00:00:00MARSHALL: [Now, brother], Johnny, uh, let me see, I am in the office of Mr.
John Barfield, Barfield Manufacturing Company on Willow Street. This is
Wednesday the 17th of June. John, where were you, uh, where were you born?
BARFIELD: I was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1927.
MARSHALL: Will you, ah, would, would you mind giving me the date, actual date
that you were born?
BARFIELD: Yes, I was born February the 8th, 1927.
MICKIE: Oh, I’m sorry! I
BARFIELD: That’s OK, Mickie, come on in.
MICKIE: I couldn’t hear you.
BARFIELD: Oh. What you got?
MICKIE: Oh, I just brought all the stuff.
BARFIELD: Those reports?
MICKIE: Yeah, these are the reports for the meeting, and these are the usual sheets.
BARFIELD: Oh, Okay.
MICKIE: And then, I don’t want to interrupt, but if you have any questions,
you can—
BARFIELD: Okay. You’re going to be here until noon?
MICKIE: Until noon.
BARFIELD: Okay, Mickie.
00:01:00
MICKIE: Jack’s daughter is coming for a visit so I have to pick her up.
BARFIELD: Oh. Oh, I met her when she was here before.
MICKIE: Yeah.
BARFIELD: Tell her hello for me.
MICKIE: I will.
BARFIELD: Okay dear. Oh. Yeah. Guess you want to get a shot.
MICKIE: If that’s all right, get a couple of you. It won’t take very long,
in fact, if you’d like—
[TAPE STOPPED, RESTARTED]
MARSHALL: Okay. We were, we were about to get your the, I think, did we get it,
the actual date of your birth?
BARFIELD: Yeah. It’s February the 8th, 1927. Go ahead, Portia.
PORTIA: I just wanted to give you this, reminder about the tour tomorrow,
BARFIELD: Oh.
PORTIA: and reservations are made at Haab’s for 5.
BARFIELD: Today?
PORTIA: That’s for the tour, for [Campbell B. Walk], tomorrow at 10 o’clock.
BARFIELD: Okay, if [Detroit absent, tell me over again]
PORTIA: Detroit’s supposed to be over there at 11.
BARFIELD: Okay, dear.
PORTIA: Okay, so I haven’t made reservations for lunch, so if you’d like me
to, just let me know.
BARFIELD: Yeah, why don’t you, Portia.
PORTIA: Okay. For how many?
BARFIELD: I know those two, me and John, possibly, say five.
PORTIA: Five at Haab’s, about 12?
BARFIELD: No, yeah, about 12.
PORTIA: 12:30?
BARFIELD: Between 12 and 12:30.
PORTIA: Okay. I will do that.
BARFIELD: Thanks, Por. It was, uh, February the 8th, 1927, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
MARSHALL: Okey-dokey, Uh, how many were in your family?
00:02:00
BARFIELD: Well, there was my sister Gladys and I, two children
MARSHALL: Two children. Who, uh, Gladys who—is she married?
BARFIELD: Yeah. She’s married now.
MARSHALL: What’s her married name?
BARFIELD: Her, her last name now is Tyree. T-Y-R-E-E.
MARSHALL: Where does she live?
BARFIELD: Ah, she lives on Ainsworth, ah, Street, here in Ypsilanti.
MARSHALL: Ah, give me your parents’ names.
BARFIELD: My father’s name was Edgar Barfield, my mother was Lena.
MARSHALL: Lena. What was her maiden name?
BARFIELD: James.
MARSHALL: Lena James. Okay. You came to Ypsilanti what year?
BARFIELD: Well, uh, we came to Ypsilanti when I was, uh, 15 years old. I’m now
54, so that would have been in 1939, when the—.
MARSHALL: 1939.
BARFIELD: 1939. Ah, we came here, uh, because of the bomber pl—you know,
MARSHALL: Yeah.
BARFIELD: the war, and uh, my father worked at the bomber plant on the
construction of that
MARSHALL: Mm-hmm.
BARFIELD: and, uh, that was our reason for moving from Pennsylvania to,
00:03:00
MARSHALL: Mm-hmm.
BARFIELD: to Michigan.
MARSHALL: Now is he, he, oh, you came, you came by way of Pennsylvania, here.
BARFIELD: Yeah, see, when I was, uh, when I was, uh, five, when I was nine years
old, we moved from Alabama to Washington, Pennsylvania,
MARSHALL: Oh yeah.
BARFIELD: which is thirty miles south of Pittsburgh. And the motivation for
moving from there, here, my dad was a sharecropper in the South and a sometimes
log, uh, worker in the logging fields and, uh, he also worked in the coal mines
which was very unhealthy in the South, you know, with no union, or, or, very
poor working conditions, and so, my father uh, caught a freight train, in those
days, people didn’t, uh, have any money to buy a ticket, and any traveling was done
MARSHALL: Depression.
