Black Monday: Tales of Survival

Two words revive the shock and anger of the most devastating day in Mahoning Valley history.

Black Monday.

“Good Lord,” Al Magrini of Boardman remembers saying as he walked out of Youngstown Sheet & Tube on Sept. 19, 1977. “Where are we going to find jobs like these again?”

Thirty years later, the foreboding nickname has proven well-deserved.

Sheet & Tube announced that it was closing its Campbell Works and moving corporate headquarters from Boardman to the Chicago area and eliminating 5,000 jobs.

Magrini’s question — where will we find work like this again? — would be repeated many times in coming years. Black Monday was the beginning of the end for Youngstown as a steel-making center.

Within several years, other mills went down.

Thousands more steel jobs were lost.

But as those steelworkers reflect on the 30th anniversary of Black Monday this week, they don’t dwell on the shock and despair of that day. Instead, they talk of how they survived.

For more, see Sunday’s Vindicator and Vindy.com