Historically it’s been written several times and said in different ways: “Lorain, Ohio and good hard work were made for each other.”
When I was born in that blue-collar town on Nov. 2, 1979, at the (now closed and vacant) St. Joseph Hospital on Broadway Avenue, phrases such as postindustrial and Rust Belt hadn’t yet entered the lexicon. Back then, Lorain still belonged to the Steel Belt—and the Steel Belt still existed. It hadn’t yet devolved into a landscape of forgotten cities, with one crummy town after another, each one now considered no different than the rest.
I wonder if the transformation was subtle. It happened during my lifetime, but I grew up in the Rust Belt with child’s eyes. On the day of my birth the local newspaper The Morning Journal carried an ominous front-page story: JOBLESS RATE RISES, EXPERTS UNSURE WHY. Now I try to imagine the reactions in the shop floors, the church halls and the shot-and-a-beer taverns frequented by men from the steel mill, the Ford plant, or the American Shipbuilding yards: “So what, we’re Lorain, we’ve been through tough times before!” “America will never abandon its car and steel businesses!” “Who can trust the Journal? That paper should be called The Urinal!” “It looks like the writing is on the wall…” “We’re fucked!” In my boxes of research, this clipped headline now rests against another, which appeared in the same newspaper, approximately twenty-three years later, on Christmas Day, 2003: ‘THERE IS NO JOY IN PEOPLE’S HEARTS.’
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I had a childhood marred by bullying, but I gained confidence when I became a journalist because it made me feel like an advocate for truth, justice, and good government. In college it’s all I thought about, and I worked hard enough to be named one of the top ten journalism students in the country, by the Scripps Howard Foundation, in 2001. And my career began in Lorain.
Hired by The Morning Journal’s competitor, The (Elyria, Ohio) Chronicle-Telegram, I received, as a lowly summer intern, the Lorain city beat. I covered the city council, read the daily police blotters, watched the municipal court hearings for DUIs and prostitution and domestic violence arrests, and regularly talked with the mayor. It was a depressing, disillusioning job for a hometown kid. Every day I discovered a new reason to move away. Every day it seemed evident that Lorain would fall apart. Sometimes as I drove back to the newsroom I even imagined the earth opening and Lorain falling into the crack, absorbed by flames and hell. (Melodramatic, I know…). But even more melodramatic—and self-fulfilling—was my fear that somehow Lorain, like a vortex, would absorb me back.
As my twenties ticked onward, with every life improvement—a better internship, a new job, a new city, even graduate school—I began feeling almost blessed by the failure and decay of the place I came from. As if the major accomplishment of my life was getting out just in time, like a scene in an action movie when the hero slides under a closing door, escaping a terrible fate, but leaving things unsettled behind.
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From The Los Angeles Times, April 30, 2007: “More than two decades after hard times hit American manufacturing, this city of nearly 68,000 is developing into more than a simple economic cautionary tale. Lorain—located about 30 miles west of Cleveland—has become an example of how life perseveres in a dying town.”
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From a police report: Officer Hodzic was dispatched to the 3900 block of West Erie Avenue in response to a menacing complaint and upon arrival met with the victim, George Kaduk, and learned the following: Mr. Kaduk received a phone call from a previous girlfriend, Cici Zakowski, around 19:00 hours requesting that he come to her residence to talk with her teenage daughter, who has been in trouble as of late. He agreed to assist his ex-girlfriend but when he arrived at her home an argument eventually ensued and he was asked to leave. Shortly after he arrived back home, around 01:00 hours, Mr. Kaduk received a call from his ex-girlfriend’s son, who was intoxicated and shouting, “I’m coming to Lorain to fuck you up nigger and shoot you!” Mr. Kaduk also related that during this same phone call his ex-girlfriend spoke on the telephone and added, “That’s right, we’re coming to fuck you up!”
