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What Happened to Weirton? Part 4: Where is God Today?

The consequences of deindustrialization manifest in many different ways.

Sherry Linkon and John Russo, two prominent scholars in working class studies, have written several books and articles about this topic, and at this point, they find you can easily make a list of what will happen when industry leaves. Let’s run down it.

In most cases, there’s a decline in population, a loss of jobs, a loss of homes, a loss of healthcare, a reduction in the tax base and therefore cuts in public services. There’s usually an increase in crime, depression, suicide and drug and alcohol abuse. You’ll find more instances of family violence and divorce, and a loss of faith in public institutions.

And, as the landscape decays and buildings crumble, there’s even a loss of personal identity. It’s not a pretty picture. So how has it been painted in my hometown, Weirton?

I went to talk to one of my middle school teachers, Melanie Donofe. She’s been in the Hancock County school system for 29 years. I wanted to know how she’s seen the area change from a teacher’s perspective. We sat down for tea at her dining room table, and she was quick to start relaying everything she’s noticed change over the years.

“You hate to say the culture of the students and the backgrounds of the students, but that’s the biggest change I’ve seen because they were used to having everything handed to them by the mill. You know, their parents a job, their grandparents a job, and that’s not there. Economically, that’s been the biggest change,” she said.

Melanie and Gerry Donofe at their dining room table

Donofe currently works at Weirton Elementary School. First opened in 2014, the school took the place of three primary schools in Hancock County. She said that this consolidation makes the economic changes much more glaring.

“Right now, Weirton Elementary School having that many students. We have over 60% are free and reduced lunch.”

What Happened to Weirton – A Five Part Series

In January 2018, the Hancock County school district began providing all students with free breakfast and lunch through funding from the federal government. Still, Donofe related that this doesn’t guarantee children will have food when class is dismissed. So, Weirton Elementary School has a backpack program that gives the very low socioeconomic students ramen noodles or macaroni cups to take home with them.

“It breaks your heart to see that, you know, and you know that they’re going to get hot lunch and you know, they’re going to get breakfast… but they leave at 3:30. When they going to eat again?” she questioned.

Donofe said that in addition to kids having less, she’s also noticed that there are a lot less kids.

“Look at Brooke High School and Weir High School. I mean, my graduating class was 347,” she said. “I mean, you’re lucky if you got 347 in three classes now. Last year they graduated less than 150.”

While a decline in the student body can be disappointing, the rise of opioids and their impact on students who remain is much more disturbing. The city of Weirton and Hancock County as a whole haven’t been hit as hard by opioids as say, somewhere like Cabell County, but the area is far from unscathed.

“I’ve had a student this year that actually saved his mother’s life,” Donofe said. “She overdosed and he called 911 and they were able to give her Narcan and she was okay. So, I mean, as a 10-year-old, a 10-year-old shouldn’t have to deal with that.”

In 2002, only one Hancock County resident died from a drug overdose. The numbers have risen ever since. According to the West Virginia Health Statistics Center, between 2013 and 2017, the amount of drug overdose deaths a year in Hancock County per 100,000 residents was nearly three times more than the national average. For Donofe, all of this points to the fact that kids in Weirton have a much different childhood experience than the generations before them.

“The kids are the ones that are suffering because their parents don’t have, and it’s because they don’t have the mill to rely on anymore,” she said.

Like many who have lived in Weirton for a while, Donofe also remembers when the mill was a reliable safety net.

“They were always there for us, and I think the community really got used to that, that they would do anything. You know, go ask Weirton Steel. Ask them for a donation. And then they’d flip you some money. You can’t do that anymore. Basically, the benefit of them being here was there were jobs for our parents. And not minimum wage jobs. Good paying jobs,” she said.

Hancock County’s unemployment rate has fluctuated a lot over the last two decades. After a low of 3.8 percent in 2001, it peaked at 13.7 percent in February 2010, following the Great Recession. It’s been creeping down ever since, coming to just under 6 percent this past January. Still, according to a 2017 report by the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, about one in every four jobs in Hancock County offers low wages amounting to $1,250 a month or less.

While we were talking, Melanie’s mom, Gerry, walked into the room. She’s lived in Weirton her entire life and was a tin flopper at Weirton Steel in the 50s.

I asked her how she’s seen the area transform, and for her, the most noticeable difference is the loss of small businesses.

“To look and see how the businesses… they’re gone. Weisberger’s, Ray Diniti’s, the Smart Shop. Five and Ten. Ravoto’s Jewelers. The Five and Dime. No more theaters,” she said. “It’s just so changed and you know, buildings gone and something else in ‘em now, it’s, it’s just crazy.”

“When the Mill Went Down, it’s Like Everything Faded”

I knew the change she was talking about. It was one of the reason’s I disliked Weirton. The last time downtown Weirton got a facelift was when the J. J. Abrams movie Super 8 was filmed here in 2010. Production crews repainted buildings and covered up the blight, literally bringing Main Street back to life. Everyone came together to help the film crew; I was lucky enough to be an extra. It brought back a sense of community that hadn’t been felt in a long time.

I decided to go downtown to Weir Cove Taxi, more often known as the Weirton Bus Terminal. It used to be a stop for Greyhound buses, but they stopped picking up passengers there decades ago. There’s a luncheonette inside where you can grab a coffee or a burger and fries. I figured I might find some people there who could talk about the decline of the area, and I was right.

It’s a bit dingy on the inside. The ceilings are lined with yellowed fluorescent lights and mismatched panels, some dark green, some white, a few broken. The fridge behind the counter hummed like an unbalanced fan, and the old box TV sitting on top of it played endless commercials. You could occasionally hear some electric bells ringing from the video lottery machines in the back room.

An empty row of seats lines the counter of the Weir Cove Taxi cab stand

The first person I spoke with was Chip Ray. He’s a life-long Ohio Valley resident and has been working at Weir Cove Taxi for five years as the director of safety. He helps hire new drivers and manage operations. It was easy for him to point out the changes in the area. He started by motioning outside to Main Street.

