Choosing Lebanon with John Turner, Plus a Special Segment with U.S. Senate Candidate Dale Romans

In this episode of Mildly Amusing, James sits down with John Turner, who has called Lebanon home for the past 37 years. Born and raised in New Jersey, John shares some of his earliest memories of accompanying his father into the family business, which manufactured tubes for major companies such as Crest and Johnson & Johnson.

John later moved to Kentucky in the 1980s to serve as plant manager of a facility in Carrollton before eventually being tasked with building and leading Teledyne Portland Forge in Lebanon. After traveling throughout the South in search of the right location, he chose Lebanon as the place to build the plant.

He talks about why he and his wife fell in love with the community and why they decided to stay after retirement. John also shares his perspective on Lebanon’s strengths, its future, and the remarkable concentration of manufacturing industries that have helped shape the local economy.

In a second segment, James talks with Dale Romans, the well-known thoroughbred trainer who is running as a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Mitch McConnell. He shares his thoughts on immigration and other issues facing the country.

It’s a wide-ranging episode that moves from Lebanon’s industrial growth to national politics, offering two thoughtful conversations with leaders who care about the future.

🎶 This episode’s song is Johnny Come Lately by Joe Henderson.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Welcome back. This is Mildly Amusing, and I'm your host, James Spraggens. Uh today's guest is someone that I've um had in mind to bring in for a long time. We just completed our conversation, and um it was they're all they've all been really good and interesting to me. This one was particularly so. Um he's he's a good talker. His name is John Turner, uh married to Suzanne, and they've lived here for 37 years when they came here with uh Telodon Portland Forge Factory. Um really interesting guy, a nice guy. He's one of these, every time I meet him, every time I run into him, I'm glad I did, because I don't know. He's an affable guy and um um and and uh I think a really good guy. And I knew he would have a story that would be of interest. I was telling him, uh, and you'll hear that um from my point of view, I only understand being like uh one of multiple, multiple generations of people in the same place. Um whereas he and Suzanne moved from other places and it sounds like don't even have that big a connection to where they came from anymore, and that just seems alien to me. But um anyway, um uh I'm glad he that they settled here and have dug in. Um what else is going on? Uh this might be the most interesting local political season, and I'm not gonna get into it big time unless somebody wants to come on here and talk about it, which I would love to do. Reach out to us on Facebook if you or someone you know would be interested in coming on to talk about what's happening. We will do a show as it gets closer to November, but man oh man, uh, and I'm not on Facebook, but people send me stuff they're seeing on Facebook, and uh so you probably all already know what I'm what I'm mostly referring to. Uh but one of the uh just totally positive things is I met um um Jasmine Harden, who last week filed for mayor, and um I frankly did not know who she was. Anyway, she has filed uh to run for mayor, and um I gotta say I'm pretty excited about that. And maybe we'll get her on the show sometime also. Anyway, uh enjoy the conversation with John Turner. Uh we'll be back at sometime unpredictable in the future with some other unpredictable um unknown to me guest. But uh stay tuned and uh thank you all so much for tuning in and returning so much. Uh this is James Spraggins, and this is mildly amusing. We're back. This is James, and this is mildly amusing. I'm very pleased to have our guest today, uh, Mr. John Turner, who's lived in Lebanon for how long?

SPEAKER_03 3:15

36 years.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

Thirty-six years. Thirty-six years. We'll get used to him. We're gonna get used to him one of these days. Um John, I guess I'd like to start out by saying that asking you, are you prepared for the level of stardom that you're about to enter as a result of this podcast? My star is fading. Your star is fading? So Oh, it's coming back. That's not what Dennis said. You're not gonna be able to walk down the street anymore, you know.

SPEAKER_03 3:43

Okay, maybe slightly. Incicuously.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Yes. And your friends like Dennis George will keep you down, won't they? That's right. Yeah, that's right. Um, so you are someone that I'd been thinking about for a long time that, oh, he'd be a good guest. Well, why would you be a good guest? Um I'm always interested in people. Like I think I am the fourth generation of my father's family to live in Lebanon. I think that's right. Yeah. I'm the fourth, my kids are the fifth. And so my experience is you're you and your people have been here a long time. And and before that, my family moved all the way from Casey County to here. And they had been there for three generations, maybe. I don't know. Been there a long, long time. And so I'm always interested in people who come from somewhere else, what brought you here, things like that, and and you've definitely dug in. I mean, you have participated in a lot of local history in the time you've been here and you're 37 years here, and um you and your wife. And um I'm always interested in like, well, why in the world did they come here? And when they could move away, move back away, why didn't they? And I don't know, just things like that. So we'll get into some of that stuff. Um so I'll just ask you some basic stuff about your uh years ago before you came here. Um where were you born, where you forwarded to grow up, and let's start there.

SPEAKER_03 5:17

So, born and raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Nothing really ever happened there.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

What part of the state is that? I don't know where that is.

SPEAKER_03 5:26

Exit nine on the term point. Exit nine, everybody says everybody says that's how life is regulated in New Jersey.

SPEAKER_01 5:32

How long did it take you to get to New York City from there?

SPEAKER_03 5:34

Fifteen minutes, maybe. Oh, is that close? Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Okay, all right.

SPEAKER_03 5:37

I didn't know that. And we spent a lot of time there because the drinking age in New Jersey was 21. It was only 18 in New York. Is that right? I'll be darn. You learn pretty fast. So that's what put New York on the map, okay. Uh but it it's interesting. I I tell people when they complain about traffic in Lebanon that you have no idea what traffic is.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

So this whole roundabout uh controversy has probably amused you a little bit.

SPEAKER_03 6:07

It's taken me back 75 years. Some of my earliest memories are of Route 1 and Route 130 when we called them circles were put in. Right. So it it it but it's just funny, it's an interesting perspective. I tell people Kentucky land-wise is five times bigger than New Jersey. Okay. New Jersey has almost three times as many people. Right. Right. So the density was the first thing that I noticed going from a county, Middlesex County, uh, when I left in 1980, 813,000 people to Carroll County.

unknown 6:50

Nine.

SPEAKER_03 6:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

So Kentucky was your first move from New Jersey?

SPEAKER_03 6:55

We did move for a very brief period of time down just south of Philadelphia.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_03 7:02

And then uh I came to Carrollton a year ahead of Suzanne. So 1980, I came, and then she followed in 81. Very similar to what happened here. I came in 1990, and Suzanne came with the kids in 91.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Okay, we're gonna get to we're gonna get to that. Uh tell me a little bit about your family, what did your parents do? How many siblings, if any, did you have?

SPEAKER_03 7:29

So I was one of seven, six boys, one girl. Okay. She was right in the middle. Yeah. My mother had six children in seven years. We used to say she was crazy. When I became a parent, I I finally understood why she was crazy. But uh kind of an interesting dynamic. My father was a very quiet and only child. My mother was one of nine. Okay. My father at the age of five was sent away to boarding school, and of course, my mother's family, that's right during the depression, they had to separate the nine of them because finances became so stressed, which is not atypical there.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

Well, that that's a big story around here, too. Some of the big Catholic families who would have 12 and 16, they'd have to farm them out. And like in my wife's family, there's instances of they would send them to like St. Minrod so they would eat. They didn't necessarily all become priests, but some of them did. And but they went there so they would eat.

unknown 8:33

You know.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

That's interesting. Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 8:36

Um the other interesting thing, or the one of the differences, I was obviously raised Catholic, went to all male Catholic school my whole life. Uh, as did all my brothers. My sister obviously had to go to a different school. But uh a m a lot more diversity, and the other thing that struck me is what you in the Catholic school, you mean? No, in the neighborhood where we were raised. Oh, the neighborhood. So, you know, there were a lot a lot of Catholics, obviously, and a lot of Jewish people. Didn't see uh, I guess I didn't know enough about Kentucky history. So when I moved, there were very few Catholics in Carroll County, smoking Methodist, I think, which is what my wife is, and uh there were no Jewish people, so it was just kind of it took me a while to understand that it was different, and then the other thing was people would say, Well, you said that our family's been here for seven or eight generations, and three of my four grandparents came through El Asyl.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

Oh, is that right?

