Well, I cannot think of a more appropriate individual to address.

Akron roundtable.

On the eve of Akron's bicentennial than today's speaker, Dave Lieberth Davis spent a good part of his lifetime promoting the city of Akron and recording its history.

Dave is also, in addition to being the executive secretary of the Akron Bicentennial Commission and president of the Akron History Center.

He is also chairman emeritus of the Summit County Historical Society, and has been a member for over 40 for over 58 years.

So, Dave, by my calculation, that must mean you joined in high school.

Yes.

Probably the only high school member.

From 1970 to 1999, Dave was a broadcast journalist, a lawyer and an ardent civic activist.

And from 2002 to 2012 he was Deputy Mayor of Akron.

Dave was the founding president of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, chaired Akron's successful efforts to be named an All American city, and 24 years ago, when he last spoke for Akron Roundtable, he delivered the Imagine Akron 2025 report.

After chairing the year long visioning project.

That speech is preserved on as a podcast on the Roundtable's website.

If any of you would be interested in listening to it.

In 2016, Dave authored Bringing the World to Akron for 40 years.

The history of the Akron Roundtable.

That book, published by UA press, has been downloaded over a thousand times in 56 different countries over the past eight years.

Dave is a charter member of the LeBron James Family Foundation Community Advisory Board, presently chairs Summa Health's Community Engagement Committee and is the lone surviving member of the steering committee that is founded Leadership Akron in 1983.

In 2019, the Akron Community Foundation selected Dave as the recipient of the annual Bert A. Polsky Humanitarian Award for volunteering thousands of hours and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for Akron civic, cultural and charitable organizations.

Please join me in welcoming Akron historian Dave Lieberth.

Thank you Barry, very much.

And thanks to the Dunaway family for their sponsorship of today's program.

I don't think I've been more pleasantly introduced since Doctor George Knepper, one of my heroes, the greatest of Akron's historians, once prepared an audience for my presentation by telling them that Dave is a true ornament to the Akron community.

I thought I was being flattered until I remembered that ornaments are dragged out in December, put on display, then shuttered into the attic for 11 months.

So that fits too.

For 48 years, the Akron Roundtable has been one of our most important traditions and institutions, bringing the world to Akron.

But in the next half hour, I plan to bring Akron to the world.

Today, December 5th, 2024 is the last day of Akron's 199th year.

Tomorrow begins Akron's 200th year as a town, a village, a city, and an urban center.

This event is the first scheduled event in our bicentennial celebration.

So congratulations!

You're now part of it.

When I left City Hall in 2012, I was aware that we had only 13 years to prepare for the celebration.

So we started by getting our houses in order, literally.

We funded the preservation of the home of Akron's founding family, the Simon Perkins Stone mansion.

We raised $1 million to rehabilitate the 190 year old John Brown House.

We've always celebrated Akron's special occasions in July.

During the centennial in 1925, the sesquicentennial in 1975.

And the cento-septaqueennial in the year 2000.

And the major celebration for the Akron Bicentennial will be next July, as well.

In 2022, Mayor Dan Horrigan appointed a Bicentennial commission, 30 individuals, some of whom are here today.

They've been volunteering for the last two years, and I'd like those members of the commission who are with us today.

Would you please stand now and be recognized for your work over the last two years.

Thank you very much.

A year ago, Mayor Malik worked with us to establish a not for profit corporation that will be raising funds for the year long event.

Akron 200 has employed an executive director, Mark Greer, and he's doing the hard work of planning the year long celebration.

You can follow our calendar of events at Akron200.org.

I am not a very introspective person, but if forced to come up with a philosophy of life, I would turn to the Danish poet Piet Heim.

He wrote “if you want to conquer the present suspiciously fast smell of the future and stink of the past.” The last time I appeared before the roundtable, I was smelling of the future.

In September of 2000, it was a privilege to report on the work of 400 volunteers that had taken place over 12 months, defining a vision for the city.

And I know that some of the people who participated in that program are here today as well.

Mayor Don Plusquellic who is with us today, I am happy to say I realized that the go ahead and give him a round of applause.

It was organic.

I heard it there, started it.

I didn't do that on purpose.

He realized that the previous time we had looked to the city's future was 1974, through goals for Greater Akron.

Now there is a lasting legacy from that 1974 program.

It is Leadership Akron now in its 41st year.

It has reflected the best of Akron, reflected the long term trend that hierarchical models of leadership are disappearing.

Now, Prognosticating what Akron might be like in the year 2025 was not my idea.

That honor goes to father Norm Douglas, who came up with the name, and since he claimed to be guided by a higher power, we all agreed.

