A GM town no more
Plant closing ends journey of decades
More on the imminent plant closing:
Sunday, December 21, 2008
MORAINE — Thanks to General Motors Corp., Steve Martin calls the Miami Valley home.
Sixty years ago, his father moved from Crab Orchard, Ky., to Dayton for a GM job at what was then the Frigidaire plant.
"That's how I ended up being born and raised here, was because of GM," said Martin, 51, himself a former GM worker.
When folks ask him where he's from, he often refers to GM's Moraine assembly plant when he answers, "Dayton, where the truck plant is."
Come Tuesday, Dec. 23, GM's last local plant will end production, and greater Dayton will no longer be a GM town.
The plant's story stretches back decades, to GM's purchase of the Dayton Wright Brothers Airplane Co. in 1919 for its Frigidaire division. The story ends when the last vehicle comes off the assembly line at the plant straddling Stroop Road. That final vehicle is expected to be a white GMC Envoy, workers have said.
GM has long had a strong link to the Dayton region itself, and at one time Dayton was considered the third largest GM town, said John Heitmann, a University of Dayton historian.
GM bought Delco — the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co. — in 1916. Charles Kettering's electric starter was introduced on the Cadillac a few years earlier, in 1912.
With the plant closing, "we're losing a lot of our identity and a lot of our heritage," said Martin, who with wife Rhonda owns Pizza Express in the shadow of the hulking assembly plant. "I don't think it's really sunk in."
