Postindustrial Media magazine, Summer 2021

SUMMER 2021

VOLUME 2 / ISSUE 4

CEO & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

KIMBERLY PALMIERO

FOUNDER & EDITOR-AT-LARGE

CARMEN GENTILE

DESIGN & LAYOUT

ELIZABETH KANE JACKSON

EDITING

SANDRA TOLLIVER, ROBERT WEIBLE

CONTRIBUTORS

KECIA BAL, FRED BROWN, HEATH DRUZIN, VINCE GUERRIERI, MICHAEL MADISON, CASEY MARTIN, JUSTIN MERRIMAN, JASON MOTLAGH, TORY PARRISH, RAMESH SANTANAM, FRANK SMITH, HOLDEN EDWARD STRAUSSER, THOMAS SYNAN

ADVISORY BOARD

J.R. AMBROSE, KRISHNADEV CALAMUR, LETRELL DESHAN CRITTENDEN, MARTHA RIAL, TONY NORMAN, DAVID PEROZZI

OFFICE

2519 PENN AVENUE, 2ND FLOOR, PITTSBURGH, PA 15222

Coming together again in Postindustrial America: Communities in transition

Communities in transition

Carmen Gentile rides along a street in Cincinnati’s Lower Price Hill neighborhood, as part of a journalism trip through four states in May.

For the story, see page 10.

Photograph by Justin Merriman for American Reportage

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CONTENTS

Editor’s Letter: Smile-worthy sights as we rediscover Postindustrial America after a year of fear and dread

BY CARMEN GENTILE

The shrinking middle class

Catching up with a Philly author of “America: What Went Wrong?” for a new generation

BY KIMBERLY PALMIERO

BY HEATH DRUZIN

In Gettysburg, a battle over solar

Residents of a small township pushed back against plans for a solar “farm” on land where soldiers crossed

BY RAMESH SANTANAM

Stepping up for moms

How doulas are supporting women to boost maternal health

BY TORY N. PARRISH

Food for all

How volunteers powered food pantries in West Virginia during the height of the pandemic

BY HOLDEN EDWARD STRAUSSER

Emptying grandpa’s closet

How museums tell the stories behind hard hats and other mementoes from an industrial past

BY KECIA BAL

Get

Come on! We know you’re overdue for a trip. Don’t miss our must-see places.

FEATURES 10

Postindustrial Explores Hopes, challenges, and inspiration. How we rediscovered the region by motorcycle one year after COVID-19

BY CARMEN GENTILE

26

Safety first!

Accident-prone, globe-trotting journalists get a refresher in motorcycle safety

BY CARMEN GENTILE

Photograph by Justin Merriman

Smile-worthy sights in Postindustrial America

Check out that goofy grin on the guy in the middle. It’s been a while since I was photographed looking that happy.

The reason is simple. While locking arms with the Ronin Motorcycle Club for a quick prayer before our ride, I was elated about being that close to others without worry for the first time in more than a year.

Thanks to my two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, simply standing next to someone without a mask

the pandemic, political upheaval, and racial strains. But they also expressed optimism that positive change is in the making.

They aren’t the only ones. Some leaders in Postindustrial America are also preparing communities for a future that tackles the problems of today.

While there are those preparing for the future, others are clearly afraid of changes they perceive as threatening to their economic futures and perceived racial supremacy.

In this issue, we have an excellent and sobering story about the radicalized in Postindustrial America — clear evidence that we still have a way to go toward achieving our brighter, more equitable future.

But as Postindustrial CEO and Editor-in-Chief Kim Palmiero notes in a column, there is something you can do about it: Run for office.

Whether it’s school board, city council, state legislature, or federal office, it’s time to get involved in Postindustrial America’s future from the inside out.

Frequent contributor Tory Parrish writes about health programs for moms in our region who are also trying to make a difference in our communities.

There’s also a story about those who are helping preserve and improve our understanding of history by donating family items to local museums preserving our industrial past.

And, as always, we’ve included our favorite destinations to celebrate your vaccinated freedom, be it with a bike in the woods or a ride on a screaminducing roller coaster.

was no longer dangerous.

Capitalizing on the freedom that vaccines afford, Postindustrial recently hit the road on a four-state tour by motorcycle to figure out how people are faring during these strange and still-turbulent times.

With the Ronin crew in Pittsburgh, we discussed last summer’s racial justice protests and the continuing tensions in our region and nation.

Yet, they were hopeful, as were many of the folks we met along the way.

Artists, journalists, rock climbers, police officers, and others shared stories of challenges faced amid

Sure, there are many concerns about America’s future and the problems we will likely face — continued racial grievance masquerading as conservative politics and the vaccine hesitation of many on the right — but there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful and happy and well.

The evidence is right there in that silly smile of mine.

Here’s hoping you’re sporting yours this summer.

CARMEN GENTILE, FOUNDER AND EDITOR-AT-LARGE

The author locks arms with Omar “Hoodfella” Smith (left), and Mark “JazZz” Howard (right), members of the Ronin Motorcycle Club, based in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, as they pray before heading off on a club ride on Saturday, May 15, 2021, in Murrysville, Pa. //

Photograph by Justin Merriman

What

is

Postindustrial America?

Our company is about redefining the Rust Belt and greater Appalachia.

We show where these regions are going through stories — in the spirit of reinvention that is so emblematic of these communities.

IN THE RUST BELT: Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, Columbus, Milwaukee

RAMESH SANTANAM has covered politics, government, the courts, and local news for more than 20 years, reporting for daily newspapers and The Associated Press before writing for Postindustrial. He is based in Pittsburgh.

CONTRIBUTORS

We feature work from writers and photojournalists across Postindustrial America. Want to see your face on this page? Email us at pitch@postindustrial.com

HEATH DRUZIN covers anti-government movements and in 2020 was the Idaho reporter for the public radio project Guns & America. Prior to that, Druzin covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is based in Idaho.

TORY N. PARRISH is Region I director for the National Association of Black Journalists. She also covers small business and retail for Newsday. She previously worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and the Observer-Dispatch in New York. A native of Virginia, she is based on Long Island.

VINCE GUERRIERI is a Youngstown native and journalist who’s worked for newspapers in the Mahoning Valley, Cleveland area, Pittsburgh, and Northwest Ohio. He’s the author of one sports history book and co-author of another, and his byline has appeared in publications as varied as Popular Mechanics, POLITICO, Smithsonian, Ohio Magazine, CityLab, and Deadspin. He lives near Cleveland.

JUSTIN MERRIMAN is a freelance photojournalist who has traveled the world to cover politics, wars, natural disasters, and civil unrest, as well as assignments throughout the United States. His work has appeared in leading national publications and he has received multiple awards. Justin is a founding member of American Reportage, a collective of photojournalists documenting the American experience. He is based in Pittsburgh.

MICHAEL MADISON is a professor of law and John E. Murray Faculty Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and a senior scholar with the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security. He writes about institutions and governance and is a co-founder of the emerging research discipline known as “knowledge commons.” Before becoming a law professor, he practiced law in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

KECIA BAL is a freelance writer and former newspaper reporter covering communities in western Pennsylvania.

JASON MOTLAGH is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone, he was formerly TIME magazine’s Afghanistan correspondent and has reported from more than 60 countries and a dozen conflicts spanning West Africa to Southeast Asia for National Geographic, Outside, Men’s Journal, The Washington Post, The Guardian and Economist. The founder of Blackbeard Media, he produces and hosts films for Al Jazeera English, National Geographic, SBS Dateline, and Vice World News.

RISING JOURNALISTS

HOLDEN EDWARD STRAUSSER has published articles in the United States Air Force’s Wild Blue Yonder digital magazine and West Virginia University’s student newspaper, The Daily Athenaeum, where he worked as its fact-checker. He is a graduate assistant at WVU majoring in journalism. He is based in Smithsburg, Md.

FRED BROWN is president and CEO of The Forbes Funds, a nonprofit based in Pittsburgh that helps human service and communitybased nonprofits build capacity. He specializes in capacity-building, and sustainable social development. Brown was previously president and CEO of the Homewood Children’s Village. He is a frequent public speaker and also has taught courses and delivered presentations at local and statewide conferences and workshops.

FRANK SMITH is a journalism major with a minor in broadcast production at Point Park University. He has served as an assistant producer intern with the Pittsburgh Film Office, and also as an intern with the Pittsburgh Media Partnership dealing with mental health news coverage. He is based in Pittsburgh.

ROAD REPORTING

Motorcycling through Postindustrial America

BY CARMEN GENTILE // PHOTOGRAPHS BY JUSTIN MERRIMAN

Two longtime friends and conflict journalists ride motorcycles to investigate a Postindustrial America finding its way after more than a year of pandemic restrictions, political upheaval, and social unrest that continues to threaten the fabric of our democracy. Here’s what they discovered.

Carmen Gentile and Jason Motlagh ride along a street on Wednesday evening, May 19, 2021, in Cincinnati’s Lower Price Hill neighborhood.

“I think that’s the same shirt you were wearing when we met!” said my friend and fellow journalist, Jason Motlagh, of the garish ensemble I’d thrown together for the West Virginia leg of our moto journey.

That I was wearing the same flowered button-down nearly two decades after our first meeting didn’t surprise me — I tend to hang onto things well past the expiration dates.

Perhaps I subconsciously knew the shirt’s significance when I packed it for our exploration of Postindustrial America, a region emerging from the worst of the pandemic and still smarting from last summer’s social justice protests, not to mention lasting divisiveness from the Jan. 6 Capitol coup attempt.

I do recall thinking that some garish outfits would add needed levity to our journey. Tempers might be running hot among some of those we encountered. After all, America and the rest of the world had endured 16-plus months of pandemic restrictions, political upheaval, festering uncertainty, malignant fear, and unbridled fury.

Who knew how we’d be received while traversing the mountains, hamlets, and cities altered by this unprecedented period in modern history?

I know my own patience has been tested by these fraught times. Surely others also would be on edge. And seeing as how the public is increasingly skeptical of journalists, I figured a clownish outfit might help ease the tension.

But my worry was for naught. Nearly everyone we encountered while riding through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia was friendly and inquisitive about us and our journey, even in deeply red counties where former President Trump’s support remains feverish, cult-like, and potentially violent.

The bikes, new models with a classic look, were just the conversation starters we needed to segue into more pressing issues such as race, addiction, politics, and the future of the region.

And while I’d like nothing better than to give my shirt credit for our smooth passage, I know it was the folks we met along the way who shared their stories of hope, struggle, and inspiration that made our journey so memorable.

Carmen Gentile and Jason Motlagh on Friday, May 21, 2021, in Cynthiana, Ky.

DAY ONE ROLLING WITH RONIN MC

There’s no better group of people and riders to help us kick off our journey than the Ronin MC, a motorcycle club based in Pittsburgh that takes its name from ancient Japan’s legendary masterless warriors.

The Ronin may ride high-speed machines and look flashy, but their club is all about community, family, and good, clean fun.

After a prayer in which we locked arms in a circle, we headed out with the Ronin for a short ride along a beautiful stretch of highway on a sunny spring day.

We zipped past the suburban sprawl and headed about 40 miles east to Blairsville, a one-time coalproducing town where one of my great-grandfathers worked in the mines.

There, we sat down at a barbecue restaurant to enjoy a meal and discuss how Ronin navigated these troubled times, including the racial unrest of last summer and the residual impact it has had.

“We’ve always been a family-oriented club,” said Ron Johnson, while elaborating on the support the Ronin gave one another, even when they couldn’t physically come together.

“Even when we couldn’t be together, we still had our camaraderie,” added Mark Howard, club president, noting how the bond among club members endured while they were separated. “I love having

Ron Johnson, a member of the Ronin Motorcycle Club, based in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, laughs as he talks with other club members on Saturday, May 15, 2021, in Blairsville, Pa. The Ronin Motorcycle Club is not your stereotypical outlaw bikers. Rather, the MC is a small group of bikers who love the thrill of long-distance rides, doing charity work in support of causes – including lupus and domestic violence awareness – and just hanging out together.

POSTINDUSTRIAL EXPLORES

DAY TWO

“SEASONED” TRUTH TELLERS

I love talking to old Italian guys — every syllable verges on shouting, even when they’re not mad, and is accompanied by animated hand gestures. It reminds me a lot of my youth, and prepares me for the inevitable day I’ll become one of them.

Carmine Lombardi, 78, doesn’t pull punches with his opinion, especially as it pertains to the direction of the country.

From his favorite coffee shop in Pittsburgh, Lombardi told us he’s saddened by the pervasive disinformation perpetuated by certain news media that amplified the lies of our former president and his followers on Capitol Hill, and the way in which minorities are vilified for some of America’s ills.

That’s not to say he’s fed up with the country to which he emigrated as a boy.

“I criticize America, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like it,” he said to us, while his fellow Italian speakers kept chatting, keeping one ear on our conversation.

We bid him his friends adieu, then rode a short distance to Youngstown, Ohio, where we met with newspaper columnist Bertram de Souza, a journalist and fellow eyepatch wearer whose reporting and columns informed, entertained, and sometimes infuriated readers for decades.

That is, until 2019, when his newspaper, the scrappy Youngstown Vindicator, effectively closed after 150 years in operation. Ogden Newspapers, based in West Virginia, purchased the name after the paper ceased its print operation.

