze the ingredients in a rubber mill till the rubber is smooth, even. Beats me how people think up all those machines. How they make them do I don't know. Well, it's like I said, people working together. Takes some people to figure out how to put the machinery to work, to manage it, uh make it pay off. Then other people to work the machine. And still other people to put up the money to finance the whole operation. I own a few shares of stock myself. What's the matter? Oh. Oh, well, you said something. Well, I don't know. I Well, I just never thought of rubber being made like a cake. Sure, it's mixed, shaped, and baked. Like Mom's cookies, huh? Yeah, Grandma's donuts. Or tires. Well, some people's donuts would make better tires, I grant you, but not Molly's. Not to Grandma's. Oh, Gramps. Well, tires just look like donuts, that's all. That's right. And tires look like barrels. Barrels? Kind of a peculiar idea, tire looking like a barrel? But it does. Yes, it does, that is before it's baked. I was kind of surprised the first time I ever found it out. Went up to visit one of the company's tire plants. I saw my first barrel tire. Tires are built up layer by layer using sheets of prepared rubber with cords inside. Cords come from textile mills. That's how rubber companies got into the textile business. There's a tremendous amount of work to be done before they start putting the actual tire together. They have to coat the cords with latex. Then they squeeze a coating of rubber over the cords. Then they put the barrel tire into a machine that shapes it and vulcanizes it all in one operation. Most rubber goods have to be vulcanized to give them their permanent shape. There she was, looking like a donut or a tire. Okay, okay. I can understand about tires, all right, but boots and shoes. Well, how do you bake a rubber boot? Well, uh first you got to build it. A lot of pieces fitted, stuck together on a last. Now, imagine something like this tired old foot of mine. Then they put all the boots in a big oven. Heat them, cure them. And then when they cool down, we wear them. Oh, not quite so fast as that. Rubber products, all kind, get a good going over before any of us get to use them. That's so the public will get good stuff. Inspection goes on all the time. And besides inspection, there's testing. Well, what's the difference? Plenty. Take what they do with tires. They pick a few right out of the factory. They wear them out on big testing wheels. They drive them thousands of miles on good roads and bad roads and no roads. They cut them up and see what happened inside. They do this with regular tires and with new designs before the public gets them. Suppose they want to know just how good a new anti-skid tire is. They fix up a section of road with slippery stuff like soapsuds. Put the new tires on one of two test cars and jam on the brakes when they hit the slippery spot. Then they're sure they've got something the public can trust. Phew, too much trouble. Not for the company. Stuff they make has got to be good. Got to give service. People use a lot of rubber nowadays. Walking, sitting, riding, playing, working, sleeping. The average person in the United States, let me see now, around 1910 when I started in the business, the average person used 1 lb of rubber a year. Today, the average person in this country uses over 15 lbs of rubber a year. All that rubber for what? For what? Jimmy, you rubber's so much part of our life that people don't realize how useful it is to us, how many ways it can help us. Open that door. What do you see around the edges? Rubber. Look at your shoes. Rubber. Look at your shoes. Rubber. Look at the table and the chairs. It's everywhere. Sure is. Look over there at the plugs and the cord running into the electric mixer. Probably a few rubber parts in the mixer, too. Little ordinary sink stopper. Lots of things. Rubber products in the bathroom, for instance. Rubber bath mats, hot water bottles, top of the little eye dropper. Find a lot of rubber products around the living room, too. Rubber in the electric cords to protect you from electricity. Lot of rubber in the radio or television set. Under a rug, too. Plenty of rubber over in the hospital, gloves, pads, masks, tubes and so on. Besides tires, average car has about 350 different rubber parts. Hmm, they're even making roads out of rubber these days. Yeah, rubber helps us relax, have fun. You'll find rubber in lots of places. On a farm. Rubber is used plenty in all kinds of factories. Rubber conveyor belts carry raw materials and finished products. And rubber packing keeps steam and water and chemicals from leaking out. Rubber hoses are mighty important in industry. And lots of other places, too. Seems you got to defend yourself nowadays if you're going to stay free. The modern army moves on rubber. Yep. Rubber is needed in every branch of the service. For boots, shoes, raincoats, tires for jeeps, trucks, landing craft. Airplanes need tires, too. And a lot of other rubber parts like bullet-sealing fuel cells. Wow, boy. I knew they made tires and shoes and football players, but all those other things, I never think of them. That was only a few of them. Rubber business must be big. Jimmy, if you do your job honestly and make good stuff for your customers, run your business right, treat your own people right, you can't help going big. I don't know how it is in other countries, but in America, that's the way it is. It's a big country. It's a free country. Big business and free business seems to be the natural thing. Seems to be the right thing. Well, they sure turn out a lot of things. Everywhere you need it, there's rubber. Yes, Jimmy, and where there's rubber, you'll always find a scientist mixing chemicals, workmen mixing and molding, making 30,000 different rubber products. People work in rubber so rubber can work for people. You uh think two of these things will hold your little supper? Well, Gram, supper's a whole hour away. Well, there he goes, pushing his rubber shoes on his rubber pedals, pumping his rubber wheels through his rubber town. Guess he learned a little about rubber today. Tomorrow, he'll learn a little about some other things from somebody else. And that's the way he'll grow up, a little at a time, nice and easy. Because in this town, in this whole country, we got a thing called freedom. We don't think about it all the time or talk about it much, but we believe in it and we fight for it when we have to. Because it's just about the most important thing there is. Yes, sir. Guess everybody's got his own particular reason for wanting to keep it this way.