WHEN THE FIRES GO OUT
Marquis, Christopher
When the Fires Go Out A steel town settles into decay BY CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS Lloyd Fuge downs a martini amid the cheap splendor of a small restaurant in Clairton, Pennsylvania, eleven miles from...
...In 1980 the company paid $805,000 in taxes to the city...
...His eyes stray and dampen as he recalls the last time he saw his hometown...
...Today, the average coke worker in Clairton earns about $ 12 in wages and $ 11 in benefits for an hour's work, says Charlie Grese...
...Cochran, though she died ten years ago...
...Technically, we're bankrupt," commented Clairton controller John Marflak after a council meeting...
...A sign on his door still reads Mr...
...Others stand packed and waiting...
...People couldn't pronounce their neighbor's name, but they could work together...
...Welcome to Clairton, the City of Prayer, reads a soot-smeared sign near the mill road...
...Fuge was fourteen when an accident sealed these images in his mind...
...Then his wife left him...
...now the operation provides free groceries to 140 households a month, 300 at Christmas...
...Clairton is just the tip of the iceberg," says Pennsylvania Senate Minority Leader Edward Zemprelli, who hails from Clairton...
...Steel...
...Last year, the food bank received $23,000, much of it in nickels and dimes from Clairton residents...
...U.S...
...Steel, in turn, became the largest and richest producer in the world...
...banks won't renew its line of credit...
...Like valley residents, the city of Clair-ton has depended on earnings from U.S...
...Japan and Korea, which paid workers less, undercut American producers...
...Steel named a new demon: foreign competition...
...Football ranks with church here and perhaps holds the edge...
...Blacks from the South were brought in "by the trainload" to work the coke and byproducts, recalls Lloyd Fuge...
...Clairton officials politely declined a loan from Zemprelli but marveled at the offer from the ambitious kid who used to sell hot dogs and sodas at the public pool...
...Others, like Millie Worrell, blame the union...
...Clairton is one of the first towns to tumble, perhaps irretrievably, into the rift as the national economy moves from manufacturing to servicing...
...They have no more social conscience than a snake...
...They don't have any other skills...
...Tom hustles to find odd jobs, which keeps him from sinking into self-pity...
...I tell people I live in a quaint little hamlet upriver," says Thomas Meade, education professor at the University of Pittsburgh and Clairton council member...
...Clairton's first census counted "10,000 souls...
...On Sunday mornings, the men and women of Clairton worship at the city's churches...
...by 1985, payments dropped to $331,000...
...Often the wife, who has always stayed home, finds work more easily than her husband, which can fuel his resentment...
...My life is over," says Wayne Cochran...
...Weekend afternoons, the Pitt (University of Pittsburgh) and Steelers games hold the town captive...
...We live from day to day," says Sharon, thirty-one, who sometimes works as a reading tutor...
...But the honeymoon was short-lived...
...This was a helluva wedding around here," says George Zdrale, whose family came from Yugoslavia in 1915...
...Workers bought second cars, television sets, homes...
...Eight hundred Clairton homes flood the market, most selling for $30,000...
...Steel...
...They're selling off facilities...
...For months, the man had insisted his job would reappear...
...Over the next two decades, U.S...
...Fuge, a tall, balding man, is blind...
...He's staying put on Walnut Street...
...Have you read Lucretius...
...Steel is rapidly diversifying...
...I was a recipient of it, and I know...
...The Democrat introduced a relief bill for failing cities that calls for early identification and state auditors' intervention...
...Today, the company counts only 5,100, and unemployment has flowed from one town to the next...
...bankrupt...
...Now, if we can hold our own, we're very fortunate...
...While experimenting with his chemistry set, a mixture exploded in his face and blinded him...
...But the demand for steel sent job notices half a world away— to Yugoslavia, Italy, and Poland...
...A downtown of diners, a five-and-dime, and a public library serve the city's 11,000 residents...
...When I walk on the sidewalk, I know when it's heaving from tree roots...
