For the Armstrong twins Bruce and Barry, General Motors was family.
Like so many in Oshawa, Ont., generations of their kin worked at the city’s General Motors plant, which has been a vital part of the community for 100 years.
Both of their parents worked at the plant. And for the now-retired Bruce and Barry Armstrong, they treated their coworkers like brothers and sisters, too.
“Everybody was family in there,” said Bruce. “That’s just the way it was.”
The news that the plant will shut down is a loss for many families in Oshawa, where the company once employed more than 20,000 workers in the 1980s. Today that number is less than 3,000.
“It was just everything,” said Bruce.
In his early 20s, Bruce wanted to be a chef, but gave up on that dream when a job came along at the GM plant. His brother Barry had been working at the plant for a few years already. Like so many Armstrongs before him, he “jumped on it.”
When Bruce retired in 2007, after 30 years, his coworkers left him with a scrapbook of memories, a kind of history book of Armstrongs at the GM plant: ID cards, workbench photos, cutouts of trucks, and dozens upon dozens of signatures and well-wishes. On one page, a clipping detailed the celebrations from decades before when his father Dick Armstrong retired.
At one point, Barry drove the sweeper at the plant just like his father had done.
“I’d do the ride down to Bruce and I’d show him that I was doing dad’s job. It felt really good,” he said.
They felt their family’s DNA within the walls of the GM plant. Bruce even believed he sensed his late father’s presence one day. “I got these deep chills in my back, and I said, ‘Yeah, you’re here.’ And I started bawling,” he recalled.
Though the GM workforce in the city is not what it used to be, the plant and workers like Bruce and Barry are forever linked to their years on the job. They remember it with fondness.
“GM gave me everything,” said Barry.
