Greenfield has never felt like a factory town in the way that the east side of Indianapolis did in the 1960s and 1970s.

But in the way those neighborhoods near the Shadeland Avenue corridor were influenced by Chrysler and Western Electric, so, too, did Greenfield feel the impact of Eli Lilly and Co. and later, its star subsidiary, Elanco.

Lilly and Elanco put food on a lot of tables. They bought a lot of cars and houses. They put a lot of people through school. A large number of those folks still live here.

I know, because I’m one of them.

My dad worked at Lilly for more than 30 years, both at Greenfield Laboratories and at the sprawling campus on McCarty Street in downtown Indianapolis. One of my earliest memories is a Lilly Christmas luncheon in an impossibly large company cafeteria with a giant Christmas tree and a Santa Claus whose suit was so red it rendered everything else in the room in pastels.

The room was in a building on the downtown campus. That’s not all that far, it turns out, from where Elanco will build its new headquarters. Elanco’s CEO, Jeff Simmons, noted that full-circle-ness when the company announced on Dec. 4 that it would relocate from Greenfield.

It’s tricky to measure a company’s contributions and influence in a community. On Shadeland Avenue, it turns out, the impact was profound. In Greenfield, even when Lilly did the unthinkable and sold its entire iconic laboratory complex in 2007, people had the option of taking a job with the new owner, so the net difference was close to zero. It will be the same way with Elanco. It’s not shutting down. The only real loss is the longer commute hundreds of people will suffer.

In that sense, we’re lucky. Thousands of jobs are not at stake. But I do sense some very rough parallels with what happened on Shadeland Avenue when Chrysler and Western Electric closed in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Now, as then, a door is closing.

Lilly and Elanco provided a certain prestige to the community. In the same way that the east side of Indianapolis could claim bragging rights for making millions of telephones, Greenfield could claim pride for helping safely bring medicines like Prozac, Keflex and Darvon to market. In the same way that the east side could point to the manufacture of millions of electrical components for a major automaker as a point of pride, Greenfield could celebrate its ties to Treflan and Trifexis.

Knowing that people in our community had a hand in making a polio vaccine, insulin and penicillin allowed us to share — in some small way — the fame and reputation of a company on the cutting edge of STEM before STEM became a thing.

These employees — scientists and technicians; animal caretakers; and even the electricians who kept laboratory vent fans running — were among us every day. These otherwise ordinary people we’d see at Kroger or waiting in line at Greenfield Banking Co. were doing extraordinary things in the name of medical science.

That probably never occurred to a lot of people. That was fine by many of the people in those laboratories, who hunched over lab tables and agonized over journal articles that advanced the understanding of how chemical compounds interacted with human tissue.

For those who cared to think about such things, it was a mysterious, magical thing in our midst. Medicines that treated depression, diabetes and other illnesses regularly rolled out of a robust pipeline in vials and bottles with the distinctive red script that said, simply “Lilly.” Just like telephones rolled out of the Western Electric plant and actuators departed Chrysler’s big factory, bound for an assembly line.

So, forgive me for thinking an era is passing with Elanco’s announcement last week that it would leave Greenfield for good. Science still has a strong presence here: Hundreds of people at Covance — which acquired Lilly’s Greenfield campus — continue to help develop pharmaceuticals. They are doing important work. Hopefully, that will continue for years to come. But for the first time in more than a century, Greenfield will have no direct connection with one of the most prestigious drug companies in the world and its progeny, a one-time subsidiary that is now the second-leading animal health company in the world.

That door is closing
© 2024 Daily Reporter