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In April 2010 George Carney found himself stacking and banding wooden boards to be made into roof and barn trusses. His new workplace was Roberts and Dybdahl, a lumberyard in Milan, Illinois. Carney was paired with a partner, an automated cutting machine with five enormous shark-toothed saw blades that bit loudly into lumber and dropped boards onto the tray below. Now 51, Carney was using his body to earn a living again, even if the job paid only $9 an hour, a shade above the Illinois minimum. The first week he put in 60 hours. “It was a hard job. It was perfect for me.” On April 29, his ninth day on the job, Carney’s life changed forever, again. Two days after an unremarkable Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspection, a two-by-six shot out of the saws like “a ball out of pitching machine.” Its long side smacked right into Carney’s skull, and in an instant his world went dark. In the previous year Carney had been bartending while he lived in his son’s extra bedroom in Matherville, Illinois. He served “fancy, high falutin” drinks at the Oak View Country Club starting in late May 2009, after being unemployed for a couple of months. Members liked Carney because he would remember their names and favorite drink. The “whisky-beer man” learned to make cosmopolitans, martinis, manhattans, and other country club mixes. “I always told myself I was shy, but everyone tells me I’m not. I feel uncomfortable with it, but I seem to be fairly sociable.” In August he added a day job at Milan Lanes, a bowling alley and bar, and was working almost every day. Still, it was a “pretty low point” to be a working-age man living in his son’s extra room. It was a role-reversal that neither of them relished. “You don’t feel like you got anything,” Carney said of the year after leaving the Town Tavern. Then Carney’s father succumbed to cancer in March 2010.

Annette Dennison Was asleep when a girlfriend called her with the news. It was mid-morning on October 11, 2002, her thirty-fifth birthday. Annette, a self-proclaimed “night owl,” had worked the second shift the night before and pulled into her driveway in Monmouth at 1 a.m. after the sixteen-mile trip from the warehouse in Galesburg. Monmouth, over forty years after Michael Patrick made his first commute to Appliance City in 1959, was still a town of about 10,000. Home to a hog slaughterhouse on one side and little Monmouth College on the other, Monmouth claimed to be the hometown of gambler, gunfighter, and lawman Wyatt Earp. “No way!” She sat alone, dazed. Her boys were at school. Her husband, Doug, was at the factory getting briefed by managers from Newton. Happy birthday, Annette, she thought. Now find something else to do with your life. A flood of emotions overwhelmed her that morning. She had been stuck in the factory since she was 22 and didn’t care for the mind-numbing work. Recently she had spent her evenings on an electric forklift in the Regional Distribution Center zipping through a landscape of brown cardboard boxes. She loaded and unloaded washers, dryers, microwaves, stoves, and refrigerators in and out of semis, one after the other, all night long. Most Maytag appliances built in Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio came to the cavernous warehouse across the street from Appliance City. On the forklift Annette would sometimes daydream about getting out, but the work had become comfortable. She had spent nearly her entire adulthood in the factory. She had girlfriends, drinking buddies, and an assortment of familiar and friendly faces she would miss. It was through them that Annette had developed strong loyalty to the factory and even to the brand itself since she started in 1989, the year of the first Maytag refrigerator. A million questions popped into her head. She had always been a Type A personality and planner, and this was so sudden. She had no idea what to do.