“Every building had something in it. A restaurant, a store. All the houses up on Weir Avenue in those little houses built on the hillside were all built for people working in that mill,” he recalled. “Now, a lot of them are abandoned now. It’s a direct manifestation of that mill, this area right now and the state that it’s in. Without having that there, walk down the street, there’s a lot of empty buildings, lot empty houses.”

I asked him if he had been affected by the opioid epidemic, and I got the answer I was expecting.

“It’s a serious epidemic around here. I know a lot of people that were impacted by it, people that I know. People that I graduated with, people that I went to college with. I can name 10 people that have died from opioids or heroin that I graduated with or a who’s close to my age. It’s a shame. It’s terrible. It’s really impacting the area,” he said.

We kept on talking and soon the subject switched to how the taxi company was still in business. Chip explained that the natural gas industry has helped with their diversification.

“We have cabs, but our trucks are water trucks. They’re not here at the cab stand, they’re at our garage in Steubenville. But that’s the future of the area around here because the steel mills… I don’t see the steel mills coming back,” Rax explained. “And, so, you got to do something. That seems to be the big industry around here. I know we alone employ about 40 truck drivers that work for the oil and gas.”

A woman named Ashley Shaffer listened to our conversation from behind the counter. Her family moved here from Charlotte, North Carolina in 1997, when she was still in high school. I turned to her next. She started talking about how it was a lot easier to find employment when she was younger.

“So, when I was 23, I was working at William’s Country Club up on Marland Heights. I mean, work was good then, and now it’s just like you can’t, I mean you can barely find a job,” she said. “I personally, myself, I don’t like it. Going from Charlotte, where there’s absolutely everything and anything you could do. You know what I mean? Hot air balloon rides, everything, to coming up here to half my friends that I graduated with are passed away or hooked on some sort of drug. It’s just not, not what it used to be.”

Shaffer and her parents originally moved away from Charlotte to escape the city’s crime problem. Now, she’s considering moving back because there’s more opportunity there for her son.

“I have a 13-year-old son and honest to God, like, I think about moving back down to Charlotte because I don’t want him around this area. Like he’s at the age right now he can go either way. You know what I mean? Yes, kids experiment stuff and they do things growing up. That’s just the way that it is. But I want him to have a good life and I want him to be able to go to school and college and have a family. You know what I mean? And be comfortable. Not struggle,” she said.

As we were talking, another woman walked in. Shaffer asked her if she wanted a coffee, and the woman sat next to me at the counter. Shaffer began to explain why I was there when the woman cut her off.

“Why don’t you let her talk? Shut up,” said Dianna Calandros.

Calandros is a very straight-forward woman. She worked in the cab stand for 17 years, but recently had to stop after she was diagnosed with cancer.

Calandros told me the town still holds a special place in her heart, even though she doesn’t hope for much.

“I love Weirton. I mean I really do. I love Weirton. It’s just that when it, when the mill went down, it’s like everything faded. It’s like, you know, it’ll never ever be with like it was and that’s, that’s, that’s sorrowful. If you’re from around here, it really hurts your heart,” she lamented.

I asked her if she had any hopes for Weirton.

“No, not at all. I’m 66 years old, what the hell can I hope for,” she quipped.

The two men sitting near the door who periodically added onto the conversation were, at this point, waiting for me to walk over to them. Jimmy Colalella helps with clerical work for his brother who owns Weir Cove Taxi. He thinks the area’s decline can be attributed to a lack of diversity in the local economy.

“It relied heavily on that industry, the steel mill. It’s like with anything in life, you can’t, you gotta have, you know, balance, diversity, and, you know, people didn’t have the vision. So, that’s why you see, you know, maybe not everybody prospering here like people used to prosper,” Colalella explained.

Henry Valentine is a non-emergency medical transport driver for Weir Cove Taxi. He helps recovering drug users get to suboxone appointments. I asked him what he hopes for Weirton.

Henry Valentine looks over his paycheck at Weir Cove Taxi

“Just to get more jobs, to get more work, more opportunities so people can do things besides be on drugs and opioids,” Valentine said.

Someone else I spoke with was a woman named Joan Sims. She kept to herself at a table in the back corner of the luncheonette. Joan used to work across the river at the Wheeling-Pittsburgh Mill in Steubenville, but she’s lived in Weirton her entire life. She pointed out that not everything about the decline is bad.

“The best thing that ever happened on Weir Avenue was all the bars went out. That was the best thing that ever happened. Every place you went it was a bar. Here and next door. That was more bars in this town probably than two towns. Three towns. Yeah. But when the bars went out, you could tell there wasn’t no money,” Sims said.

While she was happy the bar scene faded, she was upset about the lack of people attending church in the city.

“Churches don’t have nobody. Her church went down to 10 people. And there used to be, we lived on County Road, used to be lines of cars up and down County Road going to church,” she said.

Sims left me with a question that I wasn’t able to answer: “Where is God today? What have they done with him? We don’t hear about him. Churches are closing. He’s gone.”

Even though everything has changed so much, and the good times can only be felt through memories, there’s still an attachment that’s hard to let go of. Today, the Weirton Bus Terminal lives on as a reminder of what it used to be: a bustling diner filled with regulars and mill workers grabbing a bite before their shift began. And this is what seems to keep people around, even when there isn’t hope for the future. It’s what’s familiar that matters, like the same comfort you get when coming home. I don’t think you can blame anyone for longing for that.

Although not everyone in Weirton will share the same views as the people I spoke with, I think it’s apparent where their opinions come from. In the next episode, we’ll explore what’s in store for the future of Weirton.

Music featured in this episode:

“Clean Soul” by Kevin MacLeod

What Happened to Weirton? Part 3: As Goes the Mill…

“History tells us, like it or not, as goes the mill, so goes Weirton, in good times and bad.”

This is a quote from Dr. David Javersak, a former professor and local Ohio Valley historian, from his book, “History of Weirton.” There’s a lot of truth in that statement: Weirton would have never existed without the mill. And up until its fateful bankruptcy, the town fully depended on Weirton Steel, like any devoted company town. This episode will trace through some of the highlights of Weirton’s history, providing an overview of its prominence and decline.

