{"id":2638,"date":"2011-09-13T21:28:43","date_gmt":"2011-09-14T01:28:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2638"},"modified":"2015-09-26T13:57:47","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T17:57:47","slug":"lovesick-on-the-shop-floor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2638","title":{"rendered":"Lovesick on the Shop Floor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theme Songs Page<\/a> | Previous Theme Song<\/a> | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n

Lovesick on the Shop Floor<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Sweet Caroline, by Neil Diamond (1969), encountered 1969<\/h3>\n

Buy it here<\/a> | See it here<\/a> | Lyrics here<\/a> | Sheet music here<\/a><\/p>\n

Crystal Blue Persuasion, by Tommy James and the Shondells (1969), encountered 1969<\/h3>\n

Buy it here<\/a> | See it here<\/a> | Lyrics here<\/a> | Sheet music here<\/a><\/p>\n

What Does It Take (To Win Your Love For Me)?, by Johnny Bristol, Harvey Fuqua and Vernon Bullock, performed by Jr. Walker & the All Stars (1969), encountered 1969<\/h3>\n

Buy it here<\/a> | See it here<\/a> | Lyrics here<\/a> | Sheet music here<\/a><\/p>\n

The first car may frequently be more important in a young man\u2019s life than the first sex.\u00a0 This is the obvious truth. \u00a0Sometime in the first two weeks of May 1969, my dad bought me mine, a well-used blue Chevrolet Nova.[1]\u00a0 And it was<\/em> important.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

How You Could Tell<\/h3>\n

You could tell in my<\/em> case just how important it was because I got into a fight with my father over that car, the very day we took delivery.\u00a0 One of the only two big fights I ever recall with my father, I may add.\u00a0 He, I, and my girlfriend had been slated to drive up together that evening to the family cottage in the Catskills, for one farewell weekend before I would take the car on to my summer back in Michigan.\u00a0 And, since I wasn\u2019t really familiar from my learner\u2019s permit experience with negotiating New York City traffic or the mountains at night, he insisted on being the one to drive the car up to the cottage.\u00a0 I was equally insistent that I do the driving.\u00a0 Voices got raised. I stormed out, till my girlfriend (who\u2019d walked out with me) prevailed on me to call him from a phone booth.\u00a0 And of course he talked me back in, and I think we ended up starting for the mountains that night, just as planned, and with him at the wheel.\u00a0 My independence behind the wheel would just have to wait another couple of days.\u00a0 And it did come.<\/p>\n

As I have indicated, my father and I almost never fought.\u00a0 He was the parent I always got along with.\u00a0 The huge blow-ups were for my mom.\u00a0 And this fight too should have been with my mom, as the Nova represented a victory over her protectiveness.\u00a0 She had been so fearful I\u2019d kill myself behind the wheel that she had actively sabotaged my efforts to win a driver\u2019s license even after I took driver\u2019s ed, and made it so that I did not have a license when I went to college.\u00a0 As I quickly found out, it\u2019s damned hard to obtain a license as a nonresident college student in a strange state \u2013 and you don\u2019t even have a car to practice or take the road test in.\u00a0 Hence, though I cannot call to mind exactly how I finally pulled it off, I remember some of the hard times I went through to land that damn piece of plastic, including flunking the New York driver\u2019s test at least once in Albany, courtesy of the very dad I was having the fight with, the one who had parlayed his New York City residence into a phony claim of New York citizenship for me so that I could be licensed there.<\/p>\n

Tough to Go Home<\/h3>\n

But it wasn\u2019t about the slightly deferred independence alone, that fight.\u00a0 It also happened because I was emotionally overwhelmed at that point, not only by the gift of the car, by also by the prospect of leaving my girlfriend behind, and by the thought of spending another summer in Michigan.\u00a0 I loved Michigan, then and always.\u00a0 But going back was going to be tough.<\/p>\n

Let me count the ways.\u00a0 There was interrupting the studies I was starting to love with a new intensity.\u00a0 There was leaving the dyad my girlfriend and I had become, knowing we were free to date others, and feeling nonplussed about it. [2]\u00a0 And there was going back to living with my parents after the freedom of college.\u00a0 Worse, I knew that, apart from any difficulties inherent in simply living at home, it was likely going to be a period of great depression for my parents; my mom had lost her college teaching job, and she accurately foresaw that there would never be another job for her again that was as meaningful.\u00a0 She was no longer very adaptable (though she had been so once), and I was expecting her to obsess about it, which would be no fun to be around.<\/p>\n

