Persistence of Memory

The look and feel of early childhood memories is gauzy and unfocused, as if one was looking down at them through a couple feet of clean water. Nevertheless, those earliest recalled events, sights, sounds, and smells stay with us in a way later memories never can. They formed our first impression of the world we're in.

It's a world of pain and terror, but it's also the only place we know of where the sun shines.

My very earliest memory is of my mother holding me up to the window in one of the upstairs bedrooms of our house at 150 West Glenaven Avenue in Youngstown Ohio, so I could see the snow falling. This would have been in about 1946, and I don't think we'd been living there very long. My dad would have been just returned from Germany for a little over a year.

The snow fell clean and white, but after it had been on the ground a couple hours it looked like salt and pepper. Youngstown was a dirty, gritty industrial town with huge steel mills. Snowfalls were frequent in the winter, but sootfalls were constant, so by the time the snow formed a crust it was covered with little black specks.

One day, early in the summer of 1948, I sat alone in my back yard and watched a noisy little plane flying low in loops and circles, leaving a trail of smoke. I found my mother and told her, "There's an airplane writing something." She came out and watched as the pilot formed the words "Pepsi Cola" on the pristine blue background, then jauntily flew off. That was a now extinct form of advertising called skywriting.

Our block of Glenaven was paved with bricks, which made for a rough ride. Three times a week the milk truck bumped slowly down the street, and the milkman, dressed in white pants, white shirt, and white hat, left milk, eggs, and cottage cheese at the door. Sometimes a little Jewish man pushing a huge millstone on wooden wheels came down the sidewalk, making a strange, shrill cry. He sharpened people's knives.

There was no television. My parents and I sat at the kitchen table after dinner, listening to radio dramas on a little wooden Crosley unit. It was more fun than you might think.

The population of Youngstown was about 150 thousand then. It's about half that now. The steel mills are all closed and the city has become a doughnut, composed of a rotted out core surrounded by thriving suburbs. The average household income is 24 thousand a year, and the average home sells for 41 thousand.

When I drove to the site of my old house in 1987 there was nothing left of it but a hole in the ground. The neighborhood looked to be composed mostly of crack houses. The brick street had been paved with asphalt, and the huge maple tree that had stood in front of the house was gone. Memories persist, but my childhood world was gone.

But I'll always remember the power and awesome, sinister grandeur of the mills at night. We often drove past those black and ominous gods of industry and commerce after dark, just for something to do, and the huge smelting fires, like something out of a Hieronymous Bosch landscape, the glow of the red-hot ingots coming out of the furnace, the flash and sparks of the molten metal being poured, the shrieking and groaning protests of the machinery, will always be with me.

Grass grows and animals make their homes in the megalithic ruins of Youngstown Sheet and Tube. Industrial America is gone the way of the dodo and the Phoenician Empire. This is not the same world I was born into. Life is not all that short after all.