Now what? More than ever, that is the Aliquippa question.
The old ones worry. Not about themselves: They had their run, the men who returned from World War II into a world of high wages and uniquely leveraged union muscle, the women who swept the porches of homes their forebears could never buy. What’s lost can’t hurt them now. No, the old ones worry about their kids who are well beyond being kids, the ones whose drifting lives and careers over the last thirty years reveal just how vital the vanished factory, mill, and mine were to America’s idea of itself.
Nobody grew up with the dream to work such jobs. They were filthy, boring, exhausting grinds, a drain on health, a daily assault on the senses. Yet the value of a J&L becomes more apparent with each fleeing decade, even as the idea that the old industrial model can never return hardens into orthodoxy. Technology made manpower quaint: In 1980, it took 399,000 American steelworkers to produce 101 million tons of raw steel; in 2011, 97,000 American steelworkers produced 86.2 million tons. Manufacturing’s share of U.S. Gross Domestic Product is now half—22.7 percent to 11.9 percent—of what it was in 1970. The remaining “blue-collar” jobs require more education, training, computer skills. The days when a thick accent and a set of calloused hands were enough to find high-paying, secure employment are history.
“Those types of jobs—if they exist at all—are a much smaller part of the economy,” said University of Pittsburgh labor economist Chris Briem. “And those jobs aren’t coming back.”
Still, it’s not enough to say that American big industry built the bridges and rails that propelled the greatest economy in history, the tanks and battleships that beat Hitler and Tojo and won the Cold War, the skyscrapers that signified modern ambition and wealth. The more mundane fact is that places like J&L also served as social catch basins, places where those lacking academic skill or interest could fix a toe into the American flank and start climbing. J&L gave the Aliquippa workingman dignity—not to mention income enough to own a home, raise a family, take a paid vacation—and thus a stake, like that engendered in the rich and educated, in keeping the entire system humming.
Today’s low-wage, low-security service industry jobs offer little choice—much less pride—to the unskilled. The forked road offering careers in cut potatoes or crack, McDonald’s or a meth lab, have led an increasingly dispossessed lower middle class off the American grid and into the wild. “I always think about: if the mill was still going my second son would’ve been satisfied,” said Gilda Letteri. Her son, Bobby, born in ’59, wasn’t the student that his siblings were. He tried college for two years, at nearby California University of Pennsylvania, worked J&L for one, 1979, and then headed up to Bucks County. He’s in his mid-fifties now, and still renting.
“There was nothing wrong with him, but he was one of these young boys who was very impetuous and did everything he wasn’t supposed to do,” she said. “And today—I still wish—if the mill was there, or some sort of factory, he would be fine. He’s a carpenter now.
“Last year he didn’t work very much at all. This year he’s working. He’s building a house with a contract, but no stability for him. I’m always on his back about this. There’s another young man on our street, and the mother always tells me—now he has a job, he’s working here and lives with his parents, but he’s also fifty-two—the same thing. If J&L was here, he would have his own home and be different than he is now.”
Perhaps. But for decades now, there has been an oft-floated notion that most Americans—no matter their lack of skill—simply find menial labor beneath them. Hence the need for, say, illegal Mexican immigrants: They do the jobs no one else will. That this is actually a logical by-product of the American Dream doesn’t make it easy to discuss on the stump or at 4th of July celebrations. Who wants to be the lone voice saying that the nation’s hallowed vision of itself, almost by design, makes each succeeding generation more prideful, less resourceful, lazier?
“You came to the country with a brown bag with your clothes in it, and the only thing you had in terms of asset was your body,” Beaver County developer C. J. “Chuck” Betters said. “It’s so vivid to me: each generation wanted to make it better for their kid, to the point where we’re sitting today—in a country that doesn’t know how to use a shovel. Or want to.
“I’m more of that generation than today’s. I dug so many ditches with picks and shovels that people wouldn’t believe it. I know how long it would take me to dig a ditch, put a gas line in. I look at guys with a shovel today, I want to fuckin’ pick it up and beat ’em over the head with it.”
Even Aliquippa’s ironfisted avatar of the glory days, Mike Ditka—secure in his restaurants and TV work—admits to helplessness. Long before his own grown sons, Mike and Mark, began piling up drunk-driving arrests in Illinois, he’d sensed them being buffeted by the values of a flashy, leverage-as-you-go economy. “I’ve had a big house and a lot of cars, have a few hobbies like that,” Ditka said. “But the only time you’re a success is when you’re happy and know it. I’m pretty happy right now. I don’t owe anybody anything. Our country is stupid because of the credit-card thing and if you get caught up in that shit, you’re going to die. I’ve got kids that’re caught up in it up to their ass.
