The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (8 page)

The first time Vickie was locked up, Tammy was in second grade. She was taken to visit
her mother in the county jail and told that she was on vacation there. A year or two
later, her mother went away to the penitentiary for a longer stay. This time no one
told Tammy where her mother was, and she didn’t ask, but one day on the school bus
an older girl from the neighborhood taunted Tammy, saying her mother was in jail.
“No she’s not,” Tammy said, “she’s on vacation,” but the girl kept it up, until they
started fighting and were thrown off the bus. When Granny got home from work, she
told Tammy where her mother was, and Tammy became upset. But the day her mother came
home from the penitentiary, Tammy was so happy that it didn’t matter. Vickie had gained
a little weight in jail, and she had pretty hair and pretty legs and a beautiful smile,
and Tammy thought she was the most beautiful black woman she’d ever seen.

During Tammy’s childhood her mother was in and out of jail for drugs, check fraud,
even aggravated robbery. When Vickie was trying to get off heroin, she would take
Tammy with her to a brick building called Buddha, on the south side, where she would
drink methadone from a little cup, and Tammy wanted to taste it but her mother would
never allow it. She often ran out of food, so that Tammy had to learn to shop with
coupons and bag up food in individual meals for the week. More than once Vickie left
her alone somewhere and didn’t come back, and the time Tammy saw her overdose she
wondered why her mommy didn’t love her enough to stop using. She thought that if she
could just make her mommy love her a little more, then she would stop. “My mother
put me in some really jacked-up situations as a kid,” she said later. “There were
times she would just leave me, and I went through some things that I really repressed,
but at the end of the day none of that mattered because she was my mom. And I loved
her to pieces. I loved the ground she walked on. She was my mother.”

But it was her great-grandmother who shaped Tammy. Granny, with her crappy maid’s
job, cooking and cleaning past retirement age, had bought a house—not the best house,
but it was hers. Tammy’s father’s mother was the same way—she was a nurse’s aide at
St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and always came home worn out in her starched white uniform,
worked until she almost died of cancer, but she saved enough money to buy a house
and get out of the projects. Those women did what they were supposed to do. Tammy
was that kind of person—it was programmed into her. Maybe it came from Papa Thomas,
who had owned all that land in Struthers and given a piece of it to the church.

After Granny stopped working they lived on her Social Security and Vickie’s welfare
checks, and there was so little money that sometimes the gas was shut off. When her
father and grandmother were still living in the West Lake projects, north of downtown,
Tammy sometimes visited them, and when she was a little older she had friends living
in the east side projects, generation after generation on welfare who never got out.
They could buy things only at the start of the month, when stores raised prices to
take advantage of the checks. Even if they got on a program to pay their gas bill
they would always owe, they’d die owing that money. Tammy vowed to herself that she
would not go on welfare and live in the projects. She didn’t want to have just enough
to barely get by but not enough to actually be able to do anything. She didn’t want
to get stuck.

When Tammy was in fifth grade, her mother got together with a man named Wilkins, whom
Tammy thought of as her stepfather. Tammy had to leave her granny’s house and go live
with her mother and stepfather on the lower south side, which was the black part of
the south side, in a house with several apartments where her stepfather’s cousin lived.
Their apartment was on the attic floor, and it had only one bedroom; Tammy’s room
was actually a closet, with hardly enough room to stand, and they shared a bathroom
on the floor below with several other apartments. On Charlotte she had had her own
large bedroom, with twin beds from Mrs. Purnell. But she was okay with it—she was
fine. During this period Tammy’s mother was clean. Her stepfather had a good job at
the mill, but he never had money and they were as poor as ever. Tammy played flute
in the orchestra throughout elementary school, but when her new school started charging
rent for musical instruments, she had to quit. She went back to Granny’s every weekend.

It was while she was living on the south side that Youngstown entered its death spiral.

*   *   *

On Monday, September 19, 1977, Lykes Corporation of New Orleans announced that it
would close Sheet and Tube’s Campbell Works, the largest mill in the Mahoning Valley,
by the end of the week. There had been no advance word—the decision had been made
the day before, at the Pittsburgh airport, where corporate board members flew in,
voted, and then flew back home to New Orleans or Chicago. Five thousand people would
lose their jobs, including Tammy’s godmother, who had only nine or ten years in, not
enough for retirement, and had bought a house and was raising her kids by herself.
In Youngstown, that day became known as Black Monday.