So with 24 years in the rearview mirror, how did we do in Imagine Akron 2025?

We got some things right that Akron needed to prepare for a new immigrant population, that we needed to be ready for a new boom in births that people we know today as Gen Z, that Akron would need to adjust to a new information economy.

We predicted that the definition of work and leisure was changing in ways we could not fully understand at the time, and without a hint of a global pandemic, we actually predicted that telecommuting and flexible work arrangements would be part of the new century.

We did anticipate a shortage of labor, particularly in manufacturing, and that has turned out to be true.

Imagine Akron suggested that the city needed to increase its focus on the arts and develop a downtown filled with entertainment options.

And that finding provided a foundation for the opening of lock 3 in 2003, and in its first ten years, it served 2 million visitors, summer and winter.

And last week, the city celebrated the opening of the new lock three and the Maynard Pavilion.

The Imagine Akron Report advocated for what would become the first initiative in the state of Ohio to create community learning centers that modernized our public school buildings and fulfilled a long held dream by the mayor, ensuring their use by the neighborhood community all day, all week, all year.

In that first year of the new millennium, we predicted that Akron needed to prepare for an aging population and accommodate the infirmities and physical disabilities that accompany aging.

And many of us know that turned out to be true.

In 2000, we saw a wave of retirements on the horizon and the need for a new cohort of public service workers to handle everything from public safety to trash pickup.

Imagine Akron correctly predicted that the city would have to spend a lot of money to sustain its water and sewer infrastructure, but nobody guessed at that time that it was going to cost $1 billion.

One thing we got right was the continued movement toward media convergence, the challenge of informing citizens and voters, perhaps without a daily newspaper in their hands.

In 2000, remember, Facebook and Myspace even were still four years away.

Some of what imagined Akron hoped for would remain in progress even today.

Like widely available, publicly funded early childhood education.

25 years later, we're still working on it.

One thing I got wrong was my prediction that radio, as we knew it would disappear.

I thought serious XM Satellite Radio would take over, but it didn't.

In 2000, we saw how cellular telephone technology was changing the way of life for many Europeans.

However, the first iPhone wouldn't be released in the U.S. until 2007.

24 years ago, Imagine Akron smelled of a future that would require citizens to assemble regularly to confront constant and rapid change.

However, we did not predict that those meetings would be on Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

That was the future as we saw it.

Now, given the auspicious occasion of this being Akron's last day of its two centuries old existence, let's, wander into the past and stink it up a little bit.

There were as many as 2500 native people living in the Cuyahoga Valley at the time the first Europeans arrived.

The names they use to identify themselves are largely unknown to us, but it included the holding, the Haudenosaunee, the Seneca, the Cuyahoga from the Iroquois Confederacy, the Huron, the Shawnee, the Ojibwe, and the Lenni Lenape, who were also called the Delaware or were forcibly removed from the land they had sustained for hundreds of years.

Each October, we recall that legacy by walking the portage path.

In 1785, the Treaty of Fort McIntosh made our portage a boundary dividing the Ohio Country that was open to European settlement and territory reserved to native people.

That treaty lasted almost 20 years.

In 1797, Moses Warren of Connecticut ascended the Cuyahoga River from Lake Erie and arrived at the Big Bend in the Cuyahoga.

Today's area of Merriman Road.

General Simon Perkins had come to the Western Reserve of Connecticut as a 27 year old land agent.

The forests were so dense during that period of time, it was said that a squirrel could travel from here to the Atlantic seaboard and never touch the ground.

Boy was that squirrel tired.

In the summer of 1825, Perkins hired Joshua Henshaw to create a plat for a new town.

Like others of his generation, Perkins was educated in the classics, and when naming the new town, he selected the Greek word akros; defined as a summit or a high point.

199 years ago, last week, on the 28th of November, 1825, a 54 year old Simon Perkins rode to the courthouse in Ravenna, which was the seat of Portage County that included what would become Akron.

And missing from memory is the name of the man who owned one third of the land on that original map of Akron.

Paul Williams lived here with his family, and he lived right down the street.

His cabin was on Broadway, near where Buchtel Avenue intersects at today.

And on December 6th, 1825, 199 years ago tomorrow, the deed that contained the plat map, signed by Paul Williams and Simon Perkins, was filed at the courthouse in Ravenna.

Not because some of you hail from the east side of Akron.

I have to note that in 1825, when Akron was founded, the town of Middlebury, Zach, was larger than the new town of Akron.

In 1807, a sea captain, Joseph Hart, settled near the falls of the Little Cuyahoga, which would be approximately at today's intersection of East Market Street in Case Avenue.