“Debt, mortgages: everybody has to have one. I mean, that was the American Dream: put so much down, buy a house. Hello! After a while some guy’s unemployed. It’s not his fault all the time, but there’s no sympathy from society. You’re caught in a trap and you can’t get out and it’s terrible.”
Still, Ditka and his generation can’t do much about it now. They’re on the fade, losing day by day the energy needed to hector, guide, take a public stand. Once, in 2004, Ditka mulled running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. That kind of ambition is gone. He works TV mostly, bringing gruff gravitas to NFL broadcasts, but even his famed competitive fire is flickering.
Soon Ditka’s ninety-three-year-old mother, Charlotte, would be moving out of the old house in Linmar and into a nursing home in Beaver. Soon, she would die. “You see her getting all the IV shit and all that: it’s terrible,” he said. Then he shrugged. “But I’m going to go through it, too.”
Such is the mean secret of progress: it depends on the self-delusion of youth, the sense that, somehow, all striving and achievement—any kind of victory—will somehow hold death at bay. Once that goes and the truth is accepted, there’s no stopping the air from leaving the balloon. The only shock is that it doesn’t pain Iron Mike to admit as much: to admit he doesn’t care about winning anymore.
“You know what it is? It’s apathy,” Ditka said. “You don’t give a shit. Because it’s not going to define me at this point. When I was growing up, I thought it would define me. I don’t compete on TV to be the best; I say what I think I should say and that’s it.
“Up until a couple years ago I was a pretty good golfer, and I was really competitive; I really wanted to win. But now? I want to play. If I win, fine; if I don’t, that’s fine, too. I play cards: same thing. It doesn’t bother me a bit. I laugh now. I don’t miss it. You’ll find out. When apathy sets in, you don’t give a damn. And it’s setting in.”
A company town without a company is like a man past his prime; both become hollowed, age faster, without the regenerating charge of daily purpose. Such has been the Rust Belt affliction for the past forty years, but large urban economies like Pittsburgh at least had the scale and diversified infrastructure that help make reinvention possible. “Aliquippa’s in a weird place: it’s not the center of the region, it’s not the city, it’s not quite rural,” Briem said. “What is the competitiveness of a lot of towns that used to have a reason for being that don’t anymore?”
Ditka’s heirs, meanwhile, have scattered. Unlike Iron Mike, they left Aliquippa unburdened by golden-age memories; the town gave them toughness and fuel, they know, but ultimately it was a place to escape. Sean Gilbert lives in North Carolina, Ty Law in Florida, and Darrelle Revis in New Jersey and Florida in the off-season. They come back for weekends here and there to see family, to show that they haven’t forgotten their roots, to give kids a chance to see a local boy made good.
All have tried giving back. Gilbert started a nonprofit counseling program and construction of a Plan 11 church; Law funded a Head Start program in Plan 12, and ran a charity golf tournament and basketball game to raise cash for school supplies and computers; Revis holds an occasional football camp, funneled NFL-style Nike uniforms to the Quips program. But all are wary of pleas to refurbish The Pit or simply drop masses of money on the town because, first of all, no one knows whether Aliquippa High and the need for a football field will even exist in five years. And then, there is the largest unspoken question: How much, really, do I owe this place?
Years ago, Law was stopped by an elderly lady. “What are you going to do for us here in Aliquippa, Mr. Law?” she said. “What are you going to do?”
If he had known the woman, Law says, he would’ve lit into her. “You look at it,” he said. “There wasn’t nobody out there running with me at midnight, there wasn’t nobody dealing with what I was dealing with at home. So I don’t owe you anything. I owe my grandfather. I owe my mom. Because if I was out there selling drugs and end up going to jail, what are you going to do? You going to come bail me out?
“Unfortunately, that’s the mentality for some because a select few of us made it. Even if we put all our money together, all our contracts, we cannot change the facts. We can make it look nice; we can probably go out and fix up a hundred homes around there to where they look real nice and pristine. But that’s not going to change the environment with the drugs and the fact that there ain’t no jobs. How you going to maintain it? It’s going to get right back like it was before we fixed it up.”
Revis, for his part, can’t say enough about his hometown; “I love it to the utmost,” he said. But even “utmost” has its limits. He’s got a son and a daughter being raised in Beaver Falls, and the boy is another athlete in the making. Revis has no desire to send his son back home, for seasoning or grit or anything else. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “I don’t want him in Aliquippa. If Aliquippa can pick their school up, and their coaches, and move somewhere else? Yes.”
But that is impossible. Town and team are going nowhere. Any salvation, it seems, will have to be delivered by those left behind.
