About three out of every five pregnant women who came to the hospital for prenatal care screened positive for cocaine, opiates, meth, Xanax. And those were just the women who came for prenatal care—a lot of young women didn’t even bother. Many babies were born addicted. When they were, they often wound up in foster care or with relatives.
“What was I going to do, let the state take them?” one unmarried woman on the west side—herself only marginally employed at a social service agency—said to me as a way of explaining how she had come to be raising a relative’s children in addition to her own.
About half of Lancaster City School District students, and three-quarters of children on the west side, were eligible for free or reduced-cost lunches, though many didn’t accept them because they didn’t want to be seen taking free food. Almost half—44 percent—of Lancaster households led by a single woman lived in poverty. Of those single female households, 57 percent with one or more related children were living in poverty; the figure was 80 percent for single mothers living with a child under five. The overall poverty rate of all families—married, single, cohabitating—with children under five was over 38 percent. The median household income was $37,494. The median household income in Ohio was about $45,700. In the United States, it was $51,849.
The hospital may have been the largest employer, but many of the jobs there, like housekeeping and assistant, were low-paying. Linda had worked there for twenty-three years, she told me, and made $17.25 an hour. After health insurance and other deductions, she figured she took home $28,000 a year, give or take. She paid $550 a month to rent a small apartment in an area known for drug traffic. Really, she said, she was doing fine, because she’d managed to save $53,000 in her 401(k) plan. She was fifty-eight years old.
Another woman, Tina, served me a drink at a bar. Later that week, I ran into her in another bar, where she pulled a draft beer for me. When I asked if she worked two jobs—commonplace in Lancaster—she said, “No, three. I’m full-time at the hospital.”
Doctors, some of the best-paid hospital employees, stopped wanting to live in Lancaster. They and their families moved to Granville, a college town up the road that’s home to Denison University. Or they lived in upscale Columbus-area developments and commuted in the opposite direction from their patients. They often cited the school system to justify their reasoning, but it wasn’t just the school system.
The streets sagged, the houses sagged, people sagged. The country club went bankrupt. Three prominent men, including a longtime Lancaster doctor, Henry Hood, the husband of Lancaster Festival cofounder Eleanor, bought it as a way to save it from becoming a commuter tract-housing development.
Vape shops, tattoo studios—Lancaster was heavily inked—mattress stores, car-title-loan offices, Dollar General, Family Dollar, and other retailers to the impoverished peppered the town. Hickle’s department store had turned into Lev’s Pawn Shop.
One day, I walked into an appliance store to find the childhood friend who’d taught me how to shoot BBs into plastic soldiers. His forefathers started in Lancaster retail a hundred years back. His father ran the place. His son worked there, too. He’d lived in Chicago for a while but had returned to Lancaster because his family was there, the store was there—all that tradition. After a hug and a moment or two of reminiscing, he looked down at the floor, sighed, and said, “It’s like everybody is just so discouraged.”
The mayor’s wife, Deb Smith, referred to the Lancaster story, the story Forbes told and the story kids used to learn, and said, “The mythology is so persistent and so deep in the culture, in families here, that the reality of this community—more people in poverty, away from opportunities that are the core of that mythology—creates immense fear and distress in those who have not fled. And when you are fearful, you become extremely defensive.”
Defensiveness manifested itself in denial or in a chasm of wrathful division mirroring the country’s own. When a developer named Leonard Gorsuch announced a plan to build Pearl House, a downtown residential facility for recovering addicts and their children, his daughter, Jennifer Walters, who spearheaded the project, received death threats.
Walters understood the vitriol. She’d opened a wound many wished would stay closed. Several years before, Lancaster’s medical, law enforcement, and judicial leadership produced a publicity campaign to alert the town and the rest of the state about the creeping opiate addiction. Since then, many, including some of those same leaders, had concluded that the effort had backfired by turning Lancaster into the easy exemplar of the problem. Now, once again, Lancaster wanted to avoid eye contact with its Carlys and Marks. Some, echoing the way many felt about Anchor Hocking, said they wanted heroin addicts to just die already and get it over with so Lancaster would be free of them.