When Ernest Tener Weir arrived in the Ohio Valley in 1909, he had a larger-than-life vision: a fully integrated steel mill, or a steel mill that contained all the steps of the steelmaking process. The mill in Weirton had all of this and more, from the initial iron-making in blast furnaces, the smelting of steel in open hearths, to the eventual coiling of steel sheets. It was a massive production that required more than 10,000 workers.

Long before the mill existed, a much gentler landscape occupied the space where Weirton is today. All that was there was a small farming village known as Hollidays Cove, named after a colonial fort built in the area in 1776. Located in Hancock County, the northernmost county in West Virginia, the village rested in a beautiful valley nestled between rolling hills, marked with fields and thousands of fruit-bearing trees.

There was some industry there: the first being iron-making at the Peter Tarr Furnace, built in 1790. But, the farmland dominated for at least a 100 years until oil wells began dotting the landscape in the late 1800s. Ernest Tener Weir bought 105 acres of land there to develop a steel mill in 1909.

Weir might have liked the look and location of the land, but he also liked its relative isolation. He was fervently anti-union, and his managerial style reflected this. A large part of his vision as a CEO was to keep national unions out of his mill. He fostered a paternalistic environment to make this possible. Charles Varano, author of “Forced Choices,” a book about paternalism and its role in Weirton Steel’s eventual worker buyout, described this concept.

“Paternalism was a way in which the owners of companies, they were, you know, primarily the robber baron types back at the turn of the century, sought to organize their companies and in this case, organize the mill in a way that brought elements of a family structure into an otherwise industrial concern,” Varano wrote.

What Happened to Weirton – A Five Part Series

Weir, acting as the father figure, built up a community entirely dependent on the mill: his workforce constructed the infrastructure and public utilities that tens of thousands of people relied on. This company town structure faced opposition during the 1919 steel strike, when the American Federation of Labor, or AFL, attempted to organize the nation’s steel industry. As Javersak notes in his book, steel workers were disgruntled from working 12-hour shifts and making only $4 a day, which would be the equivalent of earning $5 an hour today.

But organized labor lost their battle in Weirton. In October 1919, Weir ordered his company police force to round up almost 200 suspected radicals, who were mostly workers from Finland, and marched them to town square. They were forced to kneel before the American flag, kiss it, and then were chased out of town.

In 1929, Weirton Steel merged with a few other metal companies to form National Steel, the only steel corporation to keep its head above water during the Great Depression. As President Franklin Roosevelt strengthened unions, Weir continued to douse the flames of organized labor and ultimately maintained Weirton’s reputation as a ‘scab’ town. Varano described this attitude.

“You know, we take care of our own, in our own way, and nobody should come in and tell us how to do it,” he wrote.

This paternalistic environment fostered a devoted Americanism that helped the war effort when the United States military entered World War II. When the battle of production intensified, Weirton Steel was there to support the front lines. Thomas Millsop was the president of Weirton Steel at the time. He arranged for the mill to produce 200 pound, 8-inch Howitzer Shells, and the mill was awarded an Army-Navy “E” Award for its excellence in production.

Of course, women played a key role during war-time production at Weirton Steel. Hundreds of Rosie the Riveters, donning their signature head scarves, worked on each step of the production line.

After the war, women returned to their domestic boundaries or remained in jobs specifically assigned to female workers. The most prominent of these jobs was called tin flopping. Women at Weirton wore blue uniforms as they flopped sharp sheets of tin into piles, sorting the metal and looking for defects. It was the highest-paying job for women in Weirton, but still failed to compete with the “family wage” that men were offered. And, up until 1969, Weirton Steel had a policy where they wouldn’t hire married women. Many women had to leave town to get married or act as if their husbands were only boyfriends; otherwise, they faced losing their job and the best income available to them in Weirton.

Just 6,693 people lived in Hancock County in 1900. Thousands of people of different ethnicities flocked to the area to work in the mill. By 1942, more than 13,000 people worked at Weirton Steel. The mill would continue to employ around 12,000 workers for the next few decades, making it the state’s largest employer and tax payer.

Weirton’s population reached its peak in 1960 with 28,201 residents. Enzo Fracasso, a former steel worker who now serves on the Weirton City Council, remembers how the mill and the city provided an idyllic setting for a comfortable, blue-collar life.

Retired steelworker and Weirton city councilman Enzo Fracasso stands in his living room holding his Weirton Steel employee badge

“It was fun growing up here in Weirton and the mill was always in my everyday life, really,” Fracassp described. “I mean, my grandfather worked in the mill. My father worked in the mill, my brother, myself, you know. The mill made a lot of people, tens of thousands of people, raise a family, send children to school, live the American dream.”

Everyone who’s lived in a steel town knows there is a dangerous price to pay for this American dream. More than 100 people have died in the mill, and their deaths were rarely gentle. Enzo filled me in on some of these tragedies. One time, a man was crushed by a steel coil.

“It was something he did every day for 25 years and one day it didn’t work, and he paid the ultimate price,” Fracasso said. “He was on daylight shift. I was on afternoon shift when I came out to work and they had the machine all taped off, caution tape all around it. They had the coil that fell on him. They had it bagged up, you know, from what they told me, they had to shovel him into a bag. It’s like stepping on a bug. I mean there’s a lot of gruesome stuff, a lot of gruesome stuff that can happen and has happened.”

Regardless of the dangers, the citizens of Weirton and the Ohio Valley stayed committed to the mill, and the area was seen as an example of the growth and progress of the United States. Unfortunately, it would eventually become a poster child of decline. When other countries rebuilt after WWII and revitalized their manufacturing sectors, they became less dependent on steel from the United States. In 1950, the U.S. produced about half of the world’s raw steel. By 1977, it was less than 20 percent. At the same time, U.S. manufacturers began to capitalize on cheap foreign steel.

