Woman retires following 55 years at factory
‘After a while, these people became my family’
FRANKLIN, Tenn. - At, 81, Lera Rainey walked out the doors of the Lasko Metal Products factory on Tuesday, 55 years to the day since she started working at the manufacturing plant.
Her retirement follows decades of waking at 5 a.m. then heading to an eighthour job, then to a part-time waitress job, sometimes seven days a week.
Her Lasko co-workers and supervisors, who call her the “nicest lady I’ve ever met” and the “best employee we’ve ever had,” were saddened, awed, even puzzled.
How did she do it, why did she work so long, why so hard?
On her last day, Rainey’s answer was simple: “Love.”
“At first this was a job,” Rainey said. “But after a while, these people became my family.”
A different world
Her first day was a frigid Jan. 17, 1962. It also was the Franklin factory’s first day of production. Rainey was 26.
A sepia-toned photo from the 1962 Tennessee State Fair shows her as an attractive young woman with dark hair and eyes and an easy smile.
Rainey remembers the hundreds of men and women like herself who spent their youth on farms , then took their places on the assembly line in the vast metal warehouse where they would build wares for the masses.
It was a different Williamson County then. What is now Cool Springs was mostly open fields. The Franklin Main Street was lined with teenagers lingering on the hoods of shined-up sports cars. Mechanics would fix your car on credit.
In its heyday, the Franklin Lasko factory made electric fans, skillets, griddles, can openers and a variety of other products.
“If you had appliances in your home, there was most likely something in your house made by Lasko,” said plant manager Randall Pedrick on Tuesday. “We’re the kind of place where you might not know us, but we probably made something you own.”
In the early 1960s, Rainey was a divorced single mother. In 1962, her only child, Sandra, was 6.
“I just had to work, so I could help my daughter go to school,” she said. “She was the best thing that ever happened to me. Everybody wants to see their child succeed, and if it’s a girl, you want her to know that she could take care of herself if her husband didn’t take care of her. I was always working, but I was working for her.”
Rainey worked her way through the factory’s jobs—painting fans, working the metal press, standing by the strenuous assembly line and finally using her knowledge of how products were supposed to work at the quality inspection table.
In the decades that passed, “the boys” who would call her “a second mom” became managers at the plant.
Ken Hartley, 59, Rainey’s latest direct supervisor in the quality control department said she was a mentor for generations of Lasko workers.
“I was 17-years-old when I started here — I came right out of high school,” Hartley said. “The old plant manager said I grew up here.”
When he first started at the factory, he said, he would take his girlfriend to the restaurant where Rainey worked on Friday nights, and she would ask them about their lives and tell them to be careful during rainy weather.
“You know, motherly things,” he said.
Over the years, the biggest change would come from automation.
“This place has changed a lot,” plant manager Pedrick, 61, said Tuesday as he reflected back over the years. “It would take 40 or 50 people to run one line. We’ve got that cut in half now with all of the automation we’ve done.”
Still, he said, there was something in the woman who showed up every day with a kind smile that a machine couldn’t replace.
Although the plant has more than a dozen employees who have worked there 40 years or more, these days the help is different, harder to find, less motivated and less family-focused, Pedrick said.
“If there was something she didn’t think I made the right call on, she’d tell me,” he said. “With her guidance, that’s what made the difference.”
On her last drive to work, Rainey cried.
“It was all for love,” she said.