I was relying on the car to help with all of that, and let me count the ways on that one too.<\/p>\n

If I couldn\u2019t be a college student at study, maybe I could be a college student at play; maybe I could live like the Beach Boys on the album covers, make like the college kids I read about partying on spring break.\u00a0 Cars were good for getting to beaches and parties and places where young people congregated.\u00a0 If I was going on dates with unknown women, cars would be immensely helpful, especially five hundred miles away from the public transportation grid of Philly I had so come to rely on.\u00a0 And if I had to be with my parents, at least I could use the car to get away by going to work, because I \u2013 because the car finally necessitated that I get a job, in order to pay for insurance.<\/p>\n

Well, that was the theory, anyway.\u00a0 Things worked out a little differently.<\/p>\n

When my mom finally contemplated her defeat in the form of the blue Nova sitting in the driveway, her joy at my return took the sting out of it for her.\u00a0 I have a recollection of a frantic hug and her blurting out \u201cYou\u2019re home, you\u2019re home,\u201d and being taken aback because I wasn\u2019t so glad to be home, or, candidly, to see her, but having no words for what I felt, and knowing I would have had no right to say the words if I\u2019d had them.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And all she recorded in her diary was \u201c[Jack] returns \u2013 in his car.\u201d\u00a0 The dash said it all if you knew her.<\/p>\n

Auto Worker<\/h3>\n

That was on a Wednesday.\u00a0 The following Monday I was at the gate of the Grove Street plant of the Ford Motor Company in Ypsilanti, the next town over from Ann Arbor.[3]\u00a0\"\"<\/a> Ford\u2019s need for assembly line workers was immediate.\u00a0 I took a physical in the morning, and received an offer.\u00a0 I went home and wrote the girlfriend.<\/p>\n

This is the hang-up: Ford will probably want me to work the second shift, which is 4:30 pm to 12:30 am.\u00a0 But it would phht! my recreational and social plans, let along virtually cut me off from my family.\u00a0 So for once my parents were rational and indicated that the idea didn\u2019t send them into paroxysms of joy.\u00a0 Job-hunting isn\u2019t as difficult as I feared.\u00a0 For one thing all the auto plants are hiring right now, because people are going off for summer vacation, and the auto makers expect the business to hold up well all summer.<\/p>\n

It all sounds so like science fiction now, with manufacturing jobs as scarce as hen\u2019s teeth.\u00a0 Yet in those times it was true.<\/p>\n

It turned out Ford wanted me to work a shift that started at 7:00 a.m., not 4:30 p.m. as feared, so I took the job the next day.<\/p>\n

That Friday, I wrote S., my girlfriend:<\/p>\n

My wild summer plans have come to nought so far: my job eats up all my time.\u00a0 Tomorrow, for example, is a Saturday: Ford Motor Company, however, needs 165,000 shock absorbers pronto, 1\/16th<\/sup> of which, approximately, pass through my hands.\u00a0 So tomorrow I work from 5:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.\u00a0 Time-and-a-half the whole time, so it comes to forty dollars for one day.\u00a0 Not bad for a day\u2019s work.\u00a0 But it\u2019s hard,\u2026 very hard.<\/p>\n

I described having seen a performance of She Stoops to Conquer<\/em> one evening, but feeling out-of-place amongst the cultured audience.<\/p>\n

My hands \u2026 are getting covered with dirt that is too deep to get out with mere soap.\u00a0 I am beginning to feel<\/span> like an hourly laborer\u2026 [Last night] I \u2026 found myself telling myself once or twice \u201cYou\u2019re an auto worker from over at the Ypsi Ford Plant.\u201d\u00a0 Not a student\u2026 An auto worker at General Parts.<\/p>\n

And this, mind you, was after only four days on the job.\u00a0 I described it this way:<\/p>\n

