What July 4th Means to Me By C

What July 4th Means to Me

By Christopher Rudy

The 4th of July has always been special to me, every since I won my home town's Opti-Derby on the 4th of July when I was 10 years old. Four years later I won Troy Ohio’s first international Soap Box Derby on the 4th of July. This time I made my own race car as was the new rules. Fortunately, my father was a home builder and taught me how to use his power tools this time. (band-saw, belt sanders, etc.). Out of 52 derby racers, my car won the best design award also. It was quite a thing to be recognized as home town champ at such an early age.

The soap box derby evolved out of the Troy's Optimist Club's Opti-Derby, but it was a much bigger deal, and winning meant going to go the nationals where I hung out for a week in Champ Camp, meeting 249 local derby champions from all over the world. It was like a mini Olympic Village, and let me meet TV’s Lawman, John Russell as well as Arthur Godfrey, Rock Hudson and Comedian Paul Lynde. I even recorded an interview with singer Paul Anka on a primitive reel-to-reel hand-held tape recorder.

The 4th of July for years afterwards meant that I got to ride in the new Corvettes from the local Chevrolet dealership, waving to crowds in the big 4th of July parade that preceded the Soap Box Derby race. I think it would have gone to my head, but at age 15, a skull fracture and concussion -- a near-death experience -- rebooted my brain with an intellectual humility. When I can't think of anything better to do than the best that can be done, I go ahead.

For those who read on my Internet blog about my experience on Capital Hill, that was prelude to more July 4^th history… how I came back home to write a 40 page booklet on a Bicentennial master plan for a downtown improvement project – The Troy Model -- that would do locally what the Federal government was failing to do nationally – celebrating the spirit of America’s Revolution with a contemporary upgrade of our core freedoms

My booklet was a “Christmas gift” that I self-published and personally distributed to leaders in the community and downtown businesses in December of 1975. This proposal for a “Community Communications and Convention Center” referenced the Federal matching funds for Bicentennial projects, and with the sale of Troy’s power plant to DP&L, there was the money to do the project which included a geodesic dome over the down-town square.

The dome modules were to be prefabricated at the International Hobart Welding Technology center, utilizing the new microwire production technology which I experienced while going through 10 weeks of welding school on a scholarship grant at graduation from Troy High School. Troy is where much of modern welding technology was pioneered – another expression of the engineering genius of the Hobart Family that gave Troy its Hobart Arena with ice year around, even before large cities had such facilities. Troy’s High School also has a welded steel football stadium that many small colleges would envy.

The Hobart Family has given Troy and the world a lot. Not just the Hobart KichenAid line of mixers, dish washers, and refrigerators, but also extraordinary leadership providing community infrastructure. What I proposed in my downtown restoration project was a way to harness Troy’s extraordinary capabilities during the Bicentennial, to create The Troy Model as would showcase the capabilities of the interactive CATV technology that was wiring the United States at the time.

Troy, Ohio is the middle of Middle America -- the heart of the Country near the major North-South ( 1-75) and East-West (I-70) crossroads. Troy has a very strong pioneering spirit with the home of the Wright Brothers down the road about a half hour and the home of the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, up the road about the same distance. I knew that The Troy Model could be one of the seven wonders of the U.S. with a communications system that could restore much of what was wrong with America.

The Troy Daily News published many of many letters to the editor and ran a half page article that included my blueprint for the downtown square, explaining the design that featured seven doughnut shaped platforms in the middle, rising over a core garden center, and providing infrastructure models of the seven governing bodies on the seven levels. These seven levels were to have “community body” functions analogous to the human body’s seven master glands and their corresponding “energy functions” (chakras). Community "square dances" could be held with different music appealing to four groups in the corners of the square.

The top level ring was to provide a self-service public access facility for a new cable TV system that would exemplify the capabilities of representative government as would upgrade our horse-and-buggy Bill of Rights during the Bicentennial.