...For months, boxes crowded Sharon and Tom Schwab's tiny living room...
...The divorce rate, too, stands at double the national average...
...evenings, men scrubbed the black band of grime from their necks...
...Clair Avenue, the main street, a youth huddles with a cluster of gray-haired men sporting the Clairton uniform: wind-breakers and brimmed caps...
...This is a hell-hole...
...Running a mill and energy plant in the world's steel-making capital, Clairton covered itself with the grit of prosperity...
...They played together, too...
...Fifty thousand workers once labored in the valley mills for U.S...
...Now all their savings are gone...
...The city eventually hired a private contractor after a child who had suffered a seizure went unattended for several hours...
...Each mill has tremendous capacity: The Clairton works alone produced seventy million tons of steel during World War II...
...Most were Pennsylvania coalminers and merchants looking for steady work...
...When the steel industry went down, it took Clairton and a half-dozen other Monongahela Valley townships down with it...
...In the valley, unions and industry grew up together...
...This is municipal bankruptcy in the 1980s, when little-known industrial cities are suddenly dangerously exposed...
...At seventy-three, Wayne Cochran is digging in his heels...
...Clairton has, unofficially at least, gone Christopher Marquis is an Inter American Press Association scholar working for La Nacion, a Buenos Aires daily...
...Each week, Presbyterian minister Larry Roth sprinkles hopeful words into his sermon...
...It seems twenty years ago, people in the steel business saw this coming and didn't alter their outlook of what was going to happen...
...no government bailout showers them with funds...
...The city is so strapped financially that it can't even pay its light bill...
...Outside his office, six laid-off coke workers debate whether the copy machine was built in America...
...Some of them put it off to the last minute," says Vangura...
...For a city that has maintained a budget of about $3 million a year, this decline has been disastrous...
...Mrs...
...The Schwabs are trapped in their cozy house with its monthly mortgage payment, a refrigerator full of charity groceries, two kids, and each other...
...There was no competition from anywhere...
...In 1960, U.S...
...The first thing he says is she's screwing the boss," notes Valerie Tutokey, who counsels battered women...
...Though still the nation's largest steel producer, its 1984 sales from steel accounted for 34 per cent of all revenues and only 9 per cent of total operating income...
...The janitor at city hall hides office keys behind a bulletin board...
...Valley residents have been "brutally affected by what has occurred," concedes U.S...
...I have never experienced this type of generosity," says volunteer Diane Vangura...
...So runs Clairton, a modest third-class city that acts like a small town...
...I guess he just wasn't ready to retire," says a coroner's aide...
...Lloyd Fuge, blind eyes glistening, sips a third martini...
...When the time came to move the family, though, the couple couldn't afford it...
...No single thing abides, but all things flow...
...Since similar bills stalled in the House, the lawmaker took out his personal checkbook...
...He'll go to the office and make accusations and try to drag her out, or he won't give her the car to go to work...
...Officially, the jobless rate stands at 8.7 per cent, but that figure reflects only those persons still receiving severance benefits...
...Now is worse than the Depression," says Wayne Cochran, a retired bus driver...
...Rows of tidy, modest homes with painted trim and immaculate lawns rise up the hill carved by the Monongahela River...
...Several thousand have left Clairton since 1980...
...Bishop John McDowell, who headed the research project, says that in such mill towns as Clairton, fully 35 per cent are unemployed...
...Clairton used to be a community...
...These operations, which provided gas for mills throughout the valley, were shunned by steelworkers because the work was so difficult...
...He just waited," Sharon says...
...Then he gives out food by the truckload...
...Most people are uneasy about receiving free food...
...On St...
...She really should have come before and asked for help...
...Where else in this society do you need somebody who can heat steel...
...The byproducts division made components for 200,000 different products, including fertilizer, laughing gas, resin, and dye...
...We wanted this, we wanted that...
...When the Fires Go Out A steel town settles into decay BY CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS Lloyd Fuge downs a martini amid the cheap splendor of a small restaurant in Clairton, Pennsylvania, eleven miles from Pittsburgh...
