General Electric once had a large multiple factories in Philadelphia including a very large plant in North Philly. There were also several much smaller facilities scattered around the city including a manufacturing plant on the other side of the avenue in our Germantown neighborhood. Many local men worked there.
Sometime in the early 1960's or perhaps in '58 or '59 GE closed that plant in our neighborhood and moved the operation to Schenectady NY. Several of my friend's fathers worked at that plant and when their jobs moved to NY State so did the families. Suddenly several of my friends moved away all at once and just like that we had a bunch of empty desks in our classroom. It was very sad. I had never heard of Schenectady but then everyone knew that city with the funny name because it was a GE town.
In the 1960's and 1970's there were over 70,000 people employed at GE in Schenectady but ten years ago there were barely 3,000. I wonder if any of those boys that I knew whose fathers worked for the company eventually worked there too in the late 1960's and 1970's. Were they able to stay there until they retired or were they forced to leave the city looking for work in the 1980's and 1990's as GE downsized those plants and gradually moved their manufacturing overseas. Even the GE headquarters moved from Schenectady to Atlanta in the 1990's but then moved back a much smaller version in 2012.
I always had an interest in GE when I was a kid because we had the same initials.
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