It wasn’t just addicts. Though Lancaster retained a reservoir of goodwill for the disadvantaged, the unwell, the physically and mentally challenged, many others tried to ignore the town’s poor and ill-educated.
Lancaster still had a couple of nice neighborhoods, and if you lived in one, you never had to confront the erosion. Walters didn’t see it until she served on a federal jury in Columbus. It was a drug case. Afterwards, she traveled with a friend, a local judge named Patrick Harris. She told him about her jury duty, and what she’d learned about how the system of drug distribution operated in the region, including Lancaster.
“And he looked at me and goes, ‘Has your head been in the sand?’ But if you focus on your own career, your own home, you don’t have to see things if you don’t want to. He said, ‘Come to my court one Wednesday.’ So I show up, and I’m like, ‘Holy Crap! Where did all these people come from?’”
Many refused to believe Lancaster natives—multigenerational families—could be part of the trouble. Surely, outsiders must have discovered that Lancaster was an easy touch for free food, Housing and Urban Development–subsidized apartments, welfare. The theory relied on the improbable notion that ne’er-do-wells in Dayton, Cleveland, Columbus, and points east into West Virginia and Pennsylvania looked at a map of the United States and—instead of California, Florida, or any of a hundred other towns in Ohio—decided that Lancaster was the freeloader Shangri-la they’d been looking for.
A significant faction within Lancaster lost its moderate conservatism. Stoked by cable news, Internet videos, and right-wing politicians, they insisted that most of Lancaster’s problems had to be the natural product of an over-generous social service system that coddled lazy, irresponsible people.
How else to explain all the “Obama phones” those supposedly poor people carried around? they asked, referring to Lifeline, the subsidized telephone program that was created not by Obama’s administration but by Reagan’s. The program was expanded by George W. Bush to include cell phones so the poor could have phone service.
Back in the 1980s, Community Action, a social service agency based at the far eastern edge of town on Route 22, in what used to be the old county children’s home for orphans, received about two hundred requests for food packages per month. The number was now over two thousand per month. The agency also offered a limited number of supportive housing units. There was a waiting list.
Kellie Ailes, the Community Action executive director, often heard the narrative about lazy, irresponsible outsiders who could somehow afford lots of tattoos and cell phones. When I repeated it to her, she shook her head. “The people who come to us do not want public assistance,” she said. “They feel shame when they come.” When she was asked by a city councilman if the people to be helped by a planned subsidized housing project were locals, she researched the question and found that “virtually all” were from Fairfield County zip codes, mostly from the city of Lancaster.
“From the time Plant 2 closed, people lost jobs, lost homes, lost families, lost everything,” she told me. “And we worked with a bunch of guys from Stuck Mold” when it closed after the Newell takeover. She recalled a man she helped who’d lost his house. Then his wife left him
. He could work but had some cognitive limitations. In the past, she said, he could have found a place at Anchor Hocking, but no more.
Ailes’s grandfather had been a foreman in the Anchor Hocking furnace room. He also served as president of the Lancaster Board of Education. Her father was a machinist in Plant 1. She was as Lancaster as it was possible to be. But when the Pearl House debate raged, she had to put her job on the line to support it. Some around town hadn’t yet forgotten. She’d made enemies.
Lancaster’s water was still not fluoridated, she pointed out, because a few die-hard anti-government conspiracy theorists remained convinced that fluoridation was a nefarious plot.
“They vote against their own self-interest!” Rosemary Hajost exclaimed to me one afternoon. Many with money preferred the low-tax mantra and conservative social-issue stances of the Republicans. Many union and working-class Democrats didn’t vote, and some who did viewed the modern party’s social-issues agenda—such as gay and transgender rights—as an attempt to impose an exotic order. Joe Boyer pasted a John Kerry sticker around a pole in his garage and an NRA sticker on his truck. He leaned Democrat but sometimes voted Republican because he worried that Democrats wanted his guns.
