The one that I was the most criticized for was Voices from a Steel Town. It was 1983, and ET is shut down for a while. They laid off 5,000 people. I was interviewing people about the community.
People came up with so many reasons why it collapsed. The mill was just a small part of it. The parkway going to Monroeville, from racism, to people from the GI bill building homes elsewhere, it was so complicated. At that time everyone just wanted to blame US Steel for it and it just wasn’t the case.
Even now when they talk about Braddock being affected by the collapse of the steel industry, if all the mills were going full blast, this town would still be the same. It would make no difference.
Fall 1980 Tony Buba 2009 1:00
If you go back like in the 50’s, there’s a big article in the paper, the football team had won 60 games in a row. It’s always the same crap about football. Its the heart and soul of revitalization.
This team had won 60 games in a row. I was a junior in high school. It was 1960 or something. Sports Illustrated did this big spread on it. Everybody got pissed off at Sports Illustrated because it was talking about these old clapboard houses in this decaying town, the football team is the only thing of hope.
It was someone from the outside coming and looking in. The housing was always poor, the row houses, a lot of clapboard housing. The housing was never great.
They started tearing the housing down in the 1940’s. You read stuff about it, there was a lot of outdoor plumbing then, outhouses and no running water. In the rowhouses.
A number of buildings, on close inspection - the way the pipes were run, or the way the gas lines were run, everything’s outside, and they are easily stripped, easily dismantled. Easily put up and easily taken apart.
Even as a kid, there was a lot of fires. We used to go in, after a fire, the stores had burned down. I never thought of it as looting, I didn’t know it was like -
Were you a looter, Mr. Buba?
It would be at night with the flashlights, and we would walk around and try to find something that still might be salvageable.
People look for blame because its easier.
I grew up in a town in Wisconsin in an area along a river. The Fox river where I grew up is one of two rivers in the northern hempisphere that flows from south to north. The other one is - (pause)
(said together) The Monongahela. (laughter)
On the Fox River were all of these paper mills.
There’s a nice smell.
I think another mill is closing this year in Kimberly.
Is it Kimberly-Clark?
Kimberly-Clark is one of them. There’s Kimberly-Clark and Wausau Papers and James River Paper and Appleton, which use to be Appleton Papers.
That would be Appleton, in Appleton Wisconsin.
That’s where I’m from.
Rocky Blier.
Yeah. He went to Appleton West.
I interviewed Rocky Blier and his family.
He’s still a hero. The football’s really big. Vince Lombardi. Packers.
For the people who worked in the mills, there were other areas to find employment. There was other employment, and there was a really strong public school system available.
There was always a secret pact between the people working in the mills and the mills themselves. Like you were doing this demanding physical labor but you were paid a ton of money to do that.
The social contract between them.
Yeah. The thing that amazed me about looking at Pittsburgh was the way that the mills broke that contract repeatedly. That’s why there’s such deep emotional stuff going on in the community, because its that pact that was messed with. That’s where a lot of the blame comes from, I think. People aren’t even aware that they bought into that relationship, and there’s all that public trust that was broken.
There was that social contract between - You work for us, we’ll give you a lifetime job, a decent pension, and you’ll be secure. If your kid wants a job, he can come work, too.
And that was an era in the 80’s ...