BARFIELD: on the, uh, during the Depression they, they came on the freight
train. So my father came up to Pennsylvania, and we lived with my uncle Ernest
00:04:00[M/N]ailer, uh in Pennsylvania, who had seven children, and, uh, he still had
the, the room in his heart, and his house, and in his heart to invite us into
his place
MARSHALL: Mm-hmm.
BARFIELD: and we stayed there until my folks could find a job and then my father
worked in the coal mines, and in the steel mills of Pennsylvania, probably the
most back-breaking of jobs, you know, and later on he became a professional cook
with McCann’s Restaurant, and he stayed there in that capacity until we moved
to, uh, Ypsilanti in 1939, just at the break of 1940, the motivation there
indeed was the Kaiser-Frazer, the war effort, there was employment here, and we
came here, uh, when we moved here, we moved to a house down on, on Hawkins
Street, immediately south of the Metropolitan Baptist Church, which Reverend S.
L. Roberson
MARSHALL: Oh yeah.
BARFIELD: uh, uh, pastors, and we lived there, and my father worked in the
aluminum plants and in the, uh, factories and finally retired a few years ago
00:05:00from [Burl’s]. [Wells]. [Bud Wells]. Ah, but that’s how we came from
Alabama, Mississippi to Michigan.
MARSHALL: Now you got here, when you got here, you were 15.
BARFIELD: I was 15 years old when I moved to Michigan.
MARSHALL: Okay. What did you do when you first got here?
BARFIELD: Well, immediately after moving here, I enrolled in Ypsilanti High
School, and I don’t know, I just didn’t have any particular craving for
school, I, I was in a, in a hurry. I got a job in the aluminum plant, I worked,
I went, I attended school till I was 16, then I quit school in the, in the, uh,
10th grade, and when I was 17, I joined the Army, and I went to Germany for a
year. And when I came back from Germany, I had no particular skills, and
didn’t know any trade, so I took a job as a custodian at the University of
Michigan, and I worked there for six years, and that’s where I learned to
clean. And I sensed that there was an opportunity in janitor work, because it
00:06:00was something at that time that nobody was doing.
MARSHALL: Mm-hmm.
BARFIELD: So to supplement my income as a janitor at the University of Michigan,
I took up residential cleaning. Eventually, we became the largest residential
cleaning company this side of Detroit, and in the process, developed a good name
for quality work, we really did have a good service, we’d done things that no
one else were doing and we were very good, we used to clean fraternity houses
and we washed walls and we cleaned residential homes, and sometimes when the
professional people in Ann Arbor, the professors and doctors, would go out of
the country or something, it would be my responsibility to go in and prepare
their homes so that it was fresh and clean when they came back, and we built
quite a, quite a service, and were very successful. My wife Betty and I had done
this out of the trunk of a car, we’d start this little business, we had one
00:07:00child when we started the business.
MARSHALL: Huh.
BARFIELD: Mm-hmm. And, uh, then one day Mike [Sinkole] who was then president of
the Ypsilanti Savings Bank, and Glen Grosbeck asked me if I would uh, clean the
Savings Bank on a contractual basis, and I for a year I decided I didn’t want
to do that, because I didn’t, I had a little successful business going, and I
had left the University of Michigan, so I told them that I would be interested
in doing that, finally, and I started doing that, that was the first contract we
ever had, was the Ypsilanti Savings Bank, and from that we built a, uh, a
business that was just under, oh, 3 quarters of a million dollars a year in
sales, but it took us fourteen years to get our sales, for the first five years
that we were in business, and I, I was looking through our old manuscripts the
other day, for the first five years we were in business, we didn’t have one
job that paid us more than a thousand dollars at one time.
MARSHALL: Hm.
BARFIELD: And it took us fourteen years to build the business to that level of
00:08:00sales it’s interesting because now our sales are approaching ten million
dollars [we vend them] over five years [sometimes we better ourself and
y’know] but we built the business over that fourteen years to sales near three
quarters of a million dollars in 1968 we had five large corporations coming to
us asking if we could sell the business to them and come to work for them. Now
that was mainly because I had written a book called “The Barfield Method of
Building Maintenance,” and the book was a training program that captured the
attention of a lot of, not only a lot of corporations but uh, large cleaning
companies and in 1968 uh, I was invited as a, as a result of that book to uh,
belong to the National Association of Building Service Contractors and I served
on that board for five years, and during that time, ah, word of our training
00:09:00school, which we had developed to train our janitors had gotten out, because we
thought if we could train our janitors and make them more efficient, we could
pay them more, increase the quality of our work and reduce the turnover in our
personnel. And it worked out very well. Even then, in those days, we had people,
and that was a long time ago, we had making eight, nine thousand dollars a year
doing janitor work. So we built the company to where it was a very fine company
with a good national reputation. And in 1968, we had the Consolidated Foods
Corporation, we had the Maggi Corporation, we had the Senators Corporation, ah,
all of these companies came at us and said, “Mr. Barfield, we’d like to buy
you out.” So, we sold the business to ITT in 1969, and I was 40, I was 42
years old at that time, and I worked for them for three years and then I retired.
