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In April 1974, Admiral was absorbed into Rockwell International’s growing empire. The Vietnam War contractor was, according to the New York Times, on a “debt-financed acquisition binge that lasted almost a decade” as it spread its reach into aircraft, defense, aerospace, electronics, and appliances. Admiral, meanwhile, was still churning out televisions, radios, and home appliances at factories across the Midwest. Productive as it was, the little company couldn’t afford the massive capital outlays required to modernize, market, and survive in the increasingly brutal electronics and appliance businesses. Accustomed to the massive revenues and fat profits of big government contracts, Rockwell International trimmed employment at the plant, investing $25 million to automate the chest-freezer line. In 1975 Rockwell added a 60,000-square-foot microwave oven facility, and in 1978 it spent $12 million to retool the top-mount refrigerator line and erect the “Blue Goose,” a massive machine the length of a football field that spat out finished metal cabinets. In earlier times, investment meant more jobs. Under Rockwell’s rigorous ethic of scientific management, it usually meant fewer. Admiral accounted for about an eighth of Rockwell’s revenues. “We weren’t even peanuts to Rockwell,” Michael Patrick said. It was a new era for Appliance City. One afternoon in the mid-1970s, Dave Bevard was let out of work an hour and a half early. Production workers were instructed to gather in the vast parking lot across the street from the factory. Under a circus tent, a Rockwell representative and the Admiral plant manager told workers about the importance of the B-1 bomber to the nation’s defense, to Rockwell’s future, and, consequently, to Galesburg jobs. By this time Rockwell had production of the B-1 in over forty states, making itself the model practitioner of militaryindustrial growth. The plan was to use its nonmilitary production facilities in a lobbying campaign to maintain one of the most lucrative military contracts in history—around $10 billion at the time. Workers signed premade postcards for their congressman and went home early that day.

It was Late on a sunny, but bitterly cold mid-February afternoon. Michael Patrick, red-eared from the chill, cast a long shadow across the rough concrete that used to be the Appliance City factory floor. A few months earlier, two-thirds of the expansive ruin had been razed. It was now an extended chinhigh pile of crumbled bricks, broken cinderblocks, mangled rebar, and cornyellow insulation chunks. Patrick, dressed in a corduroy jacket, wool trousers, and a brown wool fedora, remarked that there was little now to stop the bitter Arctic winds that swept through the enormous demolition site. One could see clear through to the Henry C. Hill Correctional Center across the tracks and farther north on Illinois Route 41. The razed portion of the former factory was big enough to fit twenty football fields, side by side. The newest part of the factory was still standing, but vacant. The California-based investment company that owned the property hoped that clearing the “old, antiquated industrial real estate” would make the remaining property more attractive to potential buyers. “When you’re here,” Patrick said, “you think about the people. It was the blood, sweat, and tears of the workers that made this place run. It was ours, you know? We had different owners come and go but we made it run.” He pushed his hands deep into his jacket pockets and shrugged. It was early 2013, and Patrick could mark fifty-four years since he and Bob Dennison, Doug’s father, started packing insulation at Admiral’s Midwest Manufacturing plant on January 26, 1959. Patrick lived alone in a modest brick house on South Pleasant Avenue, just across the BNSF tracks, less than a mile away. The 72-year-old retiree hibernated in the winter, but managed to make each of his granddaughter’s sixth-grade basketball games. When the weather warmed, Patrick took his late model minivan to antique shows, estate sales, and collectors’ conventions. He collected license plates and license plate toppers, die-cast cars, and other trinkets. Earlier that day, over lunch at the Landmark Cafe, we had discussed the wage pressures, retiree obligations, and foreign competition that faced Maytag in the early 2000s.