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On Christmas Day Officer Jagielski was dispatched to the Dairy Mart on Broadway Avenue in regards to an unwanted male panhandling by repeatedly asking customers for money and trying to get them to purchase compact discs that he tried to sell even after his offers were refused. In an effort to placate the man the store clerk had given him five dollars for the compact discs, which the man, instead of leaving, tried to use to purchase beer. It should be noted that when Officer Jagielski arrived on scene the man in question smelled strongly of alcohol and spoke in a slurred manner. Upon arrival the officer also observed a large steaming puddle in the northeast corner of the parking lot where the store clerk indicated the man had urinated.
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Dec. 18, 2005: AS ERA ENDS IN LORAIN, EMBRACE THE FUTURE
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Jan. 1, 2003: END OF AN ERA
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Dec. 1, 1983: AN ERA ENDS, AMERICAN SHIPBUILDING CLOSES LORAIN SHIPYARDS
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From the PBS Newshour, aired May 26, 2009:
BETTY ANN BOWSER: The health center operates two locations in the heart of Lorain, a battered Rust Belt city about 30 miles west of Cleveland. The center has a staff of 44 that serves about 13,000 people, providing primary care to children and adults, prenatal care, and general dentistry…Lorain’s patient population mirrors the national picture for community health centers: 63 percent live below the federal poverty line. And these days, more and more of them are jobless. Lorain has one of the state’s highest unemployment rates, nearly 12 percent. That’s higher than the national average, and if you’re in downtown at rush hour, it’s not too hard to figure out why. Main Street looks like a ghost town. Boarded-up businesses, bars, and abandoned storefronts are everywhere. This used to be a bustling manufacturing hub, the economy driven for decades by steel and cars, but the Ford plant was shuttered in 2005 and now is for rent. The sprawling steel mill here is practically on life support after waves of layoffs. Then came the economic meltdown. It dealt the crowning blow.
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What is a homecoming if not an opportunity to reenact the past? I can’t remember the dates exactly, but a few years after I moved away I came home and realized most of my family’s old haunts no longer existed. These places included my high school, my old grade school, my parents’ grade school, the YMCA, our favorite downtown donut shop, the restaurant where we ate breakfast every Sunday, my father’s favorite hardware store, the hospital where my mother worked, and the church where my grandparents and parents were married. To look at these places now brings an echoing feeling of emptiness in my chest, along with sentimental indignance. Coming back to Lorain is like wandering around a forest of dead trees in winter.
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Upon arrival at a residence on the 3000 block of Cromwell Drive, Officer Barron spoke with a young man named Kyle who said the father of his aunt’s baby assaulted him on the front lawn of the residence. As proof, Kyle showed the officer his upper lip, which was split on the right side and had been bleeding. The officer also spoke with Kyle’s aunt, who stated that the incident had been brewing for days and actually started with Kyle slapping her baby on the head. Once the baby’s father learned of the slapping, he confronted Kyle over the telephone, at which time Kyle suggested settling the matter the next time the child’s father came around. When the father arrived at the house today to pick up his son, he again confronted Kyle and Kyle suggested that they ‘step outside.’ Outside, the two men engaged in a mutual shoving match and then a fistfight, which Kyle lost when his lip was split open. Roger then contacted police. It should be noted that the baby Kyle slapped had drainage tubes in both of his ears from a recent medical procedure.
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The wisest thing I’ve ever heard about being a native son of Lorain came from my father’s brother, my Uncle Mike. In the 1970s he left the city for Nebraska and now seldom returns, but he still reads The Morning Journal online, almost every day. “The things that I read in the newspaper take me back to Lorain and all of the bad things that have happened to a once great city. You can leave Lorain, but you can’t escape it,” his email said.
My uncle, who’s older than my father but healthier and happier, has obligations back there that include my father and their sister, who, somewhat like my father, is afflicted with a variety of auto-immune, nervous system, and muscle fatigue disorders. An all-around good guy, I’ve often wondered if my uncle feels a nagging guilt similar to mine—a feeling he was selfish to look out for himself and seek happiness elsewhere. Because in a blue-collar union town, everyone grows up with a sense that even if times are shitty, everybody’s supposed to be in it together.
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I can trace my own awareness of privilege to an early moment in my career. It was an idle afternoon while I was writing for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, when a business editor asked me to write up a quarterly earnings report about my father’s former employer. “In the second quarter of 2001, the company implemented an employment cost reduction program as an element of an overall cost reduction program,” the press release said. The paper shook in my hands.
