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Remembering the days before Lordstown
LORDSTOWN
While most everyone holds their collective breath awaiting an announcement on the future of the General Motors Lordstown Assembly Complex, the man whose father once owned the land where the plant sits vividly recalls its past.
Ted Radtka, 87, has lived in Lordstown since he was in the third grade, and remembers the days before the then-township was synonymous with car production.
“At that point Lordstown was very poor, one of the poorest places in the county,” Radtka said. “We were so poor that we had only one snow plow for the entire township.”
Land Sold to GM
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Radtka recalls his older sister having to wear band uniforms that were donated from other school districts and basketball shorts with patches sewn over rips and tears.
Despite the poor conditions, Radtka said kids received a good education in the pre-GM Lordstown schools.
“We came out here when I was in the third grade, and they were already teaching kids multiplication. I didn’t even know what multiplication was,” he said.
Luckily for Radtka, his family was better off than many others. This allowed him to earn a small allowance growing up: every day he milked cows for his family, and his father would pay him $25 a month for the work.
“Looking back, I did that every single morning, seven days a week, 365 days a year. But hey, at least I had some money in my pocket,” he said.
Radtka – whose son, Ronald Radtka, serves as the village’s president of council – said the land that would eventually serve as the plant’s home caught his father’s eye for reasons other than development.
“There was good hunting on that land, that’s what he said,” Radtka said.
Radtka’s father, Abel, sold his 242 acres in 1955 to a man he remembers being called J.C. Berry.
Berry told the Radtkas that a manufacturing plant of some kind was coming in, but they had no idea cars would be its main product.
In 1956, Radtka’s family began the Imperial Communities mobile home park just down the street from where the plant was being built.
The park housed many of the construction workers and the early assembly workers during the plant’s first few years.
“The people they hired to build the plant came in from all over. Pennsylvania, West Virginia, even further. So we started the park, and we grew from there,” he said.
At the time, GM’s policy was to train local laborers to fill positions at the plant, as described by Charles French, the plant-city relations manager for the Chevrolet division of GM in the March 20, 1956, issue of The Vindicator.
“Such a plant brings a tremendous amount of business to a community,” French commented. He added that while specially trained workers are required for some jobs, “General Motors has found that it can quickly train and adapt local help for the majority of the assembly line jobs.“
The plant opened in 1966, and just over a year later, the township of Lordstown incorporated into a village.
Like others, Radtka doesn’t want to see the plant close.
He described GM as a “good neighbor” and pointed to the various amenities in the village that exist thanks to tax dollars paid by the company.
“GM was real good to Lordstown. They built the schools, the waste department, the administration building, all of it from tax money they paid. Didn’t cost us a dime,” he said. “Of course they haven’t had to pay taxes like that for a long time, but it was good for the community then.”
Throughout most of the 1970s, the corporate tax rate in the U.S. sat around 48 percent.
Under President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the current corporate tax rate is 21 percent.
Radtka is a major proponent of the incoming TJX HomeGoods facility – he owns land at the 300-acre site where TJX plans to build a distribution center, and he will profit from the deal. Radtka argues that some individuals in the village critical of future industry are being selfish.
“People can be spoiled. They came out here after the roads and the sewers and the schools were all built. They didn’t have to pay for any of it,” Radtka said. “A lot of them want Lordstown to be a white picket fence kind of community, and a lot are old retirees. But if we hadn’t embraced industry in the first place, none of them would have come out here to begin with. They don’t care about opportunities for the young kids.”
Whatever happens between GM and the United Auto Workers International during contract negotiations this summer, Radtka believes Lordstown will endure.
“I think Lordstown will be OK,” he said. “It always has. It has to.”