As the American steel industry declined, National Steel, Weirton’s parent company, started taking profits from Weirton and investing elsewhere. National went from the fourth-largest steel company in the country to the fourth-largest savings and loans institution. To make matters worse, National started investing in aluminum, despite Weirton Steel being the second largest tin producer in the country. Following the onset of the early 1980s economic recession, on March 2, 1982, National announced they were going to divest completely from their Weirton branch. John Balzano, USW 2911 benefits coordinator, told me what happened.

“National tells Weirton, we’re cutting our ties with you. You’re a loser. You have to go. You can either shut it down or your employees can buy it, called the ESOP. Employee stock ownership,” he said.

John Balzano, United Steelworkers Local 2911 benefits coordinator, in his office

Employee Stock Ownership Plans, or ESOPs, were very popular at this time. They offered lucrative tax incentives and gave workers more ownership of their company through stock options that were normally only available to private investors. ESOPs also provide disengaged owners a way to sell their company to already-invested employees, as finding an outside buyer might be impossible. It would have cost National $420 to $770 million in shutdown costs and pension liabilities to close up shop. Their best option was to sell Weirton to the steel workers themselves. Charles Varano illustrated that this was somewhat of a forced choice for the workers.

“It was forced because they were kind of facing, you know, the demise of the town,” Varano explained. “You know, as I started off the book, the mill goes, so goes the town and that happened to a lot of places around there, you know. I mean at that point all you had to do is look over to Pittsburgh and the Monongahela Valley, what it looked like was just, you know, shut down plants and people leaving.”

To make the deal possible, workers were told their pay would need to be cut by 20 percent. They also needed to spend $1 billion in the first 10 years of employee ownership on capital investments to upgrade the plant. It was a harsh reality, but the alternative was worse: a finishing plant that employed at most 2,000 people.

So, Weirton Steel employees and citizens banded together to secure their town’s future. There were parades and donations from basically every business in town, benefit drives and telethons. The whole town rallied around saving the mill.

“We can do it” became the town’s new motto, and they would do it. On September 23, 1983, 7,700 workers voted to implement the ESOP, and on January 10, 1984, Weirton Steel Corporation was born.

The first five years of the ESOP proved profitable. However, Mark Glyptis, president of USW 2911 in Weirton, thinks these profits only came from special tax incentives given to ESOPs at the time.

“Most ESOPs fail because they went from losing money or not being viable to all of a sudden making money. They’re making money because they had these advantages that the government were giving them, not because they changed any underlying fundamentals of the company to be successful,” Glyptis said. “And you have about five years time to do that. Then if you don’t do it, then you’ll be losing money again. We made money the first five years before we started losing money again.”

In 1989, Weirton posted a public stock offering to fund a $500 million dollar modernization plan, and again in 1994, leaving the worker-owners with only 42 percent of their company. Every year, the company laid off more workers, blaming stagnating markets, new federal U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations that required expensive pollution control updates, free trade policies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, and foreign dumping. In 1998, Weirton was no longer the largest employer in West Virginia. Walmart was.

Fewer and fewer employees were called back after each round of layoffs, and that took an emotional toll on the workers as job security became a thing of the past. Enzo told me he had many friends who took their own lives from the stress of the mill’s downfall. One time, while Enzo was cutting grass, a close friend of his randomly dropped by.

“He goes, ‘it was good knowing you,'” Enzo recalled. “I said, ‘what you talking about good knowing me? The hell you talking about? Good knowing me? I know you, and I’ll know you tomorrow, too.’

Enzo said he didn’t give the comment much thought, but later learned his friend had visited other colleagues that night.

“He stopped and saw them too, talked to them, and he went home that night and left a note killed himself,” Enzo said. “I think that was job related cause he was like really stressed out. I’ve known a lot of them. Probably more than I want to know. I can tell you that.”

By 1999, just under 5,000 workers remained. Hundreds of those workers and Weirton citizens rallied in Washington D.C. pushing for protectionist policies for the steel industry. President George W. Bush took the biggest stand for the steel industry three years later when he instated tariffs on steel imports in 2002. Mark Glyptis recalled trying to convince President Bush to continue with the tariffs after a year of their imposition.

“I said, ‘Mr. Bush, will you, what are you planning to do on the midterm review of the tariffs on your Fair Trade Act?’

And he said, ‘we will stay the course.’ That’s a quote from in the White House from Bush.

And I said, ‘I’m glad you said that because we have put together, we the steel industry, three year strategies to get us back on our feet. We appreciate you doing the tariffs, that’s going to help. It will be devastating if you revoke the tariffs on the midterm review.’

He said, ‘I’m going to stay the course.’

That was Friday. Monday, he revoked ‘em,” Glyptis said.

The tariffs were called off in 2003, and the short-term effort failed to save an industry that had lost hundreds of thousands of jobs since the 1960s. Glyptis placed full blame on the government for the fall of the steel industry in the United States.

“They deliberately made a systematic decision to shut down the steel industry in this country,” he said.

Foreign dumping wasn’t the only hurdle facing the steel industry. Automation had also been impacting manufacturing employment for many years. A new type of steel mill called “mini mills” began dominating the steel landscape. They use electric arc furnaces, or furnaces that are heated with high-current electricity, to recycle steel scrap into fresh metal. Mini-mills require far less manpower to operate and produced about half of the steel made in the U.S. in 2002.

So, nearly 20 years after the ESOP deal was signed, Weirton Steel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on May 19, 2003. The mill officially needed a new buyer, and this time, the employees weren’t able to save the business. There was, however, a two-year-old steel company buying up several bankrupt mills at fire sale prices. This was International Steel Group, or ISG, with now U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross at the helm.

ISG officially bought Weirton Steel for $255 million dollars in 2004, after Weirton Steel had already cut 950 jobs, handed off its pension liabilities to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, and cut both healthcare and life insurance benefits from its retirees. In 2005, ISG was sold to Mittal Steel, and in 2006, after a merger with Arcelor, the Weirton mill would find its permanent home with ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker.