...he asks...
...The suicide rate and the divorce rate hover at twice the national average...
...With ever-increasing orders for steel, unions could virtually write their own tickets...
...Steel continued to whittle down its operations rather than modernize them...
...There's one family where a woman waited too long...
...We lost a lot of power in the last couple of years," says Charlie Grese, president of the Steelworkers' local...
...But these jobs are vanishing, and those that remain are paying less and less...
...Right now, they're anxious about the bottom line," says Lloyd Fuge...
...The underemployed and discouraged workers who have exhausted their benefits nearly double that rate, according to a study sponsored by the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh...
...Sharon talks about one of Tom's unemployed friends from the mill...
...A town can't survive without young blood...
...Yet unlike New York City, the mill town has no mystique or unused resources to exploit...
...Violence implodes, the elderly grow weary, the young drift off By the end of World War II, the Clair-ton coke works was the largest in the world...
...Now, it's all Clairton has left...
...Clairton's pocked streets are only one sign of recent decline...
...The charity began in 1983, when he distributed six cupboards full of food to laid-off workers...
...Today, the only thing Fuge sees in Clairton is decay...
...Clairton's boom was over...
...Clairton's cohesion once lent something human to the shadow of smokestacks...
...Industry, in my opinion, has raped these towns for many goddam years," says Zdrale, who went from mill work into solid-waste management...
...A mill town is not a goddam residential neighborhood...
...A photograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt hangs on his wall and a picture of Norma Rae is posted on his door...
...I can see the deterioration," says Fuge, a former mayor of Clairton...
...It was a mill town," he says, singing "mill" with a blend of affection and pity...
...At Somer Lee's diner, the waitress worries about next week's game: There's $200 in the kitty...
...This immigrant city of 20,000 had a club for every pioneer—Yugoslav, Italian, Irish— and a corner church for every Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Catholic...
...If he weren't busy every day, I'd have to kill him," Sharon says...
...I love Tom, and our steelworker friends," she adds, "but they followed their fathers into the mills...
...Steel, citing decreased demand, snuffed out the furnaces at Clairton's steel mill...
...It's the young people who are coming up I'm worried about...
...With the pride of settlers, they celebrated their hard-won security in America's middle-class...
...Tom, a steelworker for seventeen years, had scraped together enough money to go to Florida, where he found a landscaping job...
...I've lived here all my life...
...Steel spokesman Bill Hoffman...
...I know everyone," he says...
...Mornings, women wiped soot off the window panes...
...A fifty-three-year-old Clairton man, who was given early retirement from his foreman position last July, went home and put a bullet through his head...
...The suicide rate in Clairton hovers at twice the national average...
...Fourth of July was Clairton's big holiday, Fuge remembers, when families packed picnics and headed to the park...
...Soon after, the man wrecked his car and shot his dog in the head...
...Those unions drove the mills to where they are...
...And we got it," says Grese...
...She packed up the kids and moved to California...
...Steel, the valley's largest employer, owns a vast network of mills stretching for miles up river...
...Now the young are drifting off, and the elderly grow weary...
...Fragment by fragment we lift and grow...
...Violence implodes in Clairton, destroying individuals and families singly...
...People from out of state keep going on about 'poor Pittsburgh.' Well, steelworkers won't take a job for $8 or $10 an hour...
...Walk out on the street and there isn't anyone I don't know...
...No public-relations blitz whips up support for these towns...
...Since 1978, it has reduced its valley work force by nearly 80 per cent...
...If I go to a strange place, I'll miss that...
...The only way to be sure of ambulance service is to buy one yourself," a council member told a horrified elderly resident last fall...
...Firefighters, afraid of being replaced by volunteers, offered to work without pay...
...But this is Norman Rockwell with a cruel stroke...
...The city has taken shears to its payroll, laying off sixteen employees in various departments as well as its entire fourteen-member police force...
Vol. 50 • June 1986 • No. 6