And this is the point where I always ask what was Akron's first manufactured product.

Now, Leadership Akron graduates should remember the answer.

The answer is whiskey.

Whiskey is a manufactured product.

And in 1807, they distilled the grains they grew in Middlebury to avoid spoilage of the barley, wheat, and corn crops.

General Perkins land sat astrid one of the great watershed divides of North America.

Rain falling on the south side of Akron flows into the Tuscarawas River, the Muskingum, the Ohio, the Mississippi River, and ends up in the Gulf of Mexico.

Water falling on the north side of Akron flows into the Little Cuyahoga, the Cuyahoga, Lake Erie, the Saint Lawrence River, and then east to the Atlantic Ocean.

Perkins and Williams knew that their land would surge in value if that newly planned canal that connected Lake Erie to the Ohio River would go through their city of Akron.

The canal had to cross the watershed divide somewhere.

Eventually, 16 locks were needed to lift boats a total of 149ft in the one mile staircase of locks.

And that's preserved today by the Cascade Locks Park Association.

A single lift in one lock could take 100,000 gallons of water.

Fortunately, we had a source to feed those hydraulics.

Naturally occurring glacial kettles became reservoirs that would meet the demand for water that the locks required today.

We call them the Portage Lakes.

It took 45 minutes to lock through each step of the staircase.

So people needed food and beverage and entertainments.

Akron's founders remade the land into something they understood, a town not unlike those they knew in New England.

And they were fueled by the possibilities of new opportunities and the hope of prosperity.

During Akron's first 170 years, prosperity would come, but in periods of boom and bust.

There were frequent panics or economic depressions.

They would erupt about every 20 years or so, and they would, on one hand decimate the fortunes of successful entrepreneurs and then allow a whole rebirth of industry in town.

The rubber business always operated on thin profit margins.

It was susceptible to factors outside of its control.

The industry's fortunes were so closely linked to the automobile industry that a familiar observation in the 20th century was that when Detroit sneezed, Akron caught cold.

In the year 2000, I interviewed Jerry O'Neill, the retired chairman of General Tire.

He recalled his father, Bill, saying that Detroit only cared about Akron so long as the tire was black and round and cheap.

And they didn't so much care if it was round or black.

By the year 2000, for the first time in the city's history, some economic stability was emerging from those wild swings that marked the century when Akron was the rubber capital of the world.

In the year 2000, as we began a new millennium, the Greater Akron Chamber asked me one day to moderate a conversation among a dozen corporate executives or so on what they liked about working and living in the Akron area of the affordable lifestyle, easy access to airports and major league sports, and major cultural events.

Our four seasons.

Most had lived in highly desirable urban centers around the country on the East Coast or West Coast, Chicago or Atlanta, Denver or Seattle.

And for them, the best thing about Akron was the commute.

In a room full of C-suite executives, the principal advantage of Akron was a 20 minute drive to work.

It allowed them to balance family life in ways that those other cities really could not.

That same year, as part of our cento-septaqueennial celebration, we removed a time capsule from beneath the porch of the Perkins Mansion.

It was buried in 1950.

And inside of it were letters from public officials of that time, 1950, to their counterparts.

50 years later.

Now, one letter in particular was memorable from the service director of Akron, who noted that in 1950, Akron, Ohio was the second most congested city in the United States, with Los Angeles being first.

Today, in 2024, the annual traffic U.S. Traffic study ranks Greater Akron as one of the least congested metro areas in the country.

Akron's size is really our advantage.

From Akron's earliest days, we've always been one of the largest small towns in America.

Our size is our superpower that allows us to regularly punch above our weight.

We are hard wired for collaboration.

It is part of the community's DNA to work together and seek solutions for complex problems.

We are right sized for success.

This is a characteristic that was recognized by the National Civic League when it selected Akron as an All-America city three different times.

History reveals how important our size, our connectedness, has been to our success.

There is no earthly reason why the rubber industry should have settled here.

We had land, we had water, we had canals, we had trains.

Importantly, we had established tool and dye makers.

But we had something that no other city had put together.

A few years ago, I came across a 1929 file at the library about how Benjamin Goodrich got to Akron in the first place.

One day in 1870, while walking down the street in his hometown of Jamestown, New York, he ran into an old friend, Clement Barnes.

There's a name that's been lost to rubber history.

Barnes had married a woman from Akron and opened a haberdashery on Howard Street.

Doctor Goodrich said he'd been dabbling in real estate, and Barnes was talking up his new home town.

It was the home of a cereal industry, a clay products industry, farm machinery.

