V 1 N. 17 My Town NCR

 

My Town NCR

 

George Brose

 

            I was born in 1943.  The years that I can first remember clearly began about 1947 when we lived with two other aunts and uncles and their children all at my grandmother’s house on the northeast side of Dayton, Ohio. Old North Dayton was the hub of the East European immigrant community.  Our neighbors had Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian names and the old folks spoke with heavy accents.    There was a serious housing shortage after WWII when veterans came home to the women and children they had left behind.  Many of those children had yet to be born when the father left for war.  Those couples didn’t have a home to live in because those marriages often were last minute affairs before the men were swept away by war.  The women tended to stay where they had been, still living in their family homesteads and working in the jobs their men had once filled.  Somehow that housing crisis was resolved with extensive loans to ex-soldiers.  As well many of them provided a labor force for building those new homes and expanding communities when they came back from the war. It took a few years to catch up but by 1947 we had moved into our own home.   It wasn’t a new one.  It had been built in 1903, and my father’s widowed aunt had owned it.  She financed the sale,  and I remember going to her new residence every month to make a mortgage payment.  A little over half a week’s pay per month put us into that house. 

            The house was at 37 Margaret Street  in a neighborhood called Walnut Hills on the southeast side of Dayton, Ohio.  Dayton was a midwestern industrial city of 250,000.  When I describe it as industrial, I do mean industrial.  General Motors subsidiaries were the major employers in Dayton along  with Wright Patterson Air Force Base.  Think Delco, Frigidaire, Inland Manufacturing, Moraine Products.  They were all part of the GM industrial net based in Detroit and supported by Dayton.  Chrysler was there as well.   Charles Kettering who was a big player in GM originally came from Dayton.  He was noted as the inventor of the self starter for automobiles.  He eventually became the benefactor of the Sloan Kettering Foundation, and his former estate is now the site of a major hospital in the Dayton area.  Along with those big factories there were also many smaller corporations that supported them such as tool and die factories that help make the machinery used inside those bigger factories.

            What I’ve yet to mention is another major employer in Dayton, the National Cash Register Company, NCR or as Daytonians affectionately called it “The Cash”.  There was a time that any self respecting store had an NCR cash register in it to record transactions and hold cash payments and print a receipt. They could be seen all over the world.   That company is where my father worked.  It was a company that became deeply imbedded in my life and my family’s life.  My father began working at NCR in the mid 1930’s after travelling south to Florida and East to New Jersey after graduating from high school in 1929 at the beginning of the Great Depression.  He eventually found his way back to Ohio and was hired by NCR to work in the Millwright and Heat Treating department at the great factory.  At it’s height, NCR employed 20,000 people working round the clock in three shifts.  When you joined NCR you became part of a second family, the NCR family.

            In the 1930’s even the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s when you took a job with a big company, it was assumed that job would last all of your working life.  It also benefitted the employer to have long term, loyal workers.  To keep that employee happy NCR management sought to provide services and benefits to its workers, much like a good father would be expected to do.  It was a paternalistic viewpoint of NCR management.  Unlike General Motors, which offered better wages, but few other benefits.  At General Motors, the labor unions were strong and negotiated very good hourly wages.   At NCR, there was a weak factory run union, which did not negotiate in the same sense as the United Autoworkers or AFL-CIO across town at GM.  Consequently the wages at NCR were less than GM, but the benefits of working there were much greater.  I do not believe that NCR workers ever went on strike for better pay while I was still living at home.   There may have been some negotiations, but no strikes that I can remember.  The first strike occurred after I had left home, 1968, and it was the beginning of the end.   

    For several years my mother took a job at a federal government agency, and my father worked a second job two nights a week at Sears and Roebuck in their automotive department greasing cars and changing oil.  We were never lacking heat or food on the table.  Our neighborhood was totally blue collar, maybe a few lower management guys, salesmen, and teachers lived there but they were looking for greener pastures.  Working at NCR again with its paternalism helped keep us living where we were. 

What do I mean by paternalism?  Let’s start with family.  NCR provided a summer recreation park for its employees.  It offered a swimming pool which was the biggest in the world when it was built in the 1930’s.  There were picnic grounds in a beautiful forested area.  There was a waterway with canoes for rent.  There were playing fields in the park with softball diamonds.  When my mother worked at NCR before the war, she played in a women’s softball league sponsored by NCR.  The company’s top women’s and men’s teams played in competitions around the country.  The park which was called Old River also had a bandstand where the company provided musical entertainment every Wednesday evening with a concert band of high school students that the company sponsored. 

