Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Back in 1977, a 30-year-man at the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. Campbell Works was likely to be in his mid 50s, a fellow who went to work in the mills after having his youth interrupted by World War II.
He had seen both the boom times and the bitter, costly strikes of the 1950s and ’60s. The car he parked in the lot outside the plant was probably a later model. His kids had likely gone to college — maybe out of town, maybe to Youngstown State. And while he knew the industry he worked in was in distress, he was looking toward retirement in a few years, a respite from the dirt and the heat and the noise that had been a part of his daily life for decades.
Then, Jennings R. Lambeth spoke. And life for that steelworker, his family and the entire Mahoning Valley changed. Lambeth, who only a few days before had given a business reporter an interview in which he talked about how Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. was weathering its financial storms and described Campbell’s 79-inch hot strip mill as one of the company’s brightest assets, announced that the plant would close.
It was Sept. 19, 1977, a day 30 years ago that would quickly be christened “Black, Monday.” Lambeth announced that 5,000 jobs would be lost at the giant Campbell Works by the end of the year and corporate headquarters would be shifted to Chicago. Within days, furnaces began to fall cold and workers walked through the gates onto Wilson Avenue for the last time.
Initial reaction
In the immediate aftermath of Sheet & Tube’s retrenchment, there were desperate efforts aimed at reviving the mills, either through sale to foreign interests or to the workers themselves through an employee ownership proposal.
Just five years later, an anniversary story described this area as hard-hit, but featured interviews with people who were confident that prosperity would return, but only after a long time. The idea was beginning to sink in, that the mills would never again glow the way they had and that Black Monday set in motion a series of events that would be a fact of Mahoning Valley life for decades.
Today’s page one piece by Valley native Marilyn Geewax captures the pain and loss felt by individual steelworkers and the community of Campbell. Geewax, who works in the Washington Bureau of Cox New Service, also represents many members of her generation — those who left the area to build new lives elsewhere.
The closing of the Campbell Works, followed two years later by U.S. Steel Corp.’s abandonment of the Ohio Works, left tens of thousands of men and women out of work in the steel industry and in support jobs. There were increases in alcoholism, spousal abuse, and declining health in homes throughout the Valley.
Times change
But, as this newspaper’s Sunday package showed, there were also stories of resilience, survival and rediscovered prosperity. And, there is a growing segment of the population that wasn’t born until after Black Monday or that has emigrated here since. They bring a sense of what can be that is markedly different from that dwindling number who dwell on what was.
To be sure, there are lessons to be learned from what led up to Black Monday and what came after. They should not be forgotten not here and not in other communities that are as confident today in their prosperity as Youngstown and Campbell and Struthers were in the 1960s.
But as each year passes, it becomes more necessary to look to the future, rather than to the past.