SPEAKER_03 9:54

From Ireland and England.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

Okay. This is a little bit of a detour. You mentioned your father uh went to boarding school. Right. You know, okay, this is a total detour, but I'm always interested what that does to a person. Like I was distraught when I had to leave home to go to college. Um, just because I love my home, I love my family, and I was like, why are they ejecting me from anyway? Uh but like I would think that would be like he was probably very, very young when he went to boarding school. Five. Five years old. I can't imagine that. What did you get a sense for like how that affected him? No, I'm sure it did. The kids get used to it and they grow up and they're fine.

SPEAKER_03 10:35

Yeah, yeah. At first he went to a boarding school about 20 miles away from where he lived. And then after uh seventh grade, my grandparents sent him to Stanton Military Academy. Mary Baldwin bought Stanton Military Academy's property. So if you know Candace Engle Gray, I did, she went to Mary Baldwin to the city. As did Emily Huntley. I was just gonna say Emily Hunley, who loved to tell me about Stanton, and I'd probably been to Stanton more than she had, so it was kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_04 11:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 11:10

I I mean, did it affect them? I'm sure it it did in some way, but it was interesting as an only child uh Episcopalian marries a Catholic woman and has seven kids. But uh he was uh like a very quiet person where my mother was exuberant.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

Yeah. Uh sounded like they balanced each other out.

SPEAKER_03 11:32

Uh it was an incredibly balanced marriage. Yeah. Just he was extremely devoted to my mother's great parents. I was so blessed with parents. Yeah. I remember someone once said to me when I was, I don't know, early twenties, tell me about your scars growing up. I was like, scar? Scar that you said. Are you kidding me? I was the luckiest kid in the world. All seven of us were.

SPEAKER_01 11:56

And I didn't know how lucky I was. Like my parents were there every single day. They loved me, they didn't beat me very much. And uh except when you deserved it. Only when I deserved it. Uh one time dad spanked me, he misunderstood something, and then he came back to apologize. But he said, I'm really, really sorry. He thought I'd done something, and I said, I didn't do it. And then he found out I really hadn't done it. But anyway, but I didn't hold it against him, except 40 years later, I'm telling you about it.

SPEAKER_03 12:22

Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

Um You're in therapy. I'm in therapy, that's what this is. Yeah. Um, but yeah, like, and I would hear friends of mine really complain about their parents. I was like, what's wrong with you? Yeah. But then I found out, well, maybe I was a little bit lucky. And like maybe they had a reason to complain, and I don't know. If you come from a very loving, supportive, good family, you don't know till later on that, oh wow, that was I was lucky.

SPEAKER_03 12:50

Yeah, you kind of go through life thinking this is the norm. That's right. Then as you get older, unfortunately, you begin to understand there are differences.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:58

I first realized it, like you said, when I went to college, and there was obviously a lot of different people and uh a lot of different stories. But uh just it's just so interesting, people get settled here and then just rarely leave, it seems.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

Yeah, I do want to get into that because your time here and yeah, right. Like you could have retired and gone back home or something, but we'll get into that. So um where'd you go to college? Seton Hall. Seton Hall. Okay, very good. Um, and um what did you study? What was your what were you thinking?

SPEAKER_03 13:40

Uh I was just thinking take the easiest courses I could so I could get on I could get on a path train and go to New York and watch Nick games, which is what I did.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

You know, every you need a plan in life.

SPEAKER_03 13:53

My grades reflected my plan.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

Well, that's another thing I wanted to get into. How much of your life was planned, thought out, and how much of it was you fell into stuff?

SPEAKER_03 14:08

Or that's a good question. Uh probably like 50-50. Okay. My wife would say that I can be impetuous, which is true. But I also I like routine, and I think some of that is just uh you know, when we were young, I'm really dating myself, there was only two TV stations, and of course they went off at 10 o'clock at night, New York stations. Yeah. So my mother was a big proponent of reading, which I still love to do to this day. So that's a routine that I use to settle myself when I get too anxious or excited.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

So you you are probably a little serious about your goals for what you wanted out of Seaton Hall. But when did you start to kind of formulate, you know, I might like to be this in life, or I might like to go into this work and your father did what to me?

SPEAKER_03 15:10

My father uh ran a company that made toothpaste tubes.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

Really? Okay. That was back then, and they were metal.

SPEAKER_03 15:19

Back then. Until 1972, every crest toothpaste tube was lead. A lot of people don't know that. But so our family started, my great-grandfather started a business in 1898 that was partially funded by the Johnson family of Johnson and Johnson because they needed tubes for they were in, believe it or not, they were in a toothpaste business. They had a toothpaste called 4-Ans, F-O-R-H-A-N-S. Okay. They dropped that very early. And uh my great-grandfather started that with$800 in 1898. I'll be darn.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

Yeah. Okay. So it was a family business, okay.

SPEAKER_03 16:10

A family business that was then sold in the 60s to Teledyne. And that's how I became connected with Teledyne.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

Okay, okay. So it to some extent, some of this path in your life was a little Presbyterian preordained.

SPEAKER_03 16:32

The earliest memories in my life are on Saturdays going into the factory with my father. Oh, is that right? And I I have very clear memories, probably five, you know, would go in, talk to people on the line. And uh Wow. Yeah, very clear. Yeah. I I still have dreams about it. Is that true? Which is interesting. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Yeah, yeah. Um those early memories are the strongest ones sometimes, I think. I'll find myself ruminating. I don't even realize I'm doing it, about running around the playground at Lebanon Elementary or something or going up and down stairs at the Lebanon Baptist Church that I grew up in, you know, stuff like that. But um I think it's normal though. I I think it is too. All right, good. Yeah, we're not crazy. Right. All right. At least not in that way. Um, so okay, Seton Hall. What was your major? Communications. Communications. All right, all right. And then so at some point, were you thinking I might like to do something besides uh toothpaste um uh containers?

SPEAKER_03 17:37

Uh yeah, I mean, I I think I did, but you know, that idea, it always fascinated me because again, going into the factory at such a young age, it fascinated me. It it didn't fascinate any of my other siblings. Okay. So uh that's what I did. After I got out of Seaton Hall, I went into that business with my father. And uh Where were you in the pecking order of your family?

SPEAKER_01 18:06

I'm the oldest. You're the oldest. Okay, gotcha.

SPEAKER_03 18:08

All right. So, and there's 11 years difference between me and my youngest brother.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

Okay. So you sounds like you early on had some idea. I might I like this family business.

SPEAKER_03 18:19

Yeah, I I don't think it was a real formal thought. It was just something I kind of gravitated towards. Okay, and part of that was I like history. I spent a lot of time reading history, and the whole history of that business just kind of fascinated me.

SPEAKER_01 18:37

Well, and and it's part of part of your family history, yeah. Right. Yeah. Huh. Okay. Um with your uh so what'd you do after college? What did you do after Seton Hall?

SPEAKER_03 18:48

So I went to work uh for my father, and I still was in New Jersey. Married my first wife. Oh, she's still my first wife. Um then in 19 probably 77, I was transferred to this plant, a different plant south of Philadelphia, but still did the same type of thing. It was a family-owned business. And I was there just a couple three years, and then the plant in Carrollton was having a lot of trouble.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

Your family had a had a factory in Carrollton, Kentucky as well. Right. Okay. How many other factories were there, like around the country?

SPEAKER_03 19:36

Uh in the group that we were part of, there was five. And they typically were geographically located for customers. So the plant in Carrollton was really all PG. Right, right. I was just gonna say, yeah. Uh then there was a plant in uh outside of Pittsburgh, and that was for industrial products, so like adhesives. Um and then the plant in south of Philadelphia and the New Jersey R plant was all pharmaceutical. Oh, so it's pretty broad. Things uh yeah, it's kind of interesting because Johnson and Johnson that was a family-owned business, too. Not any longer. And uh they're most famous for band-aids, and then of course hospital type things, you know, gauze and heads. And then they branched off, you know, in 1948, they were the first producer of birth control pills, oral birth control pills.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

1948, okay.

SPEAKER_03 20:46

But they were so guarded about their reputation for nurses and mothers that they built plants in northern New Jersey with walls around them, so you never knew, and called it Ortho, so you never knew it was part of Johnson and Johnson.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

They were that protective. Well, yeah, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_03 21:06

Yeah. Okay. And uh I mean a great Johnson Johnson's a, I think, a great company. They, you know, there's people that pile on now, you know, right about certain things. But if you look at the way to handled the Tylenol, you're not old enough, but Tylenol poisoning. Do you remember that?

