Youngstown, Ohio, Shouldn't Have to Wait "Four More Years!"

This article is presented irrespective of anyone’s politics: mine or a reader’s. I just hate to see a good town -- ,u home town -- kept down.

When other New Yorkers tease me by singing “Why-oh, why-oh, why-oh, why did I ever leave Ohio?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkIe_wgnGfI from Wonderful Town, I retort “I didn’t.” I finally managed to shut up friends in New York City who’d tease me by singing “Why-oh, why-oh, why-oh, why did I ever leave Ohio?” from Wonderful Town by saying “I didn’t.”

The Borough of Queens is one of the most diverse regions of one of the most diverse cities in the U.S. In Forest Hills Gardens, near me, the Tudor homes of one of America’s first planned communities are like my house in Youngstown where the massive steel industry attracted workers from all over the world.

Most of my Youngstown neighbors lived on the narrow streets of comfortable brick and wood houses that fronted what is now the Fifth Avenue Historic district. Many of the people have how moved to Liberty in Trumbull County or retired to warmer weather as part of Youngstown’s 60% hemorrhage since Black Monday, 1977 when the mills closed.

My classmates and I all attended The Rayen School. Founded in 1866 by a bequest from 1812 veteran Judge William Rayen, it was the first secondary school in the Western Reserve. Its original location now houses the Youngstown Board of Education; its final location was demolished in 2007 to make way for a Middle School that declining enrollments rendered unnecessary.

As a high school student, my greatest ambition was to escape, like a character in Buffy and the Vampire Slayer. Years later, when I think of how Rayen and Youngstown dealt with the April 4, 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, I know I was too hasty. Take how we reacted during the April 4, 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmOBbxgxKvo

One moment, I was spending study hall volunteering for the “visiting teacher,” or truant officer, Mr. Flowers, who took down the Flower Power sign I’d hung on the door. The next minute, students rushed in, hysterical. The students of color were rioting, they said.

I handled it Youngstown fashion. “Look, if I saw a bunch of people clutching each other and crying, I’d chase you too,” I told them. “Now, I am going to walk you to your lockers. You are going to get your stuff. Then, we are all going home.”

The young men and women weeping and shouting in the halls had shared schools, football games and a not-all-that-subtle defiance of school rules for six years with me. Even so, there had never been any way I could imagine their rage then or now. Their parents made them keep that aspect of themselves to themselves. I’d always respected their privacy. And then, all hell broke loose.

The fact I’d gotten along respectfully had to protect me as, 5’2” in a minidress and Pappagallo flats, I guided my crybabies down the center of the hall. I heard one whispered challenge of “hoo,” quickly hushed. No one chased us. 

Meanwhile, some of the businessmen and social workers in what we didn’t yet know to call the black community spoke to my father, the sort of prominent, small-city lawyer, whom everyone in town knew and trusted. Strictly in confidence, they warned him that outsiders had approached, offering to stir things up. The local elders had politely escorted them to the city line because this was a decent community and they intended to keep it that way. Was that quite clear? It was.

A nervous Board of Ed closed the schools to let things cool off. Given an unexpected day off, I drove downtown to buy white shoes for graduation. I’d gotten into the kind of college I always dreamed of going to, and my proto-helicopter parents were thrilled. When a friend and I got to the shoe department, however, our regular shoe salesman (he lived on my street and was both gay and out, in the late 1960s) had been watching for me. “Susan, your father called. He says, ‘If that damnfool daughter of mine comes in, tell her to get her ass home.’” The white shoes had to wait for another day. They never fit right anyhow.

 The streets were empty, all but one Jeep filled with watchful National Guard and “hey, is that a machine gun?” I asked Dad. He didn’t want to talk about it. Flashback.

Two years later, on May 4, 1970, the National Guard killed four students at Kent State. One was from Boardman, the next town over.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=youtube+may+4+1970&view=detail&mid=6CC6372F70BD2B5C92B36CC6372F70BD2B5C92B3&FORM=VIRE

On Black Monday, September 17, 1977, when the mills closed, Youngstown proved too tough to die. But it’s not quite strong enough to thrive. People who’ve stayed complain that, every four years, politicians make elaborate Rust Belt pit stops to promise jobs, development, and social services. Then the motorcades vanish for four more years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-qV4Zp0TIQ

The great Jeannette Blast Furnace, Bruce Springsteen’s “Sweet Jenny,” is long demolished. The Twentieth Century Restaurant run by the Malkoffs has become home to a religious sect. Thanks to strategic bulldozing of vacant streets, what remains of Youngstown doesn’t look all that bad. Unemployment has declined along with the population. The Mahoning River now flows clean, as opposed to the urban legend that if you stuck your hand in it, you’d lose it. The hand, not the river (it was the Cuyahoga, near Cleveland, that caught fire).

In the good days, the steel mills glowed and thumped in the hot summer nights. Youngstown’s Congressional Representatives was a tough guy like Mike Kirwan, one of my father’s Saturday lunch buddies, a prominent conservationist. Its sheriffs went to Congress or to jail. Or both.

In 1963, The Saturday Evening Post scandalized the lawyers, the doctors, the businesspeople, teachers, and families who worked in the mills generation after generation with a cover story on “Crime Town USA.” Sure, we had troubles with what the law called the mob and we called neighbors. But we were handling things. And we continued to share cannoli, kielbasa, hot dog and pancake benefits, and bagels. Beer poured into schooners, and the lawyers’ table at the downtown Ohio Hotel had a constant supply of coffee from its very own hot plate and pot.

As a freshman at rural, sheltered Mount Holyoke College, I finally realized that “Ban the Bomb” meant nuclear disarmament, not death by exploding Cadillacs.

I’d escaped. From the time I peered over my mother’s shoulder at The New York Times she sent Dad for every Sunday when he and I went shopping for comic books, I couldn’t wait to leave. Ultimately, my life in Youngstown helped me adapt to New York. Being able to cope in New York made me appreciate the strength of a town too tough to die, the acceptance of interfaith, ethnic, and racial coexistence, and the work ethic that seemed a little lost without the mills.

I haven’t been back since Mother died in Y2K. Last year, however, I joined Facebook, and the Youngstown contingent greeted me as matter-of-factly as if I’d just been down to the corner store. New York, Youngstown, or online, home is home. Don’t start anything with us that you don’t want us to finish. Better say “please.” Say it nicely. Youngstown's worth the trouble.