Unfortunately, Weirton would no longer produce raw steel. It had finally become what so many had feared for so long: a finishing plant.

Currently, ArcelorMittal Weirton employs 880 people, a small number compared to the 13,000 who worked there when Weirton Steel was a world competitive powerhouse. I spoke with Tracey Lester-Locke, who’s been working at the mill for 45 years. She explained that the steel tariffs recently imposed by President Trump have helped ArcelorMittal, but acknowledged they aren’t a long term answer.

“Right now, we’re doing okay with the tariffs, but that’s only a temporary fix,” she said. ” How long are these tariffs going to be in place, you know? And, like I said, there is a need for tin plate, but not too many people make tin plate. I think that’s why we’re still here in spite of ourselves,” Lester-Locke said.

Tracey Lester-Locke, tin mill dispatcher, standing in front of ArcelorMittal facilities

Ultimately, Lester-Locke believes that the reason the steel industry still exists in Weirton stems from the efforts of the community.

“I mean, because in spite of all the turmoil and you know, shutting down the mill, you know, we still persevered. And it just shows what kind of spirit and tenacity that we have as Weirton people. It’s just not Weirton Steel people. It’s Weirton people as a whole,” she explained.

At this point arises another question: what has all of this meant for the community? We’ll take a look at the effects of deindustrialization in the next episode.

Music featured in this episode:

“The Call of the Coyote” by Monplaisir

“Folk Round” by Kevin MacLeod

“Industrial Revolution” by Kevin MacLeod

“Final Frontier” by Sascha Ende

“Lithium” by Kevin MacLeod

What Happened to Weirton? Part 2: He Could See Everything Folding

One person’s story can change your outlook on an entire town. Unfortunately, their story can leave you with more questions than answers.

By 2018, around 10,000 people had already left Weirton in search of a better life. I wanted to find someone who had stayed in the area and could tell me about their experience with the mill’s downfall. This led me to a story written in 2006 by an Associated Press reporter, Vicki Smith.

She wrote about Weirton’s decline through the lens of the tragic death of a Weirton Steel employee. His name was Larry Tice, and his surviving wife, Mary, lives in New Cumberland, West Virginia, about six miles north of Weirton. I figured if there was anyone who could summarize the pain felt in the region it was Mary, so I took a drive up Route 2 to visit her.

Mary described her home as a red brick cottage with a green mailbox, and when I pulled into the driveway of a house that fit the description, she was waiting for me at the door.

She showed me in, and I was blanketed with the smell of candles: peppermint, apple, cinnamon, one burning in every room. Amish furniture she and Larry bought over the years filled her kitchen. A giant Hoosier cabinet made of solid oak with a 48-inch pull-out table, a spice cabinet, and the table where we eventually sat were all handmade to their specifications. Mary said her furniture collection grew after she told Larry her jewelry trove was full enough.

“It was funny because he used to buy me jewelry, and then I was like, don’t buy me jewelry anymore, buy me furniture,” she said.

Milltown Love

Mary was happy to tell me more about her and Larry’s love. They met when she was only 12 years old. She was at a friend’s house getting ready for a church cantata, and Larry happened to be there with his buddy, who knew her friend’s father. When Mary came down the stairs dressed in a lavender gown, she remembered how Larry was standing in the room below.

“When I started to walk by, he says, ‘what’s your name?’ And I told him, ‘my name’s Mary Hall,’ (Hall was my maiden name). And I said, ‘Why do you want to know my name?’ And he says, ‘well, I’m Larry Tice.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ And he says, ‘Remember my name.’ I said, ‘Why should I remember your name?’ He says, ‘I’ll be the person who marries you someday.’ And he did, six years later.”

They married in 1980, a year after she graduated from high school. Larry had been working at Weirton Steel since 1973, and soon enough, they bought a house together.

Larry and Mary Tice pose for a photo during a cruise vacation

Mary worked several clerical jobs in the healthcare industry, even though she didn’t have to. Larry’s income at the mill was enough, but they liked to treat each other, and Mary’s second income helped. She showed me some of the things he had gifted her. Hundreds of Cherished Teddies, horses, angel figurines, a kabuki doll, a music box. Her curio cabinet was filled with trinkets and gifts from Larry. But there was something else Mary wanted to show me, something even more special.

We walked into her bedroom and she pulled out what seemed to be simple blue Post-It Note from her jewelry box. It turned out to be so much more than that.

In 2004, Mary’s mother passed away. Knowing she would be hurting during Christmas time, Larry gifted her a pair of golden hoop earrings as a final gift from her mother. Even though he wasn’t a great writer, he included a note, which she read aloud to me:

“The last gift. A mother’s love for her daughter lasted a lifetime. It shines like a brilliant diamond in sunlight,” she read. “Bright, shiny like her smile, smiling face full of love and pride because her baby is … now full grown woman now, herself full of love. Love to pass on now … circle was complete love given forever … like this gift.”

“And it’s in my jewelry box, I have kept it in my jewelry box since then,” she said to me in a moment so precious that I was taken aback by her openness to share.

What Happened to Weirton – A Five Part Series

For a while, Mary and Larry were able to live out their American dream. They owned a house, had a steady income and enjoyed life together.
“So it just was, was the two of us, you know, just work hard and you know, plan for retirement … which never came,” she said as she started to explain how their modest life together would eventually be cut short.

Heart of the Mill Personified

Larry walked straight out of high school into the heart of the mill, the Basic Oxygen Plant. It was a scary looking building; at twenty stories high, the 250,000-square-foot structure seemed to take up most of downtown Weirton, like an idling beast.

“As a kid, you know, everybody used to say, ‘you know … that place is evil.’ You know, because it was the devil’s house, because of the molten steel on the bottom that you could see when you go by with the ingots and that and then the horns at the top,” she said.

Larry was a crew chief in that molten hell, known more often as ‘the pit’. Needle-like lances would drop down into furnaces full of scrap metal and molten iron and shoot out oxygen at 1600 miles per hour. This would heat the metals up to 3000 degrees, smelting them into 300 tons of steel in 25 minutes.