SPEAKER_01 21:28

I think about it every time I have to open up something now. It has screwed with people. When was that? That was in the 80s. Oh, 81. 81. Yeah, I remember it very well. It was it was a massive. You know what we're talking about, Amy? Okay, all right. And so everything is harder to open now because of that. Right. Everything.

SPEAKER_03 21:43

Tampa resistance overnight became Yeah. You had to commit.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

That's that's exactly right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:50

They they they still study how Jim Burke, who was the president at the time, a guy came from PG, handled that, and he really did. It's a case study on how to handle it. Handle it the right way.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:02

They just withdrew, think about it, this is back then, drew withdrew a hundred million dollars worth of pills and just destroyed them.

SPEAKER_01 22:10

But they had to conspicuously show we are getting to the bottom of this. Right. We are going to fix this and we're going to do it now.

SPEAKER_03 22:16

But they didn't him and haw.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

They just they took the hit. That's I mean, that's pretty wise. A lot of companies would have been like, like, just talk, don't talk about it.

SPEAKER_03 22:28

They would have prevaricated. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Okay. So family business. You're in the family business. You're in New Jersey. When did you come to Carrollton? Carrollton.

SPEAKER_03 22:40

I came late 79. Okay. I went back for a little while because our first child was born in October of 80. And then, like I said, I came back down, and then Suzanne came sometime late 81.

SPEAKER_01 22:58

You married Suzanne when? 72. 72.

SPEAKER_03 23:01

Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. 54 years. And I got the better end of the deal, trust me. I'm sure she Nobody's arguing with you here. No. Most of all, Suzanne. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 23:17

Never let you forget it. Um, okay, so how long were you in Carrollton? And what were you doing? Were you like plant manager? Yeah. You were a plant manager. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 23:25

And it was kind of an interesting time. It's again, I don't know if you remember this, but it was right.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

You were pretty young to be a plant manager.

SPEAKER_03 23:32

Yeah, it was 30, just 29 or 30. Yeah, okay. But shortly after I came, that's when Retin A, Retin A followed the Tylenol crisis, and that was the wrinkle create wrinkle remover. Do you remember that? It actually started for acne. Right.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

That's what I was thinking, retinol or whatever.

SPEAKER_03 23:53

Retinol, yeah. It was a topical to help people with severe acne conditions. Uh-huh. But then they discovered it removed wrinkles. So this place went from making maybe 300,000 tubes a day to making over a million.

unknown 24:09

A day.

SPEAKER_03 24:10

It was just incredible. Okay. Now, of course, then it went generic. Back then it was by prescription. Now it's generic, so everybody could use it.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

So you're saying that so I mean let me be clear what the connection is. You were making these tubes for that. And that was such a big impact on it, had an ancillary impact on your business.

SPEAKER_03 24:30

Oh, yeah, it was great. And again, that uh the connection with Johnson Johnson, they were Johnson Johnson also fared away our largest. After Crest, Crest up to that point was our largest customer, but after that, Johnson Johnson was probably 35% of our total business. Is that factory still in Carrollton? It closed in 1996. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 24:53

Huh. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 24:55

Okay, so uh because of the conversion from metal to laminate. Yeah. Which is what you see in toothpaste soup, say there are thin sheets of aluminum foil, polyethylene. And I thought it was all just some kind of plastic.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

I didn't know.

SPEAKER_03 25:12

It is, but it has what we call memory. That's what they like about it. So when you compress it with your fingers, it stays there. It stays. Where regular high density polyethylene tubes don't. They have spring back.

SPEAKER_01 25:25

And I've seen, yeah, that's right. I guess they still, some medicines or whatever, yeah, still use the old metal.

SPEAKER_03 25:32

Glues and hair dyes, mostly like a L'Oreal hair color. If you go to a like a beauty shop, you'll still see metal tubes because they're very corrosive. And there's a thing called moisture vapor penetration. So on real expensive stuff, you'll still see metal, but not nearly what it was.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

I think this is gonna be it. We're gonna have to have another podcast about moisture vapor penetration. That's a whole other listen. Let's let's drop that and let's put a pen in that. Okay. And we'll do another hour about that. That'll put everyone to sleep. We'll have to get Dennis in. When Suzanne listens, this is the point when she falls asleep. Yeah, we need Dennis, right? Um, okay. How long were you and Carolyn? Nine years. Nine years, okay. Um at some point, Telodon purchases the company. Right, 1960. Because I do remember that you're here because of Telodon Portland Forwards, which over in around 90. And one of the things I remember about that was I really appreciated they kept the old family home. It was a farmhouse, a big, nice brick farmhouse. And I can remember they hired Shelly George, and I remember they at the time I remember her saying they're spending$300,000 to fix up that house.

SPEAKER_03 26:55

I thought, what a number. Well, David Clements was happy about that.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

Well, it's a great old house. Oh, dude. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 27:03

And it's on a perfect piece of property. Oh my gosh, it really is up on that, kind of up on that rise. I'm not sure that the new owners of Portland Forge view it as endearingly as we did, but I gotcha.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

I gotcha.

SPEAKER_03 27:17

Different error.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

Okay. So Teladon has bought the company and it is opening uh this factory, which I don't know if I ever knew exactly what you all made up there, but uh you moved to Lebanon and you were you ran it. You were plant manager or whatever CEO of the factory, whatever you call it.

SPEAKER_04 27:37

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 27:38

Okay. What does that factory make? Forged parts.

SPEAKER_03 27:41

So gears, uh, or blanks for gears, steering mechanisms, any transmission, a lot for like caterpillar. Some automotive, but not much.

SPEAKER_01 27:54

Oh, see, I would have assumed it was all Toyota. No.

SPEAKER_03 27:59

Actually, there was no Toyota. I wish there were, but there was no Toyota back then.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Okay. Okay. Um so you you came here, and I think um Craig Farnum also. That's right. That's what I brought him here, too. You've got a good memory. Well, I've known him for a long time, and we go to church together now. So uh um uh I just yeah, I just remember that. Um so I guess that means he's been here 37 years too. He's you know, we'll we'll get used to him too. Yeah. Uh he has more hair than we do, though. Oh my gosh. Oh my god, absolutely. Um yeah, I resent that very much, actually. Um so uh you were the plant manager there at uh at Teledyne for how long? Did it sell again?

SPEAKER_03 28:46

Yeah, okay. So Teledyne then was acquired uh by Allegheny and Ludlam, which was a specialty steelmaker in Pittsburgh. Because Teledyne's real business, Teledyne was a conglomerate, had 130 different operating divisions, and uh the guy who started Henry Singleton, an MIT guy, brilliant guy, uh, as he got older, they decided, and the guy who started, or the guy who ran Allegheny Ludlum was also an MIT guy, and there's this affinity with MIT, kind of like Sarah Lawrence alum, I'm sure. You know, their talk, they have clubs together, they're always doing things. Right. So uh Teledyne in a tax or stock exchange was acquired by Allegheny Ludlum. So it really, in effect, became a specialty steel company. Still had some defense work. And back then in the 80s, they were building uh remotely piloted vehicles, so not drones the way we know it today, but very similar.

SPEAKER_01 30:04

Like first generation or something, yeah, earlier generation.

SPEAKER_03 30:06

Very sophisticated, you know, for the era, very sophisticated, right?

SPEAKER_01 30:09

Right. So Tel Don's obviously been a successful, it's still there. So it's still it's obviously a successful uh medium. Why did it move here though? If it wasn't uh out of uh to supply Toyota, why why come to Lebanon?

SPEAKER_03 30:23

Well, because they let me pick the spot. Really?

SPEAKER_01 30:27

Yeah. Okay, then you're the man to ask.

SPEAKER_03 30:30

Why did you pick Lebanon? Well, there was a couple reasons. They wanted to be in the South, so big electric user. So they wanted to be an area where it had lower cost electricity. Yeah, they wanted a large site, you know, so they didn't become landlocked if it expanded. So I spent a lot of time traveling, like in Mississippi, Tennessee. The prettiest college campus I've ever seen is in Oxford, Mississippi. Oh, it really is. Absolutely gorgeous. Yeah, you're right. Um but my wife said, uh, we're not gonna leave Kentucky. So I said, I said, all right, well, we'll have to figure this out here.

SPEAKER_01 31:11

So Kentucky economic development had gotten to Suzanne.

