Letter from Youngstown

We’re back in Youngstown and asked Jordyn Grzelewski to update us on the stories she and her colleagues at the Vindicator have been covering. We wanted to know more from Dave Skolnick about Connie Spagnola — who loves Donald Trump — and what it was like to grow up in Youngstown in the good times. And we wanted Graig Graziosi to tell us more about his coming of age in Youngstown, a generation later, and how different it was when union leader Carlton Ingram was a young man.

Jordyn: The past month has been a busy time for the Vindicator, but that’s usually the case with Youngstown.

On the morning of April 10 we had one of the biggest news stories in my three years at the paper: the suicide of Robert Seman, who was on trial for a triple homicide. The killings had shaken this community.

Seman was set to go on trial for the arson deaths of 10-year-old Corinne Gump and her grandparents, William and Judith Schmidt. The family died March 31, 2015 in a house fire — hours before Seman was to go on trial for raping Corinne.

The case came to a sudden and violent end when Seman, in court for a final status hearing before his trial in Portage County, jumped to his death from the fourth floor of the Mahoning County Courthouse. My colleague, Joe Gorman, was in the courthouse and saw it happen. The suicide set off a furor in town. Many cheered his death; others felt the victims’ family had lost its chance at justice.

My role in the story came several days later, when I was assigned to hang out outside of his calling hours, which took place on Good Friday at a funeral home a few blocks from where I live. I was forbidden to set foot on the property, and so I sat in my car for an hour and looked for signs of protest that never materialized.

Youngstown, like so many other cities, is suffering from an opioid epidemic. Both of the counties that we cover, Mahoning and Trumbull, rank among the hardest hit counties in Ohio, and Ohio is perhaps the hardest hit state in the nation. Trumbull County, north of Youngstown, recorded a staggering 189 drug overdoses — in March alone.

I’ve written a lot about addiction over the last few years, but some of the things I’ve been learning have been eye-opening. Take this number: in 2015, eight Ohioans died from overdoses each day. If 2017 stays on pace, that rate will leap to 14 people a day. Many of those people will be from Youngstown, and we are always trying to find ways to tell this story. It can be frustrating to keep writing about this when people are just tired of hearing about it.

But last Sunday, we ran a front-page photo of a young mother smiling wide, forehead-to-forehead with her toddler son. That mother died in February of a heroin overdose. Her family — her parents and three sisters — had known for only six days that she even had a drug problem.

Still, the story that’s been consuming the newsroom for the last couple days is the murder of an 84-year-old woman in Liberty, a suburb on the North Side of Youngstown. Within hours, police had arrested the woman’s neighbor. The woman — who had lived in her home for over 50 years and was beloved by her neighbors — had been bludgeoned with a hand shovel from her garden and cut with a knife while she was in bed. The motives of the suspect, Sean Clemens, remain a mystery.

Graig: When I was a child I spent my weekends at my father’s family house on the South Side of Youngstown. The three-bedroom house is on a hill just above Interstate 680 overlooking the Mahoning River and downtown Youngstown.

There is a large tree on the devil’s strip in front of the house that formerly had a robust network of branches and leaves that stretched higher than our roof. During the fall, I liked to go into the attic — it wasn’t a finished space and had absolutely no airflow, ensuring it was always balmy and the air always stagnant — and stare out the single window facing the valley.

From that window, when the leaves had all fallen from the tree, I could see all the way to downtown Youngstown. I could see the lights on the buildings and the tiny specks of light from cars zipping by on the interstate. I used to imagine, when I was older, how much I would like that space to be my room, so I could sit up there on a bed or a couch and stare out over the city.

My dad says I apparently was following in his footsteps; when he would stay home sick from the Catholic elementary school he attended in downtown Youngstown — Saints Cyril and Methodious — he would head up to the attic with his binoculars and spy on his friends while they went out for recess.

As I got older, the space became more cramped, I became less tolerant of the heat, and the ability to drive and explore replaced the escapist joy I felt staring out that window. The house has been out of our family’s possession for close to a decade now, but I still occasionally think about the view from that attic.

Thinking about Carlton Ingram — and how many more years of memories he’s got stored away about life in Youngstown — I decided to spend some time in his childhood neighborhood to get some sense of where he came from, or at very least what that area is like today.

