Above: Former Uniroyal electrician Dennis Miller, pictured Tuesday in front of Banbury Place, the former Uniroyal tire plant in Eau Claire, will debut a film and book project Sunday titled “What Was Uniroyal?” Sunday marks the 30th anniversary of the plant closing.

Above: Former Uniroyal electrician Dennis Miller, pictured Tuesday in front of Banbury Place, the former Uniroyal tire plant in Eau Claire, will debut a film and book project Sunday titled “What Was Uniroyal?” Sunday marks the 30th anniversary of the plant closing.

EAU CLAIRE — Dennis Miller views the 15 years he worked as an electrician at the Uniroyal factory in Eau Claire as an important — and memorable — part of his life.

He also recognizes the crucial role the giant tire plant played in the lives of thousands of other workers — and the overall Chippewa Valley economy — during its 75 years of operation.

Yet 30 years after the plant closed its doors for good on June 26, 1992, Miller fears many Eau Claire residents have forgotten or never learned about what was once Eau Claire’s largest and most recognized employer.

That realization hit Miller like a ton of rubber a few years ago when he stopped at a local bar and grill and mentioned to the waitress, “I haven’t been here since Uniroyal,” referring to the many times when he joined his former co-workers on payday for a cold drink after a hot day at the plant.

Her response: “What was Uniroyal?”

The exchange inspired Miller, 79, to pursue a book and film to answer that very question. Both are titled “What Was Uniroyal: The Rise and Decline of Eau Claire’s Titan 30 Years After.”

The 80-minute film will premiere Sunday — the 30th anniversary of the closing — at The Lismore Hotel, just a few blocks from the red-brick structure that once churned out as many as 30,000 tires a day.

The 1.9 million-square-foot plant on the north bank of the Eau Claire River near downtown employed 1,358 people when Uniroyal Goodrich Tire Co. officials stunned the community by announcing the shutdown. Over the years, the plant operated as Gillette Safety Tire Co., U.S. Rubber Co., Uniroyal and Uniroyal Goodrich, with a break from 1942 to 1944 when it was owned and operated by the federal government as a World War II ammunition factory employing up to 6,200 workers.

Miller’s film, the last part of his trilogy on the plant and its workers, includes several former Uniroyal workers sharing facts about the factory:

• From 1917 to 1992, workers at the plant built roughly 500 million tires — enough to circle the planet at the equator more than seven times.

• For decades it was the largest manufacturing complex in Wisconsin between Milwaukee and Superior.

• It was once the third-largest tire factory in the United States.

• It provided thousands of jobs that enabled workers to support a family and enjoy a comfortable retirement.

Among the film’s more poignant moments involves the late Uniroyal worker and poet Jean Curtis reading her favorite among several poems she wrote after the closing. Titled “A Name, a Number, a Face,” the verses describe the fear that workers in the Uniroyal family would lose touch with each other once they no longer labored side by side for eight hours a day.

Another touching segment shows workers forming a human conveyor belt to pass along the last tire made at the plant. One of the former Uniroyal workers who appears in the film, Gary Klawitter, reveals that he was the forklift driver who transferred the last pallet of tires to be shipped out.

Sections of the film that show footage of abandoned factories across the country call attention to a key part of Miller’s motivation for telling the story. He wants people to understand not just the economic impact of the nation’s movement away from well-paying, union-supported manufacturing jobs, but the sometimes-devastating impact on the lives of the workers left behind.

“It’s much more than just the story of one tire plant in one town in northwest Wisconsin,” Miller said. “It affects over 18 million people at thousands of other factories too. This one plant personalized it to the point that I could tell the story of the decline in American manufacturing.”

Darrel Wekkin, the last United Rubber Workers Local 19 president at the Eau Claire plant, said there is no doubt that the closing created tremendous hardship for many of the dislocated workers.

To this day, Wekkin instantly recalls two dates he said “live in infamy” in his memory: Jan. 8, 1991, when the plant closing was announced and June 26, 1992, when the last workers walked out the door.

“I do believe many were hurt,” said Wekkin, who will deliver opening remarks at Sunday’s film premiere. “Most never again acquired the lifestyle of being able to take a family on vacation, help their children get through school and enjoy a nice retirement.”

Even Wekkin himself acknowledged it was “kind of struggle” to get by for several years as he picked up odd jobs and relied more on his wife’s income until he was finally able to retire — thanks to Social Security and the pension he accrued working at the plant for 27 years.

Miller considers himself one of the lucky ones, as he was one of about 250 workers at the plant who transferred to other Uniroyal Goodrich Tire Co. plants. Miller and his wife uprooted their two grade-school children, sold their house and moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where Miller continued to work as a maintenance electrician for seven years until age 55 so he would be eligible for some lifetime benefits.

Like many others who elected to transfer, Miller and his family later returned to the Chippewa Valley, where he came full circle by working for a couple of years at American Phoenix, a rubber mixing firm that still operates in the former plant, now known as Banbury Place.

The remodeled multiuse complex is now home to about 165 businesses employing roughly 800 people, according to Max Kaiser, Banbury’s property manager.

Miller’s hope is that the plant’s rich history will be preserved in an Eau Claire museum.

While Banbury Place, Royal Credit Union and Chippewa Valley Museum all have displays related to Uniroyal, Miller has long wished all of the artifacts and photos could be under one roof and readily accessible to the public.

Like Eau Claire’s Wisconsin Logging Museum, a tire museum could pay tribute to the industry that defined the history of Eau Claire once the logging era ended in the early 20th century, he said.

“It’s up to us. I just think it needs an opportunity to be remembered,” Miller said. “This is all part of a love affair I have with the American worker because that’s who I am and who I’ve associated with my whole life. That’s why I do this.”

He plans to invite attendees at the film premiere and anyone else who is interested to a meeting Tuesday to discuss the possibility of a local tire museum.

Carrie Ronnander, director of Chippewa Valley Museum, said “it’s important that Uniroyal’s history and the story of labor is told here,” but cautioned that it would be a challenge to sustain a standalone museum devoted to one topic.

Miller and Wekkin indicated they appreciate and admire the efforts of Eau Claire officials to diversify the city’s economy and help it recover from the major economic blow it received when the last Uniroyal workers lost their jobs and the plant’s annual $43 million payroll and $355,0000 in property tax payments vanished.

But they still don’t want people to forget what Eau Claire had before it was taken away when the plant closed.

“We would like to think we played a very important part in developing Eau Claire,” Wekkin said of the plant’s workforce.

A little-recognized part of that legacy, he noted, is that Royal Credit Union began as the plant’s in-house credit union as a result of union negotiations.

For Miller, the fear that Uniroyal’s role in city history will be forgotten is what drives him to help people remember the answer to the question posed by his latest film: “What was Uniroyal?”

“It hurts me that many people don’t realize what we had here, how fortunate we were here,” Miller said. “We should be proud of ourselves for how we have come back, but we shouldn’t deny the pride that our forefathers had in what they did.”

Contact: 715-833-9209, eric.lindquist@ecpc.com, @ealscoop on Twitter

Dennis Miller's book "What Was Uniroyal?" will be available after Sunday at The Local Store, Chippewa Valley Museum and amazon.com. 

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