SPEAKER_03 31:14

Yeah. Somehow.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

Somehow.

SPEAKER_03 31:17

And uh so I reached out, I can't I think his name, Joe Gibson, I think, who was with Kentucky Utilities at the time. Because again, it was such a big electrical user, relatively speaking. Joe Price? Was it Joe Price? No, okay. Joe Gibson. Joe Price I met subsequently.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 31:33

Uh and then Leroy. Yeah, Leroy Sin, the Actually, we were gonna locate it where Toyotomi was, but they came in and did uh'cause there's a lot of big, big presses with pits out at Tel Avenue, and they determined that it would be just too expensive to put it on that piece of property. Okay. So uh somebody suggested, well, let's go to Levin, they're only nine miles further south. Oh, it you were gonna be in Springfield, okay.

SPEAKER_04 32:06

Yeah, all right.

SPEAKER_03 32:07

I mean, it was that close to going where that Toyotomi plant is now.

SPEAKER_01 32:11

Geology always wins. Yeah. Truly.

SPEAKER_03 32:14

It's unbelievable. Yeah, but you're exactly right. Yeah. And so uh, you know, Leroy did a great job, and the local community was great. Um Dave Hergen was fabulous, Kathy Blanford was fabulous. Merle Mattingley, you probably remember him. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 32:31

He was the um county judge executive, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 32:34

Yeah. Right before Dave. That core of people. Uh and for entertainment, I had Wheater Southall.

SPEAKER_01 32:43

Well, what else do you need?

SPEAKER_03 32:44

Probably the funniest guy I've ever met in my own.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

I mean, no joke. He was so funny. Um, lived to hadn't been gone very, very long, but he was the life of the party. Anytime he showed up, whether it was the Salat's cabin or lunch behind Iike Ikey Owen's house or something like that, he'd show up and let himself be the the butt of every joke. Right. Um, and and I think about him also, and I think, you know, maybe lifestyle choices aren't that important for longevity.

SPEAKER_03 33:17

Well because he ate everything he wanted. If you look at his diet, but his mother lived to be 107. Well, see, I uh yeah, yeah. And I'll never be preordained. Nothing. He said something one day to me, I was getting a prescription filled, and I said, How's your mom doing? I said, Well, it's not good. She's going downhill, and I start laughing. And he goes, What's the matter? I said, Frank, or we are, she's 107 years old. What do you expect? It just struck me. It does not look good. There was no disrespect intended. And he got it to his credit. He got it and he started laughing. Of course, of course. Yeah, he lived to be 95. Yeah. And of course, Betty's still alive.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

That's right. That's right. 98. Amazing. Well, you know, here's another detour. But they say some of the most important things about longevity are your social connections. He, even when he was having trouble getting around, he was still going to get around. And he went to his places, he saw his friends, and he, you know, has a big loving family. And uh that has a that is a huge determinant. That and of course your genetics. But those are big markers in people who live to be, you know, centenarians and whatnot.

SPEAKER_03 34:28

And he was a great storyteller. Absolutely. He really was a great storyteller.

SPEAKER_01 34:32

Yeah, absolutely. All right. There's another podcast, memories of memories of weeder. Um, okay, so uh so you you came to Lebanon in 90 um um 90. 90. Um you obviously stuck around. Um I had no. What did you think about Lebanon? And you can say whatever you feel. What did you think about Lebanon when you got here?

SPEAKER_03 34:56

I liked it a lot. Uh you felt welcomed and what there was more Catholics than Carroll County, so I felt like I could I'll fit in a little better here.

SPEAKER_01 35:06

You know, my wife, this is a real I'll make this real quick. My wife grew up in Columbus, but her mother is one of the Brahm Catholic families from Loreto. Massive family. Twelve people in her, she had 12 kids in that family. And so they always came down here for like weekends, holidays, things. And Wendy thought that the whole South was Catholic. She had no idea until she got a little bit older. She thought, well, I guess they're all like this, you know.

SPEAKER_03 35:31

Well, so just that aside, I went to this all-boys Catholic school talk by the brothers of the Sacred Heart in Matutcheon, New Jersey. And the history teacher there was Brother John Spaulding from Springfield, Kentucky. Oh my gosh. Len Spaulding's brother. Oh, his brother, really. Len Spaulding's brother. Okay. What a small world. Yeah. You know, that 900 miles from here. Yeah, this religious.

SPEAKER_01 36:00

1.4 billion Catholics in the world. But this whole area was pretty dang important for cat Catholicity. Um Well, Nelson County, they call it the Holy Land. Washington, Marion, and Nelson, the Catholic Holy Land.

SPEAKER_04 36:13

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 36:14

Yeah. Um so okay, so you felt well. And I know at that time there was a big push. Like the local bankers, um, they all got together. They all saw like we got to get serious about this economic development. And I've always kind of as the insider, it seems like to me Lebanon has always done a pretty good job of welcoming outsiders. Like very good. I mean, and remarkably a little unusual in that way. I don't know why that is exactly, except I know that we knew it's not our bread was buttered on. But I mean, other than that, I mean, socially, people are able to dig in who aren't from here. Yeah. And you found that to be the case.

SPEAKER_03 36:54

Yeah, I I thought it was remarkably welcoming. Uh, you know, it wasn't siloed like where I was from, everything is pretty much siloed based either on economics or religion, uh, even race, where here you don't see that. You know, that's kind of surprising. Because I think part of it is because it's so small. There's only one Kroger, there's only one Catholic church. Well, there's more than one, but you know what I mean? Socially you interact much more down here.

SPEAKER_01 37:27

And even Protestant Catholic. Yeah. That's been the case. I mean, that that's not total, I don't want to try to whitewash it, but there were I know there it was not always uh looked kindly upon for there to be a whole lot of mixed intermarriage or whatever, but but I mean there was a ton of it. I mean, people they didn't think that much about it. They might joke about it. Like, oh my Catholic friend, or you know.

SPEAKER_03 37:49

Well, my parents weren't allowed to get married into church because my father was Episcopalian, so they had to get married in rectory. So again, and that disappeared when I was young. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, the the environment here, and I attribute a lot of it to the smallness uh and the fact that you know you really can't ignore people because you bump into them everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 38:15

Yeah. You can't hate them for very long because oh my god, there they are again. I might as well find a way.

SPEAKER_03 38:21

I know it's it's it's like uh I don't like to go shopping with my wife because I said we're shopping, we're not visiting. She goes to Kroger, and every aisle she sees somebody she knows, she has to stop and visit. I'm like, come on, you know, what the eggs. I'll be in the car. Focused, eggs. Right. But that's just the way she isn't, you know.

SPEAKER_01 38:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 38:44

And she made it easy because she's very adaptable. Yeah. So you know, I've seen some situations where a spouse never got comfortable and made it difficult to do. Now, where's she from? St. John, New Brunswick, Canada.

SPEAKER_01 39:01

Okay. All right. All right. I didn't know exactly where. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 39:04

So the East Coast. Banger Main. Yes. If you're familiar with Bangor Main, 90 miles northeast.

SPEAKER_01 39:10

I'll be darn. I'll be darn. She probably likes the temperature here a little bit.

SPEAKER_03 39:14

Yeah, she always kids me that winter began September 1st and ended June 1st.

SPEAKER_01 39:21

Yeah, seriously.

SPEAKER_03 39:22

There's pictures of her as a little kid. You know, it's just in May when we're playing golf, they had leggings on and hoodies or we call all school with when you have a half-inch.

SPEAKER_01 39:35

Right. I'm sure she shakes her head at that.

SPEAKER_03 39:38

She thought it was funny.

SPEAKER_01 39:40

But no, I mean So she's so she found, I mean, she found it easy to adapt here to and meet people. Talk about some of the first people that um you met and maybe became friends with.

SPEAKER_03 39:55

So uh Gene Spraggens. Yeah. Uh Rob, because and Rob like to play golf. And then uh my favorite is Ben Smith, the dentist.

SPEAKER_01 40:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 40:07

Uh and there's another one exactly like just like him. Yeah, they're interchangeable, really. It's uh two bodies but the same brain, that's what we always say. Uh they could be a whole podcast, those two. Bob and Ben, yeah. They really are funny. Yeah. So, you know, I pretty much right away found people that I was extremely comfortable with. And I remember telling Suzanne when I would go home on weekends that uh I said, yeah, I mean, this place is it's really good. You're gonna really like it. And she said, Well, then you better get me there fast because I'm going out of my mind with these four kids.

SPEAKER_01 40:50

No doubt, no doubt. Yeah. Um did your how what what was it like raising your children here? Did they did they like it? I mean Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:01

I mean they're all still in Kentucky. Oh, I don't know for how much longer uh our younger daughter would be, but uh I mean Ryan married uh James Angel's daughter, so I don't think they're going anywhere. Uh-huh. And then uh our older son lives in Campbellsville. And uh our older daughter lives in uh Columbia. Older daughters in Columbia.

SPEAKER_01 41:30

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_03 41:31

Yeah, very close. So I don't think if anyone leaves, it would be our younger daughter. She could probably leave.

SPEAKER_01 41:38

Yeah, okay. Um did you have you or or Suzanne do you still have family back where you came from?

SPEAKER_03 41:48

That's the interesting thing. The difference that you were alluding to before. So seven kids raised in New Jersey, and we're all gone by the time we were 25.

SPEAKER_01 42:01

So maybe it wasn't so much the Charms 11 as get me out of New Jersey.

SPEAKER_03 42:05

There's a lot of that. You'd be surprised. Yeah. Okay. Much more mobility there. The the problem, of course, is it's so expensive to live there. Right.

SPEAKER_01 42:18

Yeah, 15 minutes from New York, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 42:20

Right. You know, housing's expensive, car insurances, property taxes are expensive. I'll never forget I went to the PVA office when I first moved to Carrollton uh to pay the property tax on the factory. And uh, you know, I took that thing down, the little receipt. The property tax on a factory was less than what Suzanne and I were paying on our own in Glenn Mills, Pennsylvania. And I thought it was a mistake.

SPEAKER_01 42:54

You just pretty astounding. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 42:57

People, it's just like traffic. I just giggle sometimes when people say to me, are you over this traffic yet? You guys are no idea.

SPEAKER_01 43:08

Yeah, no idea. It's just like people think taxes are high here. I mean, not just I mean, not back then, but they still are relatively very low here. But they don't know that. I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 43:20

No, and you you hear people complain about it, and we just shake our heads they have no idea.

SPEAKER_01 43:27

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 43:29

Well, I mean look what it cost to go to school up there. I was amazed. My parents had five kids in college at one time. Oh my gosh. And when I came here, and then subsequently went when I was on the council for post secondary education, I couldn't believe how inexpensive post secondary education was in Kentucky.

SPEAKER_01 43:49

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_03 43:50

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:51

Again, when I went to UK, it was like six grand a year. That's twenty something. It's almost thirty, I think.

SPEAKER_03 43:59

I remember Rob's. Father told me when Rob went, it was$230 a semester to go. I think he went to Louisville for his undergraduate degree, didn't he? Well, I should know that.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

I think he went to a couple of places, but uh, you know. We'll get into the Rob stories on another time.

SPEAKER_03 44:17

There's tons of news, too.

SPEAKER_01 44:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:19

But you know, it's just everything's relative in life. Oh, for sure. New Jersey's just so expensive. That Northeast is so expensive. Right. New York City. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:31

I don't know how people I love to go visit, but I can't even picture myself living there. I don't know how I'd do it. But or to raise kids up there for sure. I don't see it. Anyway, yeah. That's another show. Yeah. So you pretty quickly felt comfortable here. Um and was there a moment when you said, okay, this is gonna be our forever home now? Like or I was told because you had already moved around. You were told.

SPEAKER_03 44:58

I was told this is our forever home. I mean, I you don't know how hard I've tried for the last five years, like especially January or February this year. I said, wouldn't you just like to go south for three months?

SPEAKER_01 45:12

No. You've pegged it. You've pegged it. You know, Kentucky is a great place to live weather wise, except for January and February.

SPEAKER_03 45:21

And we don't cope well with it.

SPEAKER_01 45:22

Yeah, yeah. So, no, I mean Well, it's dark and yeah.

SPEAKER_03 45:28

She said, I'm not going anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 45:31

I'll be darn.

SPEAKER_03 45:32

She didn't like to travel, period.

SPEAKER_01 45:34

She just didn't. So does she go back home to Canada very much or ever? Never. Never. Never.

SPEAKER_03 45:40

See, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 45:42

I mean, remember, 20-some years ago she moved her mother to Lebanon.

SPEAKER_01 45:46

You know, that's true. That's right. Yeah, that's exactly right.

SPEAKER_03 45:50

Um and her mother loved Lebanon. They both have very similar tempers. Very can be very, very happy, very she's not low maintenance. Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 46:06

Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_03 46:07

She's easy to keep happy.

SPEAKER_01 46:10

Yes, yes. Of course, she's married to me, so well, I mean, she's giddy. Right.

SPEAKER_03 46:17

It's better than sick, right?

SPEAKER_01 46:19

Right, right. Um, so I had it written down, I was gonna get into your family and stuff, and uh one of my questions was Is there any place that's like a second home for you and your family? It sounds like not, unless it's the golf course. But yeah, her church or no. Yeah. Okay. All right. No. Well, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_03 46:39

Um mainly because uh I know Suzanne will never leave here, so yeah. There's I've gotten over that's nice to hear. Yeah, I mean, she's got her little pals, and uh she loves her little pals.

SPEAKER_01 46:53

Yeah. Well, that's that's really something. What are some things you've learned? Like, I'm sure you at least get in the car and go to like Shakertown, some other places around. Have you found some places out in the state that are kind of like favorite places for you all to go to visit?

SPEAKER_03 47:09

Well, now that we have grandchildren, uh, you know, going to our younger daughters' home, that's where Suzanne is today, and that's where I'm going. Right. Right. So uh I like Louisville, you know, she Suzanne's very involved with KCA, and then she goes to uh Kentucky Classic Arts, right? Yeah. And I forget the one in Louisville. You know, she she and her friend from Carrollton have been going to plays since 1981 or two.

SPEAKER_01 47:41

Oh, was that right? Actors theater? No, not actually, that's not even I don't even think that exists.

SPEAKER_03 47:47

You know the place.

SPEAKER_01 47:47

It's yeah, uh Kentucky Center for the Arts. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:52

And she still does that, so that's cool. That's cool.

SPEAKER_01 47:55

Um in your family, now in my in my family, meals were and are very important. Uh-huh. We love to eat and we love to eat together. And we, you know, we invite friends over, but also in my family, we eat dinner at the house every single night. And in the summer, lunch. And then so meals were always important. And it's and then we had like a lot of families, traditions that we would do for like Easter dinner, Thanksgiving dinner, yeah, Christmas dinner. Was that like an important thing in your family? Same thing. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 48:29

You know, you couldn't miss certain holidays, right? And even today it's the same. Um like Suzanne's real big on going certain places with the whole family at Christmas or uh Easter. So yeah, that's very important to me.

SPEAKER_01 48:44

We always had places like that. I wonder if some of these are um were the same for you. Of course, Shakertown was was a big place for us to go for a special meal or something growing up. We still love to go to Shakertown. Right. Beaumont in Beaumont in uh Harrisburg, that was a big one. Um, gosh, what else? I know there were some that they're all the kind of like these old, old places that were around forever. I don't know. Is that in yeah, especially if it was like mom's birthday and we'd say, All right, we're not gonna make you cook today.

SPEAKER_03 49:14

Right. Right. Yeah, our kids or Mother's Day. Our kids did that for Mother's Day. They came over to the house and they all cooked. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, no, that's very important, and that's kind of a tradition that's maintained more, I think, in smaller communities than in larger communities.

SPEAKER_01 49:33

Yeah. Um, we're just about did this hour go by quickly? Yeah, I told you it would. Okay, we're almost out of the hour. So, but I wanted to talk about kind of your thoughts on like this community today. Like, how do you see it? Is it like in a is it in your opinion, is it in a good place? Are there some questions? Are there some do you have any concerns about the near or medium-term future? Um what do you what do you see when you think about Lebanon? Like what are its like, what are the good things, what are the challenges? You have any thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_03 50:08

So the good things are uh it's blessed with good infrastructure, a good tax base. I mean, we're the envy of a lot of small communities, especially when you think we don't have a railroad or an interstate here. Yeah. Uh the people are solid, and by that I mean when they get here, they tend to stay here. It distresses me that 5,000 people come in here a day to work and then leave.

SPEAKER_01 50:36

And then leave.

SPEAKER_03 50:37

Yeah, that that bothers me. Uh the other thing that concerns me, but it's more a macro uh concern, is uh there's no children being born.

SPEAKER_04 50:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:50

I mean fertility rates now are under 1.6. You know, when I was a kid it was over three. A lot of that is just because uh expectations for you know what a woman's gonna do, they have careers outside the home now. You know, my mother, up until we all went away to school, she never worked outside the home. So I I am concerned that the population is stagnant, let's say.

SPEAKER_01 51:25

Well, it yeah, that's right. That we've been stuck on that number. What is the population? Six, six.

SPEAKER_03 51:30

Nineteen, nine hundred and twenty people in the county.

SPEAKER_01 51:33

Right, in the county.

SPEAKER_03 51:34

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 51:35

Um, it does seem like the fewer I I think about my graduating class, about who left, who stayed, it seems like a whole lot of them left. Um I don't know what the numbers are, but you might have a better sense of it, that of how many people are able, willing, and able to come to go to college and then come back here.

SPEAKER_03 51:59

Um it's few, but there there is a slight trend. If you look at like Darren Thompson at the water company, you know, he's from St. Mary. Uh a girl, Jasmine Harden, who graduated Jasmine Fogle.

SPEAKER_01 52:15

No, she's Jasmine Fogle Hardin. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 52:16

Right, graduated with our daughter. She came back to raise her family. And when I asked her why she came back, it was for a lot of the reasons that we've just discussed. She wanted more control over the environment and where the kids are. It it's safer. So I do see some of those. I mean, she's an attorney. Darren's a smart guy. Yeah. Then Bob Smith came back. Oh, yeah. That's right. So but I think Paul Ehrlich got it really wrong, didn't he, with the population bomb in the world? Oh, right, in 1970. That we'd be overrun with people by the year 2050. Yeah, not quite.

SPEAKER_01 52:59

Yeah. Yeah, I was just I I just heard some, of course, Trump's in China right now. Um and they were talking about that, what is it, 1.4 billion people over there, something like that? Well, like somebody said, yeah, but in 35 years it's going to be closer to 800 million.

SPEAKER_03 53:15

They're going to lose 400 million people in the next 30 years.

SPEAKER_01 53:18

Because of course, a ton of that was just a really stupid policy of one child. But and yeah, they should be. And they're not, I assume a lot of people are not flowing in as immigrants to China, I would assume. Well, you can't. You can't. You can't. You wouldn't want to. No, I'd love to.

SPEAKER_03 53:36

Yeah, you should. It's very interesting because it's uh it's so different from here in terms of uh it's very homogeneous. Kind of like Japan. Japan's going from 125 million people to like 70 million people. Oh gosh. That's huge.

SPEAKER_01 53:54

So, you know, look those countries. And that means their population is going to be skewed so much older. And that presents its own problem.

SPEAKER_03 54:02

So that's a problem, a discussion I have with a friend of mine in Marion County that the only cohort growing is mine. And our future is Bosley. Yeah. So, you know, when you look at the thing that scared me is if you look at one to six age, there's nobody.

SPEAKER_01 54:26

Just unbelievable. You mentioned uh uh Jasmine Hardin until last week. I did not know she existed. I knew her mother. I did not know Jennifer. Did not know that she was somebody who existed, and much less that she had moved back, and I think is a neighbor of yours. But she has just she has just uh and she said that her kids call Rob Spraggins the popsicle man.

SPEAKER_03 54:48

That's right. Right.

SPEAKER_01 54:49

He gives them popsicle. He gives them popsicle. I said if you had them tested. But um she so she just last week filed a run for mayor. Yep. Uh and a couple of people had said, hey, I don't know if you know about this, and so I uh I met with her for coffee the next day. And um, I don't know about you, I'm pretty excited about that. I mean, she impressed the hell out of me.

SPEAKER_03 55:10

I'm not objective. I love her, but you gotta remember uh she so uh Jasmine, Bryn, our daughter, AJ Rogers, Lauren Gooden, you know, all those girls. When Bryn came here, she went to kindergarten with all five of those girls. And unlike men, those girls have stayed together. Huh.

SPEAKER_01 55:33

Yeah. Stayed friends, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 55:35

Yeah, and it it I always found it's unusual, not that I have a lot of insight into women's psyche, but uh you know, women are just different. Better at friendships in a way. Uh I don't know. I think guys are good, guys forgive a lot easier and faster than women do. Okay. But it I thought for six or seven girls to stay friends, I mean, they go on girls' vacations together, which I think is great because I mean I do it with Ben and Bob. Yeah. Uh but it's just unusual.

SPEAKER_01 56:11

Yeah. Uh I can't say that I have maintained as close a friends from the people I grew up here with. Most of my friends who were really, I was really close to here moved away. Uh, didn't come back after college. Um, but my college friends, all three of the guys that I roomed with for three years, we have stayed friends, we still see each other and all that stuff.

SPEAKER_03 56:32

And that's important.

SPEAKER_01 56:33

That yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, it sure is.

SPEAKER_03 56:36

Because you're right, it's social relationships as you get older, if you maintain them, there's less opportunity for you know cognitive decline.

SPEAKER_01 56:47

Right. Um, you would be a good one to ask about this. Sometimes I think about okay, so Lebanon has, for a town this size, an amazing number of manufacturing plants. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. I forget the number. Every time I hear it, I keep forgetting it because it's almost unbelievable. But um so do you worry, well, what's gonna happen as uh robotization uh increases? A lot of factories, I don't know. I mean, I I I I know that like uh just 3D printing is getting better and better every day. It's amazing. What's gonna happen? Like, what's uh do you worry like, well, Lebanon's gonna have to make a pivot at some point, it seems like to me. I mean I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 57:31

I I'm more optimistic. I think people uh humans are pretty adaptable. I think the biggest change is gonna be with AI in teaching. You're gonna see AI eventually take over teaching. Wow. And you know, that's a huge employer here. It is, but fortunately, it's cushioned somewhat by the tax base, because again, that's they don't pay any taxes. It's the tax base of the industry supports it a lot of it.

SPEAKER_01 58:02

Well, that's what I'm saying. That's what I worry about. Like, are we gonna have the same numbers? Uh like in in fifty in 10, 15 years, are we still gonna see five or six thousand people flow in every day?

SPEAKER_03 58:13

Yeah, I I continue to think you will.

SPEAKER_01 58:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 58:16

Uh the big question is gonna be what's gonna happen to the you mentioned the legacy media is dying, or that has gone through a tremendous transition. Legacy automobile automotive companies, uh China will be much more prominent whether we like it or not in the United States and North America. Uh Canada's already opened up to a limited number.

SPEAKER_01 58:44

They're killing us on EVs, like they're we think Tesla is the be all end all, but China's got they have no idea.

SPEAKER_03 58:50

BYD is the benchmark.

SPEAKER_01 58:52

Yes, that's right.

SPEAKER_03 58:53

Now, it's not the same because they're subsidized to a large extent. For sure. As are a lot of their industries, but you know, their economy is struggling right now, too. There is no, like in this country, there is no consumer base like we have. You know, with it, 70 percent of spending is consumer base. Over there it's not. So uh the closed societies are gonna struggle.

SPEAKER_01 59:23

I I have to believe that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 59:25

They are.

SPEAKER_01 59:26

Yeah. Like I don't know how much of a what you will call an entrepreneurial class they have. Because I don't know, because if you get very big, this the state's gonna take it over.

SPEAKER_03 59:36

And they they tend to take over the ones that stink.

SPEAKER_01 59:39

Uh yeah, well, there's that too.