[It\u2019s] so simple it took me about ten minutes to learn it: Take a washer, slap it down on the block, reach down to the conveyor belt simultaneously and pick up a shock absorber (weighs anywhere from ten to twenty-five lbs.), slap the absorber on the block, pick up mallet and pound the washer onto the shock screw, put the shock back on the belt, facing the other way, and start again.\u00a0 I am one of four people doing this job.\u00a0 I\u2019ve got to know one of [the others] a little bit.\u00a0 He has been doing this same wretched job for seven years<\/span>, and he still doesn\u2019t have enough seniority to work one of the four hydraulic machines up the line.\u00a0 What kind of a future is that?\u00a0 Yet most of the thousands of automaton-men who work in the same room with me are spending their lives doing something quite similar.\u00a0 And most of them are quite happy to be doing it.<\/p>\n

I topped off the letter by describing my night on the town after this day \u201cdown the works.\u201d\u00a0 I went to a coffee house and saw no less a personage than the legendary Sun Ra, but I wasn\u2019t ready for his kind of jazz, which at the time I dismissed as \u201cpure noise.\u201d[4]\u00a0 Then I went to another coffee house, where a folkie soloist was playing guitar and singing, and saw a couple of guys from my old high school trying to pick up a pair of lost-looking teeny-boppers and failing.\u00a0 So much for high times!<\/p>\n

Then, during my second week, my job got harder.<\/p>\n

Today I was elevated to operation of a steam-powered dingus known, I think, as a bushing ram.\u00a0 Never mind the specifics: it is hell on earth.\u00a0 I have to perform an incredible number of operations with sticky and uncooperative equipment at the rate of about five times a minute or more.\u00a0 Furthermore, if I don\u2019t complete them, I can screw up \u2026 a quarter of the shock operations in the plant.\u00a0 Three times today I inadvertently shut the whole line down!\u00a0 And it looks as if I\u2019m going to be doing this awful job for ten hours both tomorrow and Thursday!… You should have seen me swearing and cursing, while I was fighting that monster.\u00a0 Nobody seemed to do anything except criticize, except at one point at which I was getting a bit faint \u2026 and this guy I didn\u2019t even like much came up and relieved me for a bit\u2026. Whatever else he does, he\u2019s my friend now.\u00a0 I always thought it looked pretty vulgar, all those workers chewing gum.\u00a0 I found out why today: your mouth gets incredibly dry.<\/p>\n

Making the Best of Doomed<\/h3>\n

Clearly, this match of job and employee was doomed.\u00a0 The qualities that made for a successful auto worker had passed me by.\u00a0 Worse, I had yet to acquire basic skills even for holding down a job; my mom came home one day in the third week and found that I had not reported to work as scheduled, nor had I called in sick.\u00a0 The truth was, I was exhausted, and did not know how to deal with it.<\/p>\n

I had gone to the shop steward and complained about the overtime, saying I had agreed to work on regular shifts, not the OT.\u00a0 To my outrage, I had met no sympathy.\u00a0 I asked my Congressman if the employer could force me to work more than 40 hours a week, and was crestfallen when I found out it could.\u00a0 I may have had a fair amount of book-learning by that point, but I didn\u2019t understand the basics of assembly-line industrial relations, like the fact that allowing each worker to pick and choose hours would precipitate chaos, and the fact that almost everyone on that line welcomed the extra hours and the extra pay.\u00a0 If I was going to be a revolutionary, I would have to do it without followers.\u00a0 When I realized this, absenteeism and sullen silence had proved my only recourse, and my only response.<\/p>\n

I have written elsewhere in this blog<\/a> some disparaging things about Ford and the old Detroit auto industry; I take back nothing, but would be less than honest if I failed to add that I brought plenty of my own failings to that brief relationship \u2013 and it\u2019s me I\u2019m writing about here and now.\u00a0 If I had come to that workplace a more mature person, I still don\u2019t know if my body or my mind would have stood up to the challenges of the job for much longer than they did,[5] but at least I would have handled myself better.<\/p>\n

As it was, my mom and stepdad had an out to offer me, and I took it most gratefully.\u00a0 After years of trying to find a way to move to a better house, they finally closed the deal on a much nicer home in the Burns Park neighborhood of Ann Arbor.\u00a0 This move was obviously going to be a huge project, and they actually did need me to stay home and help them do it.\u00a0 There was no make-work about it.\u00a0 I guess they must have picked up the cost of the car insurance at some point.[6]<\/p>\n