“I was on the school board,” Hajost continued. “And except for the first year, we were cutting and cutting and cutting. Over a hundred teachers out.” She worried that one day the wealthy would wake up to find a rabble in the streets. “People say that could never happen, but people thought we would never lose Anchor Hocking.” She said that, among her friends, “I don’t talk about the fact I voted for Obama.”
Even as many condemned both federal and state government programs and government spending, they ignored the fact that their town owed many of the jobs it had to both. Medicaid and Medicare supplied over 60 percent of the hospital’s income. The public schools were the second-largest employer in town. Anchor Hocking was third.
The absence of the critical mass of sophisticated leaders and their spouses that Lancaster once enjoyed left local politics to well-meaning but amateurish dogmatists. Once sedate city council meetings turned angry. In addition to the building of Pearl House, other issues, such as where to place a new, larger county jail, split the council into bungling, combative, factions. Endless arguments over seemingly minor issues—downtown parking dominated meeting agendas—sidetracked members from the city’s bigger problems. The majority remained captured by an ultra-conservative, anti-tax philosophy that prevented them from raising funds to repair the crumbling streets or challenging the ridiculous ban on fluoridated water, even as their pro-business bias blinded them to how Newell and Cerberus picked their pockets.
Some, supported by gadfly citizens, were convinced that Gorsuch secretly orchestrated a cabal that ran the town and foisted low-income Section 8 housing on Lancaster. Nobody ever presented any evidence (“I’m not sure I can trust you,” one citizen told me after swearing he had proof, then reneging on his offer to show it), but they were convinced the low-income housing, not the economy, was responsible for the undesirable “outsiders.”
There was real corruption, though. In September 2014, the county clerk of courts, Deborah Smalley, a Republican, was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for misusing nearly $40,000 of public money and for intimidating employees to campaign for her election. Her conviction, coming after former sheriff DeMastry’s in 2002 and former judge McAuliffe’s in 2004, was yet another black mark on Lancaster’s reputation.
Others blamed a generalized immorality, a breakdown of old restrictions and codes: all those young single mothers and “baby daddies.” All that drug use. An aversion to hard work. But they attributed these trends to “the media” or liberalism, not the decades of lousy education, economic collapse, and the minimum-wage and barely-above-minimum-wage dead-end jobs that replaced factory work.
Some responded by retreating into the comforting certainty of fundamentalist Christianity. As membership at Nancy Frick’s beloved St. John’s Episcopal declined, along with that at other mainline Protestant—and Catholic—churches, membership boomed at Fairfield Christian. (Brian Gossett referred to the big, modern campus on Lancaster’s northwest edge as “Fort God.”) Its affiliated school, Fairfield Christian Academy, founded in 1998, enrolled about five hundred students, making it by far the largest private school in the county. Every Sunday, another ministry, Crossroads.TV, packed a couple hundred worshippers into a big space in the River Valley Mall vacated by an out-of-business store and broadcast its rock-’n’-roll-and-tattoos brand of evangelism on cable TV.
The town had approved that small shopping center, located by the banks of the Hocking, north up Memorial Drive, in the wake of the Plant 2 closing, hoping it would bring in some taxes. When it opened in 1987, just as Newell took over Anchor Hocking and closed the downtown headquarters, the mall gut-punched the downtown merchants for the second time. Almost twenty years later, there were days you could shoot a cannon down the mall’s main artery from Dick’s Sporting Goods to the Sears and be pretty sure you wouldn’t hit anybody.
Like Carly, who trumpeted her will to stop smoking while pumping heroin into her veins, many in Lancaster, at least many over fifty, concluded that negativity, not reality, was the enemy. People were discouraged, but they were sick of being discouraged, sick of talking about drugs, sick of fretting over jobs, sick of bad news. The new year, 2015, was going to be the year it all turned around.