            In the winter NCR also provided musical entertainment free for it’s workers in a local basketball arena.  I can remember attending those shows with my parents.   All winter as a male child of an NCR employee I could go to that arena on Saturday mornings and participate in a basketball training school.  In the summers it was the same for baseball.  The one criticism I would offer is there was nothing like this for the female children of the employees.  But then the schools had no sports for girls.    Another criticism is that there were almost no black employees at NCR.   The GM factories on the other hand were much more integrated.  If a black man were hired at NCR, it was only in the most lowly of jobs in the foundry or as a janitor.  And the employee benefits for recreation did not exist except for one day a year at the company park. 

            Also on Saturday mornings there was a free movie at the NCR auditorium situated on the factory grounds.  It was open to any child in the city.  And there was no discrimination as to race.  It was my first experience being around African American children.  The show would begin each Saturday with some community singing led by a member of the Dayton Board of Education.  At the end of the movie, every child was given a free candy bar.   At the Christmas show, every kid got a box of candy and a silver dollar.  For that Christmas event they had to have two shows and about five thousand silver dollars were handed out.    GM didn’t have anything to compare to that.  That same spacious auditorium served all ten city high schools for their graduation ceremonies. 

            Another one of the major events for workers occurred in 1954.  The upper management of the company were all golfers and most belonged to a very exclusive club on the south side of town, Moraine Country Club.  Someone in that group decided that it would be of benefit to have a golf course for it’s employees, and so they purchased land next to Moraine Country Club and built the NCR Country Club.  It consisted of not one but two 18 hole golf courses.  One was designated a championship level course capable of hosting a major tournament which it eventually did.   The majority of the workers did not play golf, but with the building of the NCR Country Club, many of them took up the game.  The annual membership fee to employees was $5.00.   Yes, you read that right, $5.00.   My father decided he would learn to play at age 43.   He took lessons from the local pro and was on the course the first day it opened.   I was there and remember him topping the ball off the first tee.  And a grim “Shit” coming out under his breath.  It must have been a very tense moment playing his first round with a lot of guys lined up ready to go off that first tee.    As a family we enjoyed many evenings after work and supper going out to the Country Club and getting in nine holes with both my parents before it got dark.  It wasn’t uncommon to be coming in on the last hole after the sun had set.  There was also a nice snack bar where fifty  cents could get you a great double decker hamburger and fries.  Drink extra.   My first job was as a caddy at that upscale course next door where the executives played.  But they often went over to the NCR course to play and took the caddies with them.  For sure the employees had a better deal at the company course.  They could never have afforded to be members next door, nor would they have been welcome to apply, as the social order had to be maintained. 

            As for banking, there were options.  NCR had an employee credit union.   I had my first financial account at that credit union about 1960, and I’m still a member today even though NCR is long gone.  Today it is called Universal One Credit Union.  By the mid 1970’s the Cash fell on hard times.  The advent of computers brought about the downfall.  The period of downsizing and sending jobs south or overseas to cheaper labor markets was the death knell.  NCR was bought by AT&T and all semblance of the NCR community was forever gone.  The park is closed, the swimming pool is no longer there. 

The company which was in a cluster of thirty buildings just across the street from the University of Dayton is now all but gone.  Only one or two of those old factory buildings still exist, converted by the University to their own use.  Even the building where an early computer was developed during WWII that would break the Japanese code is gone.  The enigmatic Alan Turing had once consulted with NCR in Dayton during the war.  That landmark of history was torn down without a second thought.  

In 1998 I was hired by the University of Dayton to coach their women’s cross country and track and field teams.  One day as my team was working out on those grassy fields I suddenly realized that this is where my modern family had had it’s beginnings in the late 1930’s and now I was earning part of my living at those exact same geographic coordinates as both my parents had once done.   Like my father, I worked at a second job, but it was a completely different career that I would end up following, and I would turn away from those fields to become a mediator in the legal system. 

Today when you go to a store to make a purchase and you run your purchase across a scanner to read a barcode.  That invention is all that is left of NCR.