And that summer, Ben Goodrich came to meet the president of the Bank of Akron, George Todd Perkins, who was the grandson of Akron's founder.

What Akron had was a cadre of business leaders, 22 of them who came together and pooled their resources to raise $13,600, about $400,000 in today's money.

With that capital, Doctor Goodrich moved his business lock, stock and fire hose to an old building on the Ohio and Erie Canal.

By the end of the century, Goodyear and Firestone would be established, with General Tire 15 years away.

Another example of Akron's network of connections that has paid off has some mystery and some drama.

It's a story of a team of Avengers led by a superhero.

In 1941, 100 Akron companies either made molded or extruded products out of rubber.

In 1941, Akron companies used almost half of the world's output of natural rubber, and it was cultivated in a very narrow swath of geography on either side of the equator in the South China Sea.

Now, you all know what happened on December 7th of 1941, but it was the next day, December 8th, that Japan invaded Malaya.

And two months later, the Empire of Japan held hostage the world's supply of natural rubber.

12 days after Pearl Harbor, Goodyear, Goodrich, and Firestone turned over to the government their research and rights on synthetic rubber.

Doctor Waldo Semon, the head of Goodrich Research, was enlisted as the lead scientist, and from behind his thick spectacles, he led this Herculean task to replace a million tons of natural rubber with a synthetic that hadn't even been invented yet.

By May of 1942, this gang of chemistry avengers opened a synthetic rubber plant at Firestone in South Akron, and in seven months they had already produced 4000 tons of replacement rubber.

Some historians say that what happened in Akron in 1942 was a more important scientific discovery in securing the Allied success in the Second World War than the atomic bomb.

And there is a monument to this effort located at the Goodyear Polymer Center at the University of Akron.

I could certainly make a case that this series of events in 1942 was the beginning of Akron's trudge to the top of a polymer summit.

The transition has not always been easy to explain.

When the mayor of Akron addressed this roundtable in 1984, Tom Sawyer brandished three tennis rackets to the amusement of the sellout crowd.

Wood, Sawyer said when he held up his own tennis racket.

Stainless steel, he announced as he hoisted the second one.

And then, as he displayed a modern racket for the sake of simplicity, he said, graphite.

Sawyer started selling Akron's polymer materials industry and giving tutorials on polymeric molecules to audiences all over Akron.

That climbed to the polymer summit continues today, and as it is very much top of our minds today as we celebrate the work this summer by the Greater Akron Chamber, the city, the county, and all of the industry partners in establishing the Ohio Innovation Hub for Sustainable Polymer development.

Steve Millard and a considerable number of partners have put together $100 million this year from federal, state and local sources and the news of just a few weeks ago shows the impact of this initiative.

Bridgestone announced the construction of perhaps the newest manufacturing facility in 40 years on Wilbeth Road, adjacent to its advanced tire manufacturing facility.

It's going to produce butadiene for methanol.

That's a key ingredient in for synthetic polymers.

Goodyear, too, has announced that sustainability is one of its priorities, especially as it turns to autonomous and electric vehicles of the future.

And please remember that tires are still made in Akron.

Every tire used on the Indy racing circuit and the NASCAR racing circuit in the United States are still made in Akron.

When we won the rights to build the Inventors Hall of Fame here in 1987, Akron declared itself as the City of Invention.

And looking at the latest data, that is still true.

In the past 16 years, 5288 patents originated in Akron.

That's an average of over 300 a year.

And once again, change is in the air, along with the challenge to keep up with it.

It seems clear that we are about to upend the order of things in Washington, in government, in business and in media.

I mean, frankly, if you look at the news, as you all do, we can be troubled about the wars in Europe and the Middle East.

The upheaval in Asia today, stories of violence at home, stress over family finances.

These worries may even portend a feeling that we are in crisis, and, moreover, that these crises of our times are unprecedented, that we face finding solutions without experience to guide us.

This is what the author and historian John Meacham called the tyranny of the present.

“If we know how those who came before us found the ways and means to surmount the difficulties of their age,” Meacham says, “we stand a far better chance of acting in the moment with perspective and measured judgment.” Let me give you two quick examples.

The state of the environment is troubling for many people, as well as our inability to reconcile issues of race over these many years.

History shows that we've been having conversations on these issues for decades.

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Akron was one of the dirtiest cities in the Midwest.

Industrial smoke was unsightly and unsanitary.

In 1891, Akron's Board of Health announced that they intended to adopt a rules about smoke abatement.

But by 1909, no action had been taken by the government in ten years.

The Akron Women's Council argued for smoke abatement measures, but the city refused to punish businesses for toxic emissions.

