Labor Day Lesson : Horse Dies in One-Horse Steel Town

Milton Ebbert watched sadly as the 41 men and women picked up donated bags of day-old bread and doughnuts, soap and tomato sauce, corn and apples at the Episcopal Church here one recent morning.

Like Ebbert, most once worked at the giant LTV Steel Co. complex that sits rusting and lifeless down the street.

“I drive up one side of that mill and I’m brokenhearted,” said Ebbert, 64, who retired after 45 years in the mill. “Seven miles long, and weeds growing everywhere. Then I come back the other side and I’m in tears.

Way of Life Is Gone

“The smells, the smoke, the dirt, the heat,” Ebbert added, his gruff voice cracking. “It was a way of life. Now it’s gone.”

Much is gone from Aliquippa today. This was a town that steel built, a proud national symbol of a mighty industry, a hard-working mill town that pumped out fat paychecks as steadily as black smoke for 75 years.

Now Aliquippa is a boom town gone bust. With more than 20,000 workers laid off from the mill and other area industries since 1981, many families are fighting hunger and hardship for the first time. Nearly one-third the town’s population has fled. At least half those who remain are unemployed or underemployed.

Aliquippa is trying to fight back. Four job-training centers have opened. Church and community groups provide food, clothing and medical care. Homes have been saved from sheriff’s tax sales. Ground has been broken for a new industrial park, although no tenants have been found. It may be a losing battle, but there is hope and resilience here.

How Aliquippa is coping, how its 15,000 residents are surviving, is a painful Labor Day lesson for oil towns in Oklahoma, copper towns in Utah, iron towns in Minnesota, timber towns in Washington, textile towns in South Carolina and hundreds of other one-industry towns fast becoming no-industry towns.

“There’s help available,” said James Cunningham, a University of Pittsburgh social scientist who has conducted two studies of Aliquippa’s economic and social collapse. “But they only get it if they organize themselves and demand it.”

For Aliquippa, the fall from grace was sudden and sharp. This was the quintessential company town. Beginning in 1905, the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. built homes, hospitals, libraries, schools and parks on the steep wooded hills above the Ohio River 28 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. Blacks lived on one hill, whites on another, Irish here, Polish there.

The company was “the father image here,” said Earl Cunningham, 61, who worked 40 years in the mill. “You worked in the mill like your father did, like your granddad did. You worked there for life. They took care of everything.”

$30,000 a Year

In 1979, the last good year, J&L;’s huge blast furnaces and coke ovens produced more than 3 million tons of raw steel and employed 10,000 people. Uneducated millworkers, covered with soot and grime, earned $30,000 a year.

“This town really hopped, it jumped,” recalled ex-steelworker David D. Wilson. “Tuesdays were payday. It used to take you an hour to go three or four blocks near the plant.”

The streets are shabby and deserted today. Hit by the recession, cheaper imports and other problems, waves of layoffs grew to a flood. Only 700 work at the mill now. Most of the huge complex, bought by LTV in 1984, is abandoned, a silent sprawl of cold smokestacks, empty buildings and overgrown tracks.

“Basically, this was a one-horse town and the horse died,” said Steve Farmerie, 34, who was laid off last year after 10 years in the mill.

In Bankruptcy Court

The future looks no better. LTV Corp., parent company of the nation’s second-largest steelmaker, filed for protection from creditors in federal bankruptcy court in New York last July 17 in the largest such filing in U.S. history. The company said it would stop paying health and life insurance for retirees as well. It later agreed to a six-month extension.

If the court allows LTV to go ahead with its plans, 12,000 retirees and their families would lose benefits here, said George Columb, 62, who retired after working 40 years at the mill. “If they get away with it, we’re sunk,” he said.

Much of the town already is. Earned income fell by half between 1981 and 1984, according to the University of Pittsburgh studies. Property values plummeted, and nearly one-third of the homes for sale had been repossessed. Shoplifting, armed robbery and drug trafficking shot up. With a lower tax base, more than half the police were fired. Schools closed.

“We’re plagued with social problems,” said the Rev. Bill Farra, head of the Community of Celebration, an Anglican-based religious group of 26 that moved here from Scotland last year to work in the community. “My daughter’s in second grade. Last year, she was the only one in her class with two parents.”

No More Company Store

Race relations, always tense, worsened. The huge company store downtown closed. So did half the shops on blighted Franklin Avenue, once the bustling main street. Social workers reported increases in spouse and child abuse, alcohol and drug abuse, emotional stress and suicides.

“The depression and sense of loss has been so tremendous,” said Beverly Sullivan, head of human resources at the Community Mental Health Center of Beaver County, a private nonprofit psychiatric hospital. “Culturally, these men identified as steelworkers and breadwinners. Now many men feel they are no longer adequate husbands. They’ve lost their homes, their cars, in some cases, their wives and children. It’s devastating. Some of these men have lost their whole lives.”

Housing Projects Hit Hardest

Despite the increased demand, the hospital laid off 28 employees last June because of its own financial problems. “At one point, we had an eight-week waiting list for children with psychiatric problems,” Sullivan said. “No child with psychiatric problems should have to wait eight weeks.”

The town’s seven subsidized housing projects have been hit hardest. A recent study of 301 families by Sidney Elkin, a social scientist at the Beaver Campus of Pennsylvania State University, reported 61% could not afford to go to doctors, 59% unable to purchase enough food, 49% behind in utility bills. “Deepening misery and suffering are obvious,” the report concluded.

