I suppose my parents were part of Levittown’s elite, though I smile even as I write that because the words—Levittown and elite—do not much go together. My father loved being a lawyer and was a well-regarded practitioner, but the fact is he never liked the business aspect of the law or figured out how to make gobs of money at it. He was probably the rare lawyer who got a pay raise when he was appointed to the bench. When times were good at “the mill,” as everyone called it, I’m pretty sure that many of the men who drew their paychecks from U.S. Steel made more than he did.
Like every boy I knew in Levittown, I knew how to do manual labor. During my high school summers, I cut grass in parks and on the medians of highways, unloaded trucks, and walked beside road-paving equipment with a rake to smooth the hot asphalt along the curbs. During a long strike by the schoolteachers when I was a high school senior, I found a job in one of the area’s small steel plants. Even for kids, there was good money to be made. College cost a great deal less back then, and we were able to earn a substantial portion of the money for tuition ourselves, an impossibility now. My best friend took a year off from college to mix big vats of chemicals at the 3M plant, where an old-timer told him, “Remember, don’t take all your money and buy a boat with it—buy property.”
I look back on that now and just marvel at the idea behind that admonition—that a person could earn so much cash from unskilled labor that he just might go blow it all on something stupid rather than put it down on a solid investment like a house.
But for all the rich wages earned and the middle-class lives built, any claim that Levittown had to being some kind of utopia was discredited by its glaring defect: a persistent racism. The condition was congenital, present from the moment of conception. And the racism was not benign; it was virulent. Part of being the “most perfectly planned community in America,” an essential part, was for Levittown to be whites only. Levitt and Sons would not sell any of the 17,311 mass-produced houses to black families. The deeds signed by early home buyers expressly prohibited them from reselling to blacks. When questioned on the policy, William Levitt weakly insisted that he would love to sell houses to black families, but had “come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then ninety to ninety-five percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours.”
In 1957, Bill and Daisy Myers and their three young children moved into a little pink house in a section called Dogwood Hollow, one mile from the home my parents had purchased two years before. The Myerses were black and far better educated than most Levittowners. Both were graduates of Hampton Institute in Virginia. Bill was an engineer, and Daisy a stay-at-home mom who would later enter the workforce and earn master’s degrees in education and psychology. The home was sold to them by a white couple next door—Lew and Bea Wechsler, left-wing Jews, former Communists, and civil rights activists—who purchased it with the specific intent of integrating Levittown by reselling it to a black family.
Beginning with the night they moved in, the Myers family was subjected to terror, organized by an ad hoc group calling itself the Levittown Betterment Committee. Rocks were hurled through their windows, a cross burned on the lawn. A stick of dynamite was discovered on their driveway. Daisy Myers answered her phone one night, and the caller asked, “Do you want to die in that house?”
My father belonged to the NAACP and the ACLU, and years later he would hire into his small firm the first black lawyer in Bucks County, Clyde W. Waite, a graduate of Yale Law School who had been turned away by numerous other firms and went on to be the county’s first African-American judge. I saw my father take stands that were not always in his personal interest, and although he didn’t talk about it much, I knew the Bronze Star he kept in a little plastic case came to him for breaking cover and risking artillery fire to go to the aid of a wounded fellow soldier. But when I talked to him about the Myers episode, I found out he had not been among the small group of Levittowners who went to the family’s home to support them and oppose the angry mob. He regrets it still.
“I think it represented a show of cowardice on my part,” he says. He was running for township commissioner, the equivalent of city council. “My political friends very easily talked me out of going over to that house. They said it would be a disaster for my prospects to be elected. They were probably right. But I took the easy way out and sat back.”
The siege was covered on the networks’ nightly news programs. A state court issued an injunction, and the mob eventually dissipated. The Myerses moved from Levittown four years later, but the episode was far from the community’s last chapter of racial tension. There were several small black neighborhoods on the fringes of town, non-Levitt-built homes. In the schools, periodic brawls broke out between white and black students, and I spent parts of my high school years with police and police dogs stationed in the corridors to keep the races apart. In my recollection, the cause of every one of these blowups was the same: Word went out that a black boy had touched a white girl, or talked to one in an inappropriate way, or just looked at her in a way that suggested his intentions. It was primal. The girl was usually a blond cheerleader type, the boy an athlete.
Carl Grecco, the debate coach and a longtime history teacher, told me that he was assigned to be part of a team of teachers who were expected to run into the lunchroom to break up these imbroglios. He described ducking cafeteria chairs as he tried to fulfill his duty. Carol Gross, a retired gym teacher, said that she had her lip split open by Earl Williams, a black six-foot-eight basketball star who went on to play in the NBA and then had a long professional career in Israel. “Earl didn’t mean to,” she said. “He was put in the middle of it—he was always in the middle of it—and I waded in there to try to pull people away.”
Levittown did not begin to integrate after the siege at the Myers home, and really still has not. Census figures put the black population, among Levittown’s fifty-four thousand residents, at 2 percent. An equal number are Hispanic. These are much lower percentages than in nearby Philadelphia, or in Trenton, right across the river.