It wasn't until 1947 that Akron adopted a smoke control ordinance, thanks in no small way to Akron's League of Women Voters.

We certainly have had to make compromises to get where we are today.

The loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs is a high price to pay.

But the transition was really prompted by a dramatic change in the methods of tire production.

The radial tire changed everything.

Today, we remain a center of research and production and advanced manufacturing and engineering.

Truthfully, Akron has never looked better or cleaner or healthier.

We are first in the nation with the lowest risk of climate disasters, including hurricanes, wildfires and floods.

Factors that affect the quality of life and affect housing prices and insurance rates.

You remember the 1980s when many of our residents moved south.

Today, Sunbelt states are among the most disaster prone spots in the country, and millions have become what are being called climate migrants.

And several of you probably feel just a little bit guilty looking at the news this past week and watching those poor people in Erie and Buffalo shoveling all that snow while we have clean streets here in Akron.

A second example, an illustration, is the conversation that we've had over issues of race for 170 years.

In 1950, Akron was a city where blacks and whites lived separately.

Public housing was segregated.

So were cemeteries, skating rinks, swimming pools, bowling alleys.

So were the cafeterias at Goodyear and Firestone, while 4000 African Americans were employed at the rubber companies during the tire industries heydays.

Generally, they worked in positions of being janitors or laborers.

You know, there were 2000 men who actually built tires in 1950.

2000.

12 were held by black men.

In the 1960s, Akron's urban renewal program effectively destroyed a dozen intact African-American neighborhoods.

People were supporting each other there, and they looked out for each other even though the housing stock was deteriorating and in that decade, Akron transplanted 3000 families.

More than 80% were African-American.

So today, how best can we tell the stories of Akron history so that they are meaningful in the way that Jon Meacham suggests?

How people of the past found the ways and means to surmount the difficulties of their times as inspiration for our own days?

Now we've created four platforms for this purpose for the Bicentennial.

Two years ago, I discovered that the Akron Public Schools had no curriculum for teaching Akron's history to elementary and secondary students.

Today, Superintendent Robinson has assembled a group of teachers being paid for their extra work to create new digital materials about Akron history so that by the end of our bicentennial year, Akron students will have new resources to learn Akron's history in elementary and secondary schools.

A second platform will be a new published history of Akron.

We did that in 1950, 1975 and 2000, but there has been so much that has changed.

We've gathered 24 authors to write a new anthology supported by the city of Akron.

All the chapters have been written there, ready to be published.

It is being edited by Doctor John Miller, director of the University of Akron Press, and look for its release in early 2025.

A third platform where we can talk about these issues in a meaningful way, is something that Mark Greer has labeled the Forgotten History Forum series.

These will be lectures that will start in January and continue every month throughout the Bicentennial.

And the fourth platform is the leading edge of the bicentennial celebration.

And it's the realization of an idea that first surfaced 40 years ago.

In 1983, the Summit County Historical Society.

Asked why Akron did not have that one place where all of the history of Akron is exhibited, along with all the treasure trove of artifacts that we own that have not been previously seen.

This month, we hope to open the Akron History Center at the Bowery with our partners, the Akron Summit County Public Library and the Historical Society.

It's a 3000 square foot exhibit area with 30 interactive video screens, dozens of relics of Akron's past that will connect visitors today with our history of long ago.

And this will be a long lasting, free, museum quality exhibit about the 200 year history of Akron.

Located in the Bowery at 172 South Main Street.

And you can learn more about it at akronhistorycenter.org Our friend Greg Mervis has placed on your tables little cards with a QR code that will take you right there.

That website will be completed and running in about a week.

Looking forward to the Bicentennial year.

Today's roundtable presentation is the first planned event on our calendar.

Next will be the Bicentennial Opening ceremonies, and those will be next Wednesday, December 11th at the Akron Civic Theater at 7 p.m. admission is free, and it'll be a rewarding evening of music presented by local choruses, by the inimitable Theron Brown and by the Akron Symphony Orchestra.

Coming up in January on Martin Luther King Day, the Akron Zoo will open a remarkable new exhibit that will celebrate black history in the Perkins Woods neighborhood.

In April, Tuesday Musical will premiere a bicentennial fanfare that they have commissioned.

Go to Akron200.org for details on these and other events throughout 2025.

Here's some other things coming up.

A three on three basketball tournament.

A kickball tournament at Firestone Stadium.

A pickleball tournament at Shaw JCC.

And in July, the premiere of a new original outdoor historical drama.

In June, we will reprise a musical theater production that was first premiered here in Akron during our centennial in 1925.