Bertram gave us a tour of the Vindicator’s facility, guiding us through the cavernous, multi-story, cinder block space where the printing press once churned out the daily edition.

Now the room sits hollow, engulfed in silence.

He opined about what happens to a nation with so many local newspapers like The Vindicator either closing or slashing budgets.

“The increase in political ignorance in this country is directly related to the decrease in the number of newspapers,” said Bertram, 70, whose career at The Vindicator spanned 40 years.

Veteran newspaperman

Bertram de Souza stands where the presses of the now shuttered Youngstown Vindicator once printed the newspaper on Sunday, May 16, 2021, in Youngstown, Ohio.

de Souza continues to work out of the empty building, where he wrote a book on his nearly 1,600 columns and operates a podcast.

The newspaper closed on Aug. 31, 2019, after 150 years of operation.

De Souza, who worked as editorial page editor and columnist and watched the dismantling of the press at the paper, said, “Newspapers are disappearing, one by one,” and fears what it means for our communities.

DAY THREE AN ARTIST FINDS HIS CREATIVE STRIDE IN Y-TOWN

After our discussion with de Souza, we sought a ray of hope for a city that’s struggling to find its way in a Postindustrial era.

We found some of that in Justin Paik Reese, 33, a ceramic artist who draws inspiration from his Korean heritage and downtown Youngstown’s neoclassical architecture.

Reese creates colorful and ornate vases, cups, and ceramic sculptures that he fires in a brick kiln he built in the shadow of a hulking mansion — a vestige of Youngstown’s bygone era of fantastic wealth generated by manufacturing.

While discussing his creations — among them a tongue-in-cheek tribute to one of his favorite childhood athletes, the hard-charging and flamboyant basketballer Dennis Rodman — he talked about why he returned to his hometown to raise his family and create.

“We’re on the brink of something, I can feel it,” he said “I know a lot of artists who want to move here.”

Amid our conversation about art and reimagining Youngstown as an artist enclave, we discussed the problems that persist in Northeast Ohio.

Reese told of how he, the son of a Youngstown native and a mother born in South Korea, was sometimes picked on as a child and the wave of reported anti-Asian hate crimes that have spiked since the start of the pandemic.

“The first time I got in a fight it was because someone called me a ‘chinc’,” he said. “But later we talked and eventually became best friends. And we’re still best friends today.”

Reese returned after graduating from the Columbus College of Art and Design in 2010. But many others leave for good.

The challenges for Youngstown and its leaders remain those of many other communities, requiring innovative approaches to address population loss, a shrinking tax base, and job loss.

Artist Justin Paik Reese, 33, stands in his studio on Monday, May 17, 2021, in Youngstown, Ohio. Reese, a native of Youngstown and an accomplished potter, sees hope for his once thriving steel town. “I think we’re at the brink of something,” he says.

DAY FOUR EMPATHY FOR THE ADDICTED

The police chief of Newtown, a village of less than 3,000 just outside Cincinnati, is by any definition a colorful guy.

Tom Synan is a Marine veteran-turned-top cop whose take on addiction has garnered international attention. He’s witnessed what prescription and illegal drugs did to his town and the rest of a region in which thousands of lives have been lost to addiction.

He spoke of those who died as a result of drug overdoses with sorrow and personal concern for their loved ones.

In addition to his approach to tackling the drug epidemic, Synan’s known for his love of Batman and his gleaming, white Harley, replete with a thunderous stereo system.

We met Synan, 53, at the police station to discuss how showing empathy for those suffering from addiction can help them wrest control of their disease.

“As law enforcement, we don’t have the resources to deal with these chronic issues,” he said, referring to the myriad other tragedies that often result from addiction, such as homelessness, unemployment, and loss of loved ones to their disease.

“The criminal justice system is not a healthcare system,” Synan said.

After sharing his philosophy with us, Synan changed into civilian garb. He returned astride his beloved Harley wearing an ear-to-ear man-boy smile that goes perfectly with his outsized heart.

Then, together the three of us rode to nearby Cincinnati.

Carmen Gentile and Jason Motlagh talk with Thomas Synan Jr., chief of police for Newtown Police Department, at the police station on Wednesday, May 18, 2021, in Newtown, Ohio. Synan is well known for his stance on addiction and believes that it should not be treated as a crime but instead as a mental health issue.

DAY FIVE “SASSY” SAVES THE DAY

No less than an hour earlier, I had been remarking about the extraordinary luck we‘ve had while exploring — great weather, amazing people, and fun times.

That was until what appeared to be a knife blade lodged in my rear tire. It was late in the day and every Cincinnati-area motorcycle shop I called was closed. Knowing the rest of our day’s travel was derailed, I texted Laketa “Sassy” Cole, a former Cincinnati City Council member and member of a female motorcycle club we were supposed to meet, to let her know that I had to cancel our meeting in a nearby park.

“Where are you?” Cole texted me back.

I gave her our location in the Lower Price Hill neighborhood.

“OK. Stay there. I’m on my way.”

Cole pulled up with a plan: She had already sent up the Bat-Signal among her fellow riders. Soon after, Jacotta “Flip” Foree pulled up in his pickup truck with a trailer in tow.

This was the magic of the motorcycle community coming to life. I had only been virtually introduced to Sassy and her club, the A.L.L.S.T.A.R.S MC (ALLURING, LOVELY, LADIES, SOPHISTICATED, TALENTED, AND RIDING STEEL), by way of our Ronin friends a couple of days earlier. They already were coming to my aid, no questions asked.

With my bike secured to the trailer, we headed to the Northside neighborhood of Cincinnati in Sassy’s car, where we dropped in on a party at the Cartel MC clubhouse. There, we were greeted with questions about our trip and more offers to help out.

Soon, it was a street festival of music, laughter, new friends, and roaring bikes.

“This is just what we do when another rider needs help,” Cole told me, amid the revelry.

I was entranced by the camaraderie of the moto community around us. After dusk turned to dark, we begrudgingly pried ourselves away from the festivities.

“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of your bike,” Cole assured me as “Flip” Foree pulled away with my bike bound for her home until the morning, when a friend of hers could fix it.

I had no doubt they would.

Laketa Cole, a member of the Allstars Motorcycle Club who is known as “Sassy,” laughs as she hangs out with other motorcycle clubs at a gathering on Wednesday evening, May 19, 2021, in Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood.

Members of several motorcycle clubs gather at a house on Wednesday evening, May 19, 2021, in Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood.

POSTINDUSTRIAL EXPLORES

DAY SIX

THRILLED TO BE “STUCK” IN CINCINNATI

Word of advice: If you’re going to get stuck in Postindustrial America while waiting for a part for your vehicle, try to make it Cincinnati.

The Queen City is at first glance a phenomenal town. The revitalized downtown area is loaded with striking murals on older buildings and new architecture that has both modern flourishes while matching the existing style of turn-of-the-century storefronts and apartment buildings.

So when I learned we’d have to spend an extra day there waiting on a new tire for my bike to arrive, I was almost glad to have gotten a flat.

We spent part of the day at Findlay Market, a collection of bakeries, butchers, eateries and small stores that’s just one of the many attractions that make this a town worth visiting again.

A mural of Ezzard Charles on Friday, May 21, 2021, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Demontae Dickey, president of the Cartel Motorcycle Club, directs motorcycles in to park at a gathering of several motorcycle clubs on Wednesday evening, May 19, 2021, in Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood.

DAY SEVEN BLUEGRASS CRUISIN’, A DOCTOR’S WARNING, CATCHING UP WITH OLD FRIENDS

Kentucky is a great place to ride and visit: Miles of post-and-rail fences line horse and cattle farms flanking byways that meander through small towns. I’ve passed through the Bluegrass State on many rides. And each time I do, I linger an extra day or two.

This time we stopped in Cynthiana in Eastern Kentucky for a chat with the locals and a slice of pie. Sitting at one of the tables was Dr. Neil Rush, a dentist who’s been treating people here for more than 40 years.

The doctor told me that about 33% of people in and around Cynthiana are vaccinated against the coronavirus. But head a little farther out of town and the percentage of those who have been vaccinated is lower, he said, in May.

“There’s a stubborn streak in people that doesn’t allow them to change their minds,” said Rush, while noting the disinformation campaign that’s accompanied COVID-19.

However Kentucky’s politics aren’t uniformly lined up to the right. Republicans control the Legislature in a state where many are rock-ribbed Republicans, evangelical, Trump-supporting, and all-around anti much of President Biden’s agenda, particularly as it pertains to climate change and phasing out fossil fuels.

But Gov. Andy Beshear is a Democrat and the state has a lot more bipartisan flex to it than, say, neighboring Tennessee.

We know our fair share of progressive folks from Kentucky, including our friend Nick Farmer, a tobacco cultivator.

We drop in on Nick, his wife Ashley, and their young son Aldo, who’s named after the famed conservationist and philosopher Aldo Leopold.

Upon arrival at their breathtaking property along the Licking River, we commenced chatting over fireroasted hot dogs. Though we’re all vaccinated, Ashley told us how many of those around them still refuse to do so.

“It’s hard to convince people who don’t believe in facts,” she said.

We pondered our collective dilemma as the sun went down and the Kentucky night sky shone with stars and a hazy moon.

Jason Motlagh and Carmen Gentile on Friday, May 21, 2021, in Cynthiana, Ky.

DAY EIGHT MOUNTAIN STATE MELODIES

“What’s the difference between a violin and a fiddle?” asked Alasha Al-Qudwah, a Charleston-area musician with Palestinian roots, while setting up a joke with local flavor.

“A violin has ‘strings’ while a fiddle has ‘straaangs,’” she said, drawing out the twang in a West Virginia accent.

After playing a selection of tunes both Middle Eastern and Mountain State, she told us about the vibrant art scene in Charleston, a city of 48,000 that has seen its share of job losses, opioid addiction, and other hardships in recent years.

“Charleston may be a small city but it’s very supportive (of artists),” Al-Quadwah noted.

She said she sees great potential for the state, to change people’s minds about one of the poorest states in the union.

“There are beautiful opportunities for growth and change here,” she said, while discussing the state’s natural assets and the resilience of its inhabitants.

To me, West Virginia is a vexing place. Its natural beauty makes it a popular tourist destination. In the digital age of the increasingly nomadic office worker, it should be the new place to love for those who relish the outdoors, not unlike Asheville, N.C.

However, the state can’t fully capitalize on its assets because of factors such as lack of reliable internet. Getting a WiFi signal in some of the more remote areas is nearly impossible.

That digital divide, coupled with underfunded schools, a shrinking tax base, and other woes is hampering economic growth.

Solving that and West Virginia’s other problems won’t be easy.

DAY NINE

THE NEW NATIONAL PARK NOT EVERYONE IS THRILLED ABOUT

We left Charleston in our rearview mirrors in search of a man-made creation that’s been attracting people for decades.

About an hour southeast of the West Virginia capital we found both in the country’s newest national park: New River Gorge, consisting of more than 70,000 acres.

Yet some locals are not pleased that there’s now a national park near them.

“Fayetteville used to be a place you came to to get away from somewhere, but now it’s a place you come to be somewhere,” said Karen Domzalski, a registered nurse who grew up in Texas but moved to West Virginia nearly 20 years ago for the rock climbing, and natural splendor.

Domzalski and her partner, Kevin Umbel, a contractor and artist from Ohio who also enjoys rock climbing, said the park isn’t a hit with all of the locals.

He noted some people feel marginalized in their own backyard since the national park designation last year.

“The whole park thing has really rubbed some people from around here the wrong way,” said Umbel, 42.

The problem is, they told me as we gaze at the sweeping, 1,700-foot-long New River Gorge Bridge, that out-of-towners are scooping up properties in and around Fayetteville, turning them into Airbnbs, businesses, and other attractions that some locals can’t readily afford.

This seems like a problem Fayetteville will need to address soon.

DAY TEN

WINDING UP WHERE I STARTED

“Here’s where the local mob boss used to have his office,” I said to Jason and our production crew, pointing to an ornate building in my hometown, a once-thriving industrialized suburb that’s seen better days, though is making a comeback.

Stories about the “New Kensington” mafia always intrigue visitors, so I elaborated on how, back in the day, brothers Gabriel and Sam Mannarino not only ran much of that illegal activity in Western Pennsylvania, but also a casino in Havana, prior to the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

And when Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries ousted President Fulgencio Batista, legend has it that “The Beard” made a pilgrimage to the area to meet with Mannarino and others. The mob had hoped to keep the money flowing from Cuba. But with Castro in charge, that dream was dashed when the new prime minister adopted strict, communist rule that made most private enterprise illegal.

A historical marker for photojournalist and Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Eddie Adams stands in New Kensington, Pa., on Monday, May 24, 2021. Adams was born in New Kensington in 1933.

The boom days of industry and the mafia are long gone.

For a long time, New Ken’s fortunes were in freefall: crime and despair tore the fabric of the community. A police officer was killed on the job in 2017. As things grew worse, more people moved away, homes were neglected, then torn down. To some, the future seemed bleak.

That is, until recently, when a dedicated group of locals and new arrivals began reimagining the city for the Postindustrial age. These days, there are a few new businesses in the downtown area, including a brewpub, a pay-what-you-can restaurant, and more.

There’s investment by foundations and individuals for new endeavors. A branch of Penn State and its president also has brought fresh ideas to the community, with a coworking space and planned digital innovation lab made possible with a $5.5 million grant from a local foundation.

