Word: akron
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Around the Portage Country Club in Akron, Ohio, conversation these days is anxious, subdued, and addressed to one topic: dismissals of executives and white-collar workers at B. F. Goodrich Co. Since September, the fourth largest U.S. tiremaker has quietly retired or fired several hundred employees, including one vice president and many middle-aged people who have spent the bulk of their working lives with the company. The dismissals have often been abrupt, impersonal and accompanied by a minimum in severance...
That Uncertain Feeling. One way that Goodrich management found to improve performance was to thin out the 18,000 executive, professional and other white-collar personnel by attrition, early retirement and outright firings in Akron. Robert Sausaman, 48, an equipment buyer, recalls that, after 17 years with the company, he was given two weeks' notice and "my bare entitlement" by way of a pension. Robert L. Coon, 56, a staff photographer for 25 years, was given the option of $10,000 in severance pay or a $100-a-month pension. He picked the pension. One executive was offered...
Goodrich made no announcement of the firings and Akron's Beacon Journal neglected to report the biggest potential story in town. The company secrecy was deliberate policy, and so was the uncertainty created among those who stayed. "I hope some of them will look into their performance and realize they could do better," says J. Wade Miller, vice president for personnel and organization. But there could be less favorable results for Goodrich, and not only in the loss of local good will in a community that backed the company in its struggle with Northwest. One group of white-collar...
...University of Akron, a dozen black students occupied the administration building while the president and 19 staff members locked themselves in their offices. Responding to rumors that the blacks were armed and shots had been fired, Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes rushed 90 state troopers to the campus, alerted 700 National Guardsmen, dispatched the state adjutant general to Akron, and then flew there himself. "We are not going to put up with it in Ohio," said the Governor. At issue on the urban campus, which draws many of its students from the blue-collar families of Akron's rubber...
...Nosis criminally responsible for Ripple's death? Akron Prosecutor James V. Barbuto could find no precedent for such a prosecution in his state. Words, after all, are not blows. And the early common-law rule was that a man may not be convicted of a killing unless the death was caused by physical contact. Nonetheless, Barbuto charged Nosis with manslaughter...