The production is “Dearest Enemy” that had its national opening here, and we will be playing it back at the Goodyear Theater.

There also will be celebration in each of Akron's 24 neighborhoods.

The biggest celebration will be the first week of July with a homecoming celebration at Lock Three Park.

A downtown festival of food and music at the Civic Gateway, which is made up of lock three, lock four, Cascade Plaza and Main Street.

And on Saturday, July the 5th, the Bicentennial parade through downtown Akron.

We will finish the year with a closing ceremony on December 6th, 2025, one year from tomorrow.

Our actual 200th anniversary.

So we may occasionally, feel overwhelmed by today's problems and political issues.

But there is just one Akron story that always gives me hope.

And that began on Mother's Day of 1935, and it shows a lot about the networking our community can really provide that is meaningful.

There were drunks in New York, Los Angeles, there were plenty of alcoholics in Chicago and Miami.

But it took the daughter in law of Goodyear's founding family to be the catalyst for what would become the largest self-help organization in the world.

Henrietta Seiberling had learned about a spiritual movement known as the Oxford Group from Firestone's founding family.

Harvey Firestone had two sons who were serious alcoholics, and Harvey had looked to this religious movement for a solution.

Bill Wilson and Doctor Bob Smith met on that May night at the gate lodge of Stan Hywet.

Bill was looking for someone who knew something about the Oxford Group.

Not only did the two alcoholics meet Henrietta Seiberling, but they found each other and they founded the 12 Steps, which have guided AA members for 79 years.

In 2025, we will commemorate his 80th anniversary with a special bicentennial celebration.

Today, Alcoholics Anonymous has 2 million followers, plus millions more who comprise the families of alcoholics.

And then there are hundreds of thousands of people who've benefited from the AA model to overcome other addictions as well.

And it was Akron's right size that allowed Wilson from New York to find Henrietta Seiberling, who had connected with Harvey Firestone.

And it was Akron's close knit community that fostered her interest in the Oxford group.

Her acquaintance with Doctor Bob and today Stan Hywet Doctor Bob's house, are landmarks for the global AA fellowship, along with the Memorial Library at Summas new Behavioral Health Pavilion celebrating the first medical treatment of alcoholism in the world, dedicated to the work of Sister Ignatia at Saint Thomas Hospital.

And as many of you know, each June, more than 10,000 AA members make their pilgrimage to Akron to honor the place where their sobriety began.

At the Akron Center, you'll actually be able to place your hand on the door to Doctor Bob's office.

We acquired it from a private collector who had had it in his garage for years, had been removed from the Second National Building, where doctor Bob had his office from about 1950 to his death, excuse me, to his death in 1950.

And so it's going to be a meaningful artifact for those people on that pilgrimage.

And the story illustrates Akron's unique quality, I would say, of bringing smart people together to achieve a greater good.

How 1 or 2 people and their Akron networks can literally change the world.

And as for the Akron History Center, when it opens here within the month, I hope you'll come and visit us.

I hope to see you there.

Thank you.

Thank you for coming and speaking to the Akron Roundtable.

A great way to end 2024 and begin 2025.

So we have a few minutes for questions.

If you do not have a mobile device, please hold up your cards.

I see a couple of them around the room, and we'll try to get to those as well.

But also, we have a lot more questions than we have time.

So, the first question, that has come through.

What has changed in Akron that is not positive in the last 25 years?

I don't think it's just one thing, but I, I almost told this story and cut it for reasons of time.

But you remember 1987.

Mayor Plusquellic was running for his first term as mayor, and we had a bid from, that we wanted to make to the National Council of Intellectual Property Law attorneys to bring the National Inventors Hall of Fame to Akron.

We had a luncheon for them, in the old City Club at the top at that time of the Ohio Edison Building.

And, let me tell you who was at that luncheon.

Bob Mercer, chairman of Goodyear.

John Ong, chairman of Goodrich.

We had a high level official of Firestone there.

I can't remember who.

The president of Ohio Edison Company at that time, a predecessor to FirstEnergy, the president of every Akron bank was there, the head of every law firm, the head of every accounting firm.

And the people from Washington and other cities around the country were blown away by the fact that in Akron, Ohio, you could put this high powered caliber in one room at one time.

You asked what has changed that is not positive, and that would be the fact that I couldn't do that today.

Those CEOs simply aren't available to us anymore, aren't involved directly in the life of the community, as those men were at one time.

And we are run by remote control, aren't we?

From to a large degree.

Our banks are pretty much headquartered in Columbus and Cleveland.

Some of one is headquartered in Pittsburgh.