The job wasn’t for the faint of heart, and Larry had not only himself to worry about, but his crew as well. Mary told me that when Larry was training new workers, he emphasized the undivided attention needed for the job. Otherwise, you could pay the ultimate price.

“He says, ‘if I tell you to move, don’t say huh, because you’ll be burnt alive,’” she said.

And sometimes, people did pay the ultimate price. A total of 120 men died while working at Weirton Steel. The dangers made it all the more important for the steel workers to have a deep trust in one another.

“They were all very close knit and each, you know, each crew, they knew how to depend on each other,” Mary explained. “They knew what each one was capable of doing and doing for them, for each of them. And that solidified a bond that I can’t even imagine.”

“They would give their lives for each other. And I mean, Larry even said that, he says, ‘if it comes down to me or one of my buddies … it’s me,'” she added.

Larry worked in this flaming kingdom for 30 years, his whole life’s dedication spent refining a dangerous but rewarding craft. Yet, these years of devotion in the pit would make it all the harder for Larry when Weirton Steel finally went under.

The Change and the Worry

Along with several other steel mills in the early 2000’s, Weirton Steel filed for bankruptcy on May 19, 2003, after reporting around $700 million in losses over the previous five years. The mill was bought and sold a few times, ultimately ending with its new name and ownership: ArcelorMittal Weirton. All the while, the 3,000 workers who remained at this time were left to worry about their future.

Mary said it was a very tense time for everyone in Weirton.

“The change and just the worry, you know, am I going to go to work tomorrow and have a job?,” she said. “Are they going to come in and say, ‘hey, we’re going to take this off of you now.’ You know, no health care, you know, we’re gonna take another 20 percent or we’re going to do that. It was just, just the not knowing.”

When Weirton Steel filed for bankruptcy, they handed over their pension fund to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, or PBGC, a government agency that takes over benefit payments for businesses whose pension funds are floundering or at risk.

According to a 2003 PBGC press release, Weirton Steel Corporation’s Retirement Plan, which covered about 9,200 workers and retirees, only had $530 million in assets to cover almost $1.35 billion in benefit liabilities. Another press release stated that the PBGC estimated it would be responsible for about $697 million of those benefit liabilities, with a risk of incurring an additional loss of as much as $147 million for shutdown benefits.

The PBGC executive director at the time, Steve Kandarian, was quoted saying that, “I regret that the PBGC has been forced to take this course of action … because Weirton Steel did not set aside enough money to pay for the pension promises made to its employees, some participants will not get all the benefits they earned.” That is exactly what happened to Larry and his fellow steel workers. Mary explained how Larry’s pension was nearly cut in half.

“Per his calculations, he probably would have gotten clear around $3,000 a month. By the time that PBGC got ahold of it, he would have gotten less than $1,600 a month before taxes,” she said.

The PBGC method includes considering how long an employee has worked and how old the worker is at the time of the pension takeover. For example, if a man is 45 years old, because he is relatively young, he may see his “owed” pension reduced by a large magnitude, and on the other side of the equation, a man who is 65 might not see such a large reduction due to his age.

The PBGC figures that a person like Larry, who was 48 at the time, could still continue working and build up a new pension under ArcelorMittal or another company. What it doesn’t take into account, though, is the social and economic anxiety surrounding these situations.

It was a blow that was hard for Larry to handle.

“He could see everything folding I think. And you know, cause that’s what he kept saying. He says, you know, he says, ‘I’ve worked so hard for so long, gave this place my blood, sweat and tears. And then somebody’s just sitting behind a desk says, nope, we’re going to take half of it,'” Mary recalled.

She said the decision seemed impersonal.

“It was like, how, how did we let this happen? How did other individuals have that many people’s lives in their hands and just say, ‘We don’t care,'” she said.

Weirton Steel also cut healthcare benefits and life insurance for all of its retirees. Larry contemplated taking a buyout, but wasn’t sure what he would do after that. It would be hard to find a job that offered as much as the mill did, Mary explained.

“I think that was part of Larry’s desperation too, it’s like, what am I going to do? I have done nothing. I went straight from high school into this. What do I have to fall back on? What can I do if I take the buyout?” she said.

After declining the buyout and being laid off for several months, Larry returned to work in January of 2006. By then, the BOP had ceased operations as the new owners started downsizing the mill into a tin-finishing plant, eliminating all parts of the steelmaking process except for the last steps of production. Larry was able to retain his employment, but he would no longer face the heat he thrived in for so long. He was transferred to the tin mill department where he started learning how to operate a side trimmer, a computer-operated machine that cuts down steel coils to specific widths.

Rumor has it, though, Larry was being bullied by the men who were training him. He was slower to pick up the job than others, and he was completely out of his element. Plus, the workers who were training him were on their way out of the mill, as employees with more seniority filled their spaces. With only a short amount of time to learn his new job, Mary said Larry’s anxiety spiked as he attempted to pick up a new skill set.

“I’m like, ‘two weeks, nobody’s going to learn a new job in two weeks,” she recalled saying to him. “And he says, ‘well, if I don’t learn the job, … they’re going to move on to somebody else.’”

I Was A Lot Stronger Than He Ever Thought I Was

Mary had already noticed changes in Larry by Christmas of 2005, and things were about to unravel even further. He was becoming more quiet, more closed off. When he was on a long weekend and supposed to return to the tin mill on a Thursday, Mary pushed him to see a doctor.

He followed her orders, and even though he didn’t know what the doctor had prescribed him, Mary said the medicine was on the table when she got home from work Tuesday evening. He was supposed to start taking it the following morning with breakfast.

That night, as they were watching TV, Larry randomly mentioned he wanted to get rid of some of his guns. Mary said ‘OK, do whatever you want. They’re your guns.’

The next morning, Larry got up before her and had breakfast and tea ready. She asked him what he planned to do that day. He said he wanted to get his guns cleaned and cataloged and then decide what he wanted to keep and what he would sell. As she prepared to step out the door, Larry called her over from the corner of the kitchen.

