Today Adam and I attended a car show in Ritter Park in Huntington. He was most excited by the Dodge Viper (his favorite car), but I used the day to teach him a little about the industrial history of the city.
We passed some cars from the 1940s and 1950s. I pointed out the gaudy chrome excess on the 50s cars, and I showed him a chrome-plated steel bumper. I said we used to have a factory here in town that made those things. Workers put the chrome on the bumper. But as carmakers got away from steel bumpers for various reasons, the factory had less and less work. Its final customer was Chrysler, and that contract ended in the early 1980s, so the plant shut down.
Having said all that today, this evening I read a piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by reporter (and my former co-worker here in Huntington) Diana Nelson Jones. It was about how people up there are trying to save what they can of the steel works that made the city prosperous and famous.
It's a good read. As I read it, I remembered all my fleeting thoughts about how few people are interested in the industrial history of the Ohio Valley. Oh, we have our pioneer days when people gather to make apple butter, but we have precious few museums devoted to the old smokestack factories that provided the means to put beans on our tables.
It's like that car show. I was most interested in the Dodge Dart, the 1979 Ford pickup, the '79 Dodge Aspen, the Chevy station wagon and other cars that families used in my lifetime. Half the cars there were '60s Camaros and Mustangs, but the family cars that few people are interested in preserving were what I wanted to see.
I remember Houdaille Industries and the Owens-Illinois glass bottle factory in Huntington, W.Va. And the ACF plant, which made covered hopper railroad cars. In Ironton, Ohio, I remember the Dayton Malleable plant that made cast iron parts. There are many more that will be forgotten because little of them is being preserved, at least as far as people like me know.
So here's praise to the people in Pittsburgh who work to retain as much memory as they can of the old steel works.
