Victory City by Orville Simpson II (2011)

When I was a small child and the family would go out in the country on Sunday. Quite often on a
Sunday, just to take a drive in the country, and it was all farmland there. Then when I
was…before I even went to school at all and then when I was in grade school, I gradually
noticed changes in the what was going on in the country.

As the farms tend to disappear, one after another and industry would come in and they
build…and developed the real estate buildings, houses with streets…new streets put in with the
new houses and also then they came in with the industrial parks and the shopping centers. And
wherever they came in, the farms disappeared, totally.

And I couldn't help but see that when I was a small child and I and we saw the development of it
because it kept moving, changing each time we went out there and be more development and
less farm. And we really enjoyed the farm because I love to see the cows out in the field and all
of the farm animals.

One of the last things was Kings Island…that the latest developments. I realized that the way
the city grew when it originally the original houses were in good shape and new and they
weren’t dilapidated but over a long period of time, that's what happened to them.

They turn turn from solid residential houses and apartments into slums. I thought certainly is a
better way to do things and to allow the city just to grow in a haphazard way and then allow the
buildings to deteriorate into slums. After Lotspeich school, my parents sent me to Ashville
school.

A boarding school for boys. Boys only, and that was the Asheville, North Carolina. To get there,
the road was going this way and that way, circling back and forth and, and it was noisy and sort
of bumpy and, swaying an awful lot. And it made me sick. I got so train sick that when I, when I
arrived at Asheville I was so sick, they took me to the hospital and they thought I was having an
appendicitis or something.

What happened and put me there in bed and I had nothing to do. It was very boring. Just I lie
there in bed. So then I began thinking about all the problems of the way the country was
changing in the way all the food producing land was disappearing. When I was 13, I drew one
little simple, rough sketch which was extremely simple and no one paid any attention to
whenever I showed it.

And then eventually I lost because I lost a lot of things when we moved. When my parents
moved from College Hill to Weebetook Lane when father built a new house there. I was a very
poor student and I mainly the main problem I had was…I had such a poor memory.

I couldn’t memorize anything. And then when they assigned us outside reading material or
books that were part of the regular curriculum, the English teacher would assign us some book
like that. And I'd read a paragraph and it was a book I wasn’t interested in, in the first place, but
I was reading it because I was assigned to it and I'd read it.

And when I got through reading, I couldn't remember a thing I read. And I couldn't go to the
teachers and tell them about the trouble I was having, remembering they weren’t paying
attention to me. So that was a big problem and I couldn't get through…I couldn't graduate. Well
that was the first job and I, I went to work with the idea that I should try to learn all I could
because it looked as if, if I should happen to become President of the company, I should know
everything about it.

And so I started when I was 16 and worked there when I was 17 and Father didn't pay me
anything then. And then he's explaining that by saying that it took so much of the men’s’ time to
teach me how to do the work that my work wasn't worth enough to offset the cost of teaching.

That extra time teaching me how to do it. And I accepted that because I looked upon it as a
learning experience and I needed something to do anyway in the summertime, and that's when I
was out of school and free to go there and work. So that's what I did.

And then when I was 18, he paid me a quarter an hour, the lowest paid in the whole place. And I
accepted that also for the same reason. When I was 19, I was drafted into the Army. And so the
government decided what I was going to do from then on. As for 2 years and 10 months in the
Army.

And you're in this country and basic training. And then in Europe and the War and I was
wounded in Normandy, there was a type a bomb that they dropped from an airplane by a
parachute. And then it near ones near the ground it exploded and it was called an antipersonnel
bomb.

So I was in the hospital 5 months. And after it healed enough, I could go out, walk without any
crutches. Then I walked around the English countryside, which was beautiful and went to other
villages and well after the 5 months was up, then they came by and told me I was being moved
back to France and it was just after the Battle of the Bulge and my outfit had been overrun when
I was still out, away from them.

And when I got back with them, then they were real mad at me for not being there to be overrun
with them. Well, some of them were, that’s the way they are acting out as Army humor. So if I
count correctly. It was 22 different jobs in the first 15 years of my business career.

And they were all very low bottom jobs, low paying. And I could get them because I…well, they
were clerical or laboring work or sales work. And that's about the only kind of job I was able to
get because I didn't have college education and I didn't even graduate from high school.