SPEAKER_03 59:41

But they have a lot of money, and you know, look who owns GE appliance. It's a Chinese company. So but I'm just more optimistic. I think the dynamics of our culture, despite all the incivility that's going on now, yeah. Uh I'm optimistic about it. Yeah. I think I don't think young kids should be at all concerned. Yeah. Well, that's good to hear. I think you you gotta stay educated though.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:15

I mean we gotta find a way to make education more affordable, too, I think.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:22

Well, yes, but I also think post-secondary education is gonna change. You know, everyone's predicting over 500 colleges are gonna close in the next decade.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:35

Uh because what is it? The Wall Street Journal had an article about airline technicians making$200,000 a year and they're struggling to find people, and you don't need a college degree for it. That's why a lot of things that they were doing at the tech center were so attractive to me. You know, kind of I wish we had an electric car up there instead of an internal combustion engine car. But that's just my perspective.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:04

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:06

No, I think the American economy is pretty dynamic with despite all of its problems and uh our somewhat dysfunctional political structure.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:17

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:18

Another podcast, maybe a two-hour maybe one of the things China will bequeath to us is the Chinese Communist Party, and then we'll have one party. Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:30

Yeah, maybe.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:30

I say that to my wife, and it drives her out of her mind.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:35

Maybe you're right. Um listen, John, we're gonna wrap it up. This was this was just great. I knew it would be. Were you dreading this? In a way I was.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:46

I woke up at 3 50 this morning saying, what in the hell is he gonna ask me? Why did I say I would do this? If I'd known Amy was gonna be here, I would have been more than that. You would have been even earlier. Yeah. Because I've known her better.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:59

Well, I I can't argue with you there. Um, well, listen, I I feel like I got a lot of it, a lot out of it, and I think our listeners will. Um I'm I'm grateful to you. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:11

Thank you. And you got a great community. You people have built a great community. Don't ever forget that.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:16

Well, you might have had something to do with that. You've made an imprint.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:19

And the people that were here did it.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:22

Well, we're well, I'm always glad when I run into you. Um, so thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you. All right. Well, listen, everybody, thank you so much. I know that you all got as much out of that as I did, and um thank you for listening. We'll be back. Yes, hey, we are going to shoehorn a little something special into this episode. I uh at the last minute got the chance to interview a candidate for Ms. McConnell's Senate seat. This is uh Dale Romans, who is the uh famous thoroughbred trainer out of Louisville. And um he decided to run for the Democrat nomination, and he happened to be coming through Lebanon, and I got to interview him. So here's the interview. I hope you enjoy it. Hello, this is James. We're back, and um very pleased to have uh this is my very first remote interview. I'm talking to Dale Romans, who happens to be in Lebanon today. We're sitting here at Center Square in the auditorium. Dale Romans is uh out on the hustings, as they say, campaigning. He is running for the Democrat nomination for Miss McConnell's Senate seat. And um, Mr. Romans, thank you very much for giving me a little bit of your time.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:24

Well, thank you. I really enjoyed my time here in Lebanon and in all of central Kentucky.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:29

I first heard that you were running, I am I never miss an episode of James Carville's podcast. Yeah, he's one of my favorites, I love him. And uh I remember he said that he I think he said he ran into you at Saratoga maybe last year, and he said, There's this guy, he's actually he's he's he was real excited about it, and he got me excited about it. He said he's gonna run for the Senate in Kentucky. And uh that just really kind of thrilled me. Um I have nothing against your opponents, but as you say, uh they have they have run before. Um, and I think you have a lot of name recognition, but not as a politician, and I think that will help you, and I think you're a very relatable candidate. I'm not trying to buff you up or anything, but but uh yeah, I think you can tell my my side here.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:16

Yeah, I think you have a lot of enthusiasm. And going back to Carmel, we we have a lot of mutual friends. So when we we happened to both be at Saratoga Racetrack in upstate New York uh last summer, and when I was thinking about doing this, so we went to lunch together and we were discussing it, and uh, you know, just like when I talked to Brashir about it for the first time, I was expecting him to say, it's crazy, don't do it. But no, he was very enthusiastic about it. And as Governor Bashir was the first person I called and asked him what he thought. And he said, Well, you know, if a Democrat's gonna win, there's probably someone with deep roots in Kentucky, a little name recognition and no voting record, and that suits you across the board. Go ahead and run. So when those two guys tell you, go ahead, now I felt pretty good about you know having my campaign, even though I've never run for office. And I've been very politically active in my life, and as a lot of Kentuckians are a political junkie. And uh, I've always wanted to run for something.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:07

Okay, so you th you've had this in your head for me?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:08

Yeah, I have. You know, my daughter, I got her on uh with Hillary Clinton's campaign when she ran, and she was working for and I when she was on Pete Buttigieg's campaign when he ran. Now she works on Capitol Hill taking care of social media for 20 or 30 congressmen, and my son-in-law was uh Pete Buttigieg's scheduler at transportation. And uh I've always been involved statewide in in raising money for different candidates, Andy Bashir being one of them all the way back to his attorney general days. And so I've always liked it, and then working as a president of the HVPA, our largest source group in America, I deal with a lot of these politicians. I'm on Capitol Hill, I'm in Frankfurt, and it it's just it's discouraging to go up there and see how for everything you're trying to get done, there's ten people trying to block it from the other side, and it doesn't matter which way it goes. And that's not the way it should be.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:56

No, it's not. No, it's not.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:58

I can't run my business like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:00

Course not. Of course not. Um I I've been on your website and uh uh I've watched the there's a kind of an introductory video that you produced and I've watched it two or three times. I think it may be one of the best ones I've ever seen. Um and uh from the get-go I can see one of the motivations for you to run was your concern for how we are handling immigration now, which is in my mind totally insane. Um but as you go around and talk to people, um how is that how is your message hitting? Um are you because you're talking to um uh of course you're talking to voters, you're talking to restaurateurs, you're you know, you talk to people in your industry. How is your what is your what are some of your ideas for how to fix this and how's that hitting?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:46

But this is something I like to think that I'm semi-expert in because I work in an industry that relies on an immigrant workforce and understand the good people that are here and how they're doing and what they're doing for American, doing jobs that Americans don't have to do or want to do. And they're paying their taxes, most of them, and they're getting they're they're just good people.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:03

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:04

And this is kind of what I was what as the president of the horsemen's group, I was working on immigration reform a lot. And we had a good bill. My plan, and I had the lawyers that work with me in the HBPA, write up a bill, and we were dealing with Andy Barr to get him to attach it to a must-pass bill. He agreed with it. And our plan was right now there's a 10-year law, a law that says if you've been here undocumented one day past your visa, then you're exempt for running for applying for a visa again for 10 years. Okay. It was a Clinton era bill law that is backfired because what happened? Nobody went home. Right. Used to be go back and forth. And if you were a little late over here and you went back home, you could apply again and come back. So nobody ever went home. So there's no grace period. There's no grace period. So we had a three-step program we wanted to do. We want to keep the border secure, which I'll say this administration's done a pretty good job. But we need to put ice back on the border where they belong, keep them from being America's police force and doing the job they're trained to do and know how to do. Right. Let them do that. The second thing is even Trump was saying, I only want to s to get rid of the drug dealers and the and the murderers that that came through here. But how do you do that? They speak the same language, they have the same color of skin, they're all they look the same as so you're pro racial profile. What you do is you pull the good people out of the shadows. So in our plan that we have, we're gonna have Annie Bar sponsor. If you're if you if you're an immigrant and you're in this country undocumented, but you can have an employer that proves that no he's has a job no American wants to do, then you he gets a visa assigned to him, you get vetted to make sure that you're not a criminal or that you're not a problem, and then you get an annual renewable work visa.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:43

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:43

And the taxes are withheld on you, including Social Security tax, which is paid half by the employer and half by the employee. For benefits they'll never receive. For benefits they'll never receive. So what are we doing here? We're buoying up Social Security, which is failing, and we're we're filling that void of a workforce that once you fill that void of that workforce, then affordability kicks in and it starts coming down. Because if you can only pick half your crops, you gotta double your price. Right. If it takes you twice as long to put a roof on, you gotta charge twice as much. So immigration reform and affordability run hand in hand.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:14

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:15

And so we're we're we're bringing down affordability, we're filling up the social security system with money that's desperately needed, and and and we're stopping deporting everyone that are good people and productive here in this country. I keep saying, let's stop deport and start document. Now, if you can't find an employer that's going to sponsor you, if you can't pass the vetting process, you're not willing to pay your taxes and stay out of trouble, then we don't get rid of you. Absolutely. That way we're separating the good from the bad. Right. And then at the end of the day, there's one more step. So that's the immediate action, and then we talk about doing total reform where we turn immigration department into a temp service that people apply for jobs all around the world. And once you are assigned to that you prove that you have a need and no one wants to do the job, you can just apply to that and and they'll send you the people just like a temp service. Right. And you pay the immigration department, they keep a piece to to run the operation, and pay the person, and then they they know where everybody is. And they know if somebody falls off the the payroll. Right. It just makes so much sense to me. But when I went up there and pitched that to Mitch McConnell a year ago, March, he agreed with 100% of it. And he basically sat there and told me the problem is neither side wants the other side to get the win. Exactly, right. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:28

