Dear Contract Combatants:

I’m writing to you to request you move the expiration date of your labor contracts because it conflicts with a date related to my domestic bliss and continued marital comity.

You see, my wife and I were married on September 15^th, 1973 about 370 miles east of Detroit in our native state of New York.

We were but 21 at the time and not yet even experienced enough in our careers to call us “green” meaning we had no congizance whatsoever of your quadrennial exercise in contractual Hunger Games.

We led fine and happy lives through our early married life, always approaching celebration our anniversary with happy anticipation and thoughts of expensive gifts and meals.

But in 1989 that all changed. CNN transferred me up to the Motor City from Atlanta to take over as the bureau chief and correspondent at the network’s Detroit Bureau. We covered a wide region and variety of stories from suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian to hurricanes, crime, medicine, government…everything, including, of course, the auto industry. Indeed CNN founder Ted Turner created the Detroit Bureau to cover, as he accurately called it, “the biggest industry in the world.”

That meant covering the contract talks between you guys and of course the contracts always expired on either September 14^th or 15^th. Since you almost never reached a tentative agreement by the expiration date we beat reporters would get stuck awaiting the white smoke to appear languishing, sleeping, filing, doing thumbsucker live shots, killing time until something happened.

Yes, you automakers fed us well. Any reporter of a certain vintage will not forget GM providing an almost endless supply of Dove Bars.

Good eatin’ but it kept me away from home on our anniversary which caused a combination of disappointment, anger, tears and fat chance reliving honeymoon night.

On our 20^th anniversary in 1993, CNN took pity on me and sent former Detroit Bureau chief, the late, great Bob Vito to spell me at Ford headquarters. Nice touch, but Vito didn’t show up until 11:30pm on the 15^th from Los Angeles because, as he put it, “I hadn’t had a Lafayette Coney in years and I had a craving.”

Not only was he very late, but had terrible chile dog breath. I got home with about 3 minutes left on our “special” day.

Every contract since, whether I was working in TV, the Detroit News or flipped over to PR at Chrysler, we’d have to time-shift celebration of our anniversary to avoid being screwed by you guys not shaking hands on a deal on time.

This year is our 50^th anniversary. I’m now semi-retired but working freelance. I have informed my clients that I’m out of the mix this time around on the 15^th. No matter what happens…deal, no deal, strike, no strike, I’m a ghost.

Even though technology..and common sense, has elminated the need for reporters to sleep at the various automakers’ headquarters awaiting word that you’ve either reached a deal or are playing the game into overtime, I’ll be spending the 15^th blissfully someplace else, celebrating the fact my wife and I haven’t drawn pistols at dawn after half a century together.

But then, dammit, the clock will tick, the calendar will turn and the 15^th will turn into the 16^th and if you guys don’t figure it out by then I’m out of excuses.

So help a reporter out. Move the date your contracts expire to, say, the spring. How ’bout April 15^th, tax day? No one celebrates that. How hard would that be? Maybe I’ll even buy you all Dove Bars.

Thanks very much,

Ed Garsten