It is time once again to journey to the past. And so, as they have for one afternoon each of the past 21 summers, the old autoworkers flock to Moose Lodge 288 in Lansing, Mich., collecting name tags at the door.

“You see that little guy over there? He reminds me of that guy on American Bandstand. Never changes," one man whispers, pointing across a room of silver hair and stooped shoulders.

When what was left of the Reo Motor Car Co. died 31 years ago, its sturdy Speed Wagons and torpedo-nosed Royale Eights, already collector's items, gained added currency as the last tangible artifacts of a golden time.

But the memories live on vividly here under the slow-spinning ceiling fans and faint fluorescents of the fraternal hall. At least the good ones do.

Today, with General Motors Corp. cutting thousands of jobs and Ford Motor Co. struggling to find its way, Americans mourn all that we may be losing.

But to appraise what is at stake now, it helps to take measure of what has already been lost. And in the case of Reo, folks seem to have set aside the less comfortable memories.

Jim Cataline was just out of high school in 1945, clerking at A&P and waiting for the Eaton County draft board to call. In the interim, he applied for a job at Reo.

The following Monday he reported for work at the sprawling, red-brick factory. It was a heady summer for a 17-year-old kid, quickly introduced to a life at Reo that went well beyond the end of his shift.

“I remember the biggest party," he says, recalling a July night 61 years ago when a crowd packed the grand columned clubhouse Reo erected for its workers. “Everyone had their own bottle in there and was mixing their booze and the Coke. The band was playing and everybody was dancing. This was bigtime."

But few people even know such a company existed. Maybe they've seen Reo's logo of outstretched wings, heard of the little truck it initially called the Hurry-Up Wagon, but only because they were adopted as the name and symbol of a 1980s pop band.

The patriarch of the REO family was Ransom Eli Olds, best known as the creator of the Oldsmobile, who started the company in 1904, naming it with his own initials.

But its heyday didn't last. Reo introduced its luxury Royale as the Great Depression hit. The company staggered, and gave up cars in 1936 to focus on trucks. It was saved largely by the federal government's loans and wartime orders. It survived until 1975, when a bankruptcy judge ordered its liquidation.

For Dick Lundy, Reo is the place he quickly grew up. It was 1964, and Lundy was working in a special group designing trucks for the U.S. Army fighting in Vietnam. Thanks to a special phone line, generals in Saigon would call the plant, asking for help in remodeling the trucks to fend off the Viet Cong.

Lundy's group responded, with innovations like steel plates to bolt underneath the trucks after the rebels planted explosives beneath the gas tanks.

“We had to fix it in the field because people were dying," Lundy says. “It gave me confidence. It told me what I was capable of, my imagination. My inner self."

For Harry Sayles, a former welder, Reo is a story from 1972, when the inside of his home was devoured by fire. It deprived Sayles, his wife and two children of clothes, shelter and security -- at least until co-workers at the plant took up a collection. What, he asks, would they have done otherwise?

Cataline remembers it much the same way. He leads the way now through the thick summer must, deep into his garage and a file cabinet filled with a personal Reo archive. Newsletters. Brochures. Hire slips. Letters. But Cataline, now 78, isn't just holding on to bits of paper.

There was another side to Reo, too. It's the one oldtimers don't talk about so readily. And although the place closed years ago, its factory jobs were in many ways much like the ones today's autoworkers describe.

“I got off the line as soon as I could," says Noel Johnson, now 68, who hired on at Reo installing gas tanks on truck, after truck, after truck.

Back then there was little in the way of safety procedures or equipment. In an old plant, jerry-rigged for a new age, workers on the line stooped and ducked as steel baskets loaded with parts rotated overhead. Johnson points to the crease etched in the skin between his eyebrows, a scar left by one of those baskets when the factory worker, preoccupied with trying to catch up with the line, turned around too quickly.

“You're doing the same old humdrum every day, every moment doing the same thing and you've got to work at a fast pace because the line doesn't wait for you," he says. “It just keeps on moving."

Working on the line required tolerance of both discomfort and tension. Older line workers wouldn't show new hires how things worked for fear their jobs would be taken. The roof had so many holes that the men hung buckets from the ceiling.

“It leaked like a sieve. It was cold in the winter. Part of the building didn't have any heat in it. But still it was a great place," Sayles says.

They described a Reo with virtually no conflicts between unionized workers and management. But Fine found a long, bitter record of such tensions, including wildcat strikes that stretched from 1942 to 1946.

As laughter fills the Moose Lodge, a few acknowledge that life at Reo did not end well. When the company went under, most lost virtually all the pensions they had been expecting. Older workers struggled to find new jobs. There were many divorces, a few suicides.

And so, with the sheet cakes from Sam's Club served, the Reoites head for the door. Only a few linger, until finally just two remain on the folding chairs under the mounted antlers.

Drive too quickly down Washington Avenue now, and it would be easy to conclude Reo was a dream. Little remains except a historical marker along the curb, a mural of the plant painted on the side of a largely boarded-up building.

Walking down that hall, Ellis -- whose grandfather, sister and uncle worked at Reo -- stops before an old black-and-white photo of the factory floor, marveling that none of the workers wore safety goggles or gloves, and many were coated with grease. He smiles, recalling that the uncle who lost his pension talked frequently about how Reo was a wonderful place.

By the time Ellis and a few other business owners rediscovered the site in the early 1990s, there wasn't much left. But on a telephone pole out front, some unknown soul had nailed a large rectangle of plywood, with this hand-painted epitaph: “Reo Cars & Trucks Built Here, 1905-1975."

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