“He was backed up against the microwave and he says, ‘come here,'” Mary recalled. “And he opened the robe up and just give me a big bear hug. And he says, ‘I love you … see you later.’ And I said, ‘okay … well, I’ll call you later this morning … find out what you want to do later.’”

Around 10:30 in the morning, Mary got a strange feeling and felt the need to call Larry. When Larry answered the phone, something was off about his voice.

“I said, ‘what’s going on?’ And he says, ‘I’m so stupid, I’m so dumb.’ I’m thinking, okay. He broke a dish, he stepped on the dog — something goofy. And, and I said, ‘Okay, what did you do?’ And he says, ‘Oh, I’ll show you … when you get home.’ And I said, ‘tell me, I’m going to worry all day.’ ‘No, I’ll just show you when you’re getting home.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ And I hung the phone up.”

Moments later, Mary had a piercing pain in her chest that hurt so bad she thought was having a heart attack. She told a friend at work to call 911, but suddenly the pain subsided. Larry was the only thing on her mind.

“I picked the phone back up and tried to call and there was no answer. And now I kept calling and calling and I thought, ‘something’s wrong,’” she recalled.

She raced home to find her front door unlocked and her two dogs waiting inside the entrance. As she moved through the house, she called out to him, but received no answer. Finally, she made her way into their den, where Larry kept his gun cabinet. There, she found Larry laying face up, his guns strewn about.

“I said, ‘are you sleeping?’ And the dogs followed me into the room because I never put them back outside,” she said. “And when I walked in, I looked down and his eyes were open and he was gone and I could tell from his face.”

Larry had shot himself in the heart.

His medicine was still sitting on the table. He hadn’t taken one dose yet.

“I didn’t remember any of this for three and a half years,” she said, her voice becoming fainter.

“The two dogs that knew what happened in that house are gone,” she added. “I wish they could have talked back then. So I mean, you know, between God and those two dogs and my husband, nobody knows what’s happened.”

Mary said Larry was the type to shelter her.

“Didn’t want me to worry, didn’t want me to worry,” she said. “But I was a lot stronger than he ever thought I was.”

Mary said there weren’t any mental health programs for mill workers at the time. Only after the fact did people pay more attention.

I thanked Mary for living through the pain once more to tell me Larry’s story. When she originally talked to Vicki Smith for the Associated Press article, she was apprehensive. But, she figured if she told Larry’s story, she might be able to help someone going through a similar situation. And, it turns out, she did.

“I found out later that there was a gentleman who was contemplating suicide and … was at home alone and went to pick up the paper to read before he did. Had the gun on his lap and read the article that Vicki had wrote and said, ‘I couldn’t leave my family like this. Not in the pain that that woman went through,’ and he called for help and got help,” Mary said.

Mary was right. Larry’s story does resonate with others. When you take someone’s identity away from them, built up through years of labor and commitment, it’s hard to say how they’ll react. Some recover. Some don’t. So it makes you wonder, just like Mary did: how did we let this happen? It was the same thing I was thinking as I watched the BOP falling. All things come to an end, of course. But some end much better than others. In the next episode, we’ll explore how Weirton got to this point.

Music featured in this episode:

“White” by Kevin MacLeod

“Bittersweet” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)

“Melancholy Aftersounds” by Kai Engel

What Happened to Weirton? Part 1: Living in the Aftermath

In Appalachia, we know too well the symptoms of industry in decline. However, some aspects are much more visual than others.

On March 9, I stood anxiously with a crowd of Weirton natives and former steelworkers on a hillside in Weirton, West Virginia, overlooking Weirton Steel’s Basic Oxygen Plant, or BOP. Thousands of people contributed to the steelmaking process in the huge structure since its construction in 1967. Now, they were offering their final goodbyes.

An implosion crew far down below sounded the one-minute warning with an airhorn. All the small talk came to a halt, and for a few moments, the gentle birdsong coming from the trees disguised the fact that everyone was bracing for a huge explosion.

Lights flashed across the rusted structure, followed by a blanketing of noise that enveloped the hillside. The BOP fell forward, unleashing a huge cloud of dust that sped towards the neighborhood below. A giant pile of sheet metal and structural beams was all that remained of what was once called ‘the Mill of the Future’.

A view of Weirton Steel’s Basic Oxygen Plant undergoing deconstruction from Route 2 in Weirton.

My dad, Burt Jennings, was there with me. He had worked in the BOP for a year in 1990, and then all over the mill as a firefighter from 1994 to 2004. He was interviewed by a reporter for WTOV9, and his voice cracked as he spoke.

“It’s really — it’s sad. It is sad,” he said. “So many good guys worked down there. So many families grew out of that mill. It’s sad — really good men and women worked in there. It’s sad for me.”

As the crowd slowly walked away, a man asked me what I was recording the implosion for. After I explained, he commented, “you noticed no one was clapping.”

What Happened to Weirton – A Five Part Series

I was somewhat of an emotional wreck the rest of the day. I even cried a few times. But a year ago, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought. It wasn’t until after I started this project that I found myself caring about the town. Growing up, I hated Weirton. It was a place where people always reminisced about the past, because there wasn’t much to look forward to in the present.

A cloud of dust rises from what was once Weirton Steel’s Basic Oxygen Plant.

After my parents divorced, I moved to Weirton with my mom and lived there from 2005 until I graduated from Weir High School in 2014. It wasn’t an exciting place to be a kid. There are a lot of cafes around town, but not the kind for coffee; they’re gambling joints with video lottery machines. The West Virginia Limited Video Lottery Act in 2001 allowed up to 9,000 video lottery retailers in the state, and paired with the decline of the steel industry in Weirton, these cafes provided many businesses with easy revenue. Even the old Dairy Queen was converted into a video lottery hot spot, which spurred two middle school girls to start a petition to bring back places for kids to go in the city. The most popular place for high schoolers to hang out was the Sheetz parking lot.

When the time came to go to college, I couldn’t have been more happy. I arrived at West Virginia University ready to forget everything before my freshman year of college. And for a long time, I did do just that. I enrolled in journalism classes and found myself happily removed from anything to do with the Ohio Valley.

