had to raise millions of dollars to buy back the stock at a premium from Goldsmith. The debt incurred forced Goodyear to close the Cumberland Kelly-Springfield plant in 1987, just 66 years after it made its first tire. Local 26 President Clayton Oster testified in Congress that the closure cost Cumberland $175 million while Goldsmith made $94 million from his unsuccessful takeover ploy. The layoffs of more than 1,000 workers were devastating to Cumberland, already reeling from a shrinking manufacturing base. Local 26 filed an ultimately unsuccessful $200 million class action against the company, seeking to stop the closure, since the company had promised the union it would perform a study to find ways to keep the plant operating but closed before doing so. Then-Maryland Governor William Donald Schaeffer criticized the lawsuit for fear it would scare the company away as he scrambled to secure an agreement to keep some part of Kelly-Springfield in Cumberland. Under the deal, Maryland promised to pay $15.1 million to construct offices and a laboratory for the company, a full $5 million more than was originally estimated as needed. Per the deal, the company's corporate offices were moved to a new facility on Willowbrook Road in Cumberland, with a promise of 500-600 corporate and research jobs. In 1999, Goodyear closed the Kelly-Springfield headquarters in Cumberland permanently, laying off 150 people. The original plant site was returned to the City of Cumberland. Much of the factory and most of the outbuildings have been torn down. The site now houses a branch of the Cumberland YMCA and the Riverside Industrial Park. Textile industry Amcelle: Cumberland Celanese Facility (1924–1983). In 1917, prior to the US entry into World War I, the U.S. War Department negotiated with Swiss inventor and businessman Camille Dreyfus to establish an acetate lacquer (commonly called "acetate dope") production facility in Cumberland. At that time, acetate dope was needed by the aircraft industry to coat and stretch the fabric on aircraft fuselages. The American Cellulose & Chemical Manufacturing Company began construction of the Cumberland facility in 1918, but the war was over before the plant could be completed. As a result, production at the Cumberland factory was shifted from producing acetate dope for the military to production of cellulose acetate yarn for the textile industry. The first acetate yarn spun in America was on Christmas Day, 1924, at the Cumberland plant. The company introduced the