Our law firms and accounting firms have undergone a variety of mergers, especially over the last 5 to 10 years, so that they are almost unrecognizable as local, companies anymore.

So if I had to pick one thing to say, what is not as good as it was 25 years ago, that would be it.

In 2024, is Akron what you thought it would be?

Because we've been able to sustain, leadership through the Leadership Akron program primarily.

It is very much what we hoped it would be.

We have been shrinking in population, which is not ideal.

Many of you have great ideas about what should happen in Akron and, and and when you're motivated by by the fact that you saw it in Columbus or you saw it in Washington, DC or Alexandria, Virginia, or it came out of Austin, Texas or Seattle, Washington.

Those are all areas where the population is exploding.

Because our population is declining, our markets have changed, and so it is unlikely that we're going to be able to sustain those same kind of great ideas.

But what we do have, again, is our size.

It is the fact that we have this incredible record of collaboration.

When I talk to people, in the professions, especially, and ask them how Akron compares in their practices to Cleveland, for example, it is always amazing how people talk about the close knit community that Akron has, how they can get things done.

We once had a consultant to the city who said, you can do anything in Akron from the beginning of your invention and all the way to the output of your final manufactured product.

We have all of those assets, incredible assets.

Jessica, you're still trying to work on that today at the work that you're doing at the Bounce Innovation Hub.

And so those kinds of things allow us to say, yeah, Akron is where we had hoped it would be.

We ain't perfect yet, but we need that time to get there.

Imagine Akron 2025 identified arts and culture were important to the future of Akron and its downtown.

You mentioned lock three in your presentation, but could you expand on the other significant wins over the past 25 years?

Well, we have a new art museum, if you hadn't noticed.

It's doing very well.

Somehow Howard Parr has managed to keep that civic theater alive 300 nights a year.

And so that's one of our big wins.

And then I guess it's been, what, 7 or 8 years since we had the landscape project funded by Knight and GAR Nicole, that really led to the outcome of, the arts alive.

And that's and the incredible arts community that Nicole Mullet that is now, coordinating, led to more grants to, for more artists.

And, when you look at cities around the country, the arts often lead the way.

And I think that has happened here as well.

Individual artists, everything from, church choirs, all the way up to the Akron Symphony.

Paul Jarrett is here today to represent them.

We have an amazing orchestra for a city our size.

And if you look at anything.

Paul, they're clapping for Chris Wilkins.

So don't get too excited.

But if you look at any musical organization in the county today and you trace, you do a genealogy of their roots.

It all leads back somewhere along the way to the Akron Symphony Orchestra, to a musician who was a teacher, a choir director, an organizer, somebody who taught kids in school who now are professional musicians.

And so we've been able to sustain that.

I think it's a huge success on our community's part.

Okay, so we've got about six minutes and about three more questions that I'd like to try to fit in.

The John Brown Monument is an important memorial to Akron's history.

What are our plans to make this important site more accessible to the public?

He is one of my favorite, historical figures.

I often referred to John Brown in my presentations as the single most consequential individual who's ever lived in Akron or Summit County.

There was a monument built to him in 1912.

It was improved in 1925.

It sits on the grounds of the Akron Zoo right now.

It was heavily vandalized in the 1990s.

Mayor Plusquellic at that time and, the service director, Joe Keter, sent crews up there to make sure that it got cleaned off.

And as the zoo thought about moving to a more suburban location, the mayor and council president, Marco Sommerville got together, and they gave to the zoo a long term lease on land so that it could expand in its place in the central city.

When they did that, two things happened.

One thing happened.

Two consequences.

One, they had to circle the zoo with a perimeter fence to maintain credentialing.

That got everybody, prohibited anybody else from entering the zoo grounds without access, access through the front door.

The other side of that was that nobody got to see the John Brown monument anymore.

We've been doing tours, for probably since 2009.

When we celebrated the sesquicentennial of Harpers Ferry.

And what I can tell you, I don't think it.

Doug Parker is probably not here today.

I don't know if Lisa King is or not, but with the Zoo and Summit Metroparks, our bicentennial capital plan includes the development of a trails from the zoo parking lot to the John Brown monument so that they are ADA accessible and that they are open at times when the zoo is open.

We are going to be looking for funding for that project, both from the city and from private sector individuals.

That is on our list for 2025.

So we've got quite a few students here today.

High school.

College.

How do you get young people interested in history?

Well, the stories are absolutely fascinating.

I mean, they've got everything, that you'd want in a story, as I said about our history of synthetic rubber.

I mean, that was a team of Avengers.

What more do you need?

That drama.

It had heroes.

