3-05-10
Anyone who’s ever driven through Sidney has to ask, How did this village get – and keep – so much industry?
There’s Amphenol (formerly Bendix), 751 on the Fortune 1,000 list. It manufactures fiber-optics cable and related connectivity devices.
And Mead Westvaco – the subsidiary was former At-A-Glance, and before that Keith Clark Inc. – the largest calendar-maker in the U.S. There are eight other companies in the Sidney Industrial Park.
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Certainly, history played a role: Upstate New York, with its trained workforce and developed infrastructure, was generally thriving before the cheap-labor, relatively low-tax South embarked on its decades-long raid, beginning in the 1960s.But there was also a core of community-focused business leaders determined Sidney would be where the action was, wherever that might be.
In 1917, when the owners of Cortland Car & Carriage recognized their business future was limited, they began manufacturing an automobile, The Hatfield.
By 1924, it was clear The Hatfield wasn’t going to make it, so a company executive, Winfield Sherwood, went on the road – on his own initiative and at his own cost – to find a company to fill the soon-to-be-vacant auto factory.
He recruited Scintilla, a Swiss-born magneto company that had moved to New York City, which was purchased by Bendix, which became Amphenol.
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We learned all this during a couple of days spent in Sidney last month. (The Freeman’s Journal & Hometown Oneonta newspapers’ staff plans to visit a different regional town once a month this year; it began with Stamford in January.)It’s intriguing. Stamford and Sidney are facing challenges similar to the towns we cover on a regular basis, although each are tackling them differently.
To continue with Sidney: In the 1950s, Tom Mirabito, Sr., then president of James Mirabito & Sons (now simply Mirabito) became mayor because he didn’t feel his village was facing up to its responsibilities.
Soon, the village had annexed acreage to the southwest from the town, allowing expansion of the airport and development of the industrial park.
Keith Clark wanted to build a new plant, and a site was provided. When Bendix wanted to expand its Delaware Avenue plant, the Mirabito administration figured out how to do it. When Unadilla Silo Co. wanted to expand its pressure-treated lumber business, it established Uni-Lam in Sidney.
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Sidney didn’t just help these concerns, it celebrated them.“We did things,” Mirabito said. “We didn’t question: I wonder, I wonder, I wonder. We were becoming more progressive. People weren’t afraid to do things.”
During that time, there was also a corps of activist physicians at “The Hospital,” (now Bassett’s Tri-Town Hospital), that made an institution an effervescent center of community, Sidney booster Chuck D’Imperio recalls.
He also remembers businessmen like Bendix GM George Steiner, and “The Lion of Sidney” Myron Kipp, who owned the local market and, when a local company needed investors, he went out and found them.
That kind of confidence in the future is being continued today at Sidney Federal Credit Union by President/CEO Jim Doig and his board of directors. In the midst of the worst economy in 75 years, a new bank headquarters is rising on Delaware Avenue, twice the size of the current headquarters.
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A latter-day Bendix may not be what most of our communities want today. But what do we want? The public has responded to “no” – no windmills, no biomass plant, no hydro-fracking for natural gas. That’s fine, but simply rejecting someone else’s agenda isn’t enough.Do we want clean, small-scale manufacturing? (Rabbit Goody’s Thistle Hill Weavers comes to mind.) Or alpaca breeding? Or Web-based knowledge industries? Or retirement villages? Or high-tech spin-offs of our universities?
Prosperity is our best defense against every ruinous (to our environment) get-rich-quick scheme that comes our way.
Let’s take the advice os Tom Mirabito, Sr., and move behind “I wonder, I wonder, I wonder,” to a vision of where we should be. Then get there.
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