Campbell cop publishes book featuring snapshots of city’s past
By Sarah Lehr
CAMPBELL
Longtime Campbell residents remember how, during the week before Greek Orthodox Easter, the sound of braying lambs filled the city.
By the Monday after Easter, however, the city fell silent.
Joseph Pavlansky heard such tales from Campbell’s past while researching a book on the city’s history. A neighbor even gave Pavlansky a photograph of a lamb tied to a cinder block in a backyard.
Pavlansky, also a sergeant with the Campbell Police Department, released the book through Arcadia Publishing last week as part of the “Images of America” series.
The paperback, which is available for $21.99, includes 189 black-and-white photographs from Campbell’s past. There also is an e-book available for $9.99.
Pavlansky found many of the images while combing through the attic of the home of Florence Galida, president of the Campbell Historical Society.
Galida grew up during the 1930s at a company home built for workers at the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., which was then the city’s major employer.
Pavlansky, a city native, found the photo that became the book’s cover image wedged amid a stack of papers at Galida’s house. The cover depicts two Campbell Memorial High School cheerleaders in mid-jump sometime around the 1950s.
“My publisher agreed it just had to be that photo,” Pavlansky said. “It’s the joy on their faces.”
Pavlansky, who received a bachelor’s degree in history before pursuing a career in law enforcement, said he teared up at several points while going through marginalia from Campbell’s past.
It pained him, he said, to see snapshots of businesses and prosperous homes where he now he sees boarded-up buildings and vacant lots.
Pavlansky said he also was touched by the grit of early residents, many of whom lived in shanty towns and worked in the steel mills.
Pavlansky described how Campbell teachers learned bits of Polish, Slovak and Italian in order to give lessons to immigrant children who did not speak English.
“Everybody looked out for each other,” Pavlansky said.
Pavlansky hopes to release a second book of Campbell photographs in the future. After all, there are two “Images of America” books on Struthers and Pavlansky’s book is Campbell’s first.
“We’ve got to keep up with Struthers,” he said.