No one saw it coming. In the recollections she jotted down in a notebook years later,
Tammy’s friend Miss Sybil wrote:

Mills closed

City started to decline as though a cancer was slowly killing it. Decline started
slowly at first as though people were in state of shock.

There had been warning signs but they were ignored. Profits had been declining, though
not sharply, and the absentee steel corporations had not reinvested in the mills.
Instead, they cannibalized machines and parts, moving them from one mill to another—World
War I technology, not a single new blast furnace in Youngstown since 1921. Youngstown
steel became the weak man in the industry, first to close and last to reopen during
slowdowns. The United Steel Workers union was focused on contract disputes—cost of
living allowances, pensions—not the overall health of the companies. The union system
in the mills made room for everyone and took care of everyone, as long as you showed
up and acted responsible. If a worker lost his hand in a crane accident, he got a
job as a bell ringer on the hot-metal cart. Their hard-won security had the workers
lulled to sleep, even when they went on strike. A month before Black Monday, the United
Steel Workers district manager in Youngstown called local union leaders into his mahogany-paneled
office near the Campbell Works to assure them that everything was going to be all
right.

One of those leaders was Gerald Dickey. The son of a steelworker, in 1968 he got a
job at Sheet and Tube straight out of the air force. Some workers showed up with stainless
steel lunch buckets and Stanley thermoses, meaning they were in till retirement, but
Dickey was a brown-paper-bag guy, eight hours at a time. “I didn’t go there saying,
‘I want to do this for thirty years.’ I wanted to make some money.” He started at
$3.25 an hour, and within a year he had a car, and the desire to leave started to
fade. “Something happens when you’ve been there two years—your health insurance goes
up. Three years, your vacation goes up. This great big security blanket wraps around
you. That’s the way they trapped you into those industrial jobs.” A black guy in Dickey’s
local named Granison Trimiar said, “Once you had that Sheet and Tube pay stub, you
could go downtown, get you a refrigerator, get you anything—your credit was good.
And you could get into the nightclubs.”

Throughout the seventies, smaller factories in the Valley—joist plants, structural
steel manufacturers, industrial bakeries, Isaly’s dairy—kept closing, like tremors
preceding a massive quake. But no one imagined that Sheet and Tube would go down overnight.
When it happened, there was no local industrialist, no member of the Youngstown elite,
no powerful institution or organization, to step in and try to stop it. The steel
barons were long gone, local businesses had no clout, city politicians were fractious
and corrupt, the Youngstown
Vindicator
resorted to shallow optimism. The city had no civic core to rally around. The one
glimmer of hope came a few days after Black Monday, at a meeting of local clergymen
and militant steelworkers. Gerald Dickey, by then the secretary of Local 1462, got
up and said, “Let’s buy the damned thing and run it ourselves.” He saw that food stamps
and unemployment benefits weren’t going to get the workers through the crisis, that
without those jobs the community would never be the same. The city’s Episcopal and
Catholic bishops agreed, and the Ecumenical Coalition of the Mahoning Valley was born.

The crusade was named Save Our Valley, and the idea was to pool enough money from
local savings accounts and federal grants and loan guarantees to bring the Campbell
Works under community ownership. This was something new in the industrial heartland,
and for a few months it caught people’s imaginations. The Mahoning Valley became a
cause célèbre among liberals and radicals. Famous activists came to Youngstown to
help and the national media came to watch. Five busloads of steelworkers went to Washington
to protest outside the White House, and the Carter administration accepted their petition
and formed a task force to study the issue. But the local response was halfhearted—meetings
were poorly attended, with no more than a hundred people showing up. Save Our Valley
bank accounts raised just a few million dollars, while making the mills viable would
have cost at least half a billion. The steel companies actively lobbied against local
ownership, and the United Steel Workers never got behind an idea that was highly risky
and sounded too much like socialism. Even some workers who had lost their jobs were
tepid. If they were fifty-five and had their years, they could retire on a full pension,
while the younger guys started leaving the area. Finally, a study at Harvard found
that even a billion dollars in subsidies wouldn’t be enough to renovate the mills
and make them competitive. The federal government—the essential institution for keeping
the industry alive—bowed out, and the fate of the mills was sealed.

