From the Roundtable: 1956: Another watershed year in Columbia's economic development

My first contact with Big Blue was in the early ’50s. Staring at a school wall clock emblazoned with the letters I-B-M, I remember watching its pulsing hand count down the minutes to recess. I remember family talk about this burgeoning enterprise up and down the mid-Hudson River Valley during the time IBM was transitioning from manufacturer of purely mechanical devices into a company that built electronic mainframe computers such as the famed Model 360.
Computing has come a long way from the 1949 10-ton Mark III model, a computer built for the Navy — and not by IBM — that was 30 feet long and 15 feet wide and contained 4,500 vacuum tubes. IBM eventually bested dozens of other data processing contenders, including Remington, Rand, Burroughs and RCA, all while federal trust busters periodically went after Big Blue as an alleged monopoly. More recently, the online revolution and software advances have made IBM seem the outfit moving into eclipse.
There has been pain and anguish up and down the Valley during the past few decades as IBM’s plants expanded and contracted with the highly volatile vagaries of electronics, manufacturing and especially component miniaturization. The integrated circuit chip, first patented in 1958, has been as much a job buster in manufacturing as it has been the progenitor of creative, service and programming jobs using powerful computers now virtually pocket-sized.
As IBM emphasizes software development, job losses in one of IBM’s “big iron” plants back East, though unfortunate, hopefully represent a gain for the Columbia area’s more knowledge-based economic atmosphere. Not unexpectedly, caustic, often corrosive commentaries have already commenced. There are legitimate questions to be sure, but in the new reality of economic development, it looks as if Columbia has finally chosen to enter the bear pit of utilizing incentives, tax breaks and other stimulants because — for better or worse — that’s how the game is played these days.
Although the IBM announcement a fortnight ago was significant, the big daddy of economic stimuli that shaped Columbia’s future was the virtually simultaneous opening in September 1956 of the University Medical Center on the then south edge of the MU campus and State Farm’s employment of 180 people in its new regional office on the then northwest outskirts of the city. The estimated population of Columbia at the time was 34,000.
State Farm’s choice of Columbia in 1955 was based on the desire to expand to a community similar to the firm’s Bloomington, Ill., home office location. But the battle to upgrade the University of Missouri School of Medicine and replace the outmoded Parker Hospital with a sprawling complex of clinics required significant effort. The arduous, politically charged struggle for this economic development jewel pitted Columbia against Kansas City, with the former winning only narrowly in the state legislature.
The naysayers will have to swallow the fact that extending Maguire Boulevard to Stadium Boulevard and granting northern access to the LeMone Industrial Park played a significant role in attracting IBM to Columbia. It’s ironic that a community that prides itself on rigid fire code enforcement finds three City Council representatives — one of them now retired from office — deliberately denying an alternate passage in and out of this “city-within-a-city” where hundreds of people are employed.
There’s the whisper that State Farm played a role in helping IBM make up its mind about Columbia. It seems that State Farm is very pleased about being part of our community, so it was a case of one happy customer telling another about our area. Kudos equally go out to the region’s educational institutions as they collegially worked together to ensure the compatibly of their operations with IBM’s needs.
Access to the rest of the world was also significant. Reliable airline connections recently upgraded to all-jet service came along just in time.
Isn’t the pouting about IBM selecting Columbia over St. Louis ironic when in fact Missouri’s eastern anchor city wasn’t even being considered? May the spotlight of economic development successes continue to shine on the Greater Columbia area. We’ve been waiting too long for this.