• • •
There is a Bruce Springsteen song, not one of his best known, called “Youngstown.” It tells the story of a place that was working iron and steel so far back that it made cannonballs for the Union army. The mill is shut down and the owners have moved on. In the voice of the worker, Springsteen sings, “Now, sir, you tell me the world’s changed. Once I made you rich enough, rich enough to forget my name.”
They started making steel in Levittown only as far back as 1952, but the reality and sentiment of Springsteen’s haunting requiem applies just the same. I play it sometimes when I drive around my hometown, looking for familiar sights and memories. Once the wellspring of hope, Levittown is now ground zero in America’s new narratives: income inequality, the fraying of the working class, suburban poverty.
The giant swimming pools, operated by the LPRA (the Levittown Public Recreation Association), were once the pride of the community. They cost $20 to join for a whole summer of swimming, and I knew of no family that didn’t belong. I used to get excited just when the envelope arrived in late May with the pool tags—one for each family member, a different color each year, with pins on the back that attached to our bathing suits. I may have had only one swimsuit each season, because I never remember transferring the tag.
Indian Creek was our pool, named for the Levittown section it adjoined. I pedaled there nearly every summer day on my black Schwinn bicycle. The pool was so big that if the wind was right, a waft of chlorine hit you from a couple of blocks away, along with the din from the massive number of kids in the pool. My Little League field was right outside the fence, so if I had a game in the afternoon, I brought my uniform and changed into it.
Eager to see what Indian Creek looked like now, I drove over there on a summer day and parked in the lot. There were no other cars there, no bicycles locked to the fence, and n
o swimming pool—not even a trace of a pool. It had been filled in and planted over. I learned that the whole property had fallen into terrible disrepair. The pool itself was cracked and unsafe, the pool house crumbling, and the fencing rusted and falling down. Filling the pool had cost $100,000, but it would have cost a lot more to fix it, and there was no money for that. The LPRA didn’t have it, and Bristol Township had more pressing priorities than saving a swimming pool. Four of the five Levittown pools have met the same fate, with their grounds converted to “passive recreation areas.” Whatever that means, it doesn’t sound like any child’s idea of fun.
The Levittown Shop-a-Rama, site of the Kennedy campaign rally and touted as “the largest shopping mall east of the Mississippi,” was anchored by a Sears and another department store called Pomeroy’s. We used to eat hot dogs from the counter at W. T. Grant, then play on the escalators at Pomeroy’s until we got kicked out. The Shop-a-Rama had ninety stores at its peak, many of them locally owned, and was Levittown’s best approximation of a downtown. When I drive by to look at it now, I see that the whole thing has been leveled. A Walmart occupies the site.
On another of my trips, I drove in from Bethesda with my daughter Sofia, our middle child. We crossed into Levittown from New Jersey, and on the bridge over the Delaware, I slowed down and pointed out the manufacturing plants up and down the river where the jobs used to be. The defunct 3M plant was right under the bridge. The steel mill was off to our right, just a couple of miles north. A Spanish-owned company called Gamesa has taken over and is manufacturing wind turbines, green energy for the future.
I had been to the mill not long before and received a tour from a Gamesa PR man. “This was the hub of the mill, the heartbeat,” he said as we stood on a factory floor that was longer than two football fields. We were within sight of where the two blast furnaces and the nine open hearths had been—where the “pig iron,” a product of iron ore, was melted into steel. It was a hot, noisy, nasty process. But the Gamesa site is clean and quiet. A ghost mill. Where more than ten thousand men once worked, there are two hundred. Some of them make no more than the steelworkers pulled down in the 1970s—in real dollars, not dollars adjusted for inflation.
• • •
After a rehearsal one day, I give a ride home to Tyler Kelch, who had worked on the Good Boys and True stage crew and would land a lead part in Volpe’s next two productions. He is one of the brightest and most perceptive of Volpe’s students, a technophile who spends a lot of time taking apart and putting back together gadgets of all kinds—computers, sound equipment, phones, cameras. He was upset because he had just broken a video camera trying to give it night-vision capabilities. “Being the electronics geek that I am,” he says, “I knew how to do it. I really did. But I pulled away a piece of glass near the lens, and when I put it back, I hit a capacitor, which caused a little shock, and there went the camera.”
We talk about Truman, its students, and their families. I mention that I recently looked at a study out of Stanford University that explored the relatively new syndrome of suburban poverty. Because of income inequality—the widening gap between rich and poor—large swaths of America that had once been solidly middle class no longer were. “I get that,” Tyler says. “And it’s not like the people who used to live around here left and a bunch of poor people moved in. It’s the exact same people. They just got poorer.”
He’s right about that. Pennsylvania ranks fourth in the nation in its percentage of residents who were born in the state and still live within its borders, often right on top of where they were born. Many students I meet at Truman are second-, third-, and even fourth-generation Levittowners. If I ask enough questions, I usually learn that I know their families—their moms, dads, aunts, uncles, or even their grandparents. We went to school together or played on the same teams. It makes for some funny conversations. I was talking one day with one of Volpe’s students whose name sounded familiar. She told me the name of her father. “Yeah, I remember him!” I said. “First baseman, left-handed.” (A remnant of the boy who saw life through stadium lights, not stage lights.)
