DEAR EDITOR:

“Oh where, oh where, has my Chill Can plant gone, oh where, oh where, can it be?”

Well, folks, it is just like the company that was going to build blimps at a local airport in the early 1980s. Remember that? The city and the county opened their arms and wallets for nothing.

I was a student at Kent State-Salem campus in that time frame and a bunch of engineering students invited this company to come to campus and put on a demonstration — and what a demo they did!

They brought a scale model of a blimp that they proposed to build. We advertised it in the newspaper, and turnout was awesome. They even brought employment applications. What a charade, with the steel mills just closed and thousands out of work, this was a poor joke to play. Will the Chill Can plant be another pie-in-the-sky venue, as was the blimp plant at Lansdowne Airport?

With other projects going in the Valley — the battery plant at Lordstown, the electric truck plant at the former GM assembly plant and the new distribution center for TJX — I believe Youngstown will rise from the ashes like a phoenix and prosper well into the future.

JIM EIDEL

Beaver Township

Some ‘nonessential’ projects important

DEAR EDITOR:

Of the $82 million the city of Youngstown will receive, I’d like to see $1 million set aside for nonessential, but I believe worthy causes: a water fountain by the Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre downtown; removal of trees along the Mahoning River at Riverfront Park; and a statue of Frank Sinkwich of Chaney High School. He won the 1942 Heisman Trophy, was the first player taken in the NFL draft and was an NFL MVP in 1944. I think the statue of George Shuba shaking hands with Jackie Robinson is nice and was built all through donations, but if a handshake is memorialized, so should “Fireball Frankie.”

Don’t listen to people like columnist Bertram de Souza, who cried out about funding of the Covelli Centre. More than 2 million people have attended shows there, including myself, or Hunter Morrison, whose negative give-up attitude said we need a smaller downtown.

A plaque dedicated to the renaming of a bridge for Frank Sinkwich has been missing for years. How disrespectful is that? Right a wrong. And how about a grocery store in Mahoning Plaza? With no picketing allowed.

MIKE CHOLENSKY

Youngstown

Care facilities need help from the state