Tarnished lives fill Warren gem shop

By ANNE HULL

Jewelry buyer’s hubbub reflects pain of recession

WARREN — All day long, the front door buzzes at Uptown Gems & Jewels on East Market Street in the city’s downtown. The people come in with their jewelry wrapped in tissue or velvet boxes.

They say their hours have been cut, or they’ve been laid off. Some have their first names stitched in cursive on their uniforms; others wear safety-toe boots.

At campaign time, they are celebrated as the people who built America. Now they just want to know how much they can get for a wedding band.

“Let me show you something,” says Dallas Root, standing behind the counter with a jeweler’s loupe strung around his neck. He holds up a gallon-size Ziploc bag that’s two-thirds full of gold — engagement rings, class rings, promise rings, serpentine chains, St. Christopher medals, bracelets, anklets and earrings.

“This is just this week,” Root says.

Uptown Gems & Jewels doesn’t offer the refined science of Wall Street or Washington. But when Root puts the loupe to his eye, he peers into the lives of the working class and sees how badly the recession has knocked them to the ground.

The week he holds up the sack of gold is the same week that Ford Motor Co. posts third-quarter profits of $1 billion, news that sparks optimism that a national recovery is under way. But a good week for some is still a terrible week for others.

In this corner of Northeast Ohio, from Warren to Youngstown, where the old steel mills line the Mahoning River, the recession was a final cruelty piled on top of three decades of disappearing jobs.

The recession here wasn’t a black hole at the end of a sustained boom or downgrading from Target to Wal-Mart or cutting out $3 drinks at Starbucks. It was a confrontation with survival.

As other areas of the country start to revive, the recession’s full force is still on display here. Unemployment benefits are running out. New jobs have not appeared. And the door keeps swinging open at Uptown Gems & Jewels.

Root tries to describe the moment when a person parts with his last glint of prosperity.

“They don’t want to look desperate,” he says. “They say, ‘I’ve had this stuff lying around, and I was thinking about getting rid of it.’ There’s a lot of pride in Warren.”

But the pride is mixed with 15 percent unemployment and a sickening worry that the recovery might never touch this place.

Silent machines

The road from Warren and Youngstown is a graveyard of silent machines behind chain-link fences. Near the Pennsylvania border, this 25-mile stretch along the Mahoning River was the world’s fifth-largest producer of steel until the late 1970s, when more than 50,000 jobs vanished in a decade. The General Motors plant in Lordstown, which employed 14,000 in the 1970s, is down to about 2,500 workers.

The grit and grime of industrialization has mostly gone overseas. Since January 2008, another 10,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost, according to recent Ohio employment figures.

In Warren, the once-mighty Delphi Packard Electric is a ghostly presence after the auto-parts maker cut 260 more employees. The $2 million in income tax revenue the city of Warren received from Delphi in 2003 has dropped to $70,000. Smaller casualties abound: Ohio Lamp laid off 80. Mahoning Glass announced the closure of its 100-worker plant. The list goes on.

In a place defined by work, there is little to be had.

Job hunting

George Tomlin is grateful to be driving to his job.

Tomlin, 41, has worked in an aluminum foundry, a meat-packing house and a vinyl fabricator, each paying less than the one before. Last year, he landed a $10-an-hour job that seems as if it might last. Just before 8 a.m., he pulls into the parking lot and carries his lunchbox into the 82,000-square-foot facility.

Behold the new factory: a mega-call-center in Niles employing 1,280 workers who answer customer-service calls for a wireless phone company and a satellite television provider. It’s operated by Omaha-based West Corp., lured here by tax credits and an abundance of low-skilled workers.

At 4:30 p.m., he walks out to the parking lot. When Tomlin was a kid, the air glittered with black from the blast furnaces at the steel mills. Now the skies are spooky clean, and all that moves in the wind is the call center’s recruiting banner that says, “We Don’t Hire Robots.”

Two miles from the call center, Sgt. Carmen Sagnimeni is sitting in the Trumbull County Veterans Service Commission, wondering if anyone is hiring soldiers.

Prospects are bleak for those returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, wars being disproportionately fought by the working class. Sagnimeni, 30, just back from his second tour in Iraq with the Pennsylvania National Guard, has orders to go to Afghanistan in 2012 but until then has a mortgage and three kids to feed. His only lead so far is a $9-an-hour security guard job.

He visits Herman Breuer, a veterans affairs officer who urges him to consider using the Post-9/11 GI Bill to go to college until the economy improves. As far as decent jobs, Breuer says, “My best advice is to look into moving.”

In 1969, a soldier back from Vietnam was greeted by a landscape roaring with manufacturing jobs that provided blue-collar ascendancy to the middle class. The proof is at VFW Post 1090, where two dozen Vietnam veterans are eating the $4.95 lunch special. One by one, the men name the companies where they spent their lives: GM, Delphi, General Electric, Halsey Taylor, Rockwell International.

One man here recently brought in a young female Iraq vet who’d been living under a bridge in Warren. Cmdr. Jack Hilles fed her hot meals for two weeks, and another vet helped her find work.

“We even found her some clothes,” Hilles says angrily. “She didn’t have any goddamn civilian clothes.”

Out of work

The last of the leaves have fallen on Trumbull Avenue, a street of square lawns and American cars where neighbors are dutifully raking. If steel is dead and manufacturing is going overseas and new-wave economists say brain hubs such as Portland and Raleigh are the future, what becomes of Trumbull Avenue?

Tom Szykulski finishes raking and comes inside. Dinner is in the crock pot and the furniture smells faintly of lemony wax. But the order is deceptive. Tom and Debbie Szykulski have lost their jobs, are down to Tom’s unemployment benefits check, and just joined the ranks of Americans without health insurance.

“I feel like we’ve been thrown away,” says Debbie, 55. Indalex Aluminum Solutions, where Tom, 53, worked for 24 years, shut down last year, and he lost his $40,000-a-year union job. He got another job as a laborer for $12 an hour but was laid off when business slowed.

“He’s a hard worker,” Debbie says. “He worked 12-hour days. In 11 months, he never missed a day of work.”

No jobs in Warren

After the roofing company she worked for went out of business, Debbie filled out job applications all over Warren. “I’ve tried the drugstore, the mall, the pet store,” she says. “I applied for a nursing home job, in the kitchen. They paid $7.95 an hour.”

Nothing.

The small house is a still life of what a union job and hard work once afforded. No second mortgage here or big vacations on the credit card. Their weekly splurge was driving 10 miles outside Warren on Friday nights to their favorite diner.

“I get angry,” Debbie says. “Not out of jealousy, but that I can’t find a job. I don’t want a big fancy house. I want to be able to go out to dinner on a Friday night. I’d like to be able to send my grandson a little something in the mail. I would be happy with a minimum-wage-paying job, 40 hours a week, come home, spend time with my husband. And know that the next day, I can go into my job.”

But she doesn’t know how they will survive if Tom doesn’t find work soon.

She has already done the unthinkable.

One afternoon, Debbie — nice, responsible Debbie, Book-of-the-Month Club member and fan of “Masterpiece Classics” — gathered up her gold jewelry and put it in the red vinyl lunch bag she used to carry to work when she had a job. She drove to Uptown Gems & Jewels and unloaded everything for $876. The money is long gone.

XWashington Post staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.