It was July 15, 2008, and already Chattanooga was hot - pushing 90.
A crowd packed the Hunter Museum lobby to whoop and clap when then-Volkswagen CEO Stefan Jacoby said Chattanooga was "the best fit" for VW as the German automaker announced our city's largest single manufacturing investment ever.
"What we found here was ideal," Jacoby said, adding that his company would build a $1 billion plant, beginning in early 2011.
One person, though he beamed, was pretty quiet. That was then-county mayor, Claude Ramsey. He was quiet because he'd just about lost his voice cobbling together coalitions, hammering out negotiations, cajoling and even arguing - for weeks, months, years - just to make the VW plant happen.
Finally when it was Ramsey's turn to take the mic, he got right to the point:
"To all those naysayers who doubted what we were doing [like clearing hundreds of acres at the old Volunteer Army Ammunition Plant turned Enterprise South in a build-it-and-they-will-come fashion], this is an especially great day. What a good day. You made my dream come true."
That was Claude Ramsey: Understated. To the point. Determined. Pragmatic. Humble. And always - always - holding more than he was showing.
He recalled that, even 15 years in the rear-view mirror, he and other local officials had always believed the site in Tyner abandoned by federal TNT makers would eventually again produce family-wage jobs. And he thanked the "hundreds of people who helped this day come."
Perhaps that is why in more than 40 years of public service, Ramsey was elected five times as county mayor, four times as assessor of property, twice to the Tennessee General Assembly and once as county commissioner. In fact, he never lost an election.
"He always made it about the people," said today's County Mayor Jim Coppinger. "There was never a controversy about him because he lived his life with the expectations of elevating what public service should be,"
Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke also praised Ramsey: "Claude Ramsey made economic development and education our priorities, and put practicality over partisanship."
They don't make them like Claude Ramsey anymore - a man who was born to a third-generation Hamilton County strawberry farmer, but rose to be deputy governor of Tennessee.
He died Monday at 75. We will miss him. And we need more leaders like him.