Here is what I have said about my home town:
Once we found our new home in Estes Park, we decided to go east on July 1 and visit family. We feel guilty sometimes that we don’t have a home our children can visit regularly, one to which they attach special memories. When the guilt gets too great, we make the long drive to western Pennsylvania and Virginia. Sometimes these trips go well and sometimes they don’t. But each time we go back, I think about the mining and factory towns that shaped my youth and young adulthood. None of them are anything close to what they used to be. The past thirty years have devastated small-town America. In the nation’s industrial heartlands, there have been successive waves of plant closings, as intense international competition has been met by outsourcing, offshoring, and cost-cutting. In the farm belt, overproduction has driven prices down to the point where small farms cannot survive.
When Route 66 was built, it was possible to travel across the United States visiting vibrant small communities. Today this is no longer possible. Towns across the country have become ripped up and thrown away, shells of their former selves, filled with abandoned stores and factories and home now to the elderly and those whom "progress" has left behind.
I grew up in the small former factory town of Ford City (population about 3,500) in western Pennsylvania, about forty miles north of Pittsburgh. The town was dominated by a plate glass factory (Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company; everyone called it PPG), at one time the largest in the world, and a sizeable pottery (Elger). From its founding in the late nineteenth century until the end of the 1930s, Ford City was a company town, with everything that this meant in terms of all aspects of daily life. Then the workers formed unions, as part of the great wave of unionization that marked the second half of the Great Depression. They hit the picket lines after the Second World War and won some control not only over what went on in the factory but what happened in the town. My youth was marked by the town’s greatest prosperity, during the 1950s and 1960s. High wages and benefits helped to support a lively downtown, with two banks, two drugstores, two movie theaters, locally owned department stores, shoe stores, furniture stores, grocery stores, bowling alleys, restaurants, and bars. Workers took out government-guaranteed mortgages and built homes on the hills overlooking the town. They bought new appliances, including modern furnaces, refrigerators, stoves, and televisions. They bought cars and took their families on Sunday drives and vacations. They sent their kids to college for the first time. Even the small black community benefited, as black glass and pottery workers got higher wages and benefits too and began to occupy some jobs previously denied them. I remember a town in which there were not grossly obvious disparities in income and wealth. Of course, there were rich and poor, but in my schools, differences were not very marked. There were no elite private schools or exclusive clubs. There wasn’t much working-class culture in the town, if by culture we mean art, literature, music, and the like, as there was in larger union-dominated cities such as New York, but there was a lively culture of sports and clubs.
A big difference that the unions made was in daily work life. Workers were no longer industrial serfs but human beings who demanded to be treated with respect. My parents were afraid of many things, but they did not have the fear of the bosses (or even the police, who are controlled by companies in company towns) that marks life in a nonunion company town. Nobody had to do favors for the foremen to keep their jobs. I worked at the glass factory two summers while I was in college. I did mainly clerical work in the safety department. The plant’s fire hall was here, and I spent many days talking about things with the firemen and with the union officers who stopped in every day for coffee. The supervisor was next door, but no one kept quiet about the company. And the men were relatively well-informed about what was going on in the plant, in the union, and in the larger society. A union is an educating organization, not just in the direct sense of informing members of what is happening, sponsoring classes, holding elections, and the like, but also in the indirect sense of giving workers enough time and money to learn on their own.
Things have changed dramatically. The glass factory shut its doors some fifteen years ago, and the pottery is now on its last legs, the union having offered so many concessions over the years that there is now not much difference between a union and a nonunion plant. No industry has come to town to put people back to work; the glass company (PPG Industries) can’t sell the land to the town for development because it is laced with deadly chemicals. A walk around town tells you that things are not right there. In fact, most of the downtown is gone, ripped up and replaced by a drive-through bank and the business complexes of a prosperous local pharmacist. The housing stock is deteriorating. Median household income is just 60 percent of the national average. The people don’t look good either. Kids coming out of the local high school in the afternoon look poor. The adults in the Wal-Mart a few miles from town look poor too: badly dressed, grossly overweight, looking for bargains. Old people go there every day just to hang out; it is apparently one of the busiest in the country. Young people with any prospects leave town as quickly as they can. Those with none stick around and get by with odd jobs and poverty-level wage work. I have never seen a town where long-term unemployment is such a way of life. If it weren’t for the money of the pensioners (who help support their middle-aged children and grandchildren), social security, disability money, and the like, I don’t know how far things would fall. Prosperity used to radiate out from the town into rural areas, but no longer. Drive just a few miles from town and you are in the middle of real Appalachian poverty. Drug use and alcohol abuse are rampant. Matters have come to such a sorry pass that local leaders a few years ago tapped an NFL football player from that town, a young man of no known economics acumen, to be its economic spokesperson. Much hope was placed upon the construction of a new bridge linking the town with the former mining and mill towns to the south. It was actually believed that this bridge would bring in new commerce. The cultural malaise into which the town has fallen was on display this past summer when, during the town’s heritage days, an excellent jazz ensemble was brought in from Pittsburgh by a town booster. The booster had bought and renovated the old National Guard armory, fitting it up nicely for dances, concerts, and other events. He sold tickets to the concert for the remarkably low price of $5.00 and offered free beer and soft drinks. My wife, my sister, and I were among the twelve persons who showed up to hear a three-hour concert. In my hometown what has taken the place of the community cohesion and sense of well-being once buttressed by the unions is drugs, alcohol, alienation, and despair. Part-time jobs, dependence on aging parents, and dependence on unemployment compensation and disability payments, these are the new life supports.