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Comedian Bill Cosby joined Westinghouse Electric Chairman Michael Jordan on the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange on Dec. 1, 1997.

When Cosby and Jordan rang the opening bell that morning, Westinghouse Electric's "WX" stock ticker symbol would be eliminated and replaced with that of CBS --- the company that Westinghouse had bought two years earlier. The canary had swallowed the cat.

In a sense, the two men were there to mark a death --- although their mood was anything but funereal. Cosby, in fact, sounded stoked.

"Westinghouse is gone!" Cosby said enthusiastically when the bell tolled to open the market. "Now it's CBS. All right!"

. . .

Actually, it was far from all right for people in Pittsburgh. Jordan had briefly been touted as the savior of Westinghouse Electric Corp. As it turned out, he came not to praise the big-W, but to bury it.

It was actually Jordan's second time as a member of the once massive Westinghouse Electric family. As a Navy officer in the 1960s, he had worked briefly at the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory on Dravosburg Hill. For decades, Westinghouse operated Bettis Lab under a contract to the federal government.

With a background in consumer marketing at companies like Frito-Lay and PepsiCo, Jordan's skills would have been useful at Westinghouse back in the late 1960s, when the company's retail products such as TVs, radios and appliances were being drubbed by the competition.

. . .

Maybe if Jordan had been at Westinghouse back then, he would have found the right people to jazz up the stodgy design of its products, or at least to put some life into its commercials.

In the 1960s, Polaroid had a half-naked Ali McGraw on TV walking on the beach to sell its cameras. Who did Westinghouse Electric have selling its products? Betty Furness.

But when Jordan came back to Westinghouse as chairman and CEO in 1993, anyone who thought he was riding to the rescue of the corporation's rapidly shrinking industrial businesses was dreaming.

Instead, Jordan pushed the corporation deeper into the one area where its prospects still seemed bright, radio and TV.

. . .

In the first three years of Jordan's tenure, Westinghouse sold off eight of its remaining industrial divisions for $10 billion. The money financed a shopping spree in the newly deregulated broadcasting business.

In 1995, Westinghouse outbid Turner Broadcasting and other suitors to grab CBS --- then the weakest of the three major networks --- for $5.4 billion. Then it swallowed Infinity Broadcasting's 75 radio stations and American Radio Systems and its 98 stations.

The talk on Wall Street was that Westinghouse's remaining industrial divisions --- primarily its government services contracts and its nuclear power development arm, but also Thermo-King refrigeration --- were holding back the broadcasting side, and thus depressing the price of Westinghouse stock. This displeased investors, naturally.

. . .

There was some discussion of splitting Westinghouse into two separate publicly traded companies, which might have made some stockholders happy.

But it was equally apparent that a smaller, all-industrial Westinghouse, without the supporting revenue from its radio and TV stations, would have a hard time surviving as an independent company.

Instead, the decision was made to dump the remaining manufacturing businesses, move the corporate headquarters to New York, and scrub off the tarnished Westinghouse name.

. . .

As recently as the moon landing of 1969, "Westinghouse" had symbolized American technological prowess.

Now, at least on Wall Street, it carried the taint of "failure," like the name "Edsel," or more appropriately like "LTV," another former industrial giant whose last remaining Pittsburgh facility, the Hazelwood coke works, was also going out of business at the end of 1997.

There was apparently no serious effort to convince the "new" CBS to keep its headquarters in Pittsburgh. The entertainment capitals of the United States, after all, are New York and Los Angeles.

Compared to New York, Pittsburgh must have seemed about as hip as ... well, Betty Furness.

The last two Westinghouse divisions --- Process Control and Nuclear Energy and Government Operations --- disappeared a few months after the corporation changed its name. The former went to Emerson Electric, another former Westinghouse rival, while the latter was purchased by British Nuclear Fuels.

. . .

Jordan noted that the sales would provide "new opportunities for Westinghouse employees," but saved the best news for last. "For our shareholders, the divestiture option we selected for the industrial businesses has generated significantly enhanced value," he said.

Where George Westinghouse had once protected his employees above his own profits, his successor many times removed was making sure that Wall Street's interests were protected first, last and always.

The old Westinghouse, now the new CBS, didn't last much longer anyway. In 1999, it was itself gobbled up by Viacom for $35 billion, ending once and for all a continuous corporate existence that stretched back to 1886.

. . .

With renewed interest in nuclear power, there are indeed "new opportunities" for jobs at Westinghouse Electric Company, now a division of Japan's Toshiba. But those jobs are nothing like the 85,000 jobs Westinghouse once supported in Western Pennsylvania, including 27,000 in East Pittsburgh.

They're measured in the hundreds, not tens of thousands.

. . .

Westinghouse technology once powered --- literally --- the industrial development of the United States, erecting the electrical generating plants that ran machinery throughout the country. Now it's powering America's number one rival for economic dominance in the world.

This year, Westinghouse Electric began construction on the first of four new nuclear power plants in China.

In the meantime, three of the remaining large factory buildings at the old East Pittsburgh Works, including the historic "K" building from which KDKA first broadcast in 1920, have been torn down over the past two years.

In their place are parking spaces for about 1,200 people who work for 43 small firms --- most of them service businesses --- that rattle around inside the remaining factory structures, now known as RIDC's Keystone Commons.

East Pittsburgh's population is about one-third of what it had in 1940, and more than 20 percent of its residents live below the poverty line.

. . .

And the signature tenant of the old Westinghouse headquarters building on Stanwix Street in downtown Pittsburgh is Brunner Inc., an advertising agency. It makes packages and commercials, not turbines or giant electric motors or elevators.

But there is some good news. Brunner's clients include Bradford-based Zippo and Murrysville-based Philips Respironics.

Both companies have their main manufacturing plants in Western Pennsylvania; in fact, Zippo exports lighters to China, while Respironics has just opened a new $29 million plant near New Kensington, employing more than 300 people.

True, it's not at the level of World War II-era Westinghouse, but at this point, Western Pennsylvania will take whatever manufacturing it can get.