I believe I worked another three weeks, and I listened to all my parents and did give the proper notice before quitting.\u00a0 I was now freer, if not absolutely free, to try to have something like the kind of summer I had been hoping for.<\/p>\n

Things Look Up A Little<\/h3>\n

Right out of the gate, I was able to host S., my girlfriend, over the July 4 weekend.\u00a0 I had been conjuring up images of her and feasting on the frequent letters she sent as a way of coping with the rigors of the shop floor.\u00a0 Longing was not as good as having, but it gave me some kind of motivation.\u00a0 The song that had kept going through my head while I thought of her was Neil Diamond\u2019s Sweet Caroline<\/em>, which came out toward the end of June.\u00a0 \u201cSweet Caroline\u201d sort of scanned along with S.\u2019s name.\u00a0 It kept me going.\u00a0 When Sweet S. actually came, it was a wonderful visit.<\/p>\n

Then too, I was able to be of substantial help to my parents in a grown-up way.\u00a0 I was pretty certain (not to mention determined) that this would be my last summer at home.\u00a0 With a car, and, frankly, more mechanical skills than either of them possessed, I would give them something real to earn their respect and my exit visa.\u00a0 My memory is full of things like hauling boxes of books, digging post holes and pouring concrete for clotheslines, buying a lawnmower and cutting grass, helping assemble and stock bookshelves.\u00a0 My new wheels enabled me to go to the hardware store, and run out for carryout on those nights before the kitchen was assembled. \u00a0Once there was a kitchen, I did some cooking. \u00a0In short, I functioned as mostly an adult.<\/p>\n

But that was it in terms of accomplishments.\u00a0 I wrote my freshman-year roommate that \u201cI\u2019ve been making shockingly bad use of my time, getting no writing done and very little reading read.\u201d\u00a0 But even that admission was only in terms of my formal business of being a student.\u00a0 In terms of the largely inchoate, unspoken agenda I have hinted at, I truly made little progress.<\/p>\n

Trying to Touch the Zeitgeist<\/h3>\n

The only way to describe that agenda is to remember what the world promised young people my age at that moment.\u00a0 There was an exciting, authentic, fulfilled way to live, so the media told us.\u00a0 We could hang out at the beach and party all summer long, as the Beach Boys promised.\u00a0 We could dress up fabulously, so we heard from Carnaby Street.\u00a0 We could bring peace to the world and stop the War.\u00a0 We could have constant sex and touch the infinite: just ask Jim Morrison.\u00a0 I wanted to be part of all of that.<\/p>\n

I may have managed a little bit of the beach thing.\u00a0 I got away to Silver Lake with friends for an afternoon or two.\u00a0 I vividly remember Crystal Blue Persuasion<\/em> playing on someone\u2019s transistor radio, which to my mind is the absolutely perfect beach song.\u00a0 Yes, when you look at the lyrics<\/a> and examine the history<\/a>, you find it\u2019s a song about God\u2019s beneficence from a Christian viewpoint, but beaches and the relaxation one experiences there are indeed God\u2019s gift (at least if you happen to believe in a beneficent God as I did), so there\u2019s nothing really inconsistent there.\u00a0 The biblical imagery is quite dispensable.\u00a0 The echo-chambered guitar riff[7] and the throbbing Hammond organ are not.<\/p>\n

I missed out on the great Ann Arbor riots<\/a>, which were sort of about the War and everything else that might have been on students\u2019 minds, and which went down less than a mile from my house.\u00a0 I caught a momentary sight of the turmoil down one street as I was driving home from a hard day at the factory.\u00a0 I did not stop either to participate or to gawk, and in fact was hardly aware of them.\u00a0 Worse yet, I missed out on Woodstock.<\/p>\n

And the closest I came to the free love and infinitude part was hanging out with my friend Walter and his roommates in an apartment, watching the Moon Landing, while Walter\u2019s randy girlfriend made jokes about transorbital insertions.[8]<\/p>\n

