AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Meander creek reservoir9/21/2023 ![]() Most people around here, in fact, fight a constant battle between wanting to be loyal to your home and stay near your family-and fleeing. You aren’t built to survive in the world outside of here. ![]() The point of the question, couched in concern for the other’s well-being, is this: “You are from here. “But have you seen the cost of living there?” is a common question lobbed at anyone who entertains the idea of leaving. I have more grit than others.” Our birthplace is a core part of our identity, and we start rationalizing all the reasons to stay. We reason: “I’m tougher for having had to deal with this. So many stay, and once we’ve been stuck for a while, we start to take pride in our situation. To leave means to say goodbye to family and friends and familiarity. After all, the ones who tell us to leave are the ones who’ve stayed. For some it’s simply a lack of opportunity, but for many others it’s a conscious choice. We know there’s a better life out there, if only we could take off.įor as much as we’re told to leave, however, so many of us don’t. As we age and mature in this part of the country, it is easy to feel less like we’re on a journey and more like we’re perpetually stuck on the tarmac. When we weren’t being told to leave, we were subjected to stories from our elders about the old days, before the city broke. Adults tell kids that there is no future here and that the best thing to do is to get a good education and run for your life. To understand the significance of that March 2019 story, you have to understand what it means to grow up in our region. NEW AT CJR: What the press can learn from its war against disinformation I didn’t know it would soon become my story as well. The only legible section of the sign displayed the letters “GM.” The headline above the image read “The Last Days at GM Lordstown.” It was a story about the indifference of industry and the displacement of workers, which was a story all too familiar to people from Youngstown. Then I saw a photo of a battered sign, with most of its lettering dangling in the wind. The face of Bernie Sanders reminded me of my very first Vindicator assignment, covering the Ohio primary. The image of a Jamaican immigrant I wrote about immediately brought to mind the toothy, slobbery smile of his pit bull. So for every one I kept I tossed two others.Įach front page sparked a memory. I knew I’d have to move, and those papers were just one more thing I’d need to drag with me. What was I going to do with them? Frame them? That seemed a bit grandiose. Those papers were proof I realized that dream, which was coming to an end, at least in the town where I grew up. Years earlier, when the only work I could find as a college dropout was scraping the siding off houses or washing dishes in a bar, I’d dreamed about earning my pay as a writer, as a newspaper reporter. But I held on to only a few, even though they were my stories, evidence someone had actually paid me to write. Some of my colleagues chose to hold on to every issue that featured their byline. I took an inventory of the scattered paperwork around my desk: public notices, press releases, and meeting agendas, as well as a pile of file folders containing the documents I used in developing my heftier projects: pages of information on a quartet of city politicians vying to be mayor the history of a neighborhood so far from the city’s center that it had practically returned to nature the tale of a woman who was born in Ireland but sold as a baby to a family from Youngstown. ![]() A brown, wooden cigar box from Indonesia next to my computer held foreign coins, a paperweight from my college newspaper at Youngstown State, and an old Cohiba I’d picked up in Mexico. ![]() Doodles and sketches that my colleagues drew were pinned to my wall. ![]() It was time to go.Īs the last day of the Vindicator ’ s long life-the paper had been around for 150 years-approached in late August, I began packing up my desk. My family was gone and my career options limited. This time it would likely be permanent, because it had to be there was no reason left to stay. I’d already left Youngstown and returned twice. The shuttering of Youngstown, Ohio’s daily newspaper in the summer of 2019 meant my days of being a newspaperman in my own city were over. WHEN THE VINDICATOR DIED, I knew it meant I’d have to leave my hometown. This story is copublished with The Delacorte Review, the literary nonfiction journal of the Columbia Journalism School. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |