Working the Angles

In 1937, G-men came to tame what some of them proclaimed as the toughest town in America . . . Akron, Ohio.

Clueless to the agents' presence, lanky eighteen-year-old Dietrich, Deet, Jenkins' major challenge is his acclamation to the noisy, soot-filled milling department of the Consolidated Rubber Company and its accompanying labor tensions. During his first night on the job, he extricates his Black trainer from a misunderstanding prompted by their racist foreman before helping his mentor rescue a co-worker's mangled hand from a milling machine.. A few months later, after his rubber worker father falls into a mysterious coma, the same foreman offers Deet an opportunity to make more money-the door-to-door selling of the company's household rubber products where he can double his wages working only a couple afternoons a week. As his family's new breadwinner, Deet sees it as a godsend. However, he quickly learns that part of his salesman role is to be a missionary, someone who badmouths the rubber workers' union to his customers. After confiding this experience to his girlfriend, he quits the sales position and is unjustly fired that night. Plant workers stage a sit-down strike later that day and regain Deet's job.

Challenges mount as circumstances discombobulate Deet's life from all angles-his parents' are assaulted in their home; his uncle's drinking problem threatens to ruin his car repair business; Parkinson's weakens his father; his brother has been duped into criminal activities; and his Cleveland cousin is knee-deep in Hitler's American fan club, the fascist German American Bund. As the threat of a major strike looms over his factory, Deet finds an escape from the woes surrounding him in the arms of a beautiful union activist from New York. Unfortunately, his girlfriend finds out and drops him. Deet finds himself untethered from a needed anchor. The F.B.I. enters Deet's life, questioning him about suspected communist activity within the plant. The G-man offers some assistance for his jailed brother . . . if he does the Feds' bidding. While there's a risk his co-workers could suspect him of being a communist sympathizer, Deet agrees to the mission in order to help his brother. A local councilman, who's been of assistance to the Jenkins' family in various instances, offers his legal skills pro bono in defending Deet's brother and possibly getting the murder charge reduced. Deet gladly offers to do some menial delivery runs for the lawyer. On one of those deliveries, Deet learns the cargo he's carrying happens to be army-issue Springfield rifles. Deet's shocked to learn the councilman is heading the local ring of white nationalists, who've been conspiring to overthrow the government. The councilman and his henchmen plan to murder Deet. As Deet is knocked unconscious in the group's warehouse hideaway, the F.B.I. breaks in to arrest them and rescue Deet. Although his father has passed away, Deet has made amends with his girlfriend, and his precision drawing skills have been noticed by the plant's superiors, who offer him a new career as a draftsman.