I don't mourn its passing

Youngstown, Ohio is featured in this month's Inc. magazine. Youngstown! The city with poisoned air, in the heart of the Steel Valley. Famous for nearly a hundred unsolved bombing murders (which more or less ended in November 1962 but which have remained alive in memory). Famous for electing bribe-taker Jim Traficant to the sheriff's job and then to Congress, and then for supporting him while he did prison time. (Left: One of a million pics of an abandoned steel mill.)

But to many of us from Steel Valley families, Youngstown also has Mill Creek Park, 4,400 acres and more than four miles long, of lakes, waterfalls, tumbling streams, glacial caves, forested cliffs, and flowered meadows. (Right: Mill Creek's silver bridge in winter -- my dad would take me there the day after Christmas to feed the chickadees, which flocked on the field by the bridge.)

Youngstown has ethnicity. Everyone knew a restaurant with something special. Carchedi's in Lowellville?  Wedding soup. Cornersburg Pizza? Best pizza in the world. Kravitz's Deli? Corned beef to die for. Joseph's?  A separate psrt of the menu "For Fressers Only." Yes! I did know people -- cosmopolitan types -- who sneered that "in Youngstown, even food at the Ding Ho tastes like spaghetti sauce." Well, one thing that didn't taste like spaghetti was kolachi. I just googled kolachi and what was the FIRST result? A recipe from Youngstown, Ohio!   I note that the recipe keeps the fillings a secret but next time your Aunt Ann is making it, I prefer walnut.

In the Labor & Industry Museum (near St. Columba's Cathedral, left) there are blast furnaces and locker rooms lifted out of a steel mill. Locker rooms signs are in at least a dozen languages. While men of different ethnicities mingled in the locker rooms, their families didn't mingle anywhere. I have a photograph of a sixth-grade me as a finalist in the Vindicator spelling bee. Two other finalists represent St. John the Baptist school (Slovak) and St. John the Baptist school (Polish). Honterus Lutheran had services in Swedish. My college sweetheart John's family spoke Friesish at home. My friend Oksana Zayatz's dad was a Ukrainian orthodox priest (and Gayle Woloschak, one of my profs this semester here in Chicago, was best friends with Oksana's little sister).

Neighborhoods on Youngstown's west side had blood feuds going and their leaders never spoke to outsiders. For a couple years, my mother chaired the American Cancer Society's annual fund drive. She tried to get organizers in every neighborhood of Mahoning County. Nobody in a hundred blocks of the west side would speak with her -- not patients, not the priests, not the parents, not the children. Serbs here, Croats there, Ruthenians and Rumanians, Slovaks and Slovenes, all living in hostile silence in the shadows of their own, unshared saints.

And that ethnicity became something to flee. At Youngstown State, right along with their diplomas students would get a name change. Topolski became Talbott, Degli' Uomini became Degly. Why did Ozersky become Ozer, though? A Youngstown past was something to be ashamed of and left behind as soon as possible.

And it wasn't just the people in the neighborhoods of post-WW1 immigrants who wanted to get out. Pioneer families like mine, who'd settled there before statehood around 1800, counseled their kids to get out, move away, don't come back. Our generation saw people who stayed as deliberate losers. Over the years, when I sent Youngstown articles to several childhood friends, their question was, "Why do you care?"

I cared because Youngstown is a fascinating place and a life there can be well-lived. In the western foothills of the Alleghenies (which you can see now that the mills are gone from along the Mahoning River) most neighborhoods had tree-lined streets. There were dozens of cultures. Sure -- my mother's family, Ulster Presbyterians out of the Pennsylvania mountains, were a culture too (they just didn't understand that theirs was also a culture, with dialect and tribal rules). First Unitarian Church, on Youngstown's north side, was a Harvard culture. Butler Art Institute (right) in its McKim, Mead & White building, was a copying-Andrew-Carnegie culture.  It was possible to live a good life in Youngstown -- if you could let go of that nagging feeling that others, people in bigger cities, people on the coasts sneered at you for being too dumb to know the difference.

I am so proud of my many cousins who've stayed around the area (or, as we say, the southeast corner of northeast Ohio).  Betsy Johnquest taught at the Rayen School (which my dad, both grandmothers, several aunts and uncles, and one ex-husband attended) and preserved its 140-year history in a final Rayen Annual when the school closed.  Heather McMahon and Brigid Kennedy were both in a recent selection of Forty Under Forty Who Are Making a Difference in Youngstown.  Uncle Dick McLaughlin returned from a law partnership in Washington to make a difference in Youngstown.  And they have.

The reporter for Inc. magazine went there looking for people who have given up.  But giving-upness is old news.  Black Monday, in 1977, was 33 years ago!  Two generations have come and gone -- to the south or wherever they imagined a pot of gold awaiting -- but Youngstown is still there!   With ethnic food, a lively art scene, doers and shakers who open their ranks to newcomers, a symphony orchestra, several wonderful museums, and an interesting and different city plan.  You can have all that and encouragement for a large garden and live near a farm, within ten minutes of City Hall, at the same time.  That sounds like a pot of gold to me!  (Right: Lanterman's Mill in Mill Creek Park.)