The first weeks after James Moon killed D were hell. Dwan Walker careened about the emptied streets, hoping that someone would cut him off so he could slam the brakes and jump out and hit flesh, bone, feel the blood on his fists. He woke each night at the hour Diedre died, begged God to bring his sister back. For a second, a minute: Please. Just five minutes with her again. Chedda, worried, made him come by the house. His dad kept saying he heard D’s voice. “Sit quiet, son,” Chuckie said. “You don’t hear it because you still got a lot of pain.”
In November 2009, two months later, Dwan started his campaign for mayor, knocking on doors. Primary Day was still sixteen months away, but he’d finish a shift at FedEx, tug on his Quips football sweatshirt, walk until the day turned dark. He talked about his vision, passed out T-shirts: “Remember What Aliquippa Was, Knowing What Aliquippa Can Be.”
And he heard her voice clear, stepping off porches, trudging Aliquippa’s streets for twenty-two weeks straight in winter’s biting cold and the slow-coming spring. He knocked on every door in every Aliquippa neighborhood—5,100 homes in all, even in West, his opponent’s bastion. “I told you!” Dwan heard her say after each good contact. He answered by pointing at the sky.
Word filtered back to Anthony Battalini, Aliquippa’s mayor since 2003, that the kid was hustling hard. Walker was thirty-four, an ex-Quips player with no political experience. Battalini was a three-term incumbent backed by the local Democratic kingmaker, Salt Smith—former real estate agent and black Aliquippa’s most feared and connected voice, a thirty-two-year member of the Board of Education, the longtime general manager of the Municipal Water Authority, and chair of the Aliquippa Democratic Committee. Smith controlled jobs and pols alike, and Democratic governors and senators had long depended on him to deliver the town’s black vote. Aliquippa had been a Democratic stronghold since the 1930s. Nobody had ever challenged the machine’s mayoral choice—and won.
It so happened that Smith’s property backed up against Chuckie and Chedda’s place: in the 1980s, Smith would invite the Walkers over for barbecues. His parents urged Dwan to pay respects. The meeting didn’t go well. In Walker’s version, Smith told him that he had no chance of beating the machine, that he should wait his turn, work an election or two and build political capital, and only then would he deign to “give me a seat.”
“And I said, ‘I don’t want you to give me anything, Mr. Smith, because I don’t want your hands in my pocket,” Walker recalled. “‘I don’t want nobody to say I owed ’em anything, because that’s how y’all work. If I owe you something, you’re always going to have that over my head: ‘Man, you wasn’t nothing until I put you on this ticket!’
“When I said that to him, he said, ‘Mr. Walker? You can’t win. We’re a machine. We do it right.’”
Smith says he was hardly that emphatic. He says he merely told Dwan to speak to his own cousin, Aliquippa city councilwoman Lisa Walker, and learn the system: help those who came before you, and maybe you’ll get a shot. “The selfish person’s out there supporting himself,” Smith said. “People get involved, they work the election, next election there’s an opening: Who’re you going to turn to? The ones who showed the energy. That’s the way it happens.”
Neither man budged. At the end Dwan shook Salt’s hand and thanked him. “Okay, Mr. Smith,” he said. “You’re going to regret telling an Aliquippa kid he can’t win.”
More than a year later, Walker still hadn’t backed down. He convinced his twin brother Donald and a friend, Mark Delon, to run for city council on his “One Aliquippa” ticket; it didn’t seem to matter that none of them knew how to write a grant application or break down a city budget (“They’re so fucking green,” said developer Chuck Betters, “that you could dig a little hole, stick ’em in, and they’d start growing”).
Fans saw Walker screaming in the stands at football games. Most knew his story: dead and gone, D was still working for him. His love for the place that he had every right to hate seemed so obvious that it short-circuited any charge of callowness. Who could question his sincerity? The downtown had flooded twice in the past four years. The mayor’s job paid $175.42 a month, after taxes, with no health benefits. Dwan Walker was gaining traction.
In truth, that shouldn’t have been surprising. If there was one thing that Aliquippa still could be counted on to produce—and respond to—it was an against-all-odds tale. Jesse Steinfeld, James Frank, Ditka, Ty Law, and Darrelle Revis were stories the battered town kept telling itself for comfort, inspiration; Dwan Walker was just tapping in. You’re going to regret telling an Aliquippa kid he can’t win. And sure enough, just then, yet another local was pulling off an unlikely victory.