Groups Link Arms

But there is progress too. Most important, community groups have linked arms and aims to fight together. Chief among them is the Aliquippa Alliance for Unity and Development, a nonprofit community umbrella group.

Based in a Franklin Avenue office rebuilt this summer by 60 unemployed steelworkers, the alliance is trying to obtain low interest loans or grants from the county and state to develop jobs and help homeowners and businessmen get back on their feet.

Fight for Town

“Aliquippa people are street fighters,” said Cathy Cairns, chairman of the alliance. “They’re not going to let the town down without a fight.”

Another group, the Beaver County Unemployed Committee, helps its $1-a-year members obtain public welfare, utility aid, unemployment benefits, schooling and job retraining. The group successfully lobbied state legislators last year to suspend property taxes of unemployed homeowners for one year to protect their homes from sheriff’s sale for nonpayment of taxes.

Saved 80 Homes

Committee coordinator Lee Katroppa said the action helped save 80 Aliquippa homes last year. This year may be tougher. More than 1,500 area homes, businesses and properties were listed as tax-delinquent last month and are scheduled for sheriff’s sale on Sept. 8.

Other groups have begun to help those who lost health insurance. Working with the United Way and other community groups, Blue Cross-Blue Shield now provides reduced-rate health insurance for children of unemployed families that have no other source of health care. The $156 annual fees per child are paid by private and group donations.

Similarly, the Salvation Army and other groups are working with the Aliquippa Hospital to provide limited free health care to unemployed families not yet eligible for Medicaid. Still others see different priorities.

“Unless you strengthen the police and improve the schools, Aliquippa will die,” said Sylvester Greco, a dapper 68-year-old dress store owner and member of the borough’s economic development and revitalization boards.

160 Find New Jobs

Many here have given up on ever returning to work. But an increasing number are using the four job training and placement programs that have opened since 1984. The Aliquippa Center for Career Development, for example, based in the once-elegant United Steelworkers Local 1211 union hall downtown and funded by the state, the union and LTV, has trained 485 ex-steelworkers and helped 160 find new jobs.

New Uses for Hall

Half of the hall’s main floor is now used for high school diploma equivalency classes. An audio-visual lab helps improve reading and math. Upstairs, a dozen out-of-town newspapers fat with want ads are stacked next to toll-free phones. A bulletin board is posted with addresses that are signs of the times here.

Former steelworker Ronald Reitz has gone to Atlanta. Co-worker Anthony McCline is a laborer in Chicago. Richard Use took his welding skills to West Palm Beach. Harry Dowling got a construction job in Charlotte.

“It’s sad, but if you can leave here, you can find work,” said Stuart List, a job developer. Most who find jobs locally take at least a 50% pay cut; many earn only minimum wage, part time, with no benefits.

Mock Job Interviews

The career center offers free weeklong classes in landing a job. In one class, job trainer Nick Fetkovich told 10 ex-steelworkers to shed their faded jeans and caps for dressy jackets and ties when he videotapes mock job interviews later in the week.

“It’s a different world today,” Fetkovich tells a visitor of his dress-for-success tactics. “You’re talking resumes, cover letters and thank-you notes, things the blue-collar worker never had to deal with before.”

A poster on the wall puts it another way: “It is not the most qualified individual who gets the job, but the person most skilled in finding a job.”

Four of the 10 students raised their hands when asked if they are willing to move.

“I made $12 an hour in the mill,” said James English, 60, trained as an electrical worker. “I’ll be lucky if I make $6 if I leave. But there’s no $6 jobs here. If there was, you’d have hundreds of guys jumping on it.”

Will Join Army

Mark George, 29, will join the Army if he can’t find work. “If you’re going to get a job on minimum wage, you might as well go on welfare,” he said.

Frank Cindrich, 50, will stay even though his son, Frank Jr., pulled out for a finance company job in Virginia. “What do you do when your boy says, ‘Dad, I’m leaving,’ ” he asked. “You can’t tell him to stay. There’s no jobs here.”

That night, on the porch of the comfortable two-story home he built on a ridge overlooking Aliquippa, Cindrich talked about his 31 years as a sheet metal worker. He is proud of the ventilators he built on the mill roof. He laughs recalling how he fell through the roof and saved himself from a vat of deadly acid by grabbing a railing on the way down.

“I want to work again,” he said.

So does Jim Burns. Burns, a burly 50-year-old man laid off in July, 1985, after 25 years as a $35,000-a-year millwright and welder, was bitter as he drove a visitor on a tour of the town.

Three Generations in Mill

“My dad, granddad, cousins, brothers, add it up, I got 25 relatives who worked in that mill,” Burns said, driving by a boarded-up McDonald Elementary School with broken windows. “I earned my money. I bought stock. I believed in this company.”

“Now I don’t know what the hell to do,” he said. “I went up to the airport to try to get a job unloading suitcases. Minimum wage. When I tell them I’m 50 years old, they take the application and say thank you. I know what that means: No thank you.”

Still, there are hopeful signs. County officials broke ground last month for what they say will be a 97-acre industrial park with 500 jobs next to Aliquippa. “County recovery taking shape,” ran the banner headline in the Beaver County Times.

The borough has applied to the state for status as an enterprise zone. That would provide tax credits for construction, low-cost loans and grants for jobs development, and tax incentives for business. Additional hopes are pinned on a planned expansion of the nearby Greater Pittsburgh International Airport.

“There’s really no choice,” said Cairns. “Either we get a significant increase in employment. Or it goes on. And on. And on.”