GM FYI Blog

…and one huge party

By Jessica Peck
Plant Communications Manager, Moraine Assembly

Washers, dryers, refrigerators, rifles, propellers, the first dishwasher, the Wright Brothers, a Chevy S-10 and one sweet Tony Stewart customized TrailBlazer SS… What do they all have in common? They’re part of the rich heritage of GM’s Moraine Assembly near Dayton, Ohio.

When I signed up to be the Plant Communications Manager at Moraine I didn’t realize how far back our history really went. Our actual plant was built as part of GM’s Frigidaire division in 1951, but GM’s been on this site since 1919, when we purchased the property from the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company (The company that supplied the only U.S.-built planes used in World War I and was formed by E.A. Deeds and C.F. Kettering with the assistance of Orville Wright). The plant and our surrounding sites have built appliances for Frigidaire, supplies for WWI and WWII, as well as trucks, SUVs and postal vehicles, and we even have one TrailBlazer SS that Tony Stewart smoked the tires on as he drove it off the line on Dec. 12, 2006.

While Moraine Assembly was established in 1951, in 1981 the plant was converted from manufacturing appliances to building small pick-ups. On Aug. 26, 1981, the first Chevy S-10 pick-up rolled off the line. Since then we’ve built more than 6 million vehicles, ranging from small pick-ups to our current mid-size SUVs (Chevy TrailBlazer, GMC Envoy, Saab 9-7X and our joint venture, the Isuzu Ascender). So, for the past year, we’ve been celebrating this milestone with employee celebrations, a visit to the plant from two-time NASCAR Cup champion Tony Stewart, special nights at the local Dayton Dragons baseball games… and finally with what we called our “Grand Celebration” Aug. 25 and Aug. 26.

For the past year we’ve had a team of volunteer employees organizing the Grand Celebration, but until we saw the community emerge on us last weekend, I don’t think we really knew what we’d gotten ourselves into, nor did we truly understand how our community supports our team.

The grand celebration included GM’s Continuous Safety Tour, the Tiger Woods Buick Display, our Service Parts Operations’ Rides/Vibes & Chrome display, inflatable activities for kids, slot-car racing, food vendors and more. With all of our activities, the three biggest draws for the weekend were our plant open house, Sunday’s classic car show and Saturday’s “Chevy Guarantees 100,000 Miles…But Today I’m Only Good for 3.1” 5K/Walk Run. When we opened the doors for plant tours on Saturday, we saw more than 300 people waiting in line, and a steady stream followed. On Sunday, the line went out our plant’s front door and wrapped through the classic car show. Lots of people toured the plant learning about general assembly and watching our body shop robots play basketball.

All in all, 25,000 people attended the celebration with more than 140 Moraine Assembly volunteers helping. We provided more than 5,200 bottles of water, had 700 cars in the car show, cheered on 147 runners/walkers in the 5K and raised more than $15,500 for local charities.

I think our feet still hurt, but we’re proud of what we do and we’re proud to showcase our plant to our community and friends. We’re already talking about what we can do next year. Why not celebrate 26 years? Each year’s been great!

To see more photos from the weekend, check out our Moraine Flickr set.