The middle level ring – corresponding to the middle “heart chakra” -- was to provide multi-media presentations explaining the unique factor of the community’s new communications system: a “universal language” – The LOVE Model -- that frames all ancient and modern maps of consciousness in simple yet profound ways that govern both the process for origination and evaluation of public access programs. This was detailed in the booklet, detailing how it would also make possible “real time” (instant) mass-to-mass communications. I explained how this breakthrough communications process would provide humanity with a unique model of cultural DNA for the nucleus of the community body, analogous to the 1st “living cell” (interactive nervous system) in the world body. Or as quoted in the Troy Model booklet, “What we are building now is the nervous system of mankind, which will link together the whole human race, for better or for worse, in a unity which no earlier age could have imagined." - Arthur C. Clarke

The lower level ring would showcase the extraordinary history and contributions of those who had built Troy with multi-media presentations on the creation of the dome itself.

I made a multi-media presentation to Troy’s City Council on this proposal but the general feedback, as reported in the newspaper, was that I was ahead of my time. Undaunted, I incorporated a non-profit organization called “Community Video” with the intention of developing a community owned and regulated cable TV system with a model public access studio to provide an electronic Space Age upgrade of our horse-and-buggy representation system and Bill of Rights. The Board of Directors included an Antioch College media professor who was involved with one of the nation’s first CATV systems in New York City.

On the weekend of the Bicentennial, July 4^th 1976, I pulled rank as an Eagle Scout and got two scout troops in Troy to help distribute Community Video’s 12 page “Cable Sights Newsletter” and survey to 5000 homes in Troy Ohio. Troy at that time was about the size of Philadelphia when it gave birth to the Revolution at Independence Hall.

The surveys were delivered to City council and they began the process of granting a franchise to one of five CATV companies vying to develop a system in Troy. The process got heated. I was expelled from one Council meeting for video-taping proceedings with one of the 1^st Sony back-pack video recorders. But the best cable system with public access support finally won out, even though they sold out to a big cable company a few years later. The public paid for the huge profits with larger subscriber fees and little regard for public access

Years later, after I developed a health food storefront co-op on Troy’s downtown square that received the downtown improvement City Beautification Award, Troy Daily News ran a series on the Future of Troy, featuring me in the first article as "Troy’s resident visionary". It didn’t mention that one of the proposals I made to City Council before the Bicentennial was to expand the yearly downtown arts and crafts festival and move it out to the river levee, which became the Strawberry Festival, thanks to community leaders who had far more influence than myself.

More than a decade ago, after moving to Montana with my wife and four children, Troy’s industrialist, William Hobart, asked me to return to Troy to work on The Troy Model with the assistance of the new President of one of his manufacturing companies. I chose not to for family and business commitments at the time. My family has thrived here in Montana yet I often wonder what could have come of The Troy Model. Who would now champion such a grandiose vision for Troy?

Times have changed a lot, but the core issues are still the same. The truth of this is simple enough. Community problems – local and global -- are still, at heart, communication problems. Public interest must rise above commercial interests. Honesty is still the best policy. Love still heals all.

Those who read my blog at www.heartcomnetwork.typepad.com know that I continue to champion the 4th of July in global solution terms. The 4th of July still means a lot to me. The model public access CATV station I envisioned is now virtually on everyone’s computer desk-top. Anyone can originate programs that instantly go worldwide. Virtual "town hall meetings" are now held globally in chat rooms and via blogs. But the gap has widened between self-serving special interests influencing government and the purpose for which representative government was meant to serve.

Community is much more than just a place. It is a “space” between our ears. In an instant-everywhere-interactive Internet world, all local issues are now “global village” issues. We still shape our environment and that environment still shapes us. But now, the moral and mental part of "environ-mental" is far more important.

July 4^th will always be celebrated in my heart and soul as the spirit of freedom and opportunity championed by U.S. Founders. This is the legacy that finishes what the Founders began. There’s a new world being born, today as then.

Christopher Rudy lives in Paradise Valley, Montana. He’s Editor of GeoNotes Services and Director of the Legacy Project.

"A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible - indeed, inevitable - the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.

- Arthur C. Clarke, First on the Moon, 1970

"If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative."

- Arthur C. Clarke, The Exploration of Space, 1951