What was Lear like?
He was a weird character. One of the first things we had to do when we set up our plant in Detroit was remove all the clocks out of the building. The Lear factory, office, plant, whatever, never had a clock in it. It was like a gambling casino he didn t want you to know what time it was. Another thing was that Lear never slept! You would see him wandering around the plant at 3 in the morning. He operated by taking naps, maybe 4 or 5 naps in a 24-hour period. He would take 20-40 minute naps, then he d be up and going again. His office was right off the engineering department, and the only thing in that office was a couch. Wherever he went in his company there were couches like that. He d go in there, shut the door, lay down, take a little nap. That s the way he lived. His bodyguard would stand right outside the door. We had a weird place in Wichita, too. It was the only aircraft plant I ever worked in that had a barbershop. Bill felt that your hair grew on company time, so it should be
