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Vindy special | High school reunion reveals: When steel mills closed, fates flipped
By Marilyn Geewax
National Public Radio
The only high school in my hometown — Campbell, Ohio — was built on a hilltop just east of Youngstown.
Behind our football field, the earth sloped away, down to the Mahoning River valley where the Youngstown Sheet & Tube steel mills stretched out for miles.
Our school, our small town, the gritty air we breathed — they were inseparable from those blast furnaces.
"Go to the steel mills. That was my vision, go follow my father," my classmate Pete Nicolaou told me at his kitchen table when I returned to Youngstown recently for the Class of 1973 reunion.