The Unwinding

by George Packer

  The adventure ended in early 1972, around Tammy’s sixth birthday, when a family bought the mansion. Granny was allowed to take some surviving furniture and dishes, including Mrs. Purnell’s handmade bed and dressing table, white with gold trim. She and Tammy returned to the east side, and with her bequest Granny made a down payment on a wood-frame house at 1319 Charlotte Avenue, which she bought for ten thousand dollars. And it was there that Tammy lived, almost continuously, until she was twenty-six.

  She attended a series of schools named after presidents—Lincoln, Madison, Grant, Wilson; not one of them would escape the wrecking ball. In class pictures she was the thin, light-skinned girl in pigtails, with soft, expectant eyes, as if something good was about to happen. She loved going to the old amusement park at Idora and riding the Wildcat roller coaster, but her favorite place in the city was Mill Creek Park, eight hundred acres of woods and ponds and gardens on the border of the south and west sides. From the northern end of the park you could see the steel mills and train tracks, but you could also scramble over rocks, lose yourself on the trails, and talk to yourself and God. Granny sometimes took her there, or she would go with the Pearl Street Mission, where she was sent after school. At the mission, which was near her house on the east side, the kids would scoop out the insides of oranges, fill them with peanut butter, poke a hole in the rind, thread a piece of yarn through it, then hang the oranges from trees in Mill Creek Park for the birds—though Tammy never saw a bird eating peanut butter out of an orange. If she could live anywhere in the city, it would have been near the park.

  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 i
n 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.

  The theft of the door marked a turning point that she would often refer to in later years, a sign that the family’s struggles were becoming part of something larger. The mob no longer had control of the streets (even though Cyrak’s wasn’t far from Charlotte Avenue), and the neighborhood was getting bad. By the midseventies most of the white families had moved out of the east side, and Black Monday finished the exit. When Miss Sybil had graduated from East High School in 1964, the majority of the student body was white, and after her class elected a black girl as homecoming queen, a white teacher overruled the vote, saying “It’s not time yet.” But with every year of the seventies, Tammy’s class photo had one or two fewer white kids, until, by the time she entered high school in 1980, East was almost all black and Puerto Rican. The high school was within walking distance of Charlotte Avenue, but in ninth grade Tammy was bused to Wilson High on the south side for racial balance. Her best friend, Gwen, was
the only other black kid in math class, and the teacher would totally ignore them when they had their hands up. She missed being at a predominantly black school, so in tenth grade she transferred to East.

  She took on bigger responsibilities at home, learning to do simple repairs, taking the bus to shop for groceries and pay the bills. Eventually, Granny turned over ownership of the house to her with a quitclaim deed. The roles were reversed: now she was taking care of Granny.

  And then, when she was fifteen, she got pregnant.

  She wrote a letter to her mother and mailed it, even though her mother lived three blocks away, because she was too frightened to tell her face-to-face. When the conversation came, her mother got angry and demanded, “Do you want to get rid of it? How are you going to take care of it?” Tammy said that she would take care of her baby, period. The father was a debonair-looking boy, a year older, named Barry. His mother had been Vickie’s probation officer, and she thought the Thomas girl so unsuitable for her son that she called up Tammy’s father’s mother and told her that Barry couldn’t be the one. But Tammy was in love with him, and she told her mother so.

  “It’s just puppy love,” Vickie said.

  Tammy insisted, “No, Mommy, I love him.”

  “It’ll change.”

  She and her mother had never talked about sex, even though Vickie was about to conceive her third son in four years by Tammy’s stepfather (Tammy would be due five months sooner). When Vickie was in sixth or seventh grade, Big Mama had told her that babies came from under rocks and she had believed it, which was the sum of her education on the subject. Granny wasn’t about to offer any information, either.