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Dem defector recalls city’s glory days
YOUNGSTOWN
I first met Connie Spagnola on the campaign trail. I was talking to volunteers and supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Of the dozen or so I spoke to, Spagnola stood out.
She didn’t hold anything back about her admiration for Trump and her disdain for Clinton. She didn’t care at all about being careful with her words. She also spoke for a lot of people in the Youngstown area who voted for Democrats for decades, didn’t see the benefit of doing so and were looking for a change.
While Trump didn’t win Mahoning County – a Democratic stronghold for 80 years with Youngstown as its most populous city – he came pretty close. It didn’t come as much of a shock; there are a lot of people in the area like Spagnola, but many don’t talk about it, much less volunteer to help get Trump elected.
I knew how happy she was about Trump’s election and how busy she still was volunteering at the local Republican headquarters. But I wanted to know about her early life growing up in Youngstown. I was eager to hear what life was like during Youngstown’s glory days when steel was king, smoke in the sky meant success and major department stores lined the downtown.
I moved here in 1995 to work for The Vindicator after spending nearly 28 years in New York, first being raised in Brooklyn and Staten Island and then going to college and working for newspapers in upstate New York. I’m always interested in hearing about the good times in this area that has struggled so much in the past 40 years. Despite those struggles, there are some wonderful things: beautiful parks, affordable cost of living and some of the most interesting people you’ll ever meet.
I certainly heard the happiness in her voice as Spagnola talked about her parents and siblings. She was born in 1940, when the city’s population was close to 170,000 and stayed around that number into the 1960s.
If you drive through parts of Youngstown today, you see nothing but abandoned and run-down houses. In fact other parts of the city have nothing: the vacant houses are demolished, and all that’s left is overgrown grass and weeds. The city hit rough times when the steel mills closed in the late 1970s, and in a lot of ways it’s only gotten worse. Youngstown has seen its population plummet with only a few cities in the nation seeing such an exodus of people over the past 50 to 60 years. Today, the city’s population is 65,000 and decreasing every year.
Spagnola used a notebook to figure out approximate years for when things happened in her life. She remembers her time at Youngstown’s Woodrow Wilson High School as a cheerleader, a B student and someone who easily made friends. The school was demolished about a decade ago.
“High school was a wonderful time with wonderful people,” she told me. “We never had fights. We never had name-calling. Nobody stole from anybody. Nobody picked on anybody. It was really outstanding. I talked to everybody.”
Her father, John, was a barber, like his father. Her mother, Santina, was a homemaker raising her and her two older siblings, John Jr. and Betty. They lived in a house behind the barbershop that her grandfather and father ran on the city’s East Side. That house and business are gone.
“My dad didn’t want to do the barber shop anymore,” she said. “It was a bartering system. I’ll give you a haircut for a chicken or some eggs. There was always so much bartering. We ate a lot of chickens. Nobody could afford anything so my father looked for other work.”
He walked into the Photogenic Machine Co. and was hired on the spot as a machinist. The family finally had money and moved into a larger house, also on the city’s East Side. A few years later they moved to the South Side.
Like her grandfather, father and sister Betty, Spagnola ended up cutting hair for a living. She spent three months while still in high school learning to become a hairdresser at Lewis, Weinberger and Hill Academy of Cosmetology in downtown Youngstown. She graduated in 1958 and got a job at a salon.
She married two years later. She had a son and a daughter. But the marriage soured, and she was divorced in 1967. She moved back in with her parents who helped raise her children while she took a second job as a nightclub hostess. Finally, in 1976, after 18 years of cutting hair, she opened her own salon, the Hair Company.
She grew up a Democrat in a Democratic family in a Democratic town. She was too young to vote in 1960 – when you had to be at least 21 to cast a ballot – but was a fan of John F. Kennedy because he was young and handsome.
Spagnola voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 even though, as she put it, “there was nothing sensational about him, but he was the Democrat and that’s how our house was raised. We didn’t talk about issues or who’d do a better job. We were doing well. Factories weren’t leaving here. It was a good time, so we never thought about the man running for president. It was all Democrats where I lived. They never thought about the man. Everything was good so we voted for the Democrat.”
But that all changed in 1980. Ronald Reagan was running for president and Youngstown’s economy was going down the drain. “Reagan had a new outlook. He wasn’t a politician,” she told me. “You look at him and you say, ‘That’s Trump.’ He reminds me of Trump. He wanted to make American great. I liked him, and he did well. But I didn’t tell my family that I voted for Reagan. You just didn’t say anything about it. Also, I was tired of the Democrats. I worked for some of the local Democratic politicians, and I was totally fed up with Democrats by 1980. They were pathetic. They went from corruption to more corruption.”
Two years later, Spagnola sold her salon and left Youngstown for Las Vegas. “When my mother passed away in 1982, I decided to leave Youngstown. I hated it. It wasn’t the same,” she said. “My nephew and his wife lived in Las Vegas, and I would vacation there all the time. I decided to move there. I just didn’t want to be in Youngstown anymore. There was nothing here. I was a hairdresser, and I could do that anywhere so I decided to go to Vegas. I decided to leave and have a new life in Vegas. I needed some excitement in my life.”
She visited and even lived briefly in Youngstown in 2010. But it wouldn’t be until 2013 that Spagnola moved back to the city. By that time, her politics had changed considerably.