It had molecules, as you know, and that what everybody loves.

But, I mean, it's it's like anything else.

The stories need to be told in a way that engage people directly.

And we need to find these platforms that I mentioned, these four platforms to do a better job of of that.

I think you're going to be moved when you come to the Akron History Center, and you can put your hand on the door that went to Doctor Bob's office so that you can see the pistols, the flintlock pistols and, holsters that were actually worn by General Simon Perkins at the time he founded Akron.

We haven't displayed those in over 50 years.

They've been in a vault now they're going to have a permanent display case in the Akron History Center.

You're going to see relics of the AA movement, of the labor movement, and the story of how Akron helped foment, labor organization that really changed America in the last half of the 20th century.

And we have rhythms of the Rubber City.

It's a display curated by Kate Connelly from the library that will go back to the 1880s all the way up to the Black Keys with Devo and the Akron Sound in between, with artifacts related to those cases.

So as you see those artifacts, I think that is one way that anybody, young or old gets inspired to make that connection with their past.

So a couple quick, somewhat rapid fire type questions.

What's your favorite Akron landmark?

Okay, I'll say it.

The National Inventors Hall of Fame.

What is your favorite Akron restaurant?

It's not Luigi's, okay?

It just isn't.

And it's not Swensons.

I suppose I would have to go with, the New Era Cafe.

How's that?

So in in line with that, what's your favorite Akron dish?

It's not sauerkraut balls, folks.

I'm sorry about that.

I do like them once a year, though.

I think the chicken parm at Papa Joe's would be my favorite.

What are you most excited about for the next 200 years?

I think that we.

We are undersold ourselves as a center of invention and innovation.

And so we we need to embrace the fact that there are lots of smart people here.

Many of them arent in this room today, incidentally.

They're out there doing other things.

And so we have to figure out how to bring all of those smart people together on a regular basis in order to, create the economy that we want that is, found founded in innovation.

Probably polymers and advanced manufacturing are a big part of that.

But we have an I.T business that also kind of is hidden below the radar.

Do you know that the first computer used by the Federal Aviation Administration to control air traffic was manufactured in Akron, Ohio at Goodyear aircraft?

Very few people know that.

And so we've had this long line of history just dealing with the internet and with the development of computing.

And so, I think that's foundational, what I hope to see people coming to you.

What is your favorite fun fact about Akron?

And is it true that Akron is the founder of the Hamburger?

Okay.

Well, in 2000 and, four five, we did the first hamburger hearings down at Canal Park.

We lost to a town, to New Haven, Connecticut.

But, the Menchese brothers had a small shop on East Market Street near downtown, and, they would go to, county fairs around the country with their wagon and sell sausage sandwiches.

They went to the, county fair in New York State and they ran out of sausage.

So they went into the butcher, and they had no more pork.

Nobody was using ground beef then.

So the butcher said, I can grind you some beef.

And they were disappointed, but they thought they could flavor it up a little bit.

Added some coffee to it, some brown sugar.

And so they sold these as, sandwiches.

Named after the town were the New York State Fair is held in Hamburg, New York, not Syracuse.

The fair is in Hamburg.

So that's the that's the story.

All right.

So last question.

What do you getting your daughter for Christmas?

Oh, that's my question.

We'll skip right over that one.

So last question for today or not, you know, not really a question, but make one prediction for Akron for 2050.

Whoo!

Boy!

I haven't even given that any thought yet.

I've been to, too engaged in the past to think about, 25 years hence.

But if everything goes right, all the roads will be done constructing.

We will, we will adopt, the old mayor's plan for deep paving, which lasts a lot longer than the paving that we've been doing over the years.

So I'll just go with that.

It's time to go home.

Thank you.

Everybody.

Thank you.

Dave.

Thank you very much for being with us today.

My heart is full of gratitude for being a part of this community.

So thank you for sharing with us.

At this time, I invite Bob Abramson of Gardens Wealth Management to the podium, to present our signature contemplative sun.

This work of art was designed exclusively for the Akron Roundtable by Akron artist Don Drumm, and is sponsored by Gardens Wealth Management.

Very appropriate.

Today's, today's program will be broadcast Thursday, December 26th at 8 p.m. on Wksu 89.7 FM.

You may also may listen to Akron Roundtable programs on our website.

Thank you to the University of Akron and its Excel Center for Community Engaged Learning for sponsoring our podcast series.

Please mark your calendars now for our next program on Thursday, January 16th, 2025.

For our next speaker, Jeanette Sorrell, conductor and founder of Apollo's Fire.

Thank you for being with us today.

We look forward to seeing you next month.

Have a great day.