My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—“OZYMANDIAS,” PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
My grandparents’ house exemplified what it was to live in working-class Akron in the late 1970s and early 1980s. My stream-of-consciousness memories of that house include: lots of cigarettes and ashtrays; Hee Haw; The Joker’s Wild; fresh tomatoes and peppers; Fred and Lamont Sanford; Archie and Edith Bunker; Herb Score and Indians baseball on the radio on the front porch; hand-knitted afghans; cold cans of Coca-Cola and Pabst Blue Ribbon; the Ohio Lottery; chicken and galuskas (dumplings); a garage door that you could eat off of; a meticulously maintained fourteen-year-old Chrysler with 29,000 miles on it; a refrigerator in the dining room because the kitchen was too small; catching fireflies in jars; and all being right with the world.
I always associate the familiar comfort of that tiny two-bedroom bungalow with the omnipresence of cigarette smoke and television. I remember sitting there on May 18, 1980. It was my eighth birthday. We were sitting in front of the TV, watching coverage of the Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington state. I remember talking about the fact that it was going to be the year 2000 (the Future!) in just twenty years. I remember thinking about the fact that I would be twenty-eight years old then, and how inconceivably distant it all seemed. Things seem so permanent when you’re eight, and time moves ever so slowly.
More often than not, when we visited my grandparents, my uncle Jim and aunt Helen would be there. Uncle Jim was born in 1936, in West Virginia. His family, too, had come to Akron to find work that was better paying, steadier, and less dangerous than the work in the coal mines. Uncle Jim was a rubber worker, first at Mohawk Rubber and then later at BFGoodrich. Uncle Jim also cut hair over at the most appropriately named West Virginia Barbershop, on South Arlington Street in east Akron. He was one of the best, most decent, kindest people whom I have ever known.
I remember asking my mother once why Uncle Jim never washed his hands. She scolded me, explaining that he did wash his hands, but that because he built tires, his hands were stained with carbon black, which wouldn’t come out no matter how hard you scrubbed. I learned later that it would take about six months for that stuff to leach out of your pores once you quit working.
Uncle Jim died in 1983, killed in an industrial accident on the job at BFGoodrich. He was only forty-seven. The plant would close for good about a year later.
It was an unthinkably tragic event, at a singularly traumatic time for Akron. It was the end of an era.
TIMES CHANGE
My friend Della Rucker wrote a great post titled “The Elder Children of the Rust Belt,” over at her blog, Wise Economy. It dredged up all of these old memories, and it got me thinking about childhood, about this place that I love, and about the experience of growing up just as an economic era (perhaps the most prosperous and anomalous one in modern history) was coming to an end.
That is what the late 1970s and early 1980s was: the end of one thing, and the beginning of (a still yet-to-be-determined) something else. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s because I was just a kid.
In retrospect it was obvious: the decay, the deterioration, the decomposition, the slow-at-first-then-faster-than-you-can-see-it unwinding of an industrial machine that had been wound up far, far too tight. The machine runs until it breaks down, then it is replaced with a new and more efficient one—a perfectly ironic metaphor for an industrial society that killed the goose that laid the golden egg. It was a machine made up of unions, and management, and capitalized sunk costs, and supply chains, and commodity prices, and globalization.
Except it wasn’t really a machine at all. It was really just people. And people aren’t machines. When they are treated as such, and then discarded as obsolete, there are consequences. You could hear it in the music: from the decadent, desperately-seeking-something (escape) pulse of disco, to the (first) nihilistic and (then) fatalistic sound of punk and post-punk. It’s not an accident that a band called Devo came from Akron, Ohio. De-evolution: the idea that instead of evolving, mankind has actually regressed, as evidenced by the dysfunction and herd mentality of American society. It sounded a lot like Akron in the late 1970s. It still sounds a little bit like the Rust Belt today.
As an adult, looking back at the experience of growing up at that time, you realize how much it colors your thinking and outlook on life. It’s all the more poignant when you realize that the “end of an era” is never really an “end” as such, but is really a transition to something else. But to what, exactly?
The end of that era, which was marked by strikes, layoffs, and unemployment, was followed by its echoes and repercussions—economic dislocation, outmigration, poverty, and abandonment—as well as the more intangible psychological detritus: the pains from the phantom limb long after the amputation, the vertiginous sensation of watching someone (or something) die.
But it is both our tragedy and our glory that life goes on.
Della raised a lot of these issues in her post: our generation’s ambivalent relationship with the American Dream (like Della, I feel the same unpleasant taste of