I further expounded on New Ken’s colorful combination of sordid history, bygone industrial accomplishment, the subsequent hard times, and recent rays of hope — these were common threads throughout our 1,500-mile trip.

While New Ken marked the end of our journey, the places we visited and the people we met proved so intriguing I’m already planning our next adventure.

Carmen Gentile in an alley in New Kensington, Pa., on Monday, May 24, 2021.

Jason Motlagh looks over a business along a street in New Kensington, Pa., on Monday, May 24, 2021.

Stories from the open road

BY JASON MOTLAGH

Somewhere on the interstate in West Virginia, among the billboards advertising addiction hotlines and the promise of an afterlife, the message jumped out in bold: It Will Get Better.

Traveling on a motorcycle at 70 mph, I couldn’t read the fine print. But the words lingered in my mind long after I sped by, a blunt declaration of hope in backcountry America.

If you follow mainstream media coverage of the Rust Belt and Appalachia, things are going from bad to worse. From economic decay and political extremism to an opioid epidemic with no end in sight, the region is invariably cast as a parable of American decline, its people often reduced to caricatures. Not only do these tropes obscure what’s good; they reinforce the tribalism and distrust that ail the country at large.

My longtime friend and colleague, Carmen Gentile, a native son of Pittsburgh, spent the better part of his adult life covering conflicts overseas. I grew up in Virginia and likewise have built a career as a “crisis journalist.” While our attention was focused on troubles abroad, the country we grew up in has started to feel less stable. More foreign, you might say. So we decided it was time to throw out our assumptions and explore the homefront up close.

We wouldn’t shy away from the dark stuff. There’s plenty of that. But our mandate was to seek out fresh, offbeat stories of renewal in places that have been neglected or written off, places that I’ve often passed by without a second thought en route to somewhere else.

Over two weeks, and more than 1,300 miles of riding highways and byways through Postindustrial America, we found much that goes against the gloom and doom narrative.

In Youngstown, Ohio, ceramic artist Justin Paik

Reese is creating brilliant pottery infused with his mixed Korean-American heritage. His workshop would be the envy of artists in Oakland, Calif., or Brooklyn, N.Y., who can’t make rent, and social media is connecting him to clients around the world, giving him more time to create.

When he’s not making ornate urns and bowls and coffee mugs featuring his muse, former NBA wild man Dennis Rodman, he’s raising a family and mentoring a new generation of artists in his hometown.

In Cincinnati, we were charmed to find a city brimming with lively public spaces, street art and a palpable sense of community despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the gathering toll of the opioid crisis. The conversations we had were honest and wide-ranging, the local hospitality robust. When Carmen’s bike got a flat tire, Laketa “Sassy” Cole, a member of the Allstars Motorcycle Club, came to the rescue and got us back on the road — but not before a detour to a raucous gathering at another club’s house, where we were welcomed as friends.

In Charlestown, W.Va., Alasha Al-Qudwah treated us to an afternoon violin concerto on the banks of the Kanawha River.

Raised by a Palestinian father, her sound is a singular marriage of fast-paced Appalachian fiddle work and mournful violin that’s resonant of the Middle East. Alasha gave a sober assessment about the job loss and addiction problems that plague many areas of the state (which has the highest rate of population decline in the country), but she’s not going anywhere. She says the city’s strong support for the arts has allowed her to record her music prolifically while working full time as a teacher.

Farther down the road, at the New River Gorge, we rode through America’s newest national park on a perfect spring day.

The stunning scenery, world-class river rafting

and rock climbing continue to attract hardcore thrill-seekers, and the new designation is bringing in more tourists and business: a gift and a curse.

Longtime residents Kevin Umbel and Karen Domzalski told us that so far, local families are getting priced out of the market and seeing few tangible benefits from the boom.

Our journey came with its share of bad news. On returning to Newtown, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb where I made a film on the opioid crisis three years ago, I was struck to learn that a recovering addict I had profiled had relapsed and was in jail.

Police Chief Tom Synan, a veteran officer who embodies the best of the badge, has tracked the woman’s ups and downs for years with an abiding sense of tough love. Despite his interventions, he has watched three generations of the family slip into the cycle of addiction.

In eastern Kentucky’s coal country, a mining operation that I visited in 2019 on a film shoot was shut down, leaving dozens of workers unemployed. Nearby, another much-hyped tech venture that promised to create hundreds of jobs was scrapped. Internet service is still poor-to-nonexistent in some pockets of the state. And across Appalachia, local newspapers are folding or have become a shell of what they once were. More than ever, critical stories are left untold and abuses go unchecked.

Will things get better? There are no easy answers to the social and economic troubles we heard about. Finding a way forward requires honest, openminded conversations about the issues that most affect the quality of people’s lives — and celebrating the individuals who are working with grit and imagination to add value to their communities.

They are the spark in these uncertain times, and they are thriving in Postindustrial America. We look forward to sharing more of their stories.

Jason Motlagh was formerly TIME magazine’s Afghanistan correspondent and has reported from more than 60 countries and a dozen conflicts spanning West Africa to Southeast Asia for National Geographic, Outside, Men’s Journal, The Washington Post, The Guardian and The Economist. He’s a contributing editor at VQR and member of the Frontline Freelance Register. He produces and hosts films for Al Jazeera English, National Geographic, CGTN America, SBS Dateline and Vice World News. He is based in Mexico.

Climbers tackle a rock face in the New River Gorge National Park, a popular destination for many outdoor activities. //

Photograph by Carmen Gentile

Old moto dogs learn new safety tips

Jason and I have ridden for many years and on several continents.

We’ve both had our fair share of close calls on the road. Some of our hairier moments were because of circumstances beyond my control. Others ... well ... they were definitely our fault.

So before setting out on our journey through Postindustrial America, we decided we needed a refresher in the finer points of safe riding.

Enter Harold “Hal” Deily, a motorcycle safety expert with Snyder’s Riders, a community of moto lovers sponsored by the Pittsburgh-area Law Offices of Edgar Snyder & Associates.

Hal taught Jason and me the finer points of riding on unfamiliar roads, what to do when there are hazards in the way (i.e., roadkill and potholes), and other crucial tips for staying safe.

The lessons we learned proved beneficial from the start.

Jason and I employed many of the tactics Deily taught us as we cruised through communities large and small and over various “terrain” (Western Pennsylvania drivers and riders alike are especially aware of often lessthan-ideal conditions of their roads).

Having completed Hal’s course and utilizing what he taught us, I repeatedly found myself wishing I’d met Hal decades earlier and learned those same lessons.

Perhaps I could have avoided some of the bumps, bruises, and minor moto damage I’ve racked up during my riding days.

To learn more about riding safely, check out Snyder’s Riders: snydersriders.com

— Carmen Gentile

New book, same problems

BY KIMBERLY PALMIERO

It was a series of stories that prompted people to line up along the street just to get reprints from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In book form, “America: What Went Wrong?” by award-winning reporters Donald J. Barlett and James B. Steele, played into the 1992 presidential race — with then-candidate Bill Clinton waving it at campaign rallies.

Nearly 30 years later, their call to action for changes in government policy remains, as does the message: There’s an increasing income inequality among classes in America.

“It’s important for a new generation of people to see how long these problems have been with us so they will do something about this in a way that our generation didn’t,” Steele said in a recent interview. “We can’t keep going along like this without dire consequences.”

In 1992, the top 5 percent of taxpayers earned 30 percent of total income; but by 2017, “America’s wealthiest 5 percent had upped their share to 37 percent,” they write.

The wage and salary structure of businesses, the authors say, encouraged by tax policies, continues to erode the income of the middle class.

Released last year, “America: What Went Wrong? The Crisis Deepens,” came at a time when the pandemic exacerbated alreadyexisting inequities. We caught up with Steele to ask him more about the book, and where we might go from here.

“America: What Went Wrong?” for a new generation

James B. Steele

What was the reaction to the original stories and book, and what’s happened since?

Many people thought after the original project that America might take some action to try to reverse this trajectory, because the book was quite controversial. A lot of people loved it, but some people hated it. Those who hated it said that we had exaggerated the situation; that America wasn’t in any kind of decline, in terms of its middle class; that we were just in a temporary recession; that we would get beyond that and everything would be great again. And what we saw was that all the trends that we had pinpointed back in 1991 and 1992 were getting worse.

Why did you feel a sense of urgency to write an updated edition now?

What people were earning was continuing to fall behind.

Obamacare provided some relief to many working people, in terms of health care. But the same trends were still there — and in some cases, worsening. Probably, as much as anything, the Trump tax bill of 2017 is the one thing that compelled us to think about this.

Here you have people in the middle of class, and what did they get from the Trump tax bill? Maybe a few hundred dollars, over a year. If you’re earning more than $1 million a year, your average tax cut was $64,000 a year for 10 years, 60 percent each year.

So here you have a bill giving money to people who don’t need any money and not helping people who need help. It was absolutely emblematic of what we wrote about all those years ago, except a far worse example of it.

How do you create shared opportunities?

You have to invest in things like infrastructure.

You look at the things that are eroding a person’s standard of living. We need to come back and establish a true national health care system of some sort. Bolstering health care increases mobility. A lot of people stay in jobs because of health care. They’re afraid to move.

We also need to bolster the child care tax credit, to extend it for more than just one year. And pensions are a huge problem — we have to come up with retirement plans that are more feasible. 401(k) s were never meant to replace pensions. We need to raise the minimum wage, too. And student loans — there has to be a way to get students out from under these high interest rates.

How is the tax code a contributor to economic inequity?

Taxes are not the only, but the principal, driver. Half a century ago, think of the income taxes — corporate and individual — as a big pile; 39 percent were paid by corporations. Today it’s less than 10 percent. They use American roads, highways, too.

So the average person is paying more, one way or another. And until we restore some of that balance, inequality will continue. People are just trying to get by in many cases. They are stretched, they are drawn thin, and what these larger issues are, in many cases, are beyond their grasp and beyond (anything they can directly change).

This is no accident: It’s the direct result of 40 years of deliberate national policies that favor the few at the expense of the many.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

Kim Palmiero is CEO & Editor-in-Chief of Postindustrial Media.

Reality falls short of vision in Mahoning County

BY VINCE GUERRIERI

Last June, amid great fanfare, a product was introduced that was supposed to get the Mahoning Valley back on the road.

The Endurance, an electric pickup truck, was unveiled at the Lordstown Motors factory, located in a former GM plant in its namesake town in Trumbull County, Ohio. With an estimated 600 horsepower generated in part by small motors in each of the truck’s wheels, the Endurance was touted as the vanguard of electric vehicle technology. Goodyear signed on as part of a “strategic relationship,” and first overall draft pick Joe Burrow, who grew up in Athens and would play for the Bengals, was a “brand partner.”

“You’re going to make history right here at Lordstown Motors,” said former Vice President Mike Pence, who attended the event. “I believe it with all my heart.”

The news since has been anything but good. The truck was originally expected to start production that fall, but it, like its previously scheduled debut at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, was postponed because of COVID-19.

In January, a prototype truck caught fire on the road in Farmington Hills, Mich., where the company located its research and development factory. The following month, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission opened an inquiry into Lordstown Motors, specifically its alleged 100,000 pre-orders and the merger last fall that preceded the company’s initial public offering. In March, Hindenburg Research released a report that basically said Lordstown Motors was a house of cards, its thousands of pre-orders nonbinding, including one owner who made the orders from a P.O. Box and said that it was the start of a marketing relationship (and he had no intention of buying the vehicles).

Admittedly, Hindenburg is a short seller, meaning they benefit from a stock’s price going down — and nothing would make a stock price tank like a report of shady dealings and no real value (the stock peaked at $30.75 per share in February; now it’s traded at less than $10, and was recently downgraded by Goldman Sachs). But Lordstown Motors is now the defendant in no fewer than five class-action lawsuits. And a recent highly-touted entrance into a Mexican endurance race ended with the company pulling out after completing just 40 of its 280 miles. Leaders had claimed the

company’s still on track to start making trucks this fall, but a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission said, “The Company believes that its current level of cash and cash equivalents are not sufficient to fund commercial scale production and the launch of sale of such vehicles.”

Lordstown Motors is the latest player in what’s become an all-too-familiar script in the Mahoning Valley: A reputed visionary has a big, potentially market disruptive plan and the area, desperate to return to something even resembling its previous industrial might, is all too happy to buy in. They may throw in some tax breaks to sweeten the deal, but when the time comes, the reality falls far short of the vision.

“There’s no strategy on how to rebuild,” says Staughton Lynd, a local lawyer and activist. “People are not only used to layoffs and shutdowns, they are used to phony baloney.”

The great line of demarcation in the history of the Mahoning Valley came on Sept. 19, 1977. That day, still known locally as “Black Monday,” Youngstown Sheet & Tube, the largest of the local steel producers, announced it would close its Campbell mill at the end of the week.

The region was thrown into disarray as 5,000 jobs effectively vanished. One by one, all the other steel mills in the area tapped out, with a ripple effect through the economy that led to 50,000 jobs lost in a five-year span.

The ending would have come eventually, says Bill Lawson, director of the Mahoning Valley Historical Society. The mills dated to the turn of the century, using antiquated open hearth technology. And many other steel companies were changing their business strategy (U.S. Steel was diversifying, and even changed its name in 1986 to USX to reflect it wasn’t a steel company) and closing mills nationwide.