But, as I matured, I realized there was a story behind why my childhood home faces so many struggles. The term “deindustrialization” became an obsession of mine as I studied the structural issues that led to Weirton’s blighted state.

We are not alone in our struggles; hundreds of small towns and cities across the U.S. and the world have faced the consequences that come along with the steady decline of manufacturing employment. Businesses close, populations decline, the middle class shrinks, and people are left wondering what happened to their once prosperous community. How do people cope when the economy advances and they’re left behind in the rubble? I set out to find an answer to that question.

In this five-part, personal narrative podcast, you’ll follow along with me as I discover more about my city’s steeltown past and the social and economic repercussions that played out in the area as the United States’ steel industry fell. This was a journey of self-discovery for me as I made a connection with my hometown that I never thought would be possible, and I hope you will make a connection with Weirton as well.

Music featured in this episode:

“Thoughtful” by Lee Rosevere

Fallout 76: Turning 'Almost Heaven' Into a Post-Apocalyptic Tourist Destination

Tourism Day was recognized by the West Virginia Legislature this week. In light of that, we bring you a report on a video game that tourism officials…

Tourism Day was recognized by the West Virginia Legislature this week. In light of that, we bring you a report on a video game that tourism officials believe makes a positive impact in bringing visitors to West Virginia. By now, you may have heard of Fallout 76 – the latest in the popular line of Fallout video games. It was released last fall with much fanfare by Gov. Jim Justice and the West Virginia Division of Tourism. West Virginia Public Broadcasting spoke with a local gamer, and we bring you this special look inside the video game.

John Barton is a lifelong West Virginian from Gilmer County, a husband and father of three boys, a writer, former teacher, and…an avid gamer.

Barton has written stories about the Fallout 76 video game for online news outlets like West Virginia Explorer and 100 Days in Appalachia, and he remembers the moment he saw the first Fallout 76 teaser trailer last spring.

“First you hear, ‘almost heaven, West Virginia,’ and ‘take me home, country roads’ just coming through, and everybody’s like, ‘Oh, is it in West Virginia?’ Whereas, everybody from West Virginia’s going, ‘Oh my god, it’s in West Virginia!’ cause where else are you gonna play that from?” he said. “So, there [was] a lot of speculation happening on the internet, but everybody local was like, ‘Did they base this here, really?’”

It was officially confirmed at the 2018 Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, that the game would be taking place in West Virginia and be a prequel to the family of Fallout video games that started in the late 1990s.

The Fallout gaming universe is set in post-apocalyptic times with cyberpunk and retro futuristic art and style. The storyline for Fallout 76 takes place 25 years after nuclear war consumes the United States, and the goal of the game is to reclaim the land – starting with West Virginia.

Fallout 76 is the first in the series to be played entirely online and alongside other players in real time. It also features the largest in-game map ever seen in a Fallout video game. That map features six expansive regions based on actual West Virginia landmarks, towns, and history.

Barton said developers did an amazing job gathering both big and small details about West Virginia history and current events, and then adding a science fiction twist.

Watch the television broadcast of this story as it aired on “The Legislature Today.”

“There are little popups and mentions of things, and just stories that tie into it. The super mutants popping up, and their story about how West Tech had poisoned a water supply in an experiment near Huntersville; sounds an awful lot like the Freedom Industry spill, and you see current events tied into it that way,” Barton explained. “[The game] mentions Charleston and describes Charleston as being where a lot of labor protests took place, and you start wondering if they were talking about unions from long ago, or the teacher strike from this past year.”

There are nods to the Mine Wars and coal mining.

The New River Gorge Bridge and several other W.Va. landmarks appear in Fallout 76.

Landmarks like the Capitol building, John Brown’s Fort, the Chester teapot, West Virginia University’s Woodburn Hall, the Greenbrier Resort, and the Hutte restaurant in Helvetia all make an appearance.

Players can explore towns like Charleston, Beckley, and Harpers Ferry.

There are monsters in the game pulled straight out of West Virginia folklore, such as the Flatwoods and Grafton monsters, and even the Mothman.

The Mothman and many of West Virginia’s monsters appear in Fallout 76.

“You had to get the state on a deep personal level,” Bartons said. “There were things that had to make sense to you in order to try to portray that view of West Virginia; that’s what got my interest.”

The game also caught the interest of Gov. Jim Justice who announced in October a partnership between West Virginia Tourism and developers of the game, Bethesda Game Studios, headquartered in Maryland, as a way to both promote the game and also promote the state.

The West Virginia Tourism Office held events leading up to the game’s launch in November. The Office has released articles online pointing out landmarks, lore, and they created an interactive map of in-game locations.

Preparing for @Fallout #ReclamationDay? We’ve been working with @Bethesda to bring you an exclusive map of all real-world locations in #AlmostHeaven! It’s time to emerge. #Fallout76 https://t.co/UWshkIHB78

— West Virginia Tourism (@WVtourism) November 14, 2018

But since the game’s release, reviews have been mixed. Many players have cited major glitches, issues with game mechanics, and have even argued the game is boring and has no storyline. Fallout 76 even dropped in price due to poor ratings.

Bethesda Game Studios has released statements saying they are committed to improving the game going forward through system updates and bug fixes. The latest update was on Feb. 19.

Today’s #Fallout76 patch brings a STASH increase, changes to Scorchbeasts, design changes and more! Full patch notes can be found here:https://t.co/qDvp97otjf pic.twitter.com/PlIKEGrXl8

— Fallout (@Fallout) February 19, 2019

But many West Virginia gamers, like John Barton, still argue positively for the game – for its beauty, attention to detail and state history, and its expansive map, believing the game showcases West Virginia in a unique, and never before seen way.

John Barton has written about Fallout 76 for WV Explorer and 100 Days in Appalachia. He and his wife, Christal, run a nonprofit called WV Autism, where they work to help children with autism spectrum disorder improve social skills through gaming. He and his family live in Milton.