The mayor, the few remaining service clubs, and an organization promoting a rejuvenated downtown, called Destination Downtown Lancaster, stressed the truth, though it was obvious: “We’re no worse off than a lot of other places.” Some—likely many—towns were indeed worse off than Lancaster, but setting such a low bar had never been the Lancaster way. Lancaster had always thought of itself as exceptionally wonderful.
Though the optimism seemed forced, it wasn’t entirely unjustified. After pointing out the addition of a couple of new restaurants and the two downtown buildings being restored—the Mithoff and the Columbian, which was being turned into a court building—most talked up the new schools. After years of starving them, Lancaster had narrowly passed a convoluted tax levy engineered to convince voters that Lancaster’s upper class would be squeezed the hardest. The new money would have been nowhere near enough, but the state government kicked in funds—nobody seemed to object to that government spending—and now five new elementary schools were either on the drawing board or under construction.
When the Buckeyes romped over Oregon, 42–20, on Monday, January 12, Lancaster celebrated. Once again, the title would return to where everyone knew it rightfully belonged. For a moment, echoes from the era of legendary coach Woody Hayes bounced around town. Many still remembered when Lancaster sent quarterback Rex Kern to Hayes. Kern was the son and the nephew of barbers; Uncle Bud ran the shop in the basement of the hotel. When Hayes and Kern beat O. J. Simpson and those other flashy Californians from USC in the 1969 Rose Bowl, “li’l ol’ Lancaster” claimed the victory as its own.
This win wasn’t quite as sweet, but it seemed to be a portent. The day after the game, the board of the Lancaster Festival announced more good news. Joe Piccolo, a northern Ohio native who’d been working at the Aspen Music Festival, in Colorado, was hired as executive director. Aspen was big-time, yet Piccolo talked about how excited he was to come to Lancaster.
The town and the festival’s board felt lucky to get him. There had been anger over the firing of the previous director, Lou Ross. Nobody used the word “fired”—everyone thanked everyone else for years of service, expressing mutual best wishes—but Ross had been fired and he was sore about it.
The festival was nearly broke; the whole enterprise seemed a little stale. The blame fell on Ross, and for him that was the worst part. He’d worked like a mule, year after year, coordinating the volunteers, helping set up stages, paying bills, and booking talent. In the weeks before each festival, he lived on junk food and little sleep.
The whole point of the festi
val was to showcase the Lancaster Festival Orchestra by having it play with whatever musical group or singer agreed to headline. That was what made the Lancaster Festival different from a dozen other summertime music and arts fests around the region. The orchestra was Lancaster’s own. The first two festivals featured the Columbus Symphony, but every year since, for two weeks in July, the festival had formed an ad hoc orchestra made up of musicians from Chicago, Columbus, Cleveland, New York, Portland, St. Louis—even Taipei—under maestro Gary Sheldon, now the principal conductor of the Miami City Ballet orchestra. Some musicians had been coming for more than twenty years. They stayed with families and ate at the Pink Cricket. They performed chamber concerts around town. And on the two Saturday nights, on a stage set up by a creek fronted by a hill that formed a natural grassy amphitheater behind the Ohio University branch, they joined the likes of the Beach Boys, Ben Vereen, and Aretha Franklin in what amounted to Lancaster’s backyard party.
Seeing the famous-but-faded was fine back in the 1980s and ’90s, but the novelty had worn off. Young people wanted music that was very different from that favored by the old guard left over from Lancaster’s glory days. But the old guard were the only people who could afford to make donations and pay for catered tables up by the stage, instead of bringing picnic baskets and a blanket to spread out on the hillside. Most people loved the festival, and many said it was the best thing about Lancaster. But there were gripes that Ross never booked Taylor Swift or that guy on the show—what’s his name—Blake Shelton. He tried his best to book acts people wanted to see (and would pay to see), but it was never easy. He explained over and over that the festival’s budget couldn’t come close to paying Taylor Swift’s fees.
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