Factory Girl in the Rubber City: The Journal of Mary Cable

Meet Mary Cable.

 

17-year old transplant from Pennsylvania farm country to Akron, Ohio boomtown, 1916. 

 

This is her first-person journal of events small and larger upon her arrival to a young city that needed her like gasoline to the combustion engine. She and 120,000 other Akron newcomers would fuel the rubber industry and a nation that reinvented the wheel - preferably vulcanized.

 

As a young woman working for the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, Mary gives us the factory stories that bring this plant to life. With humor and directness, by turn mundane and grinding, others foreshadowing and heart-wrenching, Mary tells it like it was, and still is, working for a large industrialized corporation. 

 

Factory work filled her days, but Akron adventures filled her dreams. The city was her oyster and a culture club waiting to be opened.Horatio Alger had nothing on Mary Cable. Except that Mary did it all in heels and had a lot more fun.

 

Prologue by Debra Lape, Mary's granddaughter, is a Cleveland State University business graduate and controller in Cleveland, Ohio. Factory Girl is Deb's second book. Her first, Looking For Lizzie - The True Story of an Ohio Madam, Her Sporting Life and Hidden Legacy, was the culmination of a 40-year quest to discover the secret life of her great-great-grandmother, Mid-Ohio madam, Lizzie Lape. An Akron, Ohio native, Deb and her husband Claude have one son Perry and live in Westlake, Ohio. 

 

Epilogue by Bob Lape, Mary's only son, is an Akron-born, life-long journalist and broadcaster. He was first heard on Akron's WAKR, WADC, WHKK and WCUE. After graduating from Kent State University, he became news director of WICE, Providence, RI; and WBZ, Boston, MA. TV news work included starting Eyewitness News at WABC-TV in New York City, where he spent 48 years in local, network and print media. His food feature, Bob Lape's Dining Diary, was broadcast over the past 30 years on WCBS in New York. Bob resides in Olmsted Township, Ohio, not far from his four children and three grandchildren.