If the institutions and the people who led them had understood what was about to happen
to Youngstown, and then to the wider region, they might have worked out a policy to
manage deindustrialization instead of simply allowing it to happen. Over the next
five years, every major steel plant in Youngstown shut down: Sheet and Tube’s Brier
Hill Works in 1980, U.S. Steel’s Ohio Works in 1980, its McDonald Mills in 1981, Republic
Steel in 1982. And not just the mills. Higbee’s and Strouss’s, two of the shopping
mainstays downtown, soon closed. Idora, the amusement park on the south side that
dated back to 1899, went into a swift decline, before the Wildcat roller coaster caught
fire in 1984, which closed Idora down; its spectacular carousel was auctioned off
and ended up on the Brooklyn waterfront. Between 1979 and 1980, bankruptcies in Youngstown
doubled, and in 1982, unemployment in the Mahoning Valley reached almost 22 percent—the
highest anywhere in the country. Black workers, who had only recently entered the
better mill jobs, were hit especially hard. Houses on the east side, parts of the
south side, and even Smokey Hollow on the edge of downtown emptied out with foreclosures
and white flight. The vacancies began an epidemic of house burnings, two or more incidents
a day throughout the eighties. On the wall by the pay phone at Cyrak’s, a well-known
mob bar, there was a number you could call to have a house torched at less than half
the cost of having it demolished by the city. But during a decade of hundreds of arson
fires, only two people were convicted of anything—a black woman who killed her two
children in an insurance fire, and the city official in charge of demolitions, who
used the mob to get the job done. Between 1970 and 1990, the city’s population fell
from 140,000 to 95,000, with no end in sight.

John Russo, a former auto worker from Michigan and professor of labor studies, started
teaching at Youngstown State University in 1980. When he arrived, he could look down
almost every city street straight into a mill and the fire of a blast furnace. He
came just in time to watch the steel industry vanish before his eyes. Russo calculated
that during the decade between 1975 and 1985, fifty thousand jobs were lost in the
Mahoning Valley—an economic catastrophe on an unheard-of scale. Yet, Russo said, “The
idea that this was systemic didn’t occur.” As a resident expert, he would get a call
from
Time
or
Newsweek
every six months, with a reporter on the line asking if Youngstown had turned the
corner yet. Apparently it was impossible to imagine that so much machinery and so
many men were no longer needed.

It was happening in Cleveland, Toledo, Akron, Buffalo, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Bethlehem,
Detroit, Flint, Milwaukee, Chicago, Gary, St. Louis, and other cities across a region
that in 1983 was given a new name: the Rust Belt. But it happened in Youngstown first,
fastest, and most completely, and because Youngstown had nothing else, no major-league
baseball team or world-class symphony, the city became an icon of deindustrialization,
a song title, a cliché. “It was one of the quietest revolutions we’ve ever had,” Russo
said. “If a plague had taken away this many people in the Midwest, it would be considered
a huge historical event.” But because it was caused by the loss of blue-collar jobs,
not a bacterial infection, Youngstown’s demise was regarded as almost normal.

*   *   *

Tammy was eleven when the mills started closing. She was too young to know or care
about Steeltown, the historic strikes, deindustrialization, or the specter of a whole
city’s ruin. She had her hands full surviving her own life. The year after Black Monday,
she moved back with her mother and stepfather to the east side. Officially, she lived
with them in a house on Bruce Street, but in fact she was staying with Granny again
on Charlotte. The summer after she returned, their front door was stolen—it was a
solid oak antique, with a glass oval—along with the ornamental cut-glass windows that
surrounded it. A few of their neighbors’ houses got hit by the same thieves. Granny
couldn’t afford to replace it, so they boarded up the front door and for several years
they went in and out the back door. There were times when Tammy was too embarrassed
to have friends visit.