I started drawing in 1960. I had a sort of a dream, I was half awake and half asleep and I
visualized the city, all in one building and it would be in a sort of a valley and I had a view of it
from up on top of a high hill and so when I woke up, I thought, I better put that on paper before I
forget it, then it was more clear in my mind and I kept getting ideas and I never knew when or
where they're going to come from.

But quite often they were from other people. After I had bought my first apartment…four family
apartment building and I had a place where I could have a table and where I could work where I
had the facilities for it. The apartment I had was a one bedroom with a living room and kitchen
dinette and bathroom and I used the living room as a…where I had the card table to work on.

And then once I started, I kept seeing things that were wrong or inefficient or that could be
improved upon. And so I kept redrawing putting improvements in and changes of all kinds and
some of them were major where I had to redraw the whole thing. But that's what I did to try to
improve it.

At that time, the Empire State building it was 102 floors high and it was a tallest building in the
World. So they proved that you could do it at that height. So I thought that was a good authority
to go by. I only made one trip to New York in my whole life and that was to go to the Otis
Elevator annual meeting.

And there I met the top officials of Otis Elevator. I met them all at the meeting and I wanted to
show them I was there with Bob Ritter and I brought the models and I had set it up in the room,
in the hotel. I had a row of elevators all along the hallways so that when people walked out of
their apartment, they could have an elevator right across the hall.

I thought that would be a convenient way and then being 102 floors high. Even though the
elevator only be serving one or two apartments there be one hundred and two of them. One
hundred and two times two or whatever. So that would be plenty number of people to use the
elevator and, and also that it would go right to their door, practically.

And that was my idea, but they explained about how I should have Otis sized elevator to take 50
people and go up to Sky lobbies and the whole building should be divided up into…nine
sections and with eight Sky lobbies and within the elevators would have carried 50 people up to
the Sky lobby, then you get off and get on a conventional sized elevator to go up to your specific
floor. Or coming down to be the reverse of that.

So that was a big improvement in the plans and they got the idea from Otis Elevator. Which I
haven’t owned stock in. And when I went to Cambridge Inn cafeteria, the manager Mrs. Miller
told me about the Circl-Serve and it sounded pretty good and she made arrangements.

I could go see one up at the Milancron plant in Lebanon, or, or South Lebanon. And we had a
tour of the whole place. And then we had lunch there. And served ourselves on the Circl-Serve
because that was a key part of Victory City. And the plans were all evolved around that there
were major changes in a plan just to bring in the Circl-Serve and a new way of serving which
was far superior to the old-line cafeteria. The cafeteria was supposed to be the most economical
way to feed a large numbers of people and still given a high grade of food and there would be
less waste because the management would know how many people are coming in that
situation.

Whereas in an ordinary restaurant or cafeteria, they never know. Because it would vary from
time to time and it does, as I understand. And you can…when you go to the restaurant, you can
see a variation in the crowd. But in the Victory City, you can be sure there are going to be a very
stable number because there's no other restaurant nearby.

So people aren’t going to go take a long drive, say from here to Dayton to go to have a meal.
And they might do it on occasion, but not regularly. So you'd have a regular number…of number
of people for, and it's all planned for that number so it would be very economical.

The theory of the…the murals is that that could act as a Museum of Science or whatever
it…would be to educate the public. And they wouldn’t have to go to a Museum to see it. And
they could see it right there in Victory City whenever they went to eat. And they could see a lot
of em’ because they would be all around.

I gotta… a lot of the plans I already had and put them in a big folder about so big and sent it to
New York and invited them to use to make an article out of it. And they acted favorably, which is
a very unusual but then they sent Anne Fadiman who is a writer for them to Cincinnati to meet
me and, and also a photographer. I went to Taft Stettinius & Hollister and asked them to create
a corporation where we could sell stock to the general public and they said they would not do it.

And they said that they couldn't do it because we weren't big enough or we didn't have enough
resources to go into something of that size and try to sell stock in where you need millions of
dollars. And I can't remember how much I was worth at the time, but it was a very small still is
compared to what would be needed.

And that was their explanation. And then I thought, well, I could go to another firm and see what
they have to say and they said exactly the same thing. I hope they invest in it. And then I hope
that a large number of people would want to live in it. Or start a business in it.

And I…that’s just a hope because I will, I'll just be around a few more years. But I'm envision
this going on for centuries in the future. And I think that there will be people that will be around
to produce it, if it gets started, then it will expand. But if it never gets started, then it won't have a chance to expand.

But the first one built, I think would be most likely highly successful. And other people seeing
that there’d be imitators. And some of the imitators might be better than the originators.