Since Carlton was out of town this week — hanging out in Washington D.C. with other union members — we talked over the phone. I hope to return to the area with him sometime. Maybe he’ll give me a guided tour.

Carlton grew up on the South Side of Youngstown — about two miles away from my father’s family home — near where Kenmore Avenue meets Glenwood Avenue, which connects downtown Youngstown with the South Side and the suburb of Boardman.

The house where I spent most of my childhood weekends is still standing — not so for an increasing number of older, abandoned homes across the city as demolitions have become more common — and, to my surprise, the look of the street is still very much the same, despite not having visited the house in close to a decade.

For Carlton, the memories of his childhood neighborhood are now nearly half a century old, and time has taken a more noticeable toll on the streets in that section of town. Conditions vary wildly from block to block, the quality of the area clearly correlative to the number of residents still living on the street.

At the intersection of Kenmore Avenue and Overland Avenue — where Carlton used to play football with friends in a nearby field — the closest standing buildings are in various stages of disrepair. On one side of the street is a single level concrete building, covered in yellowing, chipped white paint, and whose glass-block windows have been haphazardly boarded over with thin plywood to prevent squatters.

Fifty feet up the road are a pair of abandoned two-story homes that are falling apart. The porches have collapsed into piles of wood and siding and tar, leaving the front doors — also boarded over with plywood — inaccessible without the use of a stepladder.

These images have become the dominant imagery of Youngstown in the mind of those familiar with the city for its economic depression. “Ruin porn” makes for good photos, and it’s a true symptom of the city, but it’s hardly the full picture.

Fifty feet in the opposite direction from the white concrete building is a stretch of Kenmore Avenue that has retained a handful of residents. Their houses — though likely 50 years old, if not older — are still in fine condition, at least from the outside. Many of the homes sit atop their own individual little hills, with concrete stairs and maintained handrails providing walkways from the street to their front doors.

These homes are not just maintained, they’re loved; in the front yard of one house is a small stone ring encircling a rock and flower garden with precision placement of the features within. Across the street another house is lined with cleanly trimmed shrubbery.

This isn’t uncommon in the older neighborhoods in the city: well-loved family homes sharing yards with the rotted husks of long abandoned domiciles.

I asked Carlton if any of his old haunts were still around, hoping to visit some little mom-and-pop grocer and chat with a Youngstown old-timer who could shed some light on what the neighborhood was like during Carlton’s heyday.

Carlton begins his response with a laugh.

“No…no. Nothing’s left, not from my time.”

Even his elementary school, St. Patrick’s school, is gone, now home to a large Salvation Army facility. The only other nearby business is a low-key bar with a penchant for police visits.

Youngstown may not be growing, but it is still changing; evolving in some areas and decaying in others. I wonder if either of my childhood homes will still be standing when I reach Carlton’s age, whether they’ll be discolored ruins and open lots or if they’ll be converted to green-spaces or community gardens. Maybe they’ll still be there.

Dave: I first met Connie Spagnola on the campaign trail. I was talking to volunteers and supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Of the dozen or so I spoke to, Spagnola stood out.

She didn’t hold anything back about her admiration for Trump and her disdain for Clinton. She didn’t care at all about being careful with her words. She also spoke for a lot of people in the Youngstown area who voted for Democrats for decades, didn’t see the benefit of doing so now and were looking for a change. While Trump didn’t win Mahoning County — a Democratic stronghold for 80 years with Youngstown as is its most populous city — he came pretty close. It didn’t come as much of a shock; there are a lot of people in the area like Spagnola, but many don’t talk about it, much less volunteer to help get Trump elected.

I knew how happy she was about Trump’s election and how busy she still was volunteering at the local Republican headquarters. But I wanted to know about her early life growing up in Youngstown. I was eager to hear what life was like during Youngstown’s glory days when steel was king, black smoke in the sky meant success and there were major department stores downtown.

I moved here in 1995 to work for the Vindicator after spending nearly 28 years in New York, first being raised in Brooklyn and Staten Island and then going to college and working for newspapers in upstate New York. I’m always interested in hearing about the good times in this area that has struggled so much in the past 40 years. Despite those struggles, there are some wonderful things about the area: its beautiful parks, its affordable cost of living and some of the most interesting people you’ll ever meet.

