LEADERS REFLECT ON YEAR OF FLEXIBILITY
Past year has dramatically changed them personally and how they operate their businesses, communities.
A year ago today marked the moment that COVID-19 went from an emerging threat on a somewhat distant horizon to a grim reality that would kill more than 500,000 Americans in its first year and alter the lives of millions.
The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. The writing had been on the wall for weeks internationally, nationally and locally, but the events of that day drove home how dangerous the situation had become.
As professional sports leagues modified or shut down seasons, organizations postponed or nixed annual festivals and colleges and universities shifted to online learning, Ohio confirmed its fourth case of coronavirus and Gov. DeWine limited nursing home visits to one person per patient per day.
The governor also discussed plans for restrictions at public events, which ended up indefinitely postponed or canceled altogether in the days, weeks and months that followed as the state and the nation sought to flatten the curve and get the rate of infections under control.
The Dayton Daily News checked in with 12 business and community leaders and let them tell us what they learned about their lives, businesses and policy making during the pandemic.
Holly Allen of the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce
Holly Allen, director of marketing and communication at the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce, was in China in late 2019 and early 2020, when COVID- 19 first took hold in that country. She and her family returned to Ohio by Jan. 25, 2020.
“It was fully underway in China, but it hadn’t quite really hit here yet,” Allen remembered. “I think in China it was just shocking to see the reaction that the government had there. We could tell when we were there that this was some- thing really serious and not to be taken lightly. I could say, coming here to the U.S., the reaction was very differ- ent and it, I think, kind of fed my feeling that possibly it would stay on the other side of the world.”
Still, when it did spread to the United States, she wasn’t that surprised.
Maybe the watchword of the past year, for Allen and others, was “flexibil- ity.” Everyone had to learn to adapt.
“I would say overall I’ve become more flexible,” she said. “For a long time I was working remotely. I’m back in the office now. But my children’s situation is still fluid. We’re still figuring out child care. They’re back in school. I think I’ve learned to just be more flexible.”
Nicole Adkins of With God’s Grace
Nicole Adkins, executive director of With God’s Grace food pantry, said the effects of the pandemic will be seen beyond this year.
“So many have been hit so hard and so many are still not in work now,” Adkins said. “We’re going to be seeing the effects of this economy… it’s not something that’s going to magically fix in a year or two. It’s going to take some time. It’s just like when we went through the tornadoes. It’s going to take a while to recover.”
With God’s Grace food pan- try saw over 2,000 families in line a day at the beginning of the pandemic. Now about 750 families come through at a given time, which is higher than before the pandemic, but need has leveled off since a year ago.
Adkins said she has seen a 60% increase in families who had never been to a food pantry before.
“We didn’t know how much the need was going to increase because we had no idea how the economy was going to be affected,” Adkins said. “A lot of families realized that they did not have enough savings to be able to hold them afloat through the pandemic. They tried to figure out what they could cut, what they could go without and food is something that no one can go without.”
Pete Landrum, Beavercreek City Manager
Beavercreek City Manager Pete Landrum said he has worked more this past year than ever before. And many of those hours working were spent making difficult decisions on whether to keep various city entities, like the senior center or golf course, open or whether to layoff employees.
“Every day it was something new,” Landrum said. “It came fast and furious.”
Landrum said the city had to evaluate how to reduce it’s spending and where it could possibly lose revenue.
“It’s really been a bizarre, crazy time,” Landrum said. “No one saw this coming.”
The city had to change some of its longstanding events.
“This literally changed the world almost overnight,” Landrum said. “I think people will look back on 2020 and be grateful for their health and their freedom to move around and go visit family and friends. People will be more appreciative.”
Nick Ripplinger of Battle Sight Technologies
Nick Ripplinger, president of Dayton’s Battle Sight Tech- nologies, recalled that when the pandemic hit, he faced two options: “Tighten the boot straps” and try to hold on or invest in new products and charge ahead as far as possible.
“We chose the second one,” Ripplinger said. “We invested heavily into new products we wanted to develop. And we also pivoted and did the hand sani- tizer to help the community a little bit. But it definitely paid off for us.”
Last spring, Ripplinger, a U.S. Army veteran, com- pletely retooled his Craytech production line to bot- tle hand sanitizer. Craytech is the company’s flagship product, a writing device with a pressure-activated chemiluminescence that leaves writing markings that can be detected by soldiers with night-vision gear, while remaining invisible to the enemy.
“I think initially there was definitely fear of the unknow n ,” Ripplinger recalled. “What are we going to do? And how are we going to survive this? But I think once you make that decision, it’s just full steam ahead on the future.”
Bridget Walker of Sweets Boutique Bakery
Bridget Walker, who owns Sweets Boutique Bakery in downtown Xenia, never thought the coronavirus would come to her hometown.
“I didn’t think it would spread throughout the whole world,” Walker said.
Walker’s brother, who is an airline pilot, was the first person she knew to come down with the coronavirus. He got sick right around this time last year. Walker’s youngest daughter was also sent home from the University of Cincinnati last spring semester to do her classes online.
Business at the bakery got very slow and Walker had to cut down on the bakery’s hours and staff. Sweets has put their wedding and catering business on hold.
“We do a lot of big wedding cakes, graduation cakes, birthday parties… all those things that people get together and celebrate, but those things weren’t happening anymore,” Walker said. “It was difficult. It’s still difficult.”
Daniel Wendt, Vandalia City Manager
Vandalia’s new city manager, Dan Wendt, a self-proclaimed extrovert, said the pandemic taught him to appreciate the small things, like handshakes.
