11/26/09

Dear Louie,

Sobbing, the Story of Saab

In 1990 just after my poorly considered retirement and rehiring at the Medical College, I decided that I needed a new image, something to go with the faculty and with the student population of the Med. College. I had driven Olds 88’s for a number of years and had an Olds 88 at the time. After a visit to the Saab agency, I bought an off-year 1990 Saab 95, I don’t believe it was called that, but it was, as usual, last year’s model. I had always thought it was better to buy a new car in fall, as the new models came out; it seemed that a savings of a couple of grand could be accomplished, a new car was purchased and a plan for repurchase using the same formula; the auto line in the fall had the bugs washed out during the trade year and the savings were substantial. For many years I had used this formula to buy Oldsmobiles and it had proved to be money-saving and image-making. Also, my reputation for being cheap would have been and was saved.

The move proved to be the first of six or seven purchases of Saabs during the past 20 years. During that time I bought one lemon, a used Saab with 12000 miles. It had belonged to a salesman, who had smoked. Try as I might the stench, which had been masked at time of purchase was never removed from the car. Especially during the late fall, when the heater was used, then the smoke stench permeated the cabin ad nauseum. It soon, after three months was traded for an off-year new Saab which I kept for three or four years.

Never, during the years of travel three times, a week to the Med College did I have any auto trouble. The rides were fun, in the fall, spring, lesser in the heat of summer, and despised in the cold of the winter. The traffic finally became too much, the fog of sunrise on cold moist days when driving near Pike Lake became too much and I quit the best job I ever had.

It was a joy to go to work in the clinics of the old Milwaukee County Hospital. There I made friends with an old cadre of hard-working caring nurses and aides, who knew and only infrequently judged the clientele; who empathized with the alcoholics in a manner of reproach but not abandonment, who wept when an old hypertensive obese diabetic stroked and died, who bitched when the social services cut off the funds for medications, who swore when the druggies became abusive, but who treated the tertiary stages of the old prostitute who had lost their charm. The nurses of the clinic were the pleasant controls of the now-infamous government providers of the present era.

The demise of the County Hospital was the initial abandonment of the trust of the poor which existed in Milwaukee County and the State of Wisconsin from the 1880s until 2000. In about 2000 in order to change the image of the Medical College and Froedert Hospital into a regional hospital, and to identify the inner core hospital for the indigent as Mount Sinai the County sold and allowed the old hospital to close, not only to close but to be removed from the face of the earth. The building, a classic from 1930, the nurses home and school, the old mental hospital; all were physically removed and replaced by the medical providers of the ’90s and the new millennium. Along with the destruction of the buildings was an elimination of a culture of help, hope, and many times happiness. The closely-knit staff of social workers, recipients, and knowledgeable alder persons, along with a working population was replaced by the present-day cadre of misplaced mismanaged do-gooders and a society that cannot be hired for want of manual job availability and training. Now instead of lines for shots of mercury and later penicillin given at the clinics in the thirties and later forties, the lines for money for unemployment and medication for drug addiction extend from the bars to the drug houses to traffic in guns and eventually to death. Unemployment in the central city is now at fifty percent for blacks between the ages of 18 and 30. Milwaukee is decaying and the stench of social decay is blinded by the glitz of new buildings, clinics, and paperless records.

As these changes progress what has happened to Saab. Today we learned of the inability of General Motors to sell Saab, to change Saab, or to give away Saab. Saab no longer will be an item of consideration but an asterisk of history. It will no longer be remembered as “being born from Jets” but will be recalled as the three-cylinder failure of the ’70s. Changes occur, many are left with a depreciated new auto and many are truly left on the scrap heap of society. Where would one rather be? I choose to drive the Saab and try to assist the discards in society.

Jim