Goodyear, My Father & the Blimp

#memoriesat60 

​Graduating with degrees in Chemical Engineering and Marketing from Texas A&M, my father was offered a job at Goodyear Chemical.  I was born in Akron, Ohio, home to Goodyear, while my father did orientation there and lived around Akron two more times in my life. This job and time obligated to the US Army, meant we moved often. Four of my elementary school years were spent in Dunwoody, Georgia, just north of Atlanta.
 
Recent politicized conflicts between our president and Goodyear, based on acceptable and non-acceptable logo-based clothing for Goodyear employees, caused me to think of our years as a Goodyear family. The company picnics, the families that also moved, just ahead of us or behind us, to the same communities . . . My father's boss' son and I were friends in high school in Hudson, Ohio and I think I recall meeting him in Atlanta.

Because my father was in marketing, he had some access to providing rides for customers in the Goodyear blimp.  In October 1968, he arranged for our family to experience its wonder. The blimp was stationed on the northeast side of Atlanta, so our ride took us over Stone Mountain, the Confederate Memorial Carving, the largest high relief sculpture in the world, depicting three Confederate figures (which I will discuss in another memory). The highlight of the ride was when the captain turned off the engines and we floated, so quietly over the pine trees and red earth with views of distant mountains and downtown Atlanta. 

From my father's stories, Goodyear was good to its employees. His only complaint was that he was Texas born and raised and any further promotions would keep him in the Akron offices. During my freshman year of college at Colorado State University, he took a job at a chemical products distribution company in Houston, Texas and he and my mother, were, finally, after moving away from Texas when she was 19, living close to both sides of the family again.