“A handshake means a lot more, a face to face meeting means a lot more because we’ve accepted the risk and it’s with reverence that we approach our relationships with anyone because we don’t want to expose them to undue risk,” he said.
At the time COVID-19 appeared locally, Wendt and his wife were awaiting the arrival of their son.
“We were so scared, and we were seeing articles about women being induced early who got COVID-19,” he said. “For me it was a matter of, this is really scary and there’s a lot that we don’t know.”
Aaron Lumpkin of Trotwood Wee Rams
Local Pee Wee football coach Aaron Lump- kin started following the updates on COVID-19 in late 2019. Most people, including Lumpkin, thought it was something that would never show up in the United States.
“I didn’t think that much about it, just because it was in China,” he said. But once it appeared in the country, he saw it as a “very big problem.”
Lumpkin said the biggest lesson that he learned was “it can hit close to home. This is one of those things that started very far away but ended up right in our neighborhoods and right in our doorsteps.”
Michelle Collins, Miamisburg Mayor
Miamisburg Mayor Michelle Collins said COVID19 news started to sink in for her as she and her husband visited Washington, D.C. the first weekend of the pandemic because he works there.
“When we were in D.C., people were wearing masks and being proactive,” she said. “We had tried to go to a couple of breweries and other establishments and they were closed. “Driving back is when we heard Ohio restaurants were closing.”
Collins said the emerg- ing pandemic was “such a shock,” especially as grocery store shelves became empty of basic staples such as bread and milk, but she became increasingly impressed at Miamisburg restaurant owners who rethought their game plan to ramp up carry-out ordering.
Collins said she was impressed at how city of Miamisburg officials and local companies quickly and adroitly adjusted. “Services didn’t end but we had to keep staff safe,” she said.
Cameron Shade of TJ Chumps
Foot traffic slowed at TJ Chumps in Miamisburg as the pandemic arrived and lead- ing up to the state’s shutdown of restaurants on March 15, according to Cameron Shade, that location’s general man- ager, who has worked for the business since 2016.
Shade said he remembers feeling unsure of how things might develop.
“You’re not quite sure what’s next, how long (it will last), uncertainty whether you’re even going to have a job the next day,” he said.
Reopening with various modifications, including social-distancing barriers, the restaurant saw “incredible,” unexpected sales due to pent-up demand, some- thing it had to tackle with- out the benefit of the typi- cal March-through-May hir- ing season, he said.
Enforcing Ohio’s mask mandate was a challenge, as was quarantining and contact tracing the few times they were necessary and adjusting to a seasonal slowdown as patio-season gave way to the holiday season, Shade said.
Duane Isaacs of Treasure Island Supper Club
Three decades of owning Treasure Island Supper Club in Moraine was not enough to prepare owner Duane Isaacs for the length of the state-mandated restaurant closure that would follow.
“I just thought it would be a week or something,” Isaacs said. “I didn’t think it would be anything like it was going to be now or has been the last year, but you never know. In my life- time, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Because Isaacs had owned the business for so long, he doesn’t have “a great big debt burden” and was able to withstand the financial punches thrown by the pandemic. His main concern, he said, was paying employees, something accomplished via Paycheck Protection Program loans.
A year into the pandemic, Treasure Island Supper Club is only able to be open at 50 percent its capacity, but is managing that via reservations, Isaacs said. He remains optimistic about what lies ahead.
“We’re just going to hope they get everybody immunized and go from there so we can get back to doing business,” he said.
Rob Connelly, chairman and chief executive of Henny Penny in Eaton
Henny Penny workers are returning to their Eaton offices, and the food preparation equipment company’s chief executive is greeting them with an upbeat message: “We’re back.”
“From being down over 80% last April to currently running at full capacity, we are as busy as we have ever been in our history,” Rob Connelly, Henny Penny chairman and CEO, said in the recent message to workers. “The Roaring 20’s are coming, and we are preparing. There is so much excitement and people can’t wait to get back out and be together, be it a restaurant, event, vacation, ballgame, or whatever.”
He added: “The future is bright, and we are happy to be back”
Last week, the company returned all employees to offices for the first time since March 2020, although the company has had about 400 workers on manufacturing floors since April 6 last year, Connelly told the Dayton Daily News.
Henny Penny Corp. makes frying equipment for restaurants like McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, KFC and Chick-fil-A.
“Our businesses are the busiest they have ever been in our history,” Connelly said Tuesday. “Through this, one of the cool things is, we’ve continued our expansion, getting ready to open up a 175,000-square-foot addition that we were in the midst of (when the pandemic struck).”
Chris Keilholz, coowner of Skyline Chili at the Dayton Mall
Chris Keilholz, co-owner of Skyline Chili at the Dayton Mall, said he remembers watching Gov. Mike DeWine give his first press conferences thinking the coronavirus was something that would go away in a few weeks or months.
“And as I read more about the 1918 Spanish flu, it seemed a little bit more scary,” Keilholz said.
Keilholz said his business was fortunate during the shutdown because it had a drive through and had already partnered with Doordash. He said his restaurant lost about 1/3 of its business in the early months, but nothing compared to other nearby businesses.
“It’s sad to see the empty businesses around here like Golden Corral and the movie theater. We were fortunate, lucky I guess,” Keilholz said.
He said customers have been supportive of the restaurant. “I think the pandemic has hurt many businesses, but it’s also given a lot of new opportunities to others that we buy services from,” Keilholz said.