But the speed of the change, Lawson said, was too much for people to fully comprehend in real time, and deepened the cynicism that had always pervaded the region, known for its organized crime presence and political corruption. During a mob war in the 1960s known for its car bombings, there was a sardonic joke: For two dollars, barbers in Youngstown would cut your hair. For three, they’d start your car for you.

The electric Endurance pickup truck at Lordstown Motors Corporation is shown, Thursday, June 25, 2020, in Lordstown, Ohio. // AP Photo/Tony Dejak

That cynicism ossified throughout the 1980s and 1990s as economic revitalization efforts tried and failed with a number of big-ticket manufacturing and industrial projects that never happened. (Ironically, the only growth industry in Youngstown has been prisons. The city is home to two state facilities, as well as a private prison — which seems to have gotten a reprieve after President Joe Biden’s order to end the use of private prisons for federal contracts.)

An airplane company, Commuter Aircraft Corp., came to the Youngstown area in the early 1980s with plans to build a 50-seat turboprop plane for commuter airlines. A factory was built on the grounds of the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport in Vienna. A $30 million federal loan was guaranteed. Not one plane was made.

In 1982, the City of Youngstown sold its old municipal airport on the east side to a British airship company for a dollar with the promise of a new plant to build dirigibles. That, too, never got off the ground.

“Some of the ideas were just bizarre,” Lawson

says. “And they reflected a certain expediency by public officials, who were trying to fill this huge void in their budgets.”

In the late 1980s, plans were made for a different auto company in an industrial park that was a former site of a steel mill on Youngstown’s East Side. One of Studebaker’s last products was the Avanti, a fiberglass personal luxury coupe designed by Raymond Loewy. The car lived on, hand-built in small numbers in Studebaker’s old  Indiana factory. Plans were made to move to a larger factory, and Youngstown was willing to sweeten the deal with state and local loans. J.J. Cafaro, whose father Bill had become a millionaire in real estate development, partnered with owner Michael Kelly. All told, 407 cars were built in Youngstown before the company closed up shop. (Kelly ended up being charged with running a Ponzi scheme; Avanti was listed as a “relief defendant,” having received financial benefit from his crimes. Kelly pleaded guilty to a single charge of securities fraud in 2012, a year before his death from cancer).

Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, center, speaks to a group of Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. workers on the steps of the Capitol, Friday, Sept. 23, 1977, Washington, D.C. The group is protesting the layoff of some 5,000 workers. // AP Photo/Harvey Georges

John Russo, a Youngstown State University professor that helped start the school’s Center for Working Class Studies, notes that there’s a certain psychological fallout with those types of ideas — many, like Lordstown Motors, sold by out-of-town investors.

“There’s a type of cover with all these ideas to give people hope,” Russo says, “and then when these things don’t pan out, there’s a politics of resentment.”

And occasionally, someone comes along to play to those feelings of resentment — such as Donald Trump. Or his forebear, another tough talker with bad hair, Jim Traficant, who for many years seemed like the only friend in high places the Mahoning Valley had.

“There’s a loss of belief in institutions that’s lingered,” Russo said. “The mob’s power came from the idea that you couldn’t rely on anyone. That’s why someone like Traficant could be so successful. He played on that resentment.”

Traficant’s devotion to the area he served was well-known, but his prominence was not one of the area’s selling points. And sometimes, there were locallygrown businessmen who thought they could be the transformation figure the area needed – but ended up becoming just as notorious as Traficant.

In the late 1980s, Mickey Monus’ Phar-Mor chain had Sam Walton shaking in his boots. The “powerbuying” discount drug and grocery chain was expanding rapidly. Monus was able to buy into Major League Baseball as the first owner of the expansion Colorado Rockies and started the World Basketball League.

But all that glittered most certainly was not gold. A full decade before Enron, Phar-Mor was using accounting tricks to make it look like they were doing more business and making more money than, uh, reality dictated. Monus and CFO Pat Finn ultimately went to prison for fraud, and the chain went bankrupt, emerged from it and went bankrupt again before its ultimate liquidation.

The Mahoning Valley’s industrial fortunes rose thanks in no small part to coal and iron deposits around the area. And in the early 2000s, when natural gas

producers started fracking to get natural gas from the Marcellus shale, the Mahoning Valley saw some benefit. Environmental concerns were shouted down, Russo said, because fracking was seen as the industry that would bring the Valley back. The biggest thing it brought was earthquakes, linked to injection wells used to dispose of the wastewater.

In 2016, ground was broken on a new project that was touted as revolutionizing the beverage industry. Chill-Can, which would make a self-chilling beverage can, was coming to Youngstown. It was viewed as a homecoming for Mitchell Joseph, a YSU alumni whose grandfather started a pop bottling company in the same neighborhood nearly a century earlier. The complex would create more than 200 jobs, and have the capacity of making potentially a billion self-chilling cans a year.

Residents were bought out. Land was cleared. Tax breaks were given. More than four years later, not only have no cans been manufactured, but Mayor Tito Brown ordered the company to fulfill its obligations or repay grants, money spent by the city to buy property for the facility and tax abatements. (Chill-can has filed its own lawsuit, alleging it doesn’t have to repay the money.)

“I don’t think Mickey Monus, J.J. Cafaro and Mitchell Joseph were trying to put one over on anyone,” Lawson says. “They tried to make things better. They just couldn’t sustain things.”

But in one of the poorest cities in the United States, with the first school district in Ohio taken over by the state, good intentions can only go so far.

“There’s this feeling of, ‘What do we have to do?’” Lawson says. “We’ve done what we could, and it seemed like the cards were all stacked against us.

“We seem to lead the world in the painful postindustrial process. We’d like to lead in something else.”

Vince Guerrieri is a Youngstown native, now working as a journalist in the Cleveland area.

Mitchell Joseph, chairman and CEO of The Joseph Company, displays their newly launched Chill-Can during an international can-making exhibition in Singapore in 1997. The Laguna Niguel, California-based company has developed the self-chilling can using an innovative “free evaporation” technology, though the British government announced it would propose a Europe-wide ban on the product due to its use of hydrofluorocarbons, which they claim are ecologically harmful. // AP Photo/Jonathan Drake

People, culture, and ideas forging a new

POSTINDUSTRIAL

They wanted to overturn the election. Now, they want your vote

BY HEATH DRUZIN

If you’re looking for the next Marjorie Taylor Greene, the GOP congresswoman and far-right conspiracy theorist from Georgia, look no further than the Rust Belt. It’s quickly becoming the heartland of an angry new GOP vanguard that is QAnon-curious and has as much scorn for the Republican establishment as it does for Democrats.

In Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, some political candidates aren’t just sympathetic to the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 – some of them were in D.C. that day, either at the rally beforehand or part of the insurrection itself.

“Marjorie Taylor Greene is like my soulmate,” said Audra Johnson, who is running in a crowded GOP primary for Congress on Aug. 3 in Michigan’s Third District. She attended the Jan. 6 rally by former President Donald Trump that preceded the storming of the U.S. Capitol. “I love what she stands for, I love the hard line that she’s drawing.”

Johnson is one of six people who were in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 and are now running for office, in Michigan alone. The Rust Belt was a hub for insurrectionists, based on charges filed so far. Pennsylvania alone has had more than 45 people arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 riot, out of about 500 arrests nationwide.

Several elected officials from the region attended either the rally that preceded the riot or the capitol siege itself, and the Rust Belt has a history of far-right activity. Michigan has been a cradle for the militia movement. Ohio has the second most antigovernment extremist groups in the country, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Pennsylvania has numerous militia and antigovernment groups and some politicians there have recently attended events with them.

Johnson gained attention as the “MAGA Bride” for her Trump-themed wedding but her run is most interesting for the district’s recent political history.

Until recently it was represented by Justin Amash, an anti-Trump Republican who quit the party while in office and then voted for Trump’s first impeachment. He was succeeded by Republican Rep. Peter Meijar, who then voted for Trump’s second impeachment.

Johnson has no such concerns about Trump. She brought dozens of people with her to the Jan. 6 proTrump rally at the Capitol aimed at overturning the presidential election.

She says she never entered the Capitol building and that destruction of property is a crime. Five people also died as a result of the riot, including a police officer. But Johnson also says she heard police may have given protesters permission to enter.

“What I’m confused about is the amount of attention (the riot) is getting when all last summer there was millions of dollars of damage from liberal protesters,” she said, referring to damage done during protests that erupted around the country after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis Police officer.

She still claims that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election, despite courts having found no

evidence of widespread voter fraud and Republican officials in several states validating President Biden’s wins. She has also claimed that America is in a “civil war,” though she says that shouldn’t be taken as encouraging violence.

Johnson has used slogans like “The Storm Is Coming,” which is connected to the discredited QAnon conspiracy theory, which includes the idea that a cabal of Democrats run a cannibalistic pedophilia ring.

In an interview with Postindustrial, she at first said she is not affiliated with QAnon. But then she said some of the things “Q” posted were true.

When asked “do you believe there’s a cabal of Democrats involved in pedophila and even murder,” the crux of the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, Johnson took a long pause.

“I believe there’s an evil faction in our world,” she said. “Is it strictly Democrat? No.”

In Ohio, J.R. Majewski, who appeared in a QAnon shirt while appearing on “Fox And Friends” is running as a Republican in in Ohio’s 9th District. It’s currently represented by Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat and the longest-serving woman in the House of Representatives.

Despite wearing the shirt, Majewski now says he does not believe in the QAnon conspiracy, though he acknowledged associating with people who say they believe in it.

“I wore the shirt because a friend of mine recommended I wear it,” he said.

Majewski says he raised upwards of $20,000 to bring more than 60 people to the Jan. 6 pro-Trump rally that devolved into a riot. Majewski said he never entered the Capitol building and disavowed the violence, but he did say he had hoped the rally would help convince the Senate and then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the presidential election.

Michigan Congressional candidate Audra Johnson held a political fundraiser in June in which she was giving away an AR-15, a semiautomatic weapon. Credit: Audra Johnson for Congress Facebook page

He stands by his participation in the rally. “What I did was extremely patriotic,” he said.

Then there’s Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican who said Trump encouraged him to run for governor and is widely expected to do just that (Mastriano has said he’s praying about it). The former Army colonel’s campaign spent thousands of dollars on buses to ferry people to the Jan. 6 rally. Though he has denied participating in the riot, video evidence contradicts what he said, appearing to show him and his wife well past police barricades as the mob stormed the Capitol.

Mastriano did not respond to multiple requests for an interview for this story.

Mastriano also attended a rally at the Gettysburg battlefield last year, where militia members converged after a hoax circulated about “antifa” burning the U.S. flag and destroying monuments. His five-page letter to the Trump-era Department of Justice touting voter fraud claims was cited in an investigation into the causes of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Jared Holt, a fellow at the think tank The Atlantic Council who studies extremism, said when candidates who push conspiracy theories win offices, it further legitimizes those views in the eyes of some people.

“A society’s ability to govern itself effectively relies on a shared understanding of basic facts,” Holt said. “When those are eroded, the ability to govern in a way that is equitable and fair gets called into question.”

Daryl Johnson, who spent 25 years monitoring domestic extremism for the federal government, including for the Department of Homeland Security, said he’s concerned that an increasing number of candidates are embracing fringe theories with little pushback from more mainstream politicians.

“It’s going to take Republican leadership, a bipartisan approach to this,” he said. “There are some Republicans that are coming around and being outspoken about this, but the party itself is more embracing it and fanning it than denouncing it.”

Johnson did say he’s encouraged by the Biden administration’s unveiling in mid-June of a strategy to combat domestic extremism, the first of its kind. He said it’s the most optimistic he’s been about combating extremism in a decade.

But Johnson, the congressional candidate, said she believes she’s just the beginning of a trend.

“The old GOP is dead,” she said. “So I think we’re gonna see more and more people like me come out and run.”

Pennsylvania State Sen. Doug Mastriano Speaks at ReOpen Rally in Harrisburg, Pa. last month.

Mastriano is considering a run for Governor of Pennsylvania in 2022. // Zach D Roberts/ NurPhoto via AP

Photographs by Casey Martin // for Postindustrial Media

BY RAMESH SANTANAM

When a Florida company was looking to install a large-scale solar farm in Adams County, Pennsylvania, Clayton Wood and his family didn’t think leasing their property to the company would be an issue.

“We are not putting up a laser tag place, or an amusement park. It’s just solar panels,” Wood said. “No traffic, no sewer lines, no extra taxes, maybe even a benefit to taxes.”

Wood and the more than dozen property owners who signed leases with NextEra Energy Resources didn’t anticipate strong public opposition to the project.

NextEra’s 75-megawatt project would take up 1,000 acres in Mount Joy Township. It would be one of the largest, if not the largest, utilityscale solar installations in the Commonwealth. Large-scale solar farms such as this were once home mostly to the sunny South and West. Ultimately, these developments generate power for companies, not individual homes.

But as it becomes more lucrative for companies to build these installations, thanks to government tax incentives, they’re now also emerging in lesssunny regions such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and elsewhere in Postindustrial America.

Those who oppose the project didn’t want such a massive solar array in their backyards. They point to the area’s agricultural setting and, more importantly, its proximity to the Civil War battlefields of Gettysburg.

