I was home on fall break in my final year at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, and I needed money to pay tuition, so I was working a twelve-hour shift with my father at the ceiling-tile factory. It was a couple of days after Thanksgiving in 1990. I’d been assigned to the wool mill, where coke rock was fed into enormous furnaces, heated to 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit, and churned out like pure white cotton candy; then we packed it into enormous bales and sent it by boxcar to our sister factory in Detroit, where it was turned into tiles.