Talk, talk, talk.
There’s been a lot of it — and lots of ideas and inspiration — over the past 40 years of the monthly speaker series called the Akron Roundtable.
Monday night, David Giffels, an author and former Beacon Journal reporter, and Patrick Carney, drummer with the Grammy-winning Black Keys and an Akron native, will be the featured speakers at the Roundtable’s 40th Anniversary Celebration Dinner. Tickets are no longer available for the event, which will be at the John S. Knight Center downtown.
Giffels and Carney are the latest in a long line of speakers — 547 to be exact — who have appeared over 480 months of Roundtables.
Below are tidbits about Roundtable history and some past speakers. We gleaned much of this information from a book by Akron historian and former deputy mayor David Lieberth. The book, published by the University of Akron Press, is titled The Akron Roundtable: Bringing the World to Akron for Forty Years.
• On May 5, 1976, Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice C. William O’Neill became the first speaker for the monthly Akron Public Affairs Forum, the precursor to the Akron Roundtable.
• The speaker series grew out of the Kiwanis Club’s monthly public affairs forum, with the help of three founding organizations: the Kiwanis Club, the Akron Regional Development Board (now the Greater Akron Chamber) and the Beacon Journal. The three groups continue to provide annual support, and the program continues to be operated by a volunteer board.
• On June 16, 1977, Jerry O’Neill, president of General Tire (sold to Germany’s Continental AG in the late 1980s), became the first head of an Akron company to address the forum. He would be the first of many area business leaders to speak.
• In 1977, the speaker series took on the name Rubber City Roundtable.
• In 1978, the board overseeing the series changed the name to the Akron Roundtable.
• On Oct. 19, 1978, Art Modell, then president of the Cleveland Browns, became the first sports figure to speak. This was 17 years before Modell pulled the Browns out of Cleveland.
• On July 24, 1980, the board approved the now iconic gift for speakers: Contemplative Sun, a cast aluminum sculpture by Akron sculptor Don Drumm.
• Beginning with Charles Pilliod in 1981, every major Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. executive has spoken to the forum. Pilliod became the fourth board chairman in the rubber company’s history in 1974. (Pilliod, who retired as CEO and chairman from Goodyear in 1983, died in April.)
• On Oct. 18, 1984, astronaut Judith Resnik spoke to a packed house. Resnik, an Akron native, was killed along with her six crew mates less than two years later on Jan. 28, 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. Resnik was among the handful of women who spoke in the forum’s first ten years.
• Two years later, on Oct. 1, 1986, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Akron native Rita Dove’s appearance was the first Roundtable sellout since Resnik’s talk. Dove told the audience that Akron is “not Paris or San Francisco and thank God it’s not New York. But it was crucial to the development of this country and to my upbringing, so I celebrate it.”
• Ohio Gov. John Kasich took the podium on Oct. 4, 2011. He is among many elected officials who have appeared at the Roundtable, including Gov. James A. Rhodes on April 7, 1977.
Each of the three times that George Voinovich spoke, he had a different job title: Cleveland mayor (Jan. 15, 1987), Ohio governor (Feb. 21, 1991) and U.S. senator (April 1, 1999).
Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan gave his State of the City address to the Roundtable on Jan. 28 this year. Former Mayor Tom Sawyer, now a Democratic state senator, began the practice of using the forum for State of the City addresses in 1984.
• Former Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic, who served in that role for 28 years and resigned in 2015, holds the record for Roundtable appearances with five.
• Every local university president in the past 40 years has addressed the forum. Former University of Akron President Scott Scarborough spoke Aug. 7, 2014, and Kent State University President Beverly Warren spoke Oct., 16, 2014.
• The Roundtable continues to address global as well as local issues. Among the more recent appearances by a local executive was that of Virginia Albanese, president and CEO of FedEx Custom Critical in Green. She spoke April 16, 2015, as part of a panel about local leadership.
On June 3, 2015, Cuyahoga Falls native Michael Morell, former deputy director for the Central Intelligence Agency, spoke.
Compiled by Beacon Journal staff writer Katie Byard.