Former Piedmont executives remember the meeting in the spring of 1987, shortly after the merger with USAir was announced, with mixed feelings.
All 40 Piedmont officers were there, seated around the U-shaped conference table in the Kitty Hawk Room of the Piedmont headquarters building, to meet their new boss, Edwin I. Colodny, the chairman of USAir.
Colodny, they said, was charming and gregarious. Before beginning his formal remarks, he introduced himself to each officer. As several executives later recalled, the substance of those remarks was: "We need you. We'll take the best of both companies."
Now, more than two years later, only four of those 40 officers are left as officers of the merged company. Several, including William G. McGee, the former chief executive, left to head an effort to turn around Braniff, a struggling airline now based in Orlando. Fla. Others retired, but many more were untimely forced out, former executives said. And dozens of other employees, from department heads to scheduling analysts to executive secretaries, were offered either a low-level job or a severance package.
One secretary, who had worked for Piedmont for more than 20 years, has just learned that if she wants to stay on with USAir, she can either sort mail or count airline ticket receipts.
"What we can't figure out is how you can pay $1.6 billion for a company that is not much more than its people and so few of the people are left," said one former executive.
USAir executives tell a somewhat different version of the tale.
Colodny said that employees retired from both sides and that there was no effort to get rid of Piedmont management.
"It's very difficult to put yourself in the position of someone who feels they were not the successful one to be given the post-merger position," he said in an interview at Piedmont Triad International Airport last week. "I have no doubt that in some cases individuals were not consulted as much as they would have liked to have been, but everyone was kept on to do a job to run Piedmont; and they had an obligation and a responsibility to do the best job they could running Piedmont during the interim period."
Other executives said that the story is not so much in the number of people who are gone, but in the added number of jobs the merger had brought to the Triad area. Before the merger, they said, there were 5,300 Piedmont employees in the area and about 20 USAir employees; now there are 5,600 USAir employees here.
While the net increase is 300 jobs, USAir executives said that they do not know how many job cuts the number includes. Last July, the company said that it was moving 600 jobs to the area, which suggests that 300 have since been cut. Meanwhile, as new routes are added, the combined company grew by a total of 8,350 jobs.
Some of the lost local jobs were senior management jobs that were moved to the Crystal Park office complex overlooking National Airport in Washington. Advertising, planning and purchasing were also moved to Virginia, and the pilot-training and dispatching departments were moved to Pittsburgh.
But as J. Daniel Brock, the vice president for marketing services and the only corporate officer left in the area, explained, several key corporate functions have been transferred to Winston-Salem.
The computer department and revenue accounting for the entire airline are now at Madison Park, and the people who keep track of the number of available seats and the airline's frequent-travel program work out of the office buildings near Hanes Mall.
More than 800 employees - pilots, flight attendants, agents and mechanics - still work at Piedmont Triad International Airport, and more than 900 mechanics work at Smith Reynolds Airport in Winston-Salem, Brock said.
He acknowledged that some employees have lost their jobs or taken less than ideal ones.
"The hardest part (about the merger) was seeing the disruption to people's lives, plans and careers," he said.
"I don't care who you are. This merger means change. Some people have taken jobs that in normal times may not have been the jobs they would have picked."