But so far, I haven’t found anything as real as the First Friday fish fry at St. Mark’s parish in north Buffalo. Or the Turkey Trot as a crucial calorie-burner before the big meal of the year. Or the first warm day of the spring when Delaware Park is alive with runners, tennis players, would-be hoop stars, and toddlers in strollers.
And that sense of place—that authenticity—is why we expatriates hold on so tight.
It’s why we gather together in other places—for example, in a Buffalo bar in Sarasota, Florida, to watch the Bills get crushed on their overseas road game in London. Or why we gravitate to other Buffalo people who have made the same move. When I moved to New York City, I found a group of literary women with western New York ties; we called ourselves the Buffalo Gals, and met monthly for dinners to speculate on such matters as whether the Peace Bridge had been lit purple for Prince’s death or for Queen Elizabeth’s birthday, and to talk about the accumulated snowfall in the Southern Tier.
It’s also why Tim Russert, who grew up in south Buffalo, never stopped mentioning Buffalo sports teams when he was the host of NBC’s Meet the Press. It’s why Lauren Belfer, the novelist who wrote the Buffalo-based City of Light, comes to her hometown so often to speak to groups as varied as the working-class patrons of the Tonawanda Public Library and the white-gloved ladies of the Twentieth Century Club and the hipsters of Larkin Square. And it’s why I’ve been so happy to write book reviews for the Buffalo News, and to come around every summer to delight, from a kayak, as the late-afternoon sunlight sparkles upon beautiful Lake Erie.
In short, we want the connection. We need the connection.
And while we know that this yearning may seem, to you who shovel the snow and pay the real estate taxes, like the passing interest of a mere dilettante—you may even feel it has a whiff of condescension—we must beg your indulgence.
Allow us expatriates to lay claim to the Buffalo that forged us and that sustains us. Because we frankly aren’t sure who we would be without it. Without those roots grounding us and feeding us, we might wither away altogether.
So when we come around for the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, or for the Fourth of July family reunion, or for our best friend’s wedding reception at the Historical Society, we’ll be listening for the words we want to hear.
Even if you deliver the phrase with an invisible roll of your eyes, please say it: “Welcome home.”
JASON SEGEDY
Confessions of a Rust Belt Orphan; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Akron
Go to sleep, Captain Future, in your lair of art deco
You were our pioneer of progress, but tomorrow’s been postponed
Go to sleep, Captain Future, let corrosion close your eyes
If the board should vote to restore hope, we’ll pass along the lie.
—“CAPTAIN FUTURE,” The Secret Sound of the NSA
IN THE BEGINNING …
As near as I can tell, the term “Rust Belt” originated sometime in the mid-1980s. That sounds about right.
I originated slightly earlier, in 1972, at St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, Ohio, Rubber Capital of the World. My very earliest memory is of a day, sometime in the summer of 1975, that my parents, my baby brother, and I went on a camping trip to Lake Milton, just west of Youngstown. I was three years old. To this day, I have no idea why, of all of the things that I could remember, but don’t, I happen to remember this one. But it is a good place to start.
The memory is so vivid that I can still remember looking at the green overhead freeway signs along the West Expressway in Akron. Some of the signs were in kilometers as well as in miles back then, due to an ill-fated attempt to convert Americans to the metric system in the 1970s. I remember the overpoweringly pungent smell of rubber wafting from the smokestacks of BFGoodrich and Firestone. I recall asking my mother about it, and her explaining that those were the factories where the tires, and the rubber, and the chemicals were made. They were made by hardworking, good people—people like my uncle Jim. But more on that later.
When I was a little bit older, I would learn that this was the smell of good jobs; of hard, dangerous work; and of the way of life that built the modern version of this quirky and gritty town. It was the smell that tripled Akron’s population between 1910 and 1920, transforming it from a sleepy former canal town to the thirty-second largest city in America. It is a smell laced with melancholy, ambivalence, and nostalgia—for it was the smell of an era that was quickly coming to an end (although I was far too young to be aware of this fact at the time). It was sometimes the smell of tragedy.
We stopped by my grandparents’ house, in Firestone Park, on the way to the campground. I can still remember my grandmother giving me a box of Barnum’s Animal Crackers for the road. She was always kind and generous like that.
Who were my grandparents? My grandparents were Akron. It’s as simple as that. Their story was Akron’s story. My grandfather, George Segedy, was born in 1916, in Barnesboro, a small coal-mining town in western Pennsylvania, somewhere among Johnstown, DuBois, and nowhere. His father, a coal miner, had emigrated there from Hungary nine years earlier. My grandmother, Helen Szabo, was born in Barberton, Ohio, in 1920. Barberton was reportedly the most industrialized city in the United States, per capita, at some point around that time.
They were both factory workers for their entire working lives (I don’t think they called jobs like that “careers” back then). My grandfather worked at the
