Before and After

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Port Byron, population 1,002, is a Mississippi River town -- the oldest river port in Illinois, according to a forlorn sign that faces the water. Today a visitor to Port Byron can still get a pretty good sense of what kind of company Sandstrom used to be just from the layout of the place, which hasn't changed. There's the plant, first of all, toward the south end of Main Street, a squat building with a sheet-metal skin that opens onto a loading dock, where the plant workers take breaks in the afternoon sun. The cinder-block laboratory adjoins the plant, but it's on a different level -- lower in physical space, higher in the organizational hierarchy. Behind the plant and the lab, up on the hill, is the office, a handsome clapboard building with views of the plant and the river.

When the new office building was built, in 1982, so was a covered wooden staircase leading from the back door of the plant up the steep side of the hill to the office driveway on High Street. Forever after, to Henkelman and the other plant workers, management was "up on the hill." To get there, you took "the stairway to heaven."

Henkelman's world, the plant floor, was dark and noisy and smelled strongly like a high school chemistry classroom. After about a year Henkelman became a mill operator, mixing paints in a giant blender, following formulas supplied by the lab. The pay was a little better, and the work was more engaging, but there were frustrations at every turn. The problems that came up were somehow always different and always the same: Henkelman would think he had a better idea about how to do something, he'd take it to the guys in the lab (who had college degrees and carried business cards and wore to work the kinds of clothes they could afterward go home and eat supper in), and they'd tell him, in so many words, to blow off. "It was like they hired me from the neck down," says Henkelman. "Warm body, strong back, weak mind."

Henkelman bristled. He had never been content to let others worry about the right way to do things. His father recalls how Henkelman, not much more than a toddler, butted in while his dad was working on a piece of machinery in the yard one day to say, "Hey, Dad, let me wrench that a little while."

Over time Henkelman learned to rely less on the formulas supplied by the lab (which were often no more than lists of ingredients, in no particular order) and more on his own knowledge and experience, which he stored on a shadow set of formula cards. The mill operators all helped one another out. "We'd get these mandates coming from the lab that you got to do it this way or else," Henkelman says. "We did a lot of things under the cover of 'Don't tell nobody that we did this, but we're gonna check this out to see whether it works, because we don't believe the guys in the lab.' And we would succeed, and we'd kinda strut into the lab and, you know, 'Suppose we can try it this way once?' And they'd say, 'Well, OK,' begrudgingly. It's like we didn't know what we were talking about or what we were doing."

It was an elaborate game -- costly, inefficient, demeaning to all parties, and increasingly untenable. As Sandstrom faced growing pressures from quality-conscious customers demanding consistent output the war between the lab and the plant escalated. Profits suffered, and so did morale. Henkelman, after 13 years, was thinking about quitting.

Meanwhile, events were spiraling toward another crisis, this one in Henkelman's personal life. Henkelman, you see, was a drunk, and also a pothead. Finding nothing at work to challenge him, he looked, he says, "into the bottom of a bottle." More and more, he lived for getting wasted. "That was the only reason I showed up for work."

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There were days, more days than he can remember, when he showed up at work with a hangover, and the smell on the plant floor would overwhelm him and he would be sick. One day the alarm went off and he rolled out of bed and into his coat and down the stairs, nearly making it all the way to work before the strange quiet on Main Street led him to examine a newspaper box, which come to find out was filled with Sunday papers. And there was the day following too many lost days spent driving around, drinking beer in his friend's convertible, when he noticed through a hole in his T-shirt a spot of sunburn on his shoulder, and only then wondered how long it had been since he last changed his shirt. The wonder is that he managed to stay employed.

In 1987, after years of slurred roadside apologies to troopers (a wink with a warning to drive straight home was the standard reply), Henkelman finally got arrested and lost his license for three months. That shook him up. By then he was living in Rapids City, the next town downriver from Port Byron, one mile and seven-tenths from the plant. He knows the distance because he walked it every day. His friends offered him rides, but he always refused. He was thinking, "I'd better walk, because if I don't walk, I'm not gonna remember why I gotta ask for a ride."

For a time after that, things were a little better. What started out as a twice-daily 40-minute forced march was, by the end, taking him 25 minutes door-to-door, and he was enjoying the exercise. He lost 20 pounds. He completed a court-ordered counseling program and actually quit drinking for seven weeks. ("I didn't quit smoking dope. I couldn't give them both up," he says.) But then it happened, barely six months after his conviction, that he woke up one morning in bed without the slightest idea how he'd gotten there. It was just like the old days. "It was like the cycle started all over again," he says.

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