I certainly heard the happiness in her voice as Spagnola talked about her parents and siblings. She was born in 1940, when the city’s population was close to 170,000 and stayed around that number into the 1960s — if you drive through parts of Youngstown today, you see nothing but abandoned and rundown houses. In fact, other parts of the city have nothing: the vacant houses are demolished and all that’s left is overgrown grass and weeds. The city hit rough times when the steel mills closed in the late 1970s and in a lot of ways it’s only gotten worse. Youngstown has seen its population plummet with only a few cities in the nation seeing such an exodus of people over the past 50 to 60 years. Today, the city’s population is 65,000 and decreasing every year.

Spagnola used a notebook to figure out approximate years for when things happened in her life. She remembers her time at Youngstown’s Woodrow Wilson High School as a cheerleader, a B student and someone who easily made friends. The school was demolished about a decade ago. “High school was a wonderful time with wonderful people,” she told me. “We never had fights. We never had name-calling. Nobody stole from anybody. Nobody picked on anybody. It was really outstanding. I talked to everybody.”

Her father, John, was a barber, like his father. Her mother, Santina, was a homemaker raising her and her two older siblings, John Jr. and Betty. They lived in a house behind the barbershop that her grandfather and father ran on the city’s East Side. That house and business are gone. “My dad didn’t want to do the barber shop anymore,” she said. “It was a bartering system. I’ll give you a haircut for a chicken or some eggs. There was always so much bartering. We ate a lot of chickens. Nobody could afford anything so my father looked for other work.”

He walked into the Photogenic Machine Co. and was hired on the spot as a machinist. The family finally had money and moved into a larger house, also on the city’s East Side. A few years later they moved to the South Side.

Like her grandfather, father and sister Betty, Spagnola ended up cutting hair for a living. She spent three months while still in high school learning to become a hairdresser at Lewis, Weinberger and Hill Academy of Cosmetology in downtown Youngstown. She graduated in 1958 and got a job at a salon.

She married two years later. She had a son and a daughter. But the marriage soured and she was divorced in 1967. She moved back in with her parents who helped raise her children while she took a second job as a nightclub hostess. Finally, in 1976, after 18 years of cutting hair, she opened her own salon, the Hair Company. She remarried that same year. She got divorced a second time four years later.

She grew up a Democrat in a Democratic family in a Democratic town. She was too young to vote in 1960 — when you had to be at least 21 to cast a ballot — but was fan of John F. Kennedy. She liked him because he was young and handsome.

Spagnola voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 even though, as she put it, “there was nothing sensational about him, but he was the Democrat and that’s how our house was raised. We didn’t talk about issues or who’d do a better job. We were doing well. Factories weren’t leaving here. It was a good time so we never thought about the man running for president. It was all Democrats where I lived. They never thought about the man. Everything was good so we voted for the Democrat.”

But that all changed in 1980. Ronald Reagan was running for president and Youngstown’s economy was going down the drain. “Reagan had a new outlook. He wasn’t a politician,” she told me. “You look at him and you say, ‘That’s Trump.’ He reminds me of Trump. He wanted to make America great. I liked him and he did well. But I didn’t tell my family that I voted for Reagan. You just didn’t say anything about it. Also, I was tired of the Democrats. I worked for some of the local Democratic politicians and I was totally fed up with Democrats by 1980. They were pathetic. They went from corruption to more corruption.”

Two years later, Spagnola sold her salon and left Youngstown for Las Vegas. “When my mother passed away in 1982, I decided to leave Youngstown. I hated it. It wasn’t the same,” she said. “My nephew and his wife lived in Las Vegas and I would vacation there all the time. I decided to move there. I just didn’t want to be in Youngstown anymore. There was nothing here. I was a hair dresser and I could do that anywhere so I decided to go to Vegas. I decided to leave and have a new life in Vegas. I needed some excitement in my life.”

She visited and even lived briefly in Youngstown in 2010. But it wouldn’t be until 2013 that Spagnola moved back to the city. By that time, her politics had changed considerably.