“There is a place for solar, but this is not the place,” said Thomas Newhart, who raises black Angus cattle on a 65-acre farm. He and his wife bought the property 35 years ago.

In Pennsylvania alone, there are more than 300 proposed solar projects on the grid that guides electricity flow to 65 million people in 13 states and the District of Columbia. Only a fraction of these projects in grid operator Audubon, Pa.-based PJM Interconnection’s queue will come to fruition.

Leasing land for such projects is a winning proposition for many landowners: Rural communities throughout Postindustrial America are rich with swaths of land on which developers are paying owners generous per-acre fees to place solar panels.

Wood, 34, owns a dairy farm in Geneva, New York, but has a stake in his family’s former dairy farm, which encompasses about 200 acres in Mount Joy, about seven miles from Gettysburg.

He grew up on the farm, his grandfather and parents still live there, and Wood would like to leave the land to his two children, making them the fifth generation in his family to own it.

The solar project, he said, “added some sort of value to the community. We were getting some personal gain from it, of course, but who wouldn’t be looking for that?”

Township supervisors deadlocked 2-2 in June about issuing NextEra a conditional use permit, thereby rejecting the project. The company can appeal the decision and is “evaluating options and look forward to the continued development of the project,” spokeswoman Lisa Paul said.

Newhart and his allies vow to continue fighting against it.

Newhart said the solar farm would ruin his business, which includes the Iron Horse Inn, a bedand-breakfast. Many guests have returned, he said, because of the undeveloped surroundings.

NextEra’s project would place an 8-foot barbed wire fence and 12-foot tall solar panels 50 feet from his property, Newhart said. “This proposed project is mind-boggling. I mean, what are we doing?”

Wood said he is sympathetic to such concerns, but pointed out: “You don’t own your view. You own it if you own that land.”

He also is frustrated that his “neighbors’ concerns dictate to a degree what we can and can’t do on our property,” he said. “It’s not our community park.”

The issue is that the proposed project “interferes with everyone,” Newhart’s attorney, Nathan Wolf, said. “It’s an industrial-sized solar power plant that they put on ag(ricultural) land.”

His clients, he said, also are concerned about possible loss of habitat and potential environmental damage, including hazardous material in the solar panels.

Some people counter that such fears are unfounded.

“One of the things we hear is that solar power hurts the ground. Mostly it’s aluminum and glass,” said Rob Altenburg, senior director for energy and climate at Penn Future, a statewide environmental nonprofit. “It’s just a matter of pulling posts out of the ground. No permanent structures.”

Ramesh Santanam has covered politics, government, the courts, and local news for more than 20 years, reporting for both daily newspapers and The Associated Press before writing for Postindustrial. He is based in Pittsburgh.

Thomas Newhart loves the view from his farm in Mount Joy near Gettysburg, Pa. If the solar project there goes through, that view would be obscured by an eight-foot-high barbed wire fence, and 12-foot high solar panels, 50 feet from his property.

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Supporting Black moms

How doulas are taking on maternal health

BY TORY N. PARRISH

The Rev. Diann Holt knew a change had to come last year.

In 2013, she founded Durham’s Baby Café, in a community center owned by Durham Memorial AME Zion Church, as a place where volunteers would provide breastfeeding education, diapers and other baby supplies, and food, to mothers in a predominantly Black neighborhood with a high poverty rate in Buffalo.

In March 2020, after the COVID-19 pandemic ended face-to-face meetings — and employment for many residents — Holt led the Baby Café’s board of directors in changing the name of the nonprofit to Durham’s Maternal Stress-Free Zone because the mission was changing, she said.

“Breastfeeding will always be my primary choice of service. But I want to bring in the doulas. I want to bring in the Lamaze [classes]. I want to do grief counseling. I want to do the healing piece,” said Holt, 73, a retired nurse who is also a certified doula and Lamaze trainer. The nonprofit also used a small grant to buy iPads to hold virtual classes on breastfeeding for pregnant women and pair them with volunteer trained doulas, she said.

The Rev. Diann Holt, standing, chats with two children at a family activities event hosted by Durham’s Maternal Stress-Free Zone in Buffalo, N.Y. // Photograph by Raymonda Reynolds

This type of grassroots connection to women — before and immediately after they give birth — is becoming more plentiful because it is a key piece of the puzzle in lowering maternal mortality rates, especially for Black women, who have the highest maternal mortality rates among all pregnant women in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Across the nation, grassroots efforts, many led by Black women, are taking shape to train women of color to be community-based doulas or provide other services that work in conjunction with more formal health care services. The goal is to provide access to support and a voice to women who may be lacking it.

“Women do better when they have support, when you can talk to someone who looks like you, someone who has the same experiences that you have, someone who can relate to what it is that you’re telling them,” Holt said.

The United States has the highest maternal

mortality rate of any industrialized country — 17.4 per 100,000 pregnancies represented about 660 maternal deaths in 2018, according to The Commonwealth Fund, a New York organization that supports independent research on health care issues.

The situation is worse for Black women.

“Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than White women. Multiple factors contribute to these disparities, such as variation in quality health care, underlying chronic conditions, structural racism, and implicit bias,” according to the website of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention in Atlanta.

Doulas are not considered medical workers.

Instead, they are trained to provide physical, emotional, and educational support to pregnant women before, during and shortly after birth, according to DONA International, a doula-certifying organization based in Chicago.

Doulas help pregnant women prepare for birth

Mothers and their children, as well as volunteers with Durham’s Maternal Stress-Free Zone in Buffalo, N.Y., attend a listening session at which they expressed their concerns about maternal health care in 2019. Durham’s founder, the Rev. Diann Holt, is standing smiling with her arms crossed in an X. // Photograph provided by Durham’s Maternal Stress-Free Zone

by teaching them breathing exercises and birthing positions, providing prenatal information, and helping pregnant women to stay calm during labor. Doulas also advocate for patients who may be reluctant to speak up for themselves to doctors.

For women at high risk of negative birth outcomes, those who receive care from doulas are two times less likely to experience birth complications and four times less likely to have babies with low birth weights, compared to women who don’t have doulas, according to The Commonwealth Fund.

Durham’s works with 13 volunteer doulas, nine of whom are African American, connecting them with pregnant women in the Buffalo community.

Buffalo resident Elyse Whitlock, 29, took several parenting preparation classes online while pregnant last year via Durham’s, which paired her with a doula.

The doula coached Whitlock in breathing exercises and birthing positions before and during her labor, and advocated on her behalf to hospital doctors during the delivery, said Whitlock, who gave birth to her first child, a baby girl, in February.

“If it wasn’t for her, ooh, I don’t know what would have happened,” said Whitlock, who works as an aide on city school buses.

Dr. Sharee Livingston, who is the department chair for obstetrics and gynecology at UPMC Lititz in Lancaster County, Pa., co-founded the Diversifying Doulas Initiative to train doulas of color in June 2020. It developed out of necessity.

“Ninety-nine percent of obstetrics are happy times, and everything is great and wonderful. But when bad things happen, it sticks with you,” Livingston said.

Because Black women are more likely to die in childbirth compared to white women, so there’s more of an urgent need for doulas and other services, she said.

“But doulas are cost-prohibitive in the marginalized communities,” she said.

Using grants, DDI pays $1,000 to $1,400 per doula to give pregnant women of color free care in the Lancaster community.

The service, which has helped 63 pregnant women of color, usually includes a doula making two prenatal visits to a client, attending the labor and delivery process, and making two postpartum visits, Livingston said.

DDI also was founded with the goal of training black and Latino women to be doulas. Before the organization’s founding, there was one doula of color in Lancaster, she said. Now there are 26.

“And that’s why we continue to advocate for funding and support. This program, as well as others, must remain in existence … until we can reverse the unfortunate trends that we’re seeing,” she said.

DDI has received grant funding, including $25,000 from the Lancaster Osteopathic Health Foundation, $5,000 from UPMC Pinnacle Foundation and $5,000 from Gateway Health.

It costs $50,000 to $75,000 annually to run Durham’s program, which is funded by nonprofits’ grants and individual donations, Holt said. The program serves about 100 clients a year, she said.

New York is one of the few states that provides any Medicaid reimbursement for pregnant women who receive doula care. The state pays $600, but the care can cost up to $1,200.

Tory N. Parrish is Region I director for the National Association of Black Journalists. She also covers small business and retail for Newsday. She previously worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and the ObserverDispatch in New York. A native of Virginia, she is based on Long Island.

The Rev. Diann Holt holds a newborn boy, Ramon, while visiting him and his mom at a Buffalo hospital. A certified lactation counselor, Holt assisted the child’s mother with initiating breastfeeding during the visit. //Photo/Durham’s Maternal Stress-Free Zone

TELL ME YOUR STORY

RECORD YOUR LIFE MEMOIRS AS A TREASURE FOR YOUR FAMILY IN BOOK FORM

‘Pieces of their lives’

Families of former industrial workers share historical snapshots

through

donated items

BY KECIA BAL

Hulking machinery. Stacks of proudly made products. Vast, sprawling campuses.

The fossil record of an industrial past is often shaped by its collective outcomes, but the individual level — and the everyday level — can be just as compelling, as a number of Pennsylvania museums illustrate through ephemera and other items donated by family members and former workers themselves.

In the Pittsburgh region’s Homestead Borough, the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area’s “From the Vault: Staff Picks from the Rivers of Steel Archives” highlights many individually donated items with personal stories behind them.

“Most of the things I picked were because of what it meant to the donor, that emotional attachment to place and to your history,” said Ron Baraff, the organization’s director of historic resources and facilities. The exhibit is open through Aug. 31 at the Bost Building, which serves as the organization’s visitors’ center. Admission to the Bost Building is free through the end of 2021.

Uniforms, lunchboxes, and hard hats are among the more personal items donated to Johnstown Area Heritage Association (JAHA). Artifacts that showcase the life of the workers at the former Bethlehem Steel Johnstown Plant are to be incorporated into an upcoming exhibit at JAHA’s Heritage Discovery Center in the Cambria City neighborhood of Johnstown, Pa.

On display at the National Museum of Industrial History are objects donated by family members of Norman King, head machine mechanic at R. K. Laros Silk Company, founded in 1919 in Bethlehem and sold in 1957. The artifacts include his 25-year service watch and his original ID badge, as well as a christening gown mill workers made for one of his children. The museum has hundreds of thousands of artifacts under archive, the bulk of which are from Bethlehem Steel Corporation, but also incorporates in its exhibits personal artifacts from workers in many different industries, from iron and steel to silk and textiles. //

Emily Marchello/NMIH

Donated to the National Museum of Industrial History by Brenda and Jim Stetler (pictured), this Western Union telegram belonged to Brenda’s father, Garvin Kram. It was shipped after Charles Lindbergh’s historic trans-Atlantic flight as a special thank you because part of the engine was made from material from Bethlehem Steel. “FOR THIRTY THREE AND ONE HALF HOURS CAPTAIN LINDBERGHS LIFE DEPENDED ON THE QUALITY OF STEEL IN YOUR FORGINGS AND THEY DID NOT FAIL HIM,” it reads, in part. Kram, whose obituary indicates he worked for 31 years in the sales department for Casting and Forgings at Bethlehem Steel, kept the framed telegram in his basement for more than 20 years before he died in 2009. //

Glenn Koehler/NMIH

“Our collections are coming generally from the people who have these pieces of their lives, their family’s lives — their father, uncle, grandmother, whoever — that they saved all these years,” he said.

Many of the family-donated collections are one or two items, taken from garages or attics. Shape books — small manuals with specs and dimensions for specific products — are a frequent donation, brought in with a loved one’s meticulous notes, a record of decades of work and devotion.

Others, such as trophies for mill-sponsored teams, demonstrate a sense of community that often came with working at places such as Homestead Works or Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Another favorite of Baraff’s, donated by third-generation steelworker and author Ken Kobus, represents a way of living: an apron his mother wore every day while she was making dinner, in the moments before his father came home from work.

Similarly, the Johnstown Area Heritage Association has collected uniforms, hard hats and lunchboxes from those who worked in the four divisions of the former Bethlehem Steel Johnstown Plant.

Mementos such as the sample pieces for final furnace firings are other typical items that family members now entrust to the keepers of history, JAHA Executive Director Richard Burkett said. Many of those donated artifacts will be weaved into an upcoming exhibit to complement the association’s Iron & Steel Gallery.

Factories that were meeting production benchmarks for war equipment during World War II were sometimes recognized with an Army-Navy “E” Award. During an award ceremony, with a band playing inside the plant and other formalities, employees would receive a pin to mark the accomplishment. The National Museum of Industrial History has an Army-Navy “E” banner bestowed on Bethlehem Steel in its collection, as well as pins donated by workers’ family members. //

Emily Marchello/NMIH

Hard hats are a frequently donated item to museums across the region, and many are accepted because they tell a personal story. Often, they feature nicknames or, in the case of Steve Petrusic’s, donated to the Johnstown Area Heritage Association (JAHA), they are a token of friendships and memories made in the mills. The association’s artifacts are to be incorporated into an upcoming exhibit to complement the Iron & Steel Gallery at JAHA’s Heritage Discovery Center in the Cambria City neighborhood of Johnstown, Pa.

