DAZE WORK: 35 years ago, IBM loss changed Greencastle forever

Known affectionately as “Big Blue” in its heydey — though that’s not apparent in this file photo — the 350,000-square foot building that was once home to the IBM Greencastle facility has since become a creamy white color and now houses Area 30 Career Center and Ascena Retail Group.

Banner Graphic file photo

Greencastle’s a lot different than it was in 1986. Understatement of the year, right?

Big Blue has been repainted a creamy white color. Nary a week goes by where there’s not someone in the obituaries who “retired from IBM in 1987.” And heck, as you drive along Indianapolis Road, there’s not even a roadside marker to indicate IBM ever existed in Greencastle.

It’s now been 35 years ago that Nov. 11, 1986 marked the day the earth stood still in Greencastle. That Veterans Day was the day IBM Corp. announced it was saying goodbye to Greencastle after 33 years and taking with it 985 jobs along with 20 percent of the community’s assessed valuation, 40 percent of all local jobs and 70 percent of the industrial payroll.

And practically overnight, Greencastle went from being a white-collar town with a legion of IBM’ers parading around town in white shirts and blue sportscoats to basically a blue-collar town. Where the city once had two suit-selling businesses on the square in Mac’s and Cannon’s, it no longer has any. You can’t buy a new suit in this town.

Big Blue was a sprawling 350,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art automated distribution center situated on 234 acres along State Road 240 on the city’s East Side.

But by March 1987, IBM Greencastle was no more.

Merrill Lynch was brought in to market the 200 houses that went on the market simultaneously. Today Prime Realty, ReMax and Carpenter Realty would be all over that.

Some 300 IBM families would leave the area to transfer to other company locations, taking a human toll on churches, schools and organizations.

I remember the night of the announcement, going to meet Vickie Parker at the GHS theater that now bears her name to take photos of dress rehearsal for the school play. A dozen cast members were huddled around a TV that had been wheeled in for the occasion as they identified the community members being interviewed along the streets of Greencastle in an Indianapolis news attempt to portray much gloom and doom.

It was then I began to understand the true effect the closing was going to have on the community.

Driving home I looked at the houses along my street. Almost every other home was owned by an IBM family. Lancasters, Kenyons, more Lancasters ... Lots of new neighbors were on the horizon.

A few years back, David Murray, first president of the Greencastle Development Center (brand new at the time), told me how he understood the effect the announcement had on the community.

“To me,” he said, “it was like being a student in high school and hearing John F. Kennedy had been shot. I can tell you exactly where I was standing when I heard that news. That’s how it was when I heard about IBM.”

For the record, Murray was standing outside his office in the DePauw University Administration Building at the time.

“Somebody said, ‘Have you heard?’ And that ultimately led to 10 or 12 of us meeting every day for six months at Central National Bank.”

And with that, as Murray has been famously known to put it, the community was “sucked into the vortex of major economic dislocation.”

But because of the small army of volunteers who fought for Greencastle’s future, within 72 days of IBM’s closing announcement, the city had landed its first new industry – Shenandoah Industries (later Lear Corp., now IAC) – and community confidence was on the rebound.

And by 1991, when Greencastle was named an All-America City by the National Civic League, it had welcomed seven new industries.

It certainly helped that IBM deeded over the land and the building to the city, along with offering its employees unprecedented severance packages and continuing to pay its United Way pledge funds for several years. Nobody anywhere’s getting that kind of response from a departing industry in this day and age.

After 35 years, the IBM numbers are dwindling. More than 300 ex-IBM employees had passed away as of 2011, and soon after that, the local retirees group quit meeting monthly and put an end to its annual Hotdog Day.

Regardless of those losses, Nov. 11, 1986 will remain a date that will live in infamy locally.

My feeling is -- although we certainly didn’t think so at the time -- we’re better people today having lived through that.