Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town

Matt (a reviewer of this book) either did not grow up in the Firestone Park area, or he is too young to remember the "bubble" in which its residents lived during the 1950-60s. In light of that possibility, he might well have found Joyce's book weird because he couldn't relate to the mindset of the huge community of Firestone workers and their families. Coming from the same graduating class as the writer, and knowing the fine education level that Garfield Senior High offered, I would have expected the reviewer to appreciate how well-written the book was. Unfiortunately, the substance of Joyce's material was lost on that reviewer. Thanks, Joyce, for your fine efforts and rememberance of a time and experience shared by many. A lesson for the future.

Frustrating? Annoying? You Bet..... This is Joyce Dyer's heartfelt (at times Slavish) tribute to her father..Thomas Coyne....and His slavish devotion to Firestone Tire & Rubber Company (Akron, Ohio) and Harvey S Firestone, Sr Thomas Coyne was a COMPANY MAN..through and through...he believed that Firestone Tire & Rubber..and Harvey Firestone would care for him & his family for life...unfortunately, that was not the case...RUBBER left Akron in the 1970s..and left Thomas Coyne behind I was born and raised in Akron, Ohio..my father spent his entire working life at Firestone Tire & Rubber Company..but he was NOT a Company Man..we did Not live in Firestone Park..and my Dad always said that Harvey Firestone Sr was "a crook" and a Robber Baron.. Ms Dyer, in spite of her slavish devotion to her Father, eventually presented a clear-eyed picture of the man..and his blind trust in a Company that let him, and so many others, down..in a shameful way this was a tough read for me..Ms Dyer and i grew up in different circumstances..different "classes"...and my father retired as a Systems Analyst..but "got out" when he could in the late 70s...but i felt for her in reading this book. Her dad bought the Company Line totally..and he paid dearly...and so did she, in a way. I envy her close relationship with her father..to a point. i won't recommend this book..unless someone grew up in Akron, when it was the Rubber Capitol of The World...but it is a heartbreaker of a book..the tale of Industry's control of a city..but it's disregard of its workers...and the price everyone paid.. 4 Stars

It began a bit slowly, I thought, but soon realized that Dyer was trying too hard to do perhaps too much in this book. Because she is trying to give you something of the history of Akron, as well as the history of the rubber industry and Firestone Tires in particular, while at the same time writing a memoir/biography combined. That's a pretty tall order for a book that runs just a little over two hundred pages. However, once she began to concentrate more on her father, the book picked up speed and chugged right along to its somewhat bitter end. I ended up admiring the book, as well as its author and her writing skills. The saddest part of this book - which is intended to be a tribute to her father, a thirty-seven year "company man" at Firestone - is not just the way that he was treated (used up and discarded) by Firestone, but the fact that Tom Coyne appeared ultimately to be a not very likeable guy, indeed a man without friends. Joyce Dyer is brutally objective in describing her father and paints him as a man lacking in the most basic of social graces and skills, a braggart and a loudmouth and probably something of a racist to boot. And yet she loved him and appreciates deeply the sacrifices he made for her, and has written this book to keep his memory alive. She certainly did not write it to praise Firestone. When she writes of her father's long slide downward in the good graces of the Firestone heirarchy and then of his final illness and death, I couldn't help but remember that line from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, after Willy Loman has cashed in that life insurance he always kept up, the line spoken by his widow: "Attention must be paid!" Because that is what Joyce Dyer is saying in this portrayal of her late father, T.W. Coyne. By his deeds she shows, in spite of his many faults and shortcomings, how completely devoted he always was to her and her mother, and how he kept on working and doing the best he could, until his health gave out and he was finally forced to retire. This is not as happy a book as another Ohio memoir I read and enjoyed - Michael Dirda's An Open Book - but it is a blazingly honest and heartfelt tribute to a man who always loved his family. I plan to pass the book along to my wife, whose father labored for over forty years in the steel mills in the service of Ford Motor Company. I'm sure she'll find some things here to relate to. This is a good book. - Tim Bazzett, author of LOVE, WAR & POLIO

As a former rubber worker who also grew up in the shadow of Harvey Firestone, I found the book to be accurate and compelling.

I was deeply moved by Joyce Dyer's tribute to her father, an expression of love that manages to eschew mere sentimentality. What is impressive is that Gum-Dipped succeeds on another level entirely. Lots of books claim to be about the sense of place, or urban tissue, or the urban experience (as opposed to form), but not very many deliver on that promise. Gum-Dipped really does convey a sense of what it meant to grow up in Akron during the 1950s and 60s--of what it meant to live in a company town, to count on Harvey Firestone to see you through, and to be betrayed in the end.