My mother was English, and in our family one was taught to appreciate the various undertakings of humankind, particularly those related to the development and utilization of technology. The reason for this, of course, was that such activities are at the core of our free enterprise system. And of course, when one talked of “us”, it was given that the United States was one of the many British colonies which had been given a nudge out of the nest and made to fly on its own.
To the end of educating my brothers and sisters and I in this principle, Mom would have the family take drives in the country on an evening, or on a weekend afternoon, to see the rivers and lakes of the region , to look at the various farms in the area and discuss their various production systems, or to visit the various rural power dams or electrical generating stations. She also would point out the different manufacturing facilities, giving us a brief description of their industries. We lived in the Grand Rapids, MI area, and one of my favorite activities was to go to the train station to see the nice shiny new Pere Marquette streamliner, which ran daily between Detroit and Chicago, come in. Or we'd go watch the airliners land and takeoff at the airport; it was the early days of commercial aviation and most of the planes were surplus DC-3's from World War II. To this day I have a fondness for the old “tail-draggers”!!
I have carried this learned appreciation of human enterprise throughout my life, and when I saw a new industry coming into our neighborhood, I was just plain glad that, instead of operations at a facility being downsized, or a facility being closed down, a new one was being constructed and started up, bringing all the benefits to our community such as new jobs, increased tax revenues, economic spinoff to other industries in the area. In the words of one of the owners, “Even more important<ly>, this will be a facility that addresses the most critical challenges of food manufacturing in a steadily more demanding environment. We and our customers, not to mention consumers and government, are establishing higher standards along the entire continuum of production — sustainability, efficiency, cleanliness of process and product.” Support for the project was provided by Dearborn County, IN, as well as the Lawrenceburg (IN) Regional Economic Grant Fund and the Indiana Economic Development Corp.