Guide Lamp Division of GM

I didn't know until last year that any of my relatives had ever worked at Guide Lamp. We were a Delco Remy family as far as I knew growing up in Anderson. Guide Lamp was like the little brother to Delco... much, much smaller... and yet it was a major employer and critical to the production of GM vehicles.

The Anderson Herald just published a story about some photos that have just been discovered... and in the nick of time.. as the buildings were about to be demolished. It was a treasure trove of photos from throughout the history of the company. They were found in a desk in the department that published the company newsletter. The person that found them has compiled them in DVD format and is selling them at cost... or thereabouts. Here is a link to a youtube video featuring some of these historical photos.

It sparked me to do a little Googling... and I came up with several interesting web sites with history related to Guide Lamp. The first has a couple of neat pictures... one is an aerial of the Guide facilities as we knew them in our Anderson days. It actually shows only the buildings that were on the west side of Indiana 9. A wider view, or maybe later picture, would show several facilities to the left of the road in this picture. If you haven't been there lately, not a single building exists today. It's completely gone, just like most of the Delco plants. It is very strange to see something like that happen.

I also found several articles about the production of guns at Guide during World War II. It mentions that the guns were produced specifically for resistance fighters, not the U.S. Army. I recently read that car production was completely stopped during the latter part of World War II and all GM plants converting to production of war material. I'd love to know more about that. Somebody should have written a book about it.

I also ran across an article about some serious labor-management issues at Guide in the 1930's. I don't think I've posted this already.

The Indiana Economic Digest has a good article on the history of Guide.