Youngstown's Image

[Rick Rowlands]

Thank you!  I feel so strongly about this issue that for the past fourteen years I've been building a museum where Youngstown's manufacturing might will be properly remembered and memorialized.  It may finally open in another year or two. 

www.todengine.org

[Toymaker]

This is what I said in a letter to the editor last night:

I am a local historian, and it strikes me as odd that as far as many of our residents are concerned our area's history began on a Monday in September, 1977.

Before that day our community did not have an identity crisis. On the contrary, the Mahoning Valley existed on this planet to do one thing, and that was to make steel. We did it so well that a group of Youngstowners created a company that grew to become the fourth largest steel producer in the United States in the 1920s. Our own grandfathers and great grandfathers worked for companies such as William B. Pollock, United Engineering and McKay Machine inventing, designing and building the steelmaking machinery that was critically needed all over the world to smelt, roll and forge steel products. Our valley was a place where if it could be dreamed, it could be built! Built by the trainload, day after day, decade after decade. It is this legacy that should be remembered and celebrated.

If you want to study our past, it would do us good to set aside the last thirty years and study the time period from 1846 until 1977. You will learn that the people of Youngstown were ambitious, intelligent, motivated people who could turn mere rocks into bridges, buildings and automobiles. Youngstowners were fearless, unafraid to handle hundreds of tons of 2800 degree molten steel at a time. We did not let anything stand in our way when there were important things to be accomplished.

When the industry left Youngstown it left us with an identity crisis. We put all of our blood, sweat and tears into making steel and did not know what to do when we were no longer needed to make steel. Over the past three decades it has been a long road toward finding what our new purpose should be. But we are finding that new purpose as each of us individually pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, harnesses that deep down Youngstown "Can Do" attitude and creates our own new purpose for being.

Perhaps we need to start thinking of our past as something to be proud of instead of something to cry in our beer about.

WOW! How excellent. This should scroll up the TV screen every night (perhaps in a shorter form) to remind the old and teach the young. Youngstown (and Ohio) was "a place to find a job" in the 1970s and earlier. Be it steel or autos. That mindset carried on for decades as work was always a birthright. It is slowly changing by necessity, but Ohio needs to do more in supporting entrepreneurs and small business. Y'town, Cleveland, and all of Ohio has a lot to promote and be proud of, current and past. But Ohio and its cities do a poor job of promoting themselves. It doesn't take much to influence people's thoughts, good or bad. There's alot of good people can focus on.

[Towntalk]

And the congregation said Amen. I couldn't have said it better.

[Rick Rowlands]

This is what I said in a letter to the editor last night:

I am a local historian, and it strikes me as odd that as far as many of our residents are concerned our area's history began on a Monday in September, 1977.

Before that day our community did not have an identity crisis. On the contrary, the Mahoning Valley existed on this planet to do one thing, and that was to make steel. We did it so well that a group of Youngstowners created a company that grew to become the fourth largest steel producer in the United States in the 1920s. Our own grandfathers and great grandfathers worked for companies such as William B. Pollock, United Engineering and McKay Machine inventing, designing and building the steelmaking machinery that was critically needed all over the world to smelt, roll and forge steel products. Our valley was a place where if it could be dreamed, it could be built! Built by the trainload, day after day, decade after decade. It is this legacy that should be remembered and celebrated.

If you want to study our past, it would do us good to set aside the last thirty years and study the time period from 1846 until 1977. You will learn that the people of Youngstown were ambitious, intelligent, motivated people who could turn mere rocks into bridges, buildings and automobiles. Youngstowners were fearless, unafraid to handle hundreds of tons of 2800 degree molten steel at a time. We did not let anything stand in our way when there were important things to be accomplished.

When the industry left Youngstown it left us with an identity crisis. We put all of our blood, sweat and tears into making steel and did not know what to do when we were no longer needed to make steel. Over the past three decades it has been a long road toward finding what our new purpose should be. But we are finding that new purpose as each of us individually pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, harnesses that deep down Youngstown "Can Do" attitude and creates our own new purpose for being.

Perhaps we need to start thinking of our past as something to be proud of instead of something to cry in our beer about.

[Towntalk]

Youngstown's Image

http://www.vindy.com/news/2009/feb/08/who-or-what-creating-our-reflection/

What say you?