A few hours’ drive away, in Bethlehem, Pa., the National Museum of Industrial History, housed in the former Electric Repair Shop of the Bethlehem Steel plant site, incorporates personal artifacts from workers in a swath of different industries, from iron and steel to silk and textiles.

When the Bethlehem plant site’s assets were dispersed in 2003, not everything was cleared away. Many items ended up in garbage bins — and residents of what was once very much a company town were quick to nab them up in what the museum’s Curator of Collections Andria Zaia called a “crowdsourced” salvage initiative.

Now the museum fields calls almost weekly from family members interested in donating those tokens

of life as it used to be. Tools, employee ID badges, awards for meeting production goals, and, of course, hard hats by the dozen, most inscribed with workers’ nicknames, all help paint a collective, but at the same time deeply personal, picture.

Zaia said the collection and curation of each of the hundreds of thousands of items in the museum’s archives requires a keen focus on storytelling.

“What we are mostly attracted to are those personal stories, where we can interject a human story in this wider industrial landscape,” she said.

Kecia Bal is a freelance writer and former newspaper reporter covering communities in western Pennsylvania.

The National Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem, Pa., has received dozens of hard hats from former industrial workers and their families. Most include a nickname, and some feature safety stickers or stickers workers received from unions and other organizations. The two pictured here were donated by a father and son. // Photograph/Emily Marchello/NMIH

the Vault: Staff Picks from the Rivers of Steel Archives” is open through Aug.

Poverty in the pandemic

How West Virginia nonprofits stayed open to feed the hungry

BY HOLDEN EDWARD STRAUSSER

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — In West Virginia, a state with among the highest poverty rates in the nation, the hungry have always had few options.

With COVID-19 restrictions, those options are even more limited, making charities one of the few dependable sources of food.

Charities such as Community Kitchen, Inc. in Morgantown and CCAP Loaves and Fishes in Martinsburg have risen to a continuing challenge to serve communities without spreading the virus. This has meant changes in operations, procedures, and staffing to meet the unchanging need of feeding West Virginians.

This is the story of how these organizations stayed open when everything else was closed, and how they continue to serve their communities in the new normal.

Founded in 1984, Community Kitchen, Inc. is a non-denominational organization with a mission of providing a free nutritious meal “in a safe, clean, uplifting environment for the hungry in the community.”

Originally, the kitchen was part of Trinity Episcopal Church, but over time it became a community-based organization. Because it is still located in the church building, it is still answerable to church leadership regarding use of the facilitiesin how the facilities are used.

It remained open throughout the pandemic, but the operating costs have risen. The Community Kitchen received at least six emergency grants to keep operating during the pandemic.

CHANGES AT THE KITCHEN

For the Morgantown Community Kitchen, COVID-19 has meant an overhaul of procedures.

The kitchen generally serves 70 to110 meals per day. Since 2020, the average meal number has dropped to closer to 80 meals per day at its highest.

The kitchen is staffed by volunteers, and it mostly runs on donations.

Meals now must be packaged in plastic foam “to-go” boxes, meaning that operations are more expensive and time-consuming.

Volunteers wear masks and practice social distancing.

“Before COVID, we would probably have six or seven volunteers, you know, prepping food, serving, manning the soup and salad stations,” said Richard Dumas, a Community Kitchen Board member.

In May they were down to three or four people, at the most, who are in the kitchen, preparing food and serving, he said. As of June, the kitchen can have all the volunteers they need.

But the largest impact on the kitchen is that its clients no longer can eat indoors. Since March 2020, the indoor dining area has been closed. Instead, clients must come to the door of the church.

For many, the Community Kitchen provides their only meal for that day.

“I just hate to see them sitting out there in the snow eating, or sitting in the rain,” volunteer Amy Wodzenski said. “But they do.”

The client number fluctuates from day to day, depending on the weather, the menu that day and whether any monetary assistance has come in recently.

“You never know exactly,” said Jeff Nieman, a volunteer. “You think it’s going to be a rainy day, you’re only going to have 50, and then if you end up having 70, you’re scrambling around at the end trying to get something else to fix.”

The volunteers lay out all the portions in advance, and put each part of the meal into the boxes. The meals generally consist of an entrée, a side, and a dessert.

Once this is done, the volunteers move the boxes to a table at the door of the church, where they can be served to anyone who asks for a meal.

“This is something I feel I can do.”

Bill Hagerty, the president of the Morgantown Community Kitchen board of directors, wishes that things could be different.

He had friendly relationships with many of the clients at the Community Kitchen before COVID-19.

Now, he struggles to remember names.

“This has separated us from them to such an extent, that today I ran into someone who I knew his name so well before and I still haven’t thought of it,” Hagerty said.

In spite of the distance, Hagerty tries to keep up his friendship with a client whose medical condition caused his hands to shake uncontrollably.

“We do special things for him, like fill his coffee mug and put it in his backpack for him,” Hagerty said.

Richard Dumas hands a meal to a client.

The son of a coal miner, Hagerty worked as a design professor at the West Virginia University Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design.

“As a child, I had a very good home life, but it was sparse,” Hagerty said. “We were provided for, but I was aware of all the difficulties that a lot of families had. And there were a lot of people that I went to school with who had difficulties.”

These experiences led Hagerty to volunteer his time helping out those who were less fortunate than himself.

Hagerty’s friend, Ernie, an Army veteran, convinced him to volunteer at the Morgantown Community Kitchen. Soon Hagerty became a staple of the kitchen, then the kitchen manager, and then eventually the president of the board.

“At my age now there are certain things I can’t do,” he said. “This is something I feel I can do.”

“A REAL LEARNING EXPERIENCE.”

Serving in a similar role to Hagerty, Beverly Van Metre is the president of the board of directors at the Congregational Cooperative Action Project Loaves and Fishes in Martinsburg.

Her church was one of the two that founded the group in 1982. CCAP Loaves and Fishes is an entirely volunteer Christian organization with the mission of making “the church visible in Berkeley County.” It provides financial aid for bills, prescriptions, medical costs, eye exam referrals and eyeglasses, as well as work shoes and food supplies to last a household for a month.

She has been on the board of Loaves and Fishes since 2014, a year before she retired from working at the Department of Veterans Affairs medical center in Martinsburg.

As a caseworker, she helped veterans with HIV/

Volunteers Richard Dumas and Jeff Nieman examine boxes of donated food delivered to the Community Kitchen by supporter Russell Kincaid. The volunteers make sure the food is usable and then record it in the inventory.

AIDS and hepatitis C. She was drawn to helping patients who were underserved.

After her 2015 retirement, Van Metre began volunteering at CCAP in addition to serving on the board. She was motivated by her upbringing, her Episcopalian faith and her belief in helping those who are underserved.

“Usually they deserve better than they get,” Van Metre said. “And I’ve always gotten better than I deserved. I really thought it was important to continue that type of work into retirement.”

During the worst of the pandemic, the organization closed briefly. Social distancing, mask wearing and an appointment schedule were set up to help keep clients and people safe.

Clients were at first instructed to call ahead to make appointments. However, this soon hit a snag because the volunteers were reliant on calling clients to arrange appointments.

“It was a real learning experience,” Van Metre said. “People who are living in poverty have phones, but a lot of times, they only turn them on when they need them.”

This is because many people who live below the poverty line sometimes use services such as Tracfone, which charges by the minute. If a robocall comes through, answering will consume the user’s minutes. To avoid paying extra money, many people keep their phones off unless they are making a call.

Van Metre has been grateful for the donations that the organization has received, coming from churches, corporations and even some people who donated their stimulus checks.

“PEOPLE, FORGIVENESS AND COMPASSION”

Richard Dumas came to West Virginia during his four years in the Army. He is a native of Massachusetts, from a family of 10 siblings.

He liked the area and went to Marshall University to get his graduate degree, and never left.

Dumas takes pride in working at the Community Kitchen, going out of his way to ensure that his clients not only have a good meal, but something that looks presentable.

“My reasoning for doing it is, really, I don’t like to see people not have what they need,” Dumas said. “My father always beat into our heads: people, forgiveness and

compassion. This is one way that I can really ensure that folks have a meal.”

Dumas started volunteering as his schedule allowed at the kitchen while he was working for BB&T Bank. Once he retired, he came to work at the kitchen every day that it was open. He cut that time down to three times a week to avoid burnout.

Dumas serves on the board of the kitchen. He often works at the door of the church, handing out meals to clients as they come.

“To be honest with you, the best part is the appreciation that the clients show,” Dumas said. “We have one client who will give us a dollar every once in a while, because that’s his way of giving back. Another client comes down on Sundays and picks up the cigarette butts” that are laying outside.

For Dumas, what makes coming to the kitchen worthwhile is his ability to make the clients’ lives “just a little bit better.”

Holden Strausser has published articles in the United States Air Force’s Wild Blue Yonder digital magazine and West Virginia University’s student newspaper, The Daily Athenaeum, where he worked as its fact checker. He is a graduate assistant at WVU majoring in journalism. He is based in Smithsburg, Md.

For more information about the Morgantown Community Kitchen, visit MorgantownCommunityKitchen.com. For more information about CCAP Loaves and Fishes, visit CCAPLoavesAndFishes.com.

Amy Wodzenski sets up for lunch at the Community Kitchen.

Roam free and soak in some sun and sights this summer

After more than a year of uncertainty and restrictions on our movement, it’s time to head out and have some fun.

Lots of it.

Museums, amusement parks, and other attractions are reopening throughout Postindustrial America. Our suggestions offer enjoyment of the great outdoors, opportunities to learn more about the history of our region, and, of course, ways to just have a ball.

View of Harper’s Ferry and the Potomac RIver from Maryland Heights.

SO MUCH HISTORY IN ONE SMALL TOWN: HARPER’S FERRY NATIONAL PARK

WEST VIRGINIA

A historic community at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, Harper’s Ferry lets visitors take a step back in time to the pre-industrial, agrarian era of America’s rich history.

Harper’s Ferry is a throughline for numerous significant moments in American history and the figures who shaped it, including famous anti-slavery crusaders such as John Brown and Frederick Douglass, as well as noted Black author and civil rights pioneer W.E.B. DuBois.

Must-see sights for history lovers include John Brown’s Fort, where in 1859 Brown and others barricaded themselves during their ill-fated raid that attempted to spawn a slave uprising and end the evil practice of brutal, forced subjugation once and for all.

Another favorite destination in Harper’s Ferry is Jefferson Rock, where in 1783 the future president and drafter of the Declaration of Independence first took in the splendid mountains and rivers where Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland meet.

Hikers will certainly find no shortage of paths to traverse in the area, among them the Appalachian Trail. Rock climbers, too, will find their share of challenging faces to scale.

nps.gov/hafe

The historic haunted St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church is an iconic landmark located in Harper’s Ferry National Park alongside the Appalachian Trail in West Virginia. // Shutterstock

EXPLORE AMERICA’S ORIGINS: BRANDYWINE VALLEY PENNSYLVANIA

Tour American castles, stroll immaculately-kept gardens, and browse museums replete with American art and historical relics.

You can do all that and more in Brandywine Valley, which is also home to a Revolutionary War battlefield, one of the oldest working colonial farms in Pennsylvania, and much more.

You’ll find the region’s rolling hills a tranquil and inspiring respite, as did famed artist and illustrator N.C. Wyeth, whose work is inspired by the Brandywine Valley.

But not every attraction has a historical or artistic bent.

Oenophiles will want to check out the Brandywine Valley Wine Trail, a collection of five vineyards producing unique wines from grapes grown in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania’s Chester County.

thebrandywine.com

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE HOUSE CINCINNATI, OHIO

Author of more than 30 books, anti-slavery activist and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) is best known for her heartbreaking tale of the devastation wrought by the insidious practice: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

Visit the home where Stowe lived much of her married life and suffered the loss of one of her seven children, an 18-month-old boy who died of cholera. The anguish Stowe felt, coupled with her anti-slavery stance, would later inspire her to write of the pain and suffering of the enslaved, thus creating one of the most celebrated works in the history of American letters.

A visit to her home in Cincinnati will also open the doors to other historic happenings during her days there, such as the Underground Railroad.

You’ll see Stowe’s desk and writing implements and learn about the other writers and scholars who have passed through the home.

To book a guided tour of the home, go to stowehousecincy.org.

The home of farmer Gideon Gilpin, in Chadd’s Ford, Pa. The Marquis de Lafayette used Gilpin’s house for his headquarters during the Battle of Brandywine in 1777. Gilpin, a Quaker farmer, was living there with his family during the war. His property was plundered by soldiers. In later years, he operated a tavern out of his home to help support his family. // Shutterstock

MUCH MORE THAN JUST A SWIMMING HOLE: NELSON’S LEDGES GARRETTSVILLE, OHIO

Where can you swim, camp, hike, check out a music concert, and soak up some sun on the beach all in one place in the Buckeye State?

Look no farther than Nelson Ledges Quarry Park, some 250 acres of forest and meadows surrounding a springfed, clearwater, quarry lake.

For decades, the park has drawn visitors from around the world to its natural and man-made beauty and myriad activities such as fishing, paddling and even scuba diving. Dry land fun includes biking, climbing, and ample wildlife-watching opportunities.

Nelson’s Ledges also offers more than 400 campsites, making it easy to spend a few days surrounded by nature in one of Ohio’s most picturesque protected areas.