I have always wanted to build a house out of Coke bottles and cement.  And I'll bet Youngstown would welcome a non-standard idea like that!  I have a site overlooking a glacial gorge all picked out, too.

It's a Youngstown thing, Part I

Pyrohy, pierogi, pirohi ... I could go on. There's at least a dozen more names and subtle differences, depending on which side of a hundred-year-old border your family came from. This shows the team of pyrohy (Ukrainian) makers at Holy Trinity (Ukrainian) in Youngstown.

:: sniff :: Personally, I always bought pirohi at Holy Trinity in Struthers. Looking around, I see that St. Stanislaus (Polish) has sauerkraut-filled pierogi. Now those are the best. Yum.

When, at age 20, I finally got my driver's license, I spent literally hours every possible day on the road exploring the area where I'd grown up. Wherever I had seen a curious sign or an interesting-looking building, I'd go search it out. These central European dumplings were a part of the scenery, produced by the church ladies for meatless Fridays. In those innocent days I deep-fried (or at least fried) them and served them with very hot mustard.

What lies ahead for the Steel Valley

The I Will Shout Youngstown blog has a trailer for a film being released this fall about Youngstown and the Steel Valley.

The trailer moved just a bit too fast, I think -- I'd prefer two or three fewer images and a half-second more to linger on each. Does an outsider register what she's seeing, or do you have to be a native to read each image?

These are dates on which the Steel Valley lost steel company jobs: 8/77: 150 at Sheet & Tube headquarters; 9/77: Sheet & Tube Campbell Works 5,000; 11/79: U.S. Steel Ohio Works and McDonald Works 3,600; 12/79: Sheet & Tube Campbell Works 1,400; 1/82 Republic Steel 2,600; 8/86 300. Bill Lawson, executive director of the Mahoning Valley Historical Society, uses the figure of ten thousand jobs eliminated between 1977 and 1981, with unnumbered tens of thousands in related and dependent industries also being lost.

Between 1977 and 1981 the number of personal bankruptcies in the region more than doubled. Alan Auerbach, reporting for the National Bureau of Economic Research, estimated a loss in regional real estate value during those same years of a billion 1980 dollars. Chamber of Commerce hopes that the laid-off workers would be hired by companies moving into the area found some new employment but at markedly reduced wages. In the same report, Shleifer and Summers [that's our friend Lawrence Summers, by the way] comment that these losses to stakeholders did not represent gains to steel company shareholders. In other words, these numbers represent a net loss of wealth to the national as well as regional community.

Even though the economic blow was devastating, there was another, equal loss. Auerbach reports psychological losses. First, individuals lost a sense that there was any real value to working hard for an employer -- because why trust an employer? Second, there was a loss in community as families and neighborhoods split apart in job searches that moved them thousands of miles, away from Youngstown and away from each other. This was not just the case with shift workers. People in suburban schools tell how their social groups shattered as management families were also moved around the country (and note the passive verb -- top management moved heads of family like so many chess pieces).

I know people who believe that no individual has a right to community. No individual has a right to live in Youngstown, to live near family. No individual has a right to live in that house there. And at the level of "that house there" it's an issue thousands of families face today with the mortgage crisis: if you can't pay for that house there, you shouldn't live in it.

And in a perfect world, that's a reasonable argument (in the sense that you can follow it even if you don't agree with it). But in today's mortgage crisis, a lot of the downside has no upside. New houses are being bulldozed because nobody can afford to live in them at the same time that families are being left homeless. And being told, "You do not have the right to live in the same community as your family" raises the question of "Who has the right to create a situation where I can't?" Looking back at the destruction of community that accompanied the collapse of Youngstown's steel industry -- and knowing from a generation down the road that there was no creation of wealth on a scale to approach that loss -- has made me reassess the underlying worldview here.

The excuse for huge economic dislocations has been that overall the greater community benefits by the creation of greater wealth. There is a rising tide that lifts all boats, and even those who are dislocated benefit, perhaps massively, in the long run. For most of us, time moves only forward. We assess our lives today with the thought (perhaps unspoken) that we are 100% alive today, and back then -- whenever then was -- we had a less than 100% chance of getting this far, so by definition we are ahead. We make countless calculations, without defining them or even noticing their existence, that argue overall today is better than yesterday. So future benefits stack up against today's damages, and future benefits win.

Remembering John

A very convoluted process led me to thoughts of John Koning, a college boyfriend. John was hands-down the most intelligent person I have ever known, and also one of the nicest.

John studied physics on full scholarship at Case Tech, back before it became attached to Western Reserve University. After a couple years, he left Case and moved back in with his parents, for reasons that were not clear to me at the time. He attended Youngstown State, having completed his physics major, and thereafter accumulated majors in math, political science, and economics. A standard course load was five classes — John routinely took nine or ten. His accum was higher than 4.0. He was, at various times, assistant editor of the newspaper, editor-in-chief of the yearbook, a member of student council, and fraternity president. The faculty was in awe of him, but he also had the gift of not leaving other students feel condescended-to.