MARSHALL: [Who spend that]
BARFIELD: And I got [old] retired, [Laughs]
MARSHALL: [Laughs]
00:10:00
BARFIELD: sold some real estate, ah, and took on some consulting work, where I
consulted with corporations, General Motors, [Kelsey-Higgins], [Kerr]
Manufacturing, uh, Bechtel Corporation, on matters pertaining to cleaning
effectiveness and efficiency. And when I had signed an agreement with ITT, if I
elected not to continue working with them, I wouldn’t compete with them for
five years.
MARSHALL: Mm.
BARFIELD: So, uh, and I observed that covenant, religiously, and in 1975 the
covenant had expired and I was free to go back to work, so I started a company
called Barfield Manufacturing, the Barfield Cleaning Company, the Barfield
Building Maintenance Company, and I was immediately sued by ITT, who said,
“Mr. Barfield, you can’t use your name, ah, you sold us your name and your
name has become a national trademark, and we bought that trademark, and we
reserve the right to keep it,” so they took us to court, and Judge Conlin in
Ann Arbor said, “No, Mr. ITT, you didn’t buy, you bought Mr. Barfield’s
00:11:00services, but you can’t deprive him of his birthright so they told us that we
could continue to use our names and we reentered the janitorial business in 1975
as Barfield Building Maintenance Company and that was at 124 W. Michigan Avenue,
the building you know, and, so we operated out of there, y’know, out of there,
for five years and we sold it last November and we bought this building which
[falling now is] the old Fruehof Manufacturing Company and stoneworks this
building was at one time the home of the largest industry in Ypsilanti.
MARSHALL: [Oh, it is].
BARFIELD: So we bought this building and we have an option on the other building
there’s a, there’s a hundred thousand square feet in this building,
there’s a hundred thousand square feet in the other building, it’s all on
eight and a half acres of land so we bought this in November, uh, and, uh, this,
you know, uh, this is where y’know, where we are now. Uh, in 1976, uh, General
00:12:00Motors in an effort to uh, develop minority suppliers uh, gave us an opportunity
to hire six draftsmen for six months with a promise to appraise the operation
uh, at the end of six months and see if they felt that there was a chance of our
succeeding. At the end of six months we had grown from the six people to thirty
people we moved out of the GM engineering space, they had given us free space
there, we moved out of that space in the Michigan Avenue and we modeled our own
engineering offices. Today we have 120 people, and we have engineering sales of
better than five million dollars a year. So that was kind of a success story,
that [explained to] General Motors because they felt that we had had the
wherewithal to put together a successful minority program and that uh, gave them
the desire to work with us further so they consigned three, three machines, and,
00:13:00uh, [coal-header] machines that enabled us to make pins for their transmissions
and we took the [coal-header] machines and heard about a fa—, a factory down
in North Carolina that was going out of business, and was selling a lot of
equipment to Taiwan, so we flew down to Taiwan my plant manager and I, and
begged the people
MARSHALL: down in North Carolina,
BARFIELD: North Carolina, sorry, and we begged the people to sell us the
equipment rather than shipping it across seas, and we convinced them that they
should do that, and they sold the equipment to us, and we bought 25 of the same
machines, and brought them back, and that also excited General Motors, because
they saw that we were trying, and I guess I find that when you’re trying, the
people [are] you’re trying they’ll help you. So, uh, we later [on the]
consigned another four pieces of equipment and we like, uh, resumed, we assumed
responsibility for making clutch apply rings, so every clutch apply ring that is
used in every Hydramatic transmission is made in our plant by our
00:14:00
MARSHALL: You said clutch—
BARFIELD: Apply.
MARSHALL: Apply.
BARFIELD: A-P-P-L-Y.
MARSHALL: Oh, uh, okay.
BARFIELD: are made here, and we made that, all of that emanated from mainly the
confidence of General Motors and more specifically the plant manager George
Griffith who felt that if given an opportunity we would take full advantage of
it. Uh, the plant has grown and everything that we have developed, and I guess
now they say we’re the 66th-largest black company in the country, was built in
five years, which is distressing because it, it just sort of says that for the
last 200 years we haven’t done very much. So we’re gratified, y’know, that
we’re recognized, but we’re saddened because we have not as a race done
more, but any way, maybe things have changed now.
MARSHALL: Well, for one reason, we, we never stick to anything, they grow one
and they drop, and they grow one and they die for some reason or another.
BARFIELD: Well, our, our health and our longevity is not actual responsibility.