It boasts a music venue that hosts top attractions such as country music legend Willie Nelson (no, the park is not named after Willie, though it’s reasonable to ask).

Check out the quarry’s website for more details about events planned for this summer, including the Summerdance 2021 music festival in September.

www.nlqp.com

SCREAM YOUR LUNGS OUT!: SIX FLAGS CHICAGO AREA

The Midwest’s largest amusement park is back in action this summer!

Those who are fully vaccinated can scream to their heart’s content sans masks, in accordance with guidelines at the park situated just north of Chicago near the Wisconsin border.

Thrill-seekers will want to test their mettle on the Bourbon Street Fireball, a seven-story-tall looping roller coaster that offers views of the entire park while you’re being whipped, flipped, and inverted.

And if that’s not extreme enough for you, there’s the granddaddy of all Six Flags coasters named after the mightiest of all comic book heroes. Superman: Ride of Steel is what’s called a “hypercoaster,” an all-new breed of extreme-thrills ride with climbs and drops topping 200 feet!.

Not to be outdone by the Fireball, Superman’s namesake ride also includes a collection of DNA-helix corkscrews that will have you wondering which side is up.

For those less inclined to have their inner ear thrown out of whack, the park offers a selection of familyoriented rides that will thrill the youngsters while allowing you to

WHAT CAN’T YOU DO HERE? ALLEGHENY NATIONAL FOREST PENNSYLVANIA

You might be asking: What’s there to do in Allegheny National Forest?

Perhaps the better question is: What can’t you do in more than 500,000 acres of protected lands replete with mountains, valleys, rushing waters, and much, much more?

Whether hiking, cycling, paddling, climbing, horsebacking, fishing, off-roading, or just lounging around in nature is your preference, this forest has opportunities in spades.

Seriously, you could spend your summer trying to tackle all that a forest straddling three counties has to offer.

It’s also a great place for nature lovers to spot woodland critters, both common and rare, including bald eagles.

Getting on the water in the Allegheny is easy and fun for the whole family, as the Clarion River running through it never gets faster than a Class I rapid, which means it’s suitable for beginners.

Campers will enjoy plenty of elbow room between you and other tents, giving you the peace and solitude you’ve been craving after more than a year of being in close confines with family during the pandemic.

If roughing it isn’t your thing, there are also plenty of places to rent, inside and outside the park.

Be sure to check out the Allegheny National Forest website for information on camping permits and cabin availability in the forest.

hang onto your lunch.

The kids will also get a kick out of the live show featuring plundering pirates as they recount their most famous treasure-seeking exploits.

Considering how much the park has to offer, multi-day passes are your best bet.

sixflags.com/greatamerica

IT’S A CLASSIC FOR A REASON: THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY VIRGINIA AND WEST VIRGINIA

The Shenandoah Valley is a much-beloved camping and day trip destination for good reason: It’s absolutely gorgeous.

You’ll be gobsmacked by mountain and valley views stretching across two states. Shenandoah is also home to many woodland creatures, including snakes and black bears. So, while hiking, keep your eyes peeled and be sure to steer clear of any cubs you might happen upon. Momma bear won’t be far behind.

You can test your hiking mettle on the Old Rag Mountain hiking trail, which features some adventurous

scrambling over larger boulders and offers incredible views from the top of the valley and beyond.

But be forewarned, pursuing the summit of Old Rag won’t be easy. Best to do it with some friends to lend a hand when making your final push to the top. And watch your step when it rains — those rocks get slick.

Rock climbers will fall in love with the multitude of vertical faces from which to choose, ranging from easy to expert climbs.

For those looking to do more relaxing in nature, Shenandoah offers plenty of camping options, from rugged to luxurious, as well as other activities such as horseback riding to birdwatching.

There’s also plenty to see and appreciate from the comfort of your car. Skyline Drive is 105 miles of north and south highway along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Driving the length of Skyline through the park will take about three hours at a leisurely pace on a sunny day. However, allow yourself a full day or more to stop and take in the sights. You’ll be glad you did.

RELIVE RALPHIE’S QUEST FOR A RED RYDER BB GUN: THE CHRISTMAS STORY HOUSE CLEVELAND, OHIO

Even diehard fans of this modern classic may not have known Ralphie’s childhood home was located just outside of Cleveland, where much of the beloved tale of childhood Christmas wishes was filmed.

The modest yellow wooden home with the provocative leg lamp (which itself has become an iconic holiday decoration favored by your cool neighbors) is etched into our collective cinematic consciousness.

Not only can you visit the house where Ralphie dreamed of owning his very own Red Ryder BB Gun, but for upwards of $600 a night you can sleep there as well.

Guests sleep in Ralphie and Randy’s room and have access to the entire film-accurate house after tours finish for the day.

Don’t want to shell out that much money, but still want the overnight, “Christmas Story”experience?

Then try staying next door at the Bumpus House, Ralphie’s hillbilly neighbor’s abode, sans the turkey-stealing hounds that are the bane of Ralphie’s dad’s existence.

No smelly hounds come with the Bumpus accommodations — fortunately.

www.achristmasstoryhouse.com

MUSIC CITY IS BACK, BABY!

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

The Music City is back in action this summer. The music, food and honky-tonkin’ good times are aplenty. World-class barbecue, hot chicken, and all the fixings are reason enough to put the Tennessee capital on your mustdo list.

Nashville’s vaunted nightlife and southern culinary treats aren’t the only thing the city’s got going for it. Check out the 12South neighborhood for cool clothes and other boutique shopping.

Burn some calories kayaking on the Cumberland River, winding through town or cycling around town, both offering great views of a New South city with loads else to offer.

While flights remain cheap — same with some hotels — Nashville is less than a day’s drive from almost anywhere in Postindustrial America, making it an ideal road trip destination.

Neon signs on Lower Broadway Area in Nashville, Tenn. // Shutterstock

Podcast presented by POSTINDUSTRIAL MEDIA

A New Pittsburgh Labor Movement

BY MICHAEL MADISON

Klavon’s Ice Cream Parlor, a favorite in Pittsburgh’s iconic Strip District, made national headlines recently when the co-owners responded to difficulty in recruiting scoopers by raising wages to $15 per hour.

As an anecdote about labor markets in a Postindustrial city, the episode offers a colorful and tasty illustration of a larger challenge. Regional unemployment in southwestern Pennsylvania has slowly fallen over the past year, but the labor force as a whole hasn’t grown. In a market capitalist economy, open jobs and fewer people to fill them mean that wages rise, other things being equal. That’s the labor story. What about the management story? Will profits fall? Klavon’s says no; its business is fine.

Beyond the economics of ice cream, the Klavon’s story highlights an even more important theme, one that extends beyond rising or falling numbers of workers and well beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Pittsburgh’s future prosperity depends largely on how the regional workforce is compensated.  In other words, it depends largely on how Pittsburgh’s workers negotiate for their share of the wealth.

Pittsburgh’s labor history is long and often unhappy. In the Battle of Homestead in 1892, the Carnegie Steel Company broke the union — the AA, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, setting the terms of labor relations in both the industry and the region for decades. Adversarialism later turned to harmony. Settlements between US Steel Corp. and its unions traded labor peace for generous wages, benefits, and working conditions. Those gave 20th century stability and prosperity to much of Pittsburgh’s working and middle classes. But as John Hoerr documented in “And the Wolf Finally Came” in 1988, that harmony contributed to the competitive complacency that eventually brought Pittsburgh to its knees.

Pittsburgh’s craft unions are still here, much diminished in size and political and economic influence. But the social and economic questions that they highlighted are very much still with us. What’s the price of prosperity?

The present and future of Pittsburgh, for better or for

worse, isn’t manufacturing and industry. It’s services and technology. At a macro level, the wealth of the region depends largely on the skills and ambitions of the younger professionals who work the levers of robotics and AI startups, local behemoths such as UPMC, Pitt, and CMU, and the Pittsburgh wings of global tech giants such as Facebook and Philips. That’s not news; that’s been the key to Pittsburgh’s post-steel rebound for at least 30 years.

The micro level matters too, and it may matter even more.  A recent book by Gabriel Winant, “The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America,” pointed out that the shared prosperity associated with 20th century manufacturing hasn’t translated into comparable income equality in the 21st century services sector. Modern health care — the centerpiece of Pittsburgh’s “eds and meds” economy — features a band of high-income earners at the top and a large pool of much lower-income earners in the middle and at the bottom. It’s increasingly obvious that the tech sector generally is badly exploiting all but a few of the people who work in it. Check out the recent photo essay, Seeing Silicon Valley, by Stanford professor Fred Turner and photographer Mary Beth Meehan, to see the true present state of the local neighborhoods where Google, Facebook, and Apple thrive as global corporations.

In a phrase, the drivers of Pittsburgh’s economic renaissance risk driving the region over a prosperity cliff.  Despite the overall story of prosperity, Pittsburgh’s steel history also left the region a legacy of economic

inequality that is only now truly coming to light. As a community, not only via leadership, Pittsburgh’s economic development strategies need to remedy that inequality, not double down on it.

The key? Growth. Not growth in the number of people; Pittsburgh as a region is experiencing some helpful population turnover, but the total number of people living here is shrinking, not growing.  The evidence points to that long-term trend continuing. And not growth as in more businesses for Pittsburgh — though that’s not a bad thing in itself.

Growth means income growth — expanding the pie, not just re-dividing the pie. Growth means more money in the hands of Pittsburgh’s non-growing workforce. Does Pittsburgh want the shared, sustainable prosperity and quality of life that it needs? Put money into the neighborhoods. Pay people more.

Where is Pittsburgh’s growth going to come from?  Partly, it may come from the ever-elusive productivity gains that arise from substituting computers for humans. Partly, it may come from us, from our increasing and changing patterns of consumption. Like most of the U.S., Pittsburgh long ago gave up its status as a productionbased economy and became a consumption-based economy. The Klavon’s story shows how this works. The store can pay its employees at least $15 per hour and remain profitable so long as customers are buying enough ice cream to keep the scoopers and owners happy. When you can, buy local.

But not all businesses will respond to local conditions as directly and voluntarily as Klavon’s did. Profits aren’t guaranteed. A services economy is a mobile economy.  Factories and mills can’t go anywhere. Companies can.

A friend of mine, a strategic planning and fundraising consultant, likes to open meetings by telling an apocryphal story about a minister addressing the congregation: “The good news is that we have all the money we need to fix the church! The bad news is that the money is still in your pockets.”

The story is meant to motivate people to give to help out the existing church, but what if the congregation were to stand up, walk out, and move to a nicer, brighter church in another town? That’s part of the difficult balance of growing and sustaining a modern, postindustrial economy. Not only are companies mobile, but they’re mobile in supply chains that link regions in complex ways.  Pittsburgh’s steel industry eventually shut down when it faced an unprofitable market. Modern businesses often have a different option.

Confronted with expectations that they compensate their workers differently, they may refresh investment opportunities and profitability by moving out and moving

on.  Or they can do what Amazon has done. Fresh from turning down Pittsburgh as a base for its “HQ2” and the associated high-income jobs, Amazon is rapidly building fulfillment centers in Pittsburgh, with associated lowincome jobs.

What’s to put an end to this, or what’s to add some much-needed braking? It’s an old lesson that we shouldn’t turn to market capitalism to fix problems that market capitalism created, but this is a problem that politicians can’t fix. Increases in the minimum wage, like them or not, are important and valuable. But they aren’t enough.

The market forces that pushed Klavon’s to raise its wage work in additional ways. Workers are mobile, too, which gives them what economists call bargaining power. A service sector worker in Pittsburgh can move to another region, or can work from home for an employer located almost anywhere. That worker can negotiate for a better deal.

Not everyone has those opportunities or wants them.  More importantly, like the “buy local” motto, the “negotiate for yourself” strategy has massive limits.

If we want to make Pittsburgh better, then collective action by workers themselves is needed.

A modern labor movement might show the way.

In East Liberty, the neighborhood that’s home to Pittsburgh’s Google outpost, several dozen workers plug away on Google projects but are employed by a contractor, HCL America, rather than by Google itself. Using contract workers is mostly contractual sleight-ofhand by Google, and in most respects it’s legal.  Google shields itself from various tax and labor law risks when it doesn’t hire outright employees. But workers are workers, and this group of HCL employees — who do their work for Google — organized themselves under federal labor law last year with the help of the United Steelworkers. As a recognized bargaining unit, they’re entitled to have HCL sit down and negotiate a union contract.

That’s the last thing that HCL wants to do; HCL is simply a wheel-greaser in the global tech ecology.  Which is why the spotlight in this dispute has been shining on Google.

People who work at Google don’t fit the stereotype of craft workers in steel mills who need unions to protect them from overbearing managers and owners. But work is work, and labor is labor, and in the modern market economy, prosperity is rarely given. The claim to prosperity has to be asserted against a profit- and investment-dependent marketplace that doesn’t yield without a struggle.

The workers are waiting.

All of Pittsburgh should be watching.

Let’s run for office!

Local government could use your help

BY KIMBERLY PALMIERO

Will there be a return to the town of Parker?

Parker is a former oil boomtown of 800 people in Armstrong County in western Pennsylvania. Now, it calls itself the smallest city in the U.S. Elections for city council pass without fanfare, and often, without competition.

That’s the story of many communities throughout Postindustrial America, where local elections garner far less interest than national and state races.