They don't want to get caught working together.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:31

No, they don't want to work together, and Republicans don't want it to look like it was a Democrat thing. And then the Democrats get up there and talk about we have to have a path to citizenship.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:38

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:38

And believe me, 99% of them don't worry about a path to citizenship. They just want a work permit so they can make enough money to feed their families back in the countries they come from. If we really want to make some we don't need tariffs on Central and South America, we really want to do something. Let's don't let anybody import here to this country that doesn't have a labor law in place that gives someone a way to live and raise their family and have a house over their heads. But instead, we don't want to do that because we want cheap coffee and avocados.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:04

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:05

So they're down there working for us for pennies and shipping everything in here. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:09

That's right. Um have you given any thought to there's talk uh well all the time, but it seems like lately I've been hearing more about some reforms, um term limits, uh a ban on Congress, uh people in Congress stock trading, uh judicial reforms. Any of that interest you?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:28

Yeah, for sure, term limits.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:30

And I was a person that wasn't always pro-term limit. And I'll tell you why, because I always thought the continuity of Congress being there for a long period of time kept us from other countries having a big edge. Like you see Putin's there for 25 years, and every eight years at a minimum, we have to have a a president that has a learning curve.

unknown 1:11:48

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:48

And he always has an edge on us. So I thought in Congress there was continuity, but then the way things are today, if you you looked at it as they're not getting too old to do the job, but how much power would a lamed up Congressman or senator have if they weren't having the answer to the president and the party in their last term, we wouldn't be in the place we are now. You look at how all the Republicans that aren't running back for office are doing the right things and aren't just begging for Trump's endorsement and not his puppets.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:15

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:16

You know, you take Tom Tillis out of North Carolina, he's not running back in the Senate. And but now he's doing some great work. Maybe some of the best of his career. And so if you think about it, if you had staggered term limits and there was a group going out, that group wouldn't be the puppets to the president, wouldn't worry about being primary. They're not running to worry about raising money for re-election. Right. And there would be great power in that, and it would really make our country stronger.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:40

Sure. I just got a couple more things. Uh and this wouldn't uh be something you would particularly address uh when you win. But uh what do you think of the Kentucky Republican supermajority phasing out the income tax?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:52

I mean, if if we can get by with it in Kentucky and we can be a tax-free state, then more power to us. Sure. I mean, that's on a state level. It's a little bit different. I don't know all the numbers. Right. But I I don't think anybody's gonna argue with phasing out state tax. Sure. I mean it is. Nobody's gonna complain. Nobody's gonna complain. And it, you know, you look at states around us like like Tennessee that don't have a state tax or even down in Florida, it's been proven that it can bolster your economy.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:17

Yeah. Um I read your uh the a herald leader put out a questionnaire and I was reading that and I was reading your answers. What did you mean? Um I think it was maybe the last thing in the article. What did you mean by ending the large g age gap in in like in the same grade? What was I didn't understand exactly what that was about.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:34

Education is something I really think a lot about because education was hard for me. I was diagnosed severely dyslexic early, and it's it was very difficult for me. I think there's a lot of things we can do to fix education. I think you used to call it learning disabled class, I would get up and go to, but it really is learning differently class. And and we could take kids and start training them with iPads and documentaries, still teach them reading, writing, arithmetic. But everything else you want to teach, you don't we don't need to base how much they're gonna learn or how well they read.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:02

You know, most people are visual or or or audio, and and you can learn a whole lot more teaching those kids that way. But the age gap thing I was talking about, if you read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, and he talks about when all the six-year-olds go in first grade, the age gap between the youngest six-year-old and the oldest six-year-old is a high percentage of their life. And how much better the older six-year-old does than the younger six-year-old. And they never catch up with that. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:31

And so it maybe we break it down into six-month periods. I mean, we really need experts in child psychology and and experts in in education to get into a room and discuss it. But it's just an idea ever since I read Gladwell's book that that what a difference that might make. Yeah, sure. If you took a kid that's really was just turned six years old and put him in his own age group, and the kid that is six and a half to seven in their group, it may make a huge difference in the kids' lives as they get older.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:00

That's interesting. You're the only candidate I know of even with that even on his radar. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:04

It's just a thought, and it may never come to fruition, but it these are the types of out of the box things I want to think about.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:10

Right. And I think it would make sense to people. Um so you are skeptical of Medicare for All, and you don't hear Democrats at all talking about that anymore because it was kind of an electoral loser. But why are you particularly against it? And would you be okay with lowering the Medicare eligible eligibility age?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:26

Well that that's the program I've been talking about. If you've seen it, I think I'm the only one talking about that. Medicare for all, if you look around the world and you look at the health care systems of the places that are they either are so overtaxed and they pay for that program, or the health care system itself is inferior to ours. And I think that I'm a f have a fear of that happening where you get on a waiting list and you don't go see your doctor for weeks or months at a time, like they talk about in Canada, and people end up buying their own private insurance policies anyway or come to the United States for health care. So it's pretty much a proven that health care as a whole deteriorates. And plus, you're putting a government over something else that's that big, and that the way and you're not expecting waste and fraud.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:09

What?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:09

Yeah, right. So so here's a plan a guy talked to me about. He said because Medicare and Medicaid are paid by the employer and the employee. I think it's like one and a half percent out of the checks. If you just doubled that to three percent, but you lowered Medicaid and Medicare to 50 because most of our illness comes 50 and above. Right. So you're taking the highest risk.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:29

And when you can do something about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:31

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:31

So you're taking the highest risk out of the population that the private insurers would have to cover, which would make a lot lower for the people who are just getting going in life. And and and can't pay those high premiums. I mean, I have a 30-year-old son, and his him and his wife just had a six-month-old child and two thousand a month for health care for the three of them, which probably aren't going to get sick. It's it's almost impossible for them to pay. So if if we lowered it to 50 and the the health care, the the insurance companies weren't paying for as many heart attacks or open art surgeries and different things like that, it would be a whole lot cheaper from anyone 50 below.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:09

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:10

Final question. Should the triple crown schedule be changed? Absolutely not. I'm a traditionalist. Me too. Okay. Right? Let me tell you how to fix the triple crown problem. All right. Make the freakness more relevant. How? It's lost its relevance with not a big enough purse. Okay. And there's not a bonus system in place for the triple crown. Like if you remember the Visa Triple Crown Challenge, if it that back then Visa put up the money. And if you won the triple crown, you were going to get$10 million. But any horse that won ran in all three races that hit the board and got the most points was getting a million dollar bonus. Okay. We just never to figure and and then people start running back in two weeks. But when you're giving five million away here and only a million or what is it? I think it's a million dollars for the preakness, it's not enough anymore. That might sound crazy. And the preakness is one of my favorite races.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:56

Yeah. It was interesting what I heard you saying out there in Minnesota.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:59

It's the most fun race for horsemen. Derby's the biggest, but it's a lot of pressure.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:03

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:03

When you get to the preakness, we all have a good time. We're all in a barn together. Everybody who's running in the race, we're all friends. And they they feed you breakfast, they take you to lunch, they take you to a baseball game for Baltimore. They usually have a concert for you. They have drivers there for you. And afterwards, there's a huge party at the Preakness Barn. Everybody's there. And so the year Shockleford won it, when I won it in 2015, he was he was kind of mean, but he was he was so smart, he was a ham. And first guy wanted to come over and pet him, and that's when I was drinking back then, so I was celebrating him by the fifth beer in the 100th person. I just said, go pet him. He must have 1,500 people were in the par at the party going and petting Shockleford, and he didn't bite one, and I couldn't believe it. I thought somebody had to lose a finger.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:45

He was just a ham. But he was just a ham. It's interesting. Uh Dale Romans, uh candidate for the Senate. Uh I can't tell you how much I appreciate this. I wish you the very best.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:54

Thank you, and thanks for having me. And let me tell you something, guys. Get out there and vote. Either way, whoever you're voting for. Absolutely. We can start today, right? We can start today.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:01

That's right. Sounds good. All right.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:05

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