It’s hard to pick something about the world of 2009 and say “John would have loved that.” John would have loved everything about 2009! He would have been a computer nerd extraordinaire, a wizard online. He would have done good, trustworthy things with hedge funds; alternatively he could have been secretary of the treasury. Better than all that, John was such fun to be with: he was funny, with humor that worked at levels both simple and very sophisticated. He was fun-loving and wicked and sweet.

John died in 1974, but despite that, I got hits when I googled him. For one thing, there’s the John Koning Award for players of the game Diplomacy. (The first two Diplomacy Cons were held in Youngstown, in John’s parents’ back yard on South Belle Vista.) He was passionate about Diplomacy, obviously, and created The Youngstown Variant and several rules which are apparently followed even today. (I wonder if it's still a valid tactic to get an opponent drunk and lock him in a closet? It was in the 60s.)

From his mid-teens, he was an energetic sci-fi fan and published a couple zines. For you nonfans (or as they were then called, non-fen) zines were like blogs, only they were sent through the mail. He was the publisher of sTab and a founder of OOPSLA, which apparently has thrived. His copies of the Ring trilogy were first editions.

My parents sent me John’s obituary. He earned a Ph.D. in economics and taught at Northwestern, but apparently he returned to Youngstown to die. John had childhood onset diabetes, and for someone born in 1942 to be diagnosed before 1950 — let’s just say he didn’t make retirement plans.

He was the adopted-after-20-childless-years son of a Dutch Calvinist couple. The Konings lived in a fundamentalist community of siblings and cousins, and the only book his parents owned was a Bible. But they turned the entire top floor of their house over to John, who slept on a cot in the narrow aisles of his own personal library, which filled the entire space. His father and mother protected him, assuring him of years to be exactly who he was, and if one of them could have given him a pancreas, it would have happened in a heartbeat.

John almost reached the age of 32; he outlived the predictions by four years. If he had been born the year he died, he could anticipate a normal life span. For the diabetic born now, "normal" can include not just long life but children. It's our loss that the world didn't get more John Konings.

Youngstown’s bishop to go back where he belongs

The I Will Shout Youngstown blog reported today that Bishop George Murry of the Youngstown (Ohio) diocese has decided to move — wait for it — into Youngstown.

The bishop is taking two important steps. He is giving up a house on 2.5 acres, with five bedrooms and two family rooms. In terms of sustainability, a single man living in such a place is insupportable. While a bishop by definition has neither wife nor children, I suppose he has some sort of corporate ménage … but five bedrooms? Two family rooms? In a prestigious public school district? C’mon.

An equally praiseworthy step is: Bishop Murry is moving back into the city. The bishop’s home has been in Liberty Township, north of Youngstown in a different county. Many of the tycoons who once lived on Youngstown’s north side (within the mile immediately north of the cathedral) moved their families to Liberty Township years ago.

The bishop's new home will be on Gypsy Lane, the boundary between Youngstown and Liberty Township. Most Gypsy Lane houses look across a wide, tree-shaded street at a municipal golf course. I note that Bishop Murry rides a bicycle, and while it's something of a walk from Gypsy Lane to St. Columba's Cathedral, it would -- will! -- take no time at all for a cyclist.

Now comes the BUT. But -- wouldn't it be less symbolic and more real for the bishop's home to be truly in Youngstown? Gypsy Lane is, after all, as far away from the city as you can be and be in the city.

Wick Park, about a half mile south of the bishop's new home, is a glorious area of green that survived the worst of Youngstown's downturn. It has many grand houses and institutions surrounding it -- admittedly, grand houses that have seen better days -- but who better than the Diocese to take on the project of restoring a mansion to LEED standards? Imagine if the Diocese of Youngstown created a green rehabbing training program. It would put the energy of a large, rich institution, and the charisma of Bishop Murry (which I understand is considerable) into a job-training program that would be invested not just in Youngstown's future but in the whole country's future. It could be a model copied around the United States!

Nobody understands better than I how a person can hunger for green, open space. And rank hath its privileges. But rank hath its responsibilities too … and in my humble UU view, this bishop, any bishop, belongs close to the cathedral, in his city.

Youngstown is not a splendid diocese. It may be that the Liberty Township home is Youngstown’s diocesan equivalent to the treasures of the Vatican. But Youngstown (like Flint and Detroit and Buffalo and Erie and Cleveland) has been struggling since the 60s with the butchery of urban renewal programs that ripped out their cores. Quality lifestyles wait in those cities for people to go claim then. The Catholic Church in action can be an amazing force for good, and I hope that its enlistment in this battle is as meaningful as it seems to me this spring day.

And that 2.5 acres? It’s too much to hope that the diocese will turn it into a market garden. But Liberty Township is fairly flat … and imagine a diocese-wide composting program. Oh, the possibilities of it!