“I’m not going to write this,” I told the editor, my voice low and sad. “My father was one of the men this company just ‘reduced.’”
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Dec. 29, 2004: MAN WHO KILLED WIFE OUTSIDE LORAIN LIBRARY SENTENCED TO PRISON
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As soon as Officer Boehnlein entered the residence the complainants, two adult sisters, requested that he not inform their father, Mr. Stanko, that they were the ones who called the police because they were afraid Mr. Stanko would harm them. One daughter explained that Mr. Stanko had been drinking all night and returned home yelling at them, and they just wanted him to stay quiet and sleep. Neither of the daughters could stop Mr. Stanko’s aggressive yelling and arguing, so they phoned police.
They guided the officer to the back bedroom where Mr. Stanko was lying in bed watching television. The officer informed him that he was there because the neighbors had called police to complain that a male in apartment B9 was being very loud. Mr. Stanko began arguing that he had been quiet, and demanded to know who had called police. Officer Boehnlein suggested that if Mr. Stanko could not keep quiet, it would be best for him to go to sleep. But Mr. Stanko continued to argue, telling the officer that he needed to investigate and prove whether Mr. Stanko actually had been being loud.
Informing him that if police needed to return he would be arrested for disturbing the peace, Mr. Stanko, upon the door closing, began screaming at his daughters loudly enough to disturb his neighbors. Due to the daughters’ fears and the officer’s own fear that if he left the apartment the situation would escalate, Mr. Stanko was arrested for domestic violence. But his daughters did not want to sign the affidavits against him because they feared his physical retribution. So the officer signed the charges on their behalf.
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May 1983: ‘DEAR GOD, I JUST CAN’T TAKE THIS ANYMORE’
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On Dec. 20, Officer Perry was behind the old Lorain Catholic High School giving his K-9 partner a break when Officer Perry observed a white work van pull into the lot. The officer was way in the back near the old concession stand, and he didn’t believe that the driver of the van had observed him. The driver turned off his lights and parked the van facing the gate entrance. The officer waited a couple of minutes and approached the vehicle, which belonged to The Morning Journal and had the newspaper’s name on the side panel. When the officer got to the side of the van he observed a male in his middle thirties lighting a pipe commonly used for smoking marijuana. As the driver inhaled from the pipe Officer Perry opened the door and said, “Hi, police.”
The man choked on the smoke and placed the pipe in his lap. The officer asked him to step out of the van. He was patted down and he advised Officer Perry that he had more marijuana in his left pants pocket. After the man was taken to jail The Morning Journal was contacted in reference to the van and a representative was sent to pick it up.
It should be noted that the driver of the van had a known Lorain prostitute named Bootsy with him, but Bootsy was not observed doing anything illegal.
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While Officer Licari was en route to a residence in the 900 block of Highland Park Boulevard, a man called the 911 dispatchers to advise that, “The woman in the Santa Claus hat has a gun.”
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On the telephone my father has told me many times, “It’s the goddamn politicians ruining this place.” And then he adds, less out of seriousness than a desperate need to feel in control, “You just watch, one day you’re gonna see me on the news having given them all what they deserved.”
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The Plain Dealer reported in 2006 that, “At least 13 school and city officials in Lorain have been convicted of crimes since 1990: Herman Noland, former principal, theft in office, forgery, 1990; Ronald Pecora, councilman, felonious assault, 1992; Joseph Pribanic, fire chief, theft in office, bribery, tampering with evidence, 1992; Sanford Prudoff, community development director, misdemeanor assault, 1993; Kenneth Koscho, auditor, theft in office, forgery, tampering with evidence, 1993; Joan Brumback, school treasurer, theft, evidence-tampering, 1994; John Ralph, school coach, unlawful interest in a public contract, 1994; Arnaldo Berrios, detective, theft in office, tampering with evidence, 1997; Angel Lozano Jr., utility worker, theft in office, 1998; Thomas Harris, utility worker, complicity to theft in office, 1998; Vinson Shipley, teacher and former councilman, sexual battery, corrupting another with drugs, 2003; Doug Johnson, sewer superintendent, theft in office, unlawful interest in a public contract, 2006; Edwin Heyduk Jr., building inspector, drug trafficking, 2006.”
The article didn’t offer explanations for this oddity; the facts were meant to speak for themselves, implying that small-town Lorain wouldn’t be revived anytime soon.
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Dec. 7. 2007: HUNGER IN LORAIN REACHES ALL-TIME HIGH, PLEASE HELP TO FEED THE NEEDY
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In the same conversations with my father about the politicians: “What the hell can people do when there isn’t anybody or anything to help them?”
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Feb. 10, 2006: LORAIN YMCA CLOSES
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May 31, 2007: LORAIN TO LOSE SIX CHURCHES, DIOCESE TO CLOSE SEVERAL PARISHES
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July 20, 2007: LORAIN SCHOOL BOARD CONFIRMS MORE THAN 200 TEACHER LAYOFFS
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Nov. 4, 2008: DWINDLING FUNDS, HIGH DEMAND FORCE LOCAL FOOD PANTRY TO CLOSE
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From The Los Angeles Times, April 30, 2007: “What’s happening in Lorain, economists and regional lawmakers say, could offer a glimpse into what similar communities across the country can expect in the years to come.”
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At times I’ve wondered if the universe, God, or fate was beckoning my attention home. My father, out of work, in chronic pain. Old acquaintances in trouble with drugs or police. The eyes of the national media occassionally fixated on Lorain as a benchmark of postindustrial suffering. As a writer and native son, someone who benefitted from this community’s schools and organizations, its churches and its blue-collar values of hard work and allegiance to those you love — how could I have stayed away?
Or did I fall victim to the Superman complex embedded in me as a young reporter? I had visions of writing a heart-wrenching, intimate book that captured what was happening in the Rust Belt. A book that depicted Lorain and asked, implicitly, Why??? These magnanimous visions now strike me as foolish. Much like the character Barton Fink in the Coen brothers’ movie of the same name, I was really just a tourist in a landscape of numbness, inertia, and pain—including, eventually, my own. That’s the only way I can process the years of my Lorain research and remembering. A paradox. I was trying to recreate the city and free myself from it at the same time.
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The Morning Journal reports, “Jesus Sanchez, who was convicted of stalking, has resigned as a Lorain police officer while awaiting sentencing for that felony…Sanchez was found guilty of menacing by stalking for harassing a Lorain woman during a 19-month period between 2001 and 2002.”
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The Morning Journal reports, “[The year 2008] has been a tumultuous year for the Lorain Police Department, filled with headlines about fired and suspended officers, federal investigations and officers on trial.
“Since the beginning of the year, officers have been suspended for actions ranging from attendance problems to dumping guns down a city sewer. Two officers have been fired.”
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Officer McNutt was dispatched to the 1700 block of E. 33rd Street in reference to an open window at a vacant residence and after clearing the residence to make sure no one was inside Officer McNutt contacted the last known resident of this vacant home, a Mr. Pfrehm, who relayed that his family had lived at this residence for many years until the recent passing of his mother. At present the family is moving their remaining property from the residence, but Mr. Pfrehm has reported several previous burglaries here. Most of the house’s copper pipes and ductwork are gone.
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Dec. 4, 2008: REPUBLIC ENGINEERED PRODUCTS TO LAY OFF HUNDREDS OF STEEL WORKERS BEFORE HOLIDAY
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A daily police blotter recounts the events of a single day, and from this report of a single day, reporters decide what’s necessary for their readers to know about their community, their home. So this means that day in, day out, all year, across time, the daily newspapers and daily police blotters catalog information that may seem disparate and fragmentary when taken out of context, but maybe, in actuality, these fragments are the best snapshots we have of places forgotten.
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Speaking of which: In the years I kept going back, an enormous white banner used to hang from the overhead railroad tracks near the city’s enormous and unused Ford plant, full of potential but desolate. The banner said, “WELCOME TO LORAIN.”
Author’s Note: This essay is an excerpt from a longer personal and journalistic work about the narrator’s relationship to the place where he grew up.