Kimberly Palmiero is CEO and editor-in-chief of Postindustrial Media. A small business owner, she held management roles for media outlets for 20 years prior to joining Postindustrial. She is a board member and past president of the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania.

“It’s super important that people run but it’s important before they run they research what the position entails so we don’t have people starting the job and resigning after a year,” said MaryBeth Kuznik, elections director for Armstrong County. “That’s happened.”

Communities in Postindustrial America will receive billions of dollars — nearly $14 billion in Pennsylvania alone — from the federal government following the pandemic-induced economic fallout. Though Parker is an extreme example, in some communities there are not enough people seeking office or volunteering to have a say in how any of that money is spent, or what policies should change to create more opportunities.

We justly turned our attention to the presidential campaign last November. This year, thousands of people will be elected — mostly without fanfare and often, devoid of competition — to run schools, townships, boroughs, and cities.

You might not even know the names of those running your community.

Nationally, there were nearly 39,000 counties, cities, towns, townships, and boroughs in 2017. That doesn’t count things such as authorities, which have the power to tax and often oversee things like the management of water and sewage.

The nonprofit group Run for Something is working to get more young people to run for public office, focusing exclusively on state and local offices.

“We have to fight for every single office, no matter how hard or how small,” said co-founder and Executive Director Amanda Litman, “because the alternative is that either the worst people end up jumping in or no one does, and then critical services get under-provided.”

Among Postindustrial states, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, New York, and Michigan were in the top 10 — Illinois with more than 2,800 government bodies and Pennsylvania, with more than 2,600, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

These elected positions, often unpaid, carry with them the responsibility for developing the character of a community beyond clearing roads of snow or paving them.

They codify such seemingly banal things as the size of signs, the height of fences, and perhaps least sexy of all, managing sewage treatment, and, in some cases, whether there are actual sewer pipes to your house — at all.

They also decide how to spend your taxes. They manage the public schools your child attends. They vote on permits that sometimes make the difference between, say, a solar farm coming to town or not, as in a recent case in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, population, 8,000 (see related story on page 42).

If your town has police, those who run the town are responsible for hiring them. Sometimes, the people who do that have no experience in hiring.

Volunteering in your town’s government or seeking office, to most of us, carries not the feeling of release one might get from pitching a sign skyward and chanting in protest.

The tenor is generally not one of roaring emotions, as a protest might be. Rather, it is the quiet patter of prescribed assembly, often in a town hall, the elected officials seated in a row, one of whom pounds a gavel to call a meeting to order, as per Robert’s Rules of Order, with the sound of someone eating crackers because they’ve not had time for supper.

Residents are, of course, entitled to attend these meetings, ask questions, and speak.

Sometimes meetings are held in a basement, a school gymnasium, a dingy office with bad ventilation — or in a barn (I took notes next to hay bales while working as a reporter in Greenwood Township, Pa.).

Twitteratti they are not, nor is local government easily expressed as Instagram-cool.

Their digital soapbox might be limited to a Facebook page with town announcements.

These groups frequently do not represent the diversity of a community, but rather, those who happen to run for office.

Sometimes, not enough people pay attention or get involved until something goes wrong.

Protest has its place: It is society’s emoticon of rage, frustration, and sadness, an expression of things pent up all unfurled at once. It has helped to start — and push — movements.

Sometimes, it is the lever for systemic change.

But the wheel for that change can also happen in town halls and on school boards, and grow outward. Serving on committees and then running for office allows each one of us to affect policy in our communities.

It is unquestionably less action-packed to stay awake while pondering borough code, or hiring a police officer or wondering how the road will get paved.

But it’s also a place where one person can make a measurable difference.

When local elections take place this fall in many Postindustrial states, we urge you to check out opportunities to serve on boards, commissions, and advisory committees in your community.

If you’re feeling bold, successful write-in campaigns are possible at the local level, with voter turnout so low.

Towns rise and fall as a result of the people running them.

Change is hard. Yet whether we want it or not, change will come.

It becomes harder — and slower — when we watch, rather than participate in it.

People line up completely surrounding the Jackson Township Municipal Building, in three separate lines alphabetically by last name, before the polls open, Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020, Election Day, in Jackson Township, Pa. // AP Photo/Keith Srakocic

Protestors gather to listen to Courtney Wiggins speak at Open Space Park in Traverse City, Mich., during a rally in June 2020 in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. The protest movement over black injustice has also quickly spread deep into predominantly white, small-town America, notably throughout the parts of the country that delivered the presidency for Donald Trump. Protests were plentiful last year, but how many people are volunteering within their community or running for office? // Mike Krebs/Traverse City Record-Eagle via AP

Policing with empathy

Tom Synan Jr. is the chief of the police for the Village of Newtown, in Hamilton County, Ohio. In 2015, he helped form the Hamilton County Heroin Coalition, now the Hamilton County Addiction Response Coalition. In 2017, he testified at a Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee on Investigations hearing on the impact of synthetic opiates have had on the country. His career and work with the opioid epidemic has been recorded and archived in the National Law Enforcement Museum in Washington D.C.

Photograph by Justin Merriman

BY TOM SYNAN

As a boy, I dreamed of being a police officer.

That’s all I wanted to do. I believed that if I became a police officer, I could change the world. To fulfill my life’s purpose, I would have to wear a badge.

Yes, it was a naive, maybe corny idea — but holding onto just a touch of that corniness and naivete has carried me through a 30-year career in law enforcement.

So much has changed, yet so much remains the same since that time. It didn’t seem so difficult in the beginning to understand what law enforcement was. As a kid, I watched reruns of the “Lone Ranger.” I cherished the image of a lone officer riding in to save the day by catching the “bad guy” — not only saving the day but also saving the town from evil. Our hero always came through it seemingly unscathed.

That’s what I believed law enforcement — and a lawman — to be.

I also watched reruns of “The Andy Griffith Show.” In contrast to the Lone Ranger, the sheriff of the small town of Mayberry did less “catching the bad guy” and more “solving the everyday problems” of those in his community. In every episode, Andy also was able to save the day.

In my three decades as an officer, much like those who served 30 years before me and those who will come 30 years after me, I have lived through wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, sieges in Waco and Oklahoma City, the traumas of 9/11 and COVID-19, the beating of Rodney King and the killing of George Floyd.

In my small community, I have accompanied the people I serve during births, weddings, and birthdays. I have cried with them through their divorces, the deaths of friends and family members, and incidents of despair.

In 2014, I witnessed an entire family, an entire generation, lost to addiction. A mother and all three of her sons are gone — shattering some of my naivete that I could save the world. After that, I met with others in the community and helped form the Hamilton County Heroin Coalition, which helps connect people to services that can help them with life’s traumas, and addiction.

I’ve had the lines of the “bad guy” blurred. Not all drug dealers stand on a street corner wear suits. Although the drug dealers do it for the same reasons — money — both types are not treated equally in the justice system.

I have watched how we as a society look to sports stadiums and tax breaks for companies to build or expand as investments to help the greater good.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m cool with capitalism. Without it, I wouldn’t be riding a Harley or driving the Dodge brothers’ crazy idea of a muscle car. But why do we not apply the same theory to investing in helping those with addiction, homelessness, and poverty?

Would it not benefit them and our communities if we chose not to punish the afflicted and instead work to heal them so that they could work, find stable housing, and transportation?

Would we not reap the same investment benefit

of more people working and paying taxes, spending money at local businesses, and ensuring that the next generation would not have to pay so much on the front end for these chronic, social issues that are not, in themselves crimes?

Looking back, my image of policing has not changed as much as my understanding of what it is. It took decades to realize that both the Lone Ranger and Andy Griffith were right.

The most successful, gratifying law enforcement careers are the ones that come with the scars of being the officers who had to walk the fine line of knowing when to be the Lone Ranger and when to be Andy Griffith. The best officers understand that the foundational principle of policing must be rooted in compassion and humility, but that they must keep in reserve the tactical skills needed to risk oneself to save another.

One also must possess an abundance of resilience to understand that policing — much like society — has blurred lines.

In policing, politics, ideologies, and society, life is not as clear as we wish it to be or portray it to be. It is not simply “good guy” vs. “bad guy,” because those can be interchangeable, depending on your job, what you wear or where you live. It’s not as simple as black and white, because, in life, it is mostly gray. It is not always a crime or leniency, because what may be law may not always be right, and what is illegal may not always be wrong.

Oh, how I wish for the simpler times of watching old TV shows. As a kid, it was easier for me to maneuver through the images of policing, life, and being a human being.

Maybe I’m fortunate that I have held onto a little bit of that simplicity and still ride the waves of life with the understanding that, to succeed, we all must begin by looking at each person with compassion and humanity. Despite our differences, we are still very much the same.

After all, that is how the Lone Ranger and Andy Griffith were able to save the day — by being human beings first.

What is the North Star for Pittsburgh? It’s new era of opportunity

BY FRED BROWN

As a result of COVID-19, many issues that some of us knew existed have been exacerbated.

Pittsburgh is at the precipice of being a global leader in technology. This development supports a three-legged stool for the region, encompassing technology, education, and the health care sector.

Today, we have an opportunity to lift all the individuals in our state and southwestern Pennsylvania toward this trajectory as a possible “North Star” for the region.

Optimizing the ability to learn 21st century transferable career skills should be a shared objective for every citizen.

If we continue to outsource talent when we miss aligning our natural resources, we will never fulfill our dominance as a region because some of our best and brightest move away each year. Our region’s young talent targets places like Chicago, Philadelphia, DC, New York, Los Angeles, or Boston — places that are richer in diversity and inclusion.

We are emerging from the worst of the pandemic. In some ways the atmosphere feels post-Prohibition: We’re experiencing a feeling of permissiveness we have not had in more than a year. But the systemic problems we have remain.

Postindustrial cities — many that boomed a century ago — continue to struggle to find a path forward, with infrastructure built for another time and inherited systems that inherently favor certain groups over others. Now is the time to explore this work together.

The post-Prohibition era was an opportunity for America to reimagine itself and to tap into the possibilities of what it can become. It spurred business and opportunities for development and expansion. Expanding upon the traditional aspects of the economy leads to creating economies of scale that change communities.

Cities that are closer to New York and New Jersey, run different industries and benefit from diversity in their inception. Pittsburgh, being on the other side of the state, did not have that across race, ethnicity, and economic strata. The diversity in Philadelphia allows for imagination across social-economic strata and crosscollaboration evident in the most innovative places on earth with global and local corporations.

Unfortunately, Pittsburgh still is lagging as it deals with its conceptual commitment to racial equity versus its operational commitment to systemic change.

Our region’s inability to capitalize on the depth of talent continues to result in less diverse communities. Eventually, this leads to a disconnect of people from all different industries across the region.

Creating momentum around the North Star will be critical in ensuring that all boats rise with the emerging tide.

We are building on opportunities to create a path forward to nurture the region’s growth. A North Star allows us to guide the region’s capacity or how we can better align the best skills and talents with the opportunities.

Southwestern Pennsylvania suffers from paradigm paralysis.

The guidance of a North Star can realign our nonprofits, schools, and businesses in a way that ensures that we meet the sector’s needs through collaboration. This way, we can transform people’s lives by supporting them to have sustainable livable wage jobs, health, and safe communities, less toxic environments, and good education for their children. There is a need to raise our

voice for a shared North Star based on inclusion and diversity that is catalytic.

We have done studies and reports. Our communities are rich in philanthropy and good intentions. But how do you apply those resources to create long-term solutions? And solutions that last long after a specific pilot program has ended? How do you bring people to a new kind of table to create change that sustains itself — and creates more significant opportunities for all?

The call to action is to govern the sector around a North Star that uses the social determinants of health to create a continuum of care for all residents. Using that platform allows us to extrapolate our regional assets to create a continuum from pre-kindergarten to career.

If we create that continuum within the social determinants of health within the North Star, it will improve the ability to retain talent, create succession plans across professional domains and will give people a desire to stay because they will see a viable pathway forward towards real, systemic change.

Lack of a shared vision for the region creates doubt and tells people they do not know if they want to stay in Pittsburgh.

We have an unstated North Star in Allegheny County, where there are young talent recruitment efforts, but not enough people settle in the region longer-term. We do not build continuity. The environment is not culturally receptive; having a diverse and inclusive workforce mirrors the world.

Pittsburgh is missing an opportunity to build that continuum if it were so. Is this the place that we want to put energy? If it is, what can we do to create energy in how we want to move forward?

The call to action is to develop resources that can preserve the integrity of our region’s activities. The North Star helps to personify, grow, and groom professionals.

Fred Brown is president and CEO of The Forbes Funds, a nonprofit based in Pittsburgh that helps human service and community-based nonprofits build capacity. He specializes in capacity-building, and sustainable social development. Brown was previously president and CEO of the Homewood Children’s Village. He is a frequent public speaker and also has taught courses and delivered presentations at local and statewide conferences and workshops.

SUMMER READING

#pghreadsfive

Did you know that reading just five books over summer vacation helps students return to school ready to learn? Reading and keeping kids and teens engaged has never been more important. This summer, we’re asking the community to band together to ensure that all Pittsburgh youth read five.

This summer, help Pittsburgh kids and teens read five! Summer Reading runs through August 31, 2021!

All Locations are Open - Check carnegielibrary.org for days and times Sign up today at carnegielibrary.org/summer or scan below