Reply #5: NCR checked out years ago.

[AngryOldDem]

It was a done deal beginning back in the -- shit, I don't know, 1980s? -- when it slowly began to diminish its corproate presence here one white collar job at a time, thinking people wouldn't notice. I say it began even longer before that, when it started to dismantle its huge manufacturing buldings between Stewart Street and Main Street. (Anyone with any ties to Dayton remembers how impressive those structures were.)

I see no point now in flipping off NCR as it packs up its trucks and heads south on 75. It doesn't care about its history here -- sentimentality and nostalgia rarely figure into any business move. But Dayton has to care about what happens now, not only to itself, but to the region as well. The last major industry with Dayton ties is gone -- now the question becomes: Where do we go from here? How does Dayton retool itself to be a competitive and attractive city for new business, especially now when the economy is in a depression and the auto industry is (for all intents and purposes) dead? How do city and county leaders dialogue (to use Commissioner Mark Foley's words) with existing business to see what can be done to nurture and keep them here, and by extension, how do we attract new, outside business?

City (and county) leaders should have been pondering these questions years ago, when the signs of trouble first popped up with Delco, GM, and NCR. They didn't. And now we're all paying for it. That's why **I** give a rat's ass about inept leadership because I see it very much complicit in this area's downfall and (as I said in my first reply to you) the squandering of the industrial and entrepreneurial legacy left to us by Kettering, Patterson, Deeds, etc.

One final point of interest: NOT ONCE did I see/hear Dayton Mayor Rhine McLin yesterday comment on NCR's move. I would think of all people, she would have been right up there on the Courthouse steps with Nan Whaley, Foley, and Lee Fisher. Speaks volumes.

As for us knowing each other...I was born and raised in East Dayton and went to the neighborhood public schools there. (I spent a lot of summers at NCR's Old River Park, and whenever I drive by it, a part of me hurts.) I moved to Indianapolis for a short time (which, by the way, is a textbook case for true, meaningful urban renewal that Dayton would be well to follow), and am back here, for now -- like the line goes in the Billy Joel song "Allentown" (another fitting analogy for Dayton), "It's getting very hard to stay."