00:15:00
MARSHALL: Yeah.
BARFIELD: You know, if, if, if I didn’t, if they were to withdraw at this
stage, their support we would do that, too.
MARSHALL: Yeah.
BARFIELD: All we said to them was, “Look, if you will give us an opportunity,
we’ll put together a management team that will, that will handle it,
MARSHALL: Mm-hmm.
BARFIELD: but you got to support us,”
MARSHALL: Yeah.
BARFIELD: and this is what we’re trying to, to do. And, and really, this is
where we are in our development.
MARSHALL: Let’s go back a little bit. I’m interested in going back to the
bomber plant. Do you, in, in, in, in, in your recollection, what do you remember
about, the, uh, well, the actual employment now, your father worked on the
bomber plant.
BARFIELD: Yeah, he worked on the building.
MARSHALL: Okay. After the building was completed, did he remain with them or did
he move someplace else?
BARFIELD: No, my father was in the construction business.
MARSHALL: Oh, I see.
BARFIELD: not as a contractor, but as a worker.
MARSHALL: Mm-hmm.
BARFIELD: And, when the, the building, uh, when that job was finished, my father
then took a job with the aluminum plant.
00:16:00
MARSHALL: I see.
BARFIELD: On [River] Street.
MARSHALL: Uh-huh, uh-huh.
BARFIELD: And he rose to the foreman of that facility.
MARSHALL: Uh-huh.
BARFIELD: And he gave me a job, which I think was the worst around the plant,
called “shaking out,” where you shovel hot sand into a hot—
[PHONE RINGS TWICE]
BARFIELD: And that a—and, and my job was to, to do that,
MARSHALL: Yeah.
BARFIELD: and I think my father gave me that kind of job to convince me that I
shouldn’t be—
MARSHALL: [Laughs]
BARFIELD: But anyway, I, I [can’t announce], I was 16 years old.
MARSHALL: He was trying to help you.
BARFIELD: He was trying to help me. And I was only 16 years old. And I, uh, I,
I’d done it, you know,
MARSHALL: Uh-huh.
BARFIELD: And then, I joined the, the Army, and, uh, I went to, uh,—hey, you
tell me if that’s straight.
MARSHALL: No, that’s not straight. Down a little on the left side.
BARFIELD: Down here?
MARSHALL: Down on the left.
BARFIELD: Okay.
MARSHALL: That’s better.
BARFIELD: Is that better?
MARSHALL: Yeah.
BARFIELD: Then, uh,
MARSHALL: quite straight, should come up there, ah, there you go.
00:17:00
BARFIELD: Then, I uh, I’ve forgotten where I was, I think.
MARSHALL: Well, one, one thing I wanted, I wanted to find out from you—do you,
do you recall the circumstances, since you were here, uh, uh, there were a lot
of people coming here to work in the bomber plant, not on, but in the bomber plant,
BARFIELD: in the plant, mm-hmm,
MARSHALL: And, and, I hear that many of them, after they came here, were not
getting jobs. But took a lot of blacks.
BARFIELD: Yeah, yeah.
MARSHALL: There were some who got jobs.
BARFIELD: Yeah.
MARSHALL: But there were a lot who came here and didn’t get jobs. And I’m
wondering, I’m trying to put my finger on why, was it actual discrimination or
prejudice or was it tied to the fact that they were perhaps so ill-trained [in aqua]
BARFIELD: No, nobody was trained in those days. I don’t know whether there was
a problem, I—remember, I was only
MARSHALL: Yeah. I know.
BARFIELD: 15 and I wasn’t aware of that. But, what happened, there was a,
00:18:00there was a tremendous influx of people from all over the country,
MARSHALL: Yeah.
BARFIELD: because suddenly there was work, that’s why we were here,
MARSHALL: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
BARFIELD: there was work, and people came from the South. I remember, years ago,
we used to call it “Ypsitucky.”
MARSHALL: Yeah.
BARFIELD: But, uh, years ago, they all came up here, there was a tremendous
amount of people came up, and they, uh, the, the, uh, the, uh, the fact that
there was such a need for workers sort of suggested that they weren’t turning
anyone away. But, I, I don’t really know,
MARSHALL: Yeah.
BARFIELD: really, about that. I do know, that when I came to Ypsilanti, there
was a tremendous amount of prejudice here.
MARSHALL: Yeah.
BARFIELD: There was no support at all from the banks. And all of the black
people in Ypsilanti in those days built their build houses, built them by
blocks, I mean they’d buy
MARSHALL: Yeah.
BARFIELD: cement blocks, they’s pile them up on a lot—
[PHONE RINGS TWICE]
MARSHALL: they’d dig a hole in the ground,
BARFIELD: they’re trying to tell me those guys are here, I guess we’ll have
to have another session.
MARSHALL: We’ll, we’ll, we’ll get together again.
00:19:00
