Closing makes for uncertainty
Clint Stuckey, Haldex Brake production manager, is busy in the final stages of closing down the company’s plant here and will spend the better part of three weeks to get equipment transferred to Monterrey, Mexico, up and running.
At age 51, Stuckey isn’t sure what will occur next, and he hasn’t spent much time thinking about it.
“I know the Lord will open a door for me to go through. I know there will be an opportunity for me to do something different and learn something new,” he said.
Stuckey has worked his way up at Haldex, eventually to production manager a year ago.
Closure of the Haldex Brake plant, announced earlier this summer, was “a business decision that I had no say in,” Stuckey said. “I’d be lying if I said it made me happy. I am a little discouraged and upset. Some of it is fear of the unknown, but I’m trying to keep a positive attitude.”
“It’s reassuring to know that God has a plan already, it’s just that we don’t know yet what it is,” said his wife, Melanie.
“It is a little difficult to find something when you’re in management, but I have some talents” that Stuckey is convinced will be marketable, if not in Iola then somewhere, perhaps Joplin, Mo., “where both of us have lots of family.”
Because of the crush of activities, Stuckey said he had little time to dwell on the plant’s closing or what might happen next for himself and the other 150-plus employees who soon will walk from the Iola plant for the last time.
“We have some very special people at Haldex,” he said. “We’ve been working six days — seven in machining — and the quality has stayed real high. Everyone has remained quality minded. It takes special people to keep that kind of attitude when they know what’s going to happen.”
The extended hours have been spent building inventory to bridge production time lost when equipment is moved from Iola to Monterrey and startup of the Mexican plant. The move is just around the corner — Oct. 1 is the target date — with some machining work expected to be done in Iola through October.
Stuckey said 15 employees, including himself, had volunteered to help with production startup in Monterrey. They will go in rotations that will have the Iolans in the Mexican plant 10 days, home for three and then back for 10 more.
The process involved in moving Iola’s production to Mexico isn’t altogether unfamiliar to Stuckey.
He went to Rexdell in Ontario, Canada, to help close out an Echlin plant several years ago; Echlin was Berg’s parent company. He also was in Paris, Tenn., two years ago on a similar mission, when production lines there were moved to Iola.
Being in management, Stuckey has the fate of other workers on his mind, as well as his own.
“I pray every night that the Lord helps everyone find a job,” he said.
“Working in a plant like this for as long as I and many others have — average tenure is better than 15 years — makes it seem like family,” he said. “You know about everyone’s kids, you know everyone’s illnesses and when they’re having problems. You care about each other. We had an awards banquet Saturday night, the last one we’ll ever attend all together, and it got pretty emotional.
“I’ve always liked what I’ve done, with new challenges every day, and I appreciate Haldex having given me the opportunities I’ve had,” Stuckey said. “Until I’m done with the job I have a job to do and I’ll do it.”
Stuckey harbors no ill feeling.
“The company is doing more than a lot would with severance pay we’re getting,” based on tenure and level of employment. “They’re even having classes to help everyone write resumes to get ready to move on.”
STUCKEY SAID he probably never would have heard of Haldex Brake if he and a friend had not decided to cruise Main Street in Joplin, Mo., on a warm summer evening in 1975. They happened onto a couple of girls, one his friend’s steady, and stopped to talk.
“He was talking to her and I walked around and said to the other girl, ‘Weather is nice isn’t it,’” Stuckey recalled, which didn’t make much of impression. Melanie, his wife now of 32 years, said, “Sure is,” and rolled up the window.
Stuckey was a bit flustered at her response, but still intrigued enough to follow up.
She moved to Iola in 1976 when her father, Barry Rowe, was hired to supervise machining work at the shell building, then an adjunct of Berg Manufacturing. She, just out of high school, went to work in the main plant’s office.
Berg Manufacturing was the brake component manufacturer’s name when it opened here in 1975. It later became Midland Brake and then Haldex Brake.
Stuckey graduated from high school the next May and also was hired at Berg, after he and Melanie had spent a year commuting every weekend between Iola and Joplin. In 1978 they married. Later she took time off to be a stay-at-home mom with sons Matt, Mitchell and Marshall, and today works for Farm Bureau Insurance.
The Stuckeys are a little more fortunate than some in that when the stark reality of the plant’s closing hit home, they had the opportunity to downsize by selling their home in the 1100 block of East Miller Road and move a week ago to 1116 N. Jefferson, where his mother lived until her death a year ago.
“We don’t have a house payment,” Stuckey said, “but we’re still trying to figure out where to put everything. I had a two-car garage on Miller Road and a detached two-car garage where I had my shop. Mom’s house has just a single-car garage.”