Partly my being in the wrong place at the wrong time was just a quick lesson in the reality of what it\u2019s like to experience a Zeitgeist: there may not be that much of a there there.\u00a0 (People I\u2019ve talked to who were<\/em> at Woodstock, for example, report feeling that they were in the wrong place to see or experience things properly.)\u00a0 But part of it was just my karma; I was not destined for that kind of summer cool.\u00a0 1969 was as close as I would come.\u00a0 The adulthood I was rapidly reaching would have its own thrills.\u00a0 But not that kind.<\/p>\n

Echt<\/em> Southern Michigan, Ex-Southern Michigan<\/h3>\n

The song that summarizes the summer for me is What Does It Take (To Win Your Love For Me)?<\/em> as performed by Jr. Walker & the All Stars, which was a great hit during that stretch.\u00a0 It is echt<\/em> southern Michigan, gutbucket soul by a tenor saxophonist from Battle Creek playing on a Detroit label.\u00a0 It is infused with longing, perhaps one of the longingest songs ever recorded.\u00a0 It is harmonious to a fault; if you only know the song from that recording, I challenge you to hum it.\u00a0 You really can\u2019t, and not just because of the baroque sax break line, but because of the two human voices you hear singing at places, in thirds, there is no lead.\u00a0 (When co-composer Johnny Bristol performed this in 1990 in Bristol<\/a>, the harmony from an unbilled accompanist is, if anything, even tighter and more inscrutable.\u00a0 Do not, on any account, miss, however, Walker\u2019s 1985 performance of the song on David Letterman<\/a>, where he sings without vocal accompaniment; the melody is utterly clear there, for my money much stronger, and the playing is simply out of this world.)\u00a0 That song exactly chimed with my mood through much of that summer.\u00a0 I was lovesick, and bored, and frustrated with my family, and excited about growing up and having a car.\u00a0 And this is the song.<\/p>\n

On Sunday, August 24, I got up at 5:00 a.m., got dressed, ate the breakfast my mom made, packed up the car, went with my mom to church (there turned out not to be a Mass at the anticipated hour), drove her home, and, by 6:45 a.m., motored away.\u00a0 Ahead lay a house where S. and I could live together, along with friends, and the college life I had been building for myself.\u00a0 Behind lay everything I had ever known.<\/p>\n

When I came back next, I would be a visitor.\u00a0 I would never live in Michigan again.[9]<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/p>\n

[1]\u00a0\u00a0 Bought from a UN colleague of my stepmom\u2019s, a Mr. Shezad Sadiq.\u00a0 It was a car that had already been around the block, so to speak; it bore a Kansas City dealer\u2019s markings, and I don\u2019t think people with names and accents like Mr. Sadiq\u2019s spent much time in Kansas City in those days.\u00a0\u00a0 General Motors had discontinued my model in 1965.\u00a0 Putting these clues together, I conclude I had to be at least the third owner.\u00a0 Source for the photo: http:\/\/wikicars.org\/en\/Image:1962_Chevrolet_II.jpg.<\/p>\n

[2]\u00a0 Not entirely voluntary on either of our parts.\u00a0 I believe the girlfriend\u2019s parents had extracted a promise from her that she would date around during the summer, and so of course it was only fair that I do so.\u00a0 And, to go on being fair, I think I kind of wanted it; the record is somewhat ambiguous on that score, and my memory is a little hazy as well.\u00a0 And rather than being evasive with each other about what we were up to as sensible kids would have done, we were fairly explicit, which was calculated to inflict jealousy and depression upon each other.\u00a0 Since we had already been bandying about the \u201cm word,\u201d I think we regarded this freedom to seek the embrace of others as sort of a test to see if we were really serious about making a lifelong commitment.\u00a0 But of course if you\u2019re confiding in each other, you\u2019re not really letting go enough to test separateness, and you\u2019re also not engaging in the kind of confidentiality with anyone else that might give a relationship with that other person a fair shake.<\/p>\n

[3]\u00a0 \u00a0Source for photo: http:\/\/www.ypsilantihistoricalsociety.org\/history\/page999995.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[4]\u00a0\u00a0 And to be honest, I still feel that way about much of Sun Ra\u2019s music.\u00a0 Check out the clips Amazon sets out on this 1971 album<\/a>, and see if you don\u2019t agree.<\/p>\n

[5]\u00a0\u00a0 One legacy of that job is my perpetual respect for assembly line workers, especially the ones who make heavy machinery.\u00a0 What they do is amazing, and any white collar condescension based simply on what they do is, to be polite about it, misinformed.\u00a0 I continue to take a dim view of the ubiquitous foul language and some of the other things I saw; these are not all misplaced noblemen who, in Gilbert and Sullivan\u2019s words, have gone wrong.\u00a0 But the work itself, and the fortitude required to make it happen, merit only admiration.<\/p>\n

[6]\u00a0\u00a0 At least, with my help.\u00a0 I have a very unhappy letter from my father, urging me to stay on the job, and lamenting what it will cost him if I don\u2019t.\u00a0 Apparently I had also been ungrateful about my stepmom\u2019s loan of the license plates.\u00a0 Clearly this was not my finest moment.\u00a0 But I know I sent some money which I earned.<\/p>\n

[7]\u00a0\u00a0 Sampled, to my delight, by De|Phazz in their song Sabbatical<\/em><\/a> (2001).<\/p>\n

[8]\u00a0\u00a0 If you don\u2019t remember the catchphrase, which you could hear on newscasts at the time, here\u2019s a technical explanation<\/a>.\u00a0 Of course the girlfriend had a rather different kind of insertion in mind.<\/p>\n

[9]\u00a0 Well, the declaration that I never lived in Michigan again makes for a good ending, anyway.\u00a0 A few weeks after writing it, however, I came across clear evidence that I was back in Michigan from the beginning of July to early September of 1970, taking a History course (on the British Empire) at the University of Michigan and helping my folks in some of the ways attributed above to the summer of 1969.\u00a0 It certainly goes to show how unreliable memory is.\u00a0 I guess you could argue that if it made so small an impression, it stands as proof that I had mentally checked out at the end of the summer of 1969, and hence that there was some “poetic” accuracy to my statements that I was no longer living at home thereafter.\u00a0 But I’m not a poet.\u00a0 So all I can say is I was wrong.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for images<\/p>\n

Theme Songs Page<\/a> | Previous Theme Song<\/a> | Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first car may frequently be more important in a young man\u2019s life than the first sex. Sometime in the first two weeks of May 1969, my dad bought me mine, a well-used blue Chevrolet Nova. The car finally necessitated that I get a job, in order to pay for insurance. The following Monday I was at the gate of the Grove Street plant of the Ford Motor Company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,968],"tags":[3036,22,3033,3030,3035,2039,2713,1712,3016,3018,3010,3037,20,3040,2316,3015,3021,3026,3039,37,3032,3013,1175,3012,3008,3009,3007,3038,3020,3001,3023,1092,3034,3004,3017,3025,3028,2465,3041,3024,3022,40,3002,3029,3019,3027,3003,3005,3006,3014,109,3011,39,3031],"class_list":["post-2638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-3036","tag-ann-arbor","tag-ann-arbor-riots","tag-auto-industry","tag-battle-creek","tag-beach-boys","tag-carnaby-street","tag-catskills","tag-chevrolet-nova","tag-chevy-nova","tag-crystal-blue-persuasion","tag-david-letterman","tag-detroit","tag-dephazz","tag-drivers-education","tag-first-car","tag-ford-motor-company","tag-general-parts","tag-gilbert-sullivan","tag-grove-street","tag-hammond-organ","tag-harvey-fuqua","tag-jim-morrison","tag-johnny-bristol","tag-jr-walker","tag-jr-walker-the-all-stars","tag-junior-walker","tag-kansas-city","tag-learners-permit","tag-lovesick","tag-manufacturing-jobs","tag-michigan","tag-moon-landing","tag-neil-diamond","tag-nova","tag-oliver-goldsmith","tag-overtime","tag-philadelphia","tag-sabbatical","tag-she-stoops-to-conquer","tag-shifts","tag-shock-absorbers","tag-shop-floor","tag-shop-steward","tag-southern-michigan","tag-sun-ra","tag-sweet-caroline","tag-tommy-james","tag-tommy-james-the-shondells","tag-vernon-bullock","tag-vietnam-war","tag-what-does-it-take-to-win-your-love-for-me","tag-ypsilanti","tag-zeitgeist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2638"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5517,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2638\/revisions\/5517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}