I found out about this "must buy" via Clarkeson...FLINT, MI -- He disappeared from the General Motors shop floor a long time ago, but the Quality Cat is back -- at least in digital form.
Howie Makem, the one-time mascot of General Motors who roamed the shops cheering on workers, recently started his own Facebook page.
(Okay, so it might not actually be Howie, but it's far more fun to pretend.)
According to the Facebook page, the 37-year-old cat was born and raised in Flint, but now spends his days in Reno. It also says he's interested in women (unclear whether the human or feline variety) and is a pro-union Democrat.
He started the page March 7 and, despite the "morale-boosting mascot duties" he lists on his page, he has yet to make many friends on Facebook -- he's currently at ten.
That, however, may be in part due to a lack of effort. The Quality Cat hasn't posted much since joining, and it wasn't until Dec. 5 that he wrote a post telling a bit more about himself.
"I worked at the GM truck and Bus plant in Flint for many years, back when Reagan was in office, most cars on the road were built here, and this country still had an industrial heartland. But now I'm just a retired Quality Cat, roaming the land in search of kibble," it reads.
GM spokesman Tom Wickham said he's unfamiliar with the page.
"I don't know who was responsible for managing that. ... We have multiple Facebook pages," he said. "We have our GM Facebook page and the brands have their own, but I'm not familiar with that Facebook page and who would have been the owner of that."
Mary Henige, who manages social media for GM, could not be reached for comment.
Howie was made even more famous by author Ben Hamper in his book, "Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line," which details his time at GM and related shenanigans. On Hamper's website he includes an excerpt from his book in which he tells Michael Moore, then editor of the Flint Voice, for which Hamper wrote columns, about when Makem took the mascot gig.
On the other hand, my editor at the Voice loved hearing about Howie Makem. I can't remember anything that made him laugh harder. He'd double over and clutch his stomach, tears running down his cheeks. Plainly, this was the most hysterical gag Moore had ever heard of. The best part about it was that I didn't have to make up a single word. Everything that I told him regarding Howie was pure fact. I remember the first time I told Mike about Howie.Hamper further described Howie:"You mean to tell me," Moore spluttered between assorted snorts and cackles, "that GM has a guy who walks around the factory... dressed up like a... GIANT CAT! This is their idea of enticing Quality out of their work force?"
"Correct," I replied straight-faced.
"Oh my God, oh (expletive)," Moore squealed. "You know what this means, don't you?"
"The end of Western Civilization as we know it? A communist overthrow?"
"No, no, no. You have to get an interview with Howie Makem for the paper. The Rivethead meets the Quality Cat! Oh Jesus, oh (expletive)..."
It appears the phenomenon lives on. At least in the realm of social media.Howie Makem stood five feet nine. He had light brown fur, long synthetic whiskers and a head the size of a Datsun. He wore a long red cape emblazoned with the letter Q for Quality. A very magical cat, Howie walked everywhere on his hind paws. Cruelly, Howie was not entrusted with a dick.
Howie would make the rounds poking his floppy whiskers in and out of each department. A "Howie sighting" was always cause for great fanfare. The workers would scream and holler and jump up and down on their workbenches whenever Howie drifted by. Howie Makem may have begun as just another Company ploy to prod the tired legions, but most of us ran with the joke and soon Howie evolved into a crazy phenomenon.
Quentin Willson has read a great many books and is prone to inserting large and complicated pieces of Shakespeare into normal conversation. My wife's bedside book table, on the other hand, is filled entirely with those orange-spined Penguin Classics, all of which are about women in beekeeper hats who walk around fields full of poppies, doing nothing. These make for good bed-time reading, only on the basis that you need to go to sleep. "A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight and the vast, unenclozzzzzzz..."
With Quentin's books, I'd have to spend the whole time buried in a dictionary, finding out what all the words meant. The guy reads Chaucer for fun, for Chrissakes!
All my books have either a sub-marine or a jet fighter on the front and they're full of goodies who seem like they're going to lose but who, on the last page, do in fact win. I like plots, and Hardy wouldn't recognise a plot if one jumped out of a hedge and ate his foot. A book is no good, as far as I'm concerned, unless I just cannot put it down. I missed a plane once - on purpose - because I was still sitting at home finishing Red Storm Rising. If Princess Diana had walked into my bedroom naked as a jaybird just as I was three quarters of the way through The Devil's Advocate, I wouldn't have looked up long enough even to tell her to get lost. My wife, however, has just taken two years - yes, years - to read Wild Swans, which is about a woman in China who has a daughter who goes to live somewhere else.
But I have just read a book which has no plot, no F-16 on the cover, no goodies, no baddies, and I absolutely loved it. Which is a bit of a worry. It's called Rivethead and it's by an American person called Ben Hamper who, in the review section, describes it as ‘an enormously enjoyable read. I laughed. I cried. I learned. I got naked and performed cartwheels for my repulsed neighbours'. My kinda guy.
Basically, Rivet-head is the story of one man; a man who gets up every morning and goes to work at the General Motors truck and bus plant in Flint, Michigan. Really, it should have an orange spine, but mercifully it doesn't. Because if it did, I never would have heard about GM's answer to the Japanese threat. You see, when American cars were being sold with tuna sandwiches under the driver's seat and coke bottles rattling in the doors, GM decided it must impress on its workforce the need for better standards. The workforce, largely, was a doped-up bunch of ne'er-do-wells who thought only of their weekly pay cheques and how much beer they could cram in at lunch-time, which is why GM's decision to have a man dress up as a cat and prowl the aisles, spurring people on, is a trifle odd. That they called him Howie Makem is stranger still.
Equally peculiar was the later scheme, which involved the erection of several sizeable electronic notice boards all over the plant. These kept the people informed of sales, production figures and such, but could also be used for messages. One day it would say: ‘Quality is the backbone of good workmanship' and on another: ‘Safety is safe', but Hamper saves his vitriol for the day when he looked up from underneath a suburban pick-up to see the sign: ‘Squeezing rivets is fun!' He goes on to wonder whether, in the local sewage works, there are boards telling the guys that ‘Shovelling turds is fun'. And asks why, if the ‘demented pimps' who had dreamed up this message thought riveting was so much fun, they weren't all down on the line every lunchtime, having the time of their lives.
Hamper also lays into the likes of Springsteen and John Cougar Mellonfarm, asking what they know about the daily grind. He says they should be forced to write about things they understand, like cocaine orgies, beluga caviar and tax shelters.
I made an exception and read this book because I am interested in the car industry, but I can recommend it to you even if you have never been in a car plant, and don't ever intend to.
I tried to get Quentin to read it, but as the first word is ‘Dead' and not ‘Sibilance', he said he couldn't be bothered... and asked how Janet and John were these days.