Tyler has one sibling, an older brother studying music at Bloomsburg University, one of the Pennsylvania state colleges that attract Truman students. His parents had grown up in neighborhoods less than five miles from their current home. His mother works at the Bucks County Courier Times, feeding advertising supplements into a “big giant machine” that inserts them into the newspapers that get delivered to homes. His father, immersed in rock music, had built a recording studio in their home. “My dad, growing up in the sixties, he thinks he’s a rock star, or he wanted to be,” Tyler says. “He sang for friends’ bands, and he was a roadie for my uncle’s band. This dream never died in him. Even in his forties, he kept it alive, but maybe he’s living a little through me, now.”
His father works as a carpenter for a company that makes kiosks for trade shows. “It’s not union. Right now he’s technically a freelancer. He’s been a freelancer for quite some time now. And we keep praying that they are going to hire him eventually, because he’s worked for this company for so long. He went somewhere else for a while, and now he’s back, so we’re hoping that he’s got enough time built up now.”
Tyler is one of those kids cursed with an acute awareness of his parents’ circumstances and struggles. Even when he was little, if his mother wanted to buy him something in a store, he would sometimes ask her not to because he feared the family couldn’t afford it. “I wish I wouldn’t have been like that,” he says. “Some of it was cool stuff I’d probably still like to have.”
His family’s finances have been stressed in recent years, and both his parents quit smoking in order to save money. He hasn’t seen that it’s made much of a difference, “but they’re trying everything they can.” We pull up to his house. In the front of the driveway is an old van. Nearby is a boat. They both look marooned.
“That’s the van that hasn’t run since, like, the year 2000,” he says. “And that’s the boat we never put in the water anymore.”
• • •
One evening, I stop in at a college and career fair in the Truman cafeteria. Students are taking brochures off tables, watching short videos, talking to recruiters from various schools and local businesses. A representative for the steamfitters and pipefitters union offers information about apprenticeships leading to work that pays between $17 and $29 an hour. The caveat is that such work has to exist, and in the current economy, it doesn’t. And candidates have to take a math exam. “It’s difficult,” the union man says. “It might be easier to get into college than pass it.”
Technical academies are well represented, most of them from the for-profit sector that has been under scrutiny in recent years because students too often emerge with tens of thousands of dollars of debt—but not jobs. Of course, the same criticism could be leveled against America’s fully accredited four-year colleges. The technical schools offer training in a wide range of fields—pharmacy technicians, medical technologists, business accountants, cosmeticians, massage therapists, court reporters, and so on.
A U.S. Marine recruiter tells me that three Truman seniors have already enlisted, but he hopes to attract a couple more from the 2010 senior class. A young boy, perhaps ten, wanders over to ask questions about the meaning of the insignias on his uniform. “Hit the floor and give me a hundred push-ups,” the recruiter says. The boy does thirty-seven. “That’s pretty good,” the Marine says. “Better than a lot of the high school kids.”
Frank Zuccarini, an admissions officer, is standing in front of a table displaying literature for Rider University. “Truman is an interesting school,” he says. “There’s what we call the Bucks County effect, but it falls outside of that.” He explains that he views Truman as distinctly different from the wealthier high schools in the county. Here, the students are not as aspirational. Their parents definitely do not have the same money. I ask if he has ever se
en steamfitters and pipefitters recruiting at those other schools. If they were there, he hasn’t noticed them.
Truman students are not terribly competitive with one another. Unlike where I live now, they do not apply for the same few spots in competitive colleges. They don’t approach life as a zero-sum contest (where your loss is my gain). It doesn’t make them the best candidates to be competitive out in the wider world. They live in their own kind of bubble, and I’m not sure they realize how hard many American children—for better or worse—push themselves.
But striving is not cost-free. For most Truman students, even the main campus of Penn State is a stretch. Many of them end up at its satellite campuses, or at West Chester, Bloomsburg, Slippery Rock, or other institutions in Pennsylvania’s network of publicly supported colleges. And the Truman students who enroll at more expensive colleges—even solid but not exclusive institutions like Temple University in Philadelphia—often must take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans. They are the generation of working-class kids entering adulthood with heavy encumbrances.
A youngish guy with short-cropped black hair, Zuccarini has the affable, upbeat manner common to salesmen in any field. The school he represents, Rider, is a middling institution in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, with a hefty price tag—about $45,000 for tuition, room, and board. It began as Trenton Business College and is not well-known outside the region. I assumed that a big part of his mission was to attract higher-quality students to Rider in order to elevate its profile and reputation, but his attitude toward Truman actually angered me. He seemed to be there purely out of duty, with no expectation of finding a student. “We just don’t see the test scores here matching up with the grade point averages,” he says. “You get lots of 3.5 GPAs, but SATs in the 920 to 950 range. It makes you wonder about the course work.”
He offers a kind of backhanded compliment: There’s a “snob factor” at Truman’s neighboring high schools that does not exist here. He finds that refreshing. What I should have asked Zuccarini was the following: On the off chance a Truman student did qualify for your school, why would he or she want to pay $45,000 to go there?
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