Book: "The Good Old Days at the Buick" by Lynn Ruester; Flint, Michigan Factory

Description

This is just a great book filled with all the personalities that made Buick a market success year after year.  Though I am long retired from the AC plant across town, in my many years as a literature and manual dealer, and now nearly 50 years as a member of the Buick Club of America, and quite a few years as a basically inactive member of the Flint Buicktown Chapter, I got acquainted with a few of the people in this book.
This book is a great read for anyone who worked at "The Buick" as all us locals called the place.  It was, as I remember, the largest of all UAW Locals with almost 30,000 workers at it's peak, I guess in the late 1960's.  Most of the people in Lynn's book I had only heard of.  Cliff Studaker was a flyer in WWII and lived to his near-mid '90's.  I attended his packed funeral in Mt Morris because I enjoy local history and I wanted to hear as much of that as I could.  Moreover, my good friend Leroy Cole was officiating and that was an added feature because he is a major auto manufacturing historian in his own right.  Later on the family called me to go to the house in Flushing and make an offer on Cliffs old Buick manuals and they liked and accepted my
offer.  I sell things like that on Ebay nowadays.
I guess John Burnside I knew the best, as far as this book goes.  He called me less than a week before he passed away in late 1998.  He had a massive literature collection so that was most of our connection.  I was full time in the old car literature business until I sold Factory Automanuals in late 2007, so I was "up" on current market prices of original manuals and literature of all kinds for all cars.  Usually John called to get an idea of the value of this or that and usually would bark at me because I was selling too low!  "Golly John," I'd say.  "I sell a lot of this stuff because I keep my prices fair."  He wasn't usually satisfied with that answer and he'd mutter a bit and hang up.  But he always called back a month or so later.  I liked John and never got mad at him for being short with me.  I counted him as a good friend.
Bill Lamb.  What a fantastic radio show he had on the radio and I listened often to his interesting take on Flint auto plant doings on "The Buick Factory Whistle Show."  I didn't know him personally except through his show.  Do you know that the fellow who taught a 15 year old kid in
Tupelo,
Mississippi how to play the guitar.... had been working at The Buick for years by the mid 1970's.  The kid was Elvis Presley.  The man had a Mexican-sounding name and I forget it now after 45 years, but that radio interview with Bill Lamb was just great and (mostly) unforgettable.  Well, hopefully I didn't put you folks to sleep with all this.  Moving right along.....
Condition is excellent but not mint for the book, fair to good for the jacket.  There are some rips and tears in that.  These jackets have brittle paper.
NOTE: I notice lately that when a customer makes multiple orders from my store, Ebay stacks up all the individual postage costs and customers are having to pay it.  I have made a practice of refunding all that extra postage back to the customer's Paypal account and doing it 3 times a week.
Buyer is responsible for shipping
costs of .95.  Shipped in a box, well wrapped and protected.
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