I have lived in a half dozen cities over the past twenty years. I have appreciated and criticized them all for different reasons, but only Youngstown feels complicated. Perhaps it is complicated in the way all hometowns are. They are the places where we learn to feel love and hate and the spectrum of other meaningful emotions. But I think it’s different for those of us from Youngstown. Everything about our city is heavy—steel, corruption, racial and class division, and, most distinctively, the weight of others’ condemnation.
Everyone carries it, even those of us without direct ties to steel or organized crime. Neither Steeltown nor Crimetown had much claim on me. My parents were professionals, and my closest relatives to toil near the blast furnace were great-uncles. As a girl, I didn’t see myself in the history of a Youngstown everyone else seemed to know. Where was my Youngstown? It would be many years before I would realize no one had written its history yet.
At my grandparents’ house, there was no thrill of discovery in exploring the trappings of my mother’s past. Almost nothing from my mother’s girlhood remained—perhaps because she had so little as a girl. Her tiny bedroom, at the top of a flight of steep, narrow stairs, held only a single bed and a dresser. I knew kids whose bedroom closets were bigger. There was so little room, in fact, that the door only opened about halfway before hitting the dresser. I didn’t know how my mother survived in that room. My bedroom was my refuge, the place where I read and dreamed and wrote in a household where no one except my father ever wanted to be alone.
To write fiction, Virginia Woolf said a woman needed money and a room of her own. I think that’s good advice for anyone wishing to write anything, though I would add another requirement: the room should be big enough for a desk.
Growing up, my mother did not have money or a desk, and she was rarely alone. Her one-bathroom, thousand-square-foot house was shared with two younger brothers. My grandparents were very social and their neighbors were close. My mother remembers their community fondly. She walked everywhere, waving at the neighbors sitting on their front porches, engaged in the traditional Youngstown pastime of street watching. She even walked to her school, Sacred Heart, with its giant crucifix that towered over the mills. In the early 1980s, however, we weren’t allowed to leave Grandma’s brick driveway. When we went to Sacred Heart for spaghetti dinners, we drove. The school was closed by then and the church’s crucifix had lost some of its majesty, overlooking the ruins of the mills we used to hide from in the Oldsmobile.
One by one, my grandparents’ neighbors moved away from Pearl Street. There were break-ins and drugs. Empty liquor bottles and garbage littered the street. We rarely saw other children there, only our cousins when they were visiting from other cities.
My grandparents left for Boardman in the 1980s, and I didn’t return to Pearl Street until nearly two decades later. I went back because Youngstown was haunting me. Once again, the city was at the center of something very bad on a national stage. By 2000, after a four-year investigation, the FBI had convicted dozens of people, including judges and other public officials, on corruption charges. Even Youngstown’s congressman, James Traficant, was being investigated. It was like the worker uprisings of the 1910s, the mob wars of the 1960s, or the economic devastation of the 1970s. It didn’t matter if you had nothing to do with any of that personally. If you were from Youngstown, you felt the heat.
Corruption in Youngstown wasn’t just a onetime thing. It was “institutional,” woven into the fabric of the city’s culture. Or that’s what everyone was saying, anyway. As a graduate student, I wanted to learn why. I went back to Youngstown to research the places where the city’s history and my family’s history intersected. I spent many hours over several months interviewing my relatives, including my grandparents. Even though I found no close relatives among the scores of Youngstown politicians, organized criminals, and lackeys who had been convicted over the years, I was amazed by the few degrees of separation between my family members and those who had given the city its disrepute.
These connections were often passing but memorable. My great-grandmother was shaken down for a gold pocket watch—the only thing of value belonging to her late husband—by a member of the Black Hand. Mobster Joseph “Fats” Aiellio, whose wife was one of my paternal grandmother’s dearest friends, once gave my father a toy gun. (My grandmother, mortified, made him give it back.) My great-uncle Joe worked at the Calla Mar, a restaurant owned by Pittsburgh “godfather” Jimmy Prato, who threw a luncheon in honor of that grandmother when she died. At one time, almost everyone played the bug, the illegal gambling racket that perpetuated organized crime in Youngstown.
“Every day a guy would come to the house,” my maternal grandmother, Betty D’Onofrio, told me. “You’d play three cents or five cents on a number.”
Even I have a connection to a Youngstown criminal. Briefly in 1992, I interned for Congressman Traficant on Capitol Hill. After a full day of opening mail, answering phones, and greeting visitors, I asked one of his female aides when it would be my turn to shadow the chief of staff and attend receptions, like the only other intern—a man—had been doing all day. Her answer? Never.
“The congressman always wants a woman at the front desk,” she said, with a contempt I hadn’t expected. If I