They always speak of “The Next One” in Aliquippa, but the position also casts a shadow. Because for every alum like Revis there’s a Monroe Weekley—some gun-toting wraith whose talent isn’t enough to stop him from killing or being killed, fast or slow: the next waste. The next, Man, that’s pathetic. And by 2008, Tommie Campbell had just about completed his jump from “One” to the other.
Of all of the great athletes on that ’03 state championship team, he might’ve been the most gifted. But Campbell flunked out of Pitt, lost a full scholarship after two years of missed classes, practices, and football meetings. His last-chance meeting with head coach Dave Wannstedt? Didn’t show; didn’t even call. Campbell had narcolepsy, tended to skip his medication, and never saw why the world couldn’t soften up its pesky rules, schedules, commitments. “Like a lost little boy,” he said. “I never had a plan. I just thought things were going to be handed to me.”
Such entitlement was rarely discussed on the “Next One” side of the divide. If football presented Aliquippa’s flashiest alternative to drug dealing and led to scholarships, too often its players went off ill-prepared and returned without a diploma—never mind a pro contract. Athletics might get them out, shield them for a time, but higher competition or injury exposed any weakness. And, paradoxically, successes like Ty Law and Revis could discourage those bumping up against the limits of their own skill or desire. Once a means to escape the steelworker’s fate, football had evolved into an end in itself, a promise of riches and fame that made a mere bachelor’s degree seem shabby.
“Some of our guys have been struggling,” Wytiaz said. “Everybody can’t play at Pitt, Penn State, Notre Dame, but you may be able to play at Grove City or Westminster. But they go to these places, and quite honestly it’s a step down athletically—and they can’t handle it. The kids are bright enough. There’s nothing wrong with going to Westminster, Slippery Rock, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Get your education.”
Still, if it doesn’t work out, Aliquippa—and its troubles—always welcomes them home. Josh Lay, the gifted Aliquippa quarterback who manned Pitt’s other cornerback slot during Revis’s sophomore season, the senior Revis escorted into the end zone after his blocked kick, had short stints with the New Orleans Saints and St. Louis Rams, played semipro ball, and then, in March 2011, was arrested after being stopped near Sixth Avenue in a car carrying a digital scale and thirty-one bags of marijuana. “He’s as good or better than Revis,” said longtime Quips booster John Evasovich. “But no work ethic. Had all the athletic talent you could possibly have. All of a sudden he doesn’t have a job because he doesn’t have a degree . . . so what do you do? There ain’t no mill. So you sell shit.”
The guessing game on who will end up good or bad starts early (“I guarantee you: next year three of these kids will be in jail,” Evasovich said, scanning a Quips roster; “I just don’t know which three”) and can finish late. Some surefire successes curdle: Jonathan Baldwin became a first-round draft pick in 2011, signed a $7.5 million contract with the Kansas City Chiefs with a signing bonus of $3.9 million, but was out of the league within three years because of a lax work ethic, inconsistency, injury. And some surefire failures, at the last minute, reverse course.
After sleepwalking his way out of Pitt, Tommie Campbell played the ’07 season at Division II Edinboro and then washed out of there, too, all the way back to his mother’s couch in Plan 12. He started smoking, drinking, dropped twenty-five pounds, frittered away a year on PlayStation. One night Tommie rushed in, shaken from a run up to Valley Terrace. “He was over some girl’s house and they stuck a gun to his head,” said his mother, Della Rae. “They thought Tommie had money and wanted to stick him up because he was delivering, you know, back and forth. They put the gun to his head and it jammed. Tommie had tears coming down his face. He just knew that was going to be his last thing, right there.”
Campbell won’t confirm the details, but admitted, “It was a real scary moment, man. If that had never happened to me, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. I got scared straight, you could say.”
No. Fear was only half the antidote. Next came shame: he was twenty-two years old with two sons, no future, no job. He tried to enlist in the Marines, but a slew of unpaid speeding tickets—$2,000 worth—ended that. He stayed on the couch, scared to go out and face people asking what the hell he was doing with his life.
A girlfriend’s connection finally landed Campbell one of the only positions he was qualified for: janitor, at Pittsburgh International Airport’s USAir terminal. His mom had been a janitor once, at Aliquippa Hospital: Tommie used to vow that he’d never clean up people’s trash. But now, for the next six months he worked graveyard shift—changing can liners, scraping gum off the floors with a blade, spraying blue chemicals into toilets littered with piss and pubes and streaks of shit. Every two weeks, he took home about $460.
Every day men and women hurried past him without a second look, on their way to homes, careers, respect. You’d think his worst nightmare would be the sight of a pro football player—the realization of what Tommie, once, was sure he would be—walking past. “I saw something worse: one of my ex-teammates from the University of Pittsburgh coming through,” Campbell said. That evening, he was pushing his cleaning cart in the terminal when he saw defensive back Elijah Fields approaching in his team-issued sweats. Tommie wanted to disappear. Fields saw him.
“It made me feel little,” Campbell said. “I was real skinny and everything, and it made me feel little just as a human being. He came over to talk to me for a brief second. I told him I was proud for him because he was doing the right thing at the time. I told him: ‘Listen, if you don’t take care of what you need to take care of, you’re going to be right here, too. . . .’”
Fields didn’t listen. By 2010, he had been kicked off the team and out of Pitt in a haze of indolence and pot smoke. The chance meeting has lingered with Campbell ever since. “There’s a lot of time to think while you’re mopping that floor,” he said. “Lot of time to think about what you could’ve done better—and if you’ll ever get a chance again, what’re you going to do?”
His daily round was filled with cautionary tales: Mom, Rick Hill, Peep Short, so many football teammates. Then there was Byron Wilson, the long jumper on that miracle track team of ’05, son of the Aliquippa police chief. Two years after his title-clinching long jump, Byron plea-bargained a fifteen-month sentence after pulling up next to his Linmar enemies in a car and opening fire. In August 2009, while Tommie Campbell was gathering trash, Wilson stepped into the Hollywood Lounge during a Linmar birthday party and wounded two men with a .22-caliber pistol, got two years in prison.
Finally, Tommie Campbell reached out to Larry Dorsch—a white real estate developer living in whiter, quieter Cranberry Township whom he’d met just before going to Pitt. Dorsch put Campbell to work on one of his job sites, spreading mulch, stocking shelves at a local supermarket, gave him money to eat. But Dorsch also knew that any comeback had to start instantly. He invited Tommie to move in with him, his wife, and her eighty-three-year-old mother. Della didn’t like it; she wanted her son to stay home. But Tommie knew this was his last chance.
He stayed there a year and a half. The Dorsches laughed when their neighbors did double takes at seeing a young black man come and go. They started calling Tommie, after the old TV comedy series, “The Fresh Prince of Cranberry.” He took to calling Dorsch “Pops.”
“He helped me in every aspect possible,” Tommie said. “He is the father figure to me. I have a stepdad and he was always there for me, but everybody had a disagreement. Larry never gave up on me. If I was willing to do it, he would always help me try.”
The cigarettes disappeared. The first time Campbell tried a timed, 40-yard dash he ran a 4.70—good for bragging at the Hollywood Lounge and little else. Then the meals and sleep and work kicked in, and the pounds began to stick. Campbell paid off the speeding tickets. He convinced a skeptical defensive coordinator at California University of Pennsylvania to give him a shot. Everybody in Western Pennsylvania knew what a motivated Tommie, back up to 220 pounds now, could do.
Campbell turned twenty-three during the 2010 season—his final year of college eligibility—that he played cornerback for the Vulcans, suddenly the old guy. He started four games, appeared in all twelve, finished with 29 tackles. He showed up for meetings. He did not oversleep. He made sure to take his medication. “I quit putting blame on everything around me,” Campbell said. “Because in reality it’s your choice. You have a choice to get up in the morning or not. You have a choice to work out or not. You have a choice to go to class or not. You’re reflected by the choices you make and I was making no choices at all—by sleeping. That’s even worse. That was basically saying: Bump you. I don’t care what you all say or do, I’m going to do what I want to do, and what I want to do is go to sleep. Bump everybody.”
But at Cal U and beyond, Tommie wanted to run again. He went to the Cactus Bowl All-Star Game, lit up NFL scouts’ eyes and stopwatches with his 40-yard times of 4.33 and 4.31. Suddenly Campbell’s past and age didn’t matter. The Tennessee Titans drafted him No. 251, the fourth-to-last pick in the 2011 draft. A 90-yard, game-winning interception for a touchdown against the Bears in preseason sealed his rise. He signed a four-year, $2.09 million contract. He’d made the league at last.
Campbell played three years in Tennessee, another in Jacksonville, mostly on special teams and as a backup defensive back, countering niggling injuries with preseason heroics—an 84-yard kick return here, a 65-yard punt return there. He was never a starter, never broke out as a star. But he became a steady, tough, fully awake professional. That’s more than most can say.
When he walks through an airport these days, Pittsburgh or any other, Campbell carries a fine bag, and the clothes inside are expensive and clean. He eyes the men pushing carts, the men with short brooms and dustpans. He may not say a word, but when he stops at a urinal and sees the blue water, it comes back: Tommie can smell his past. He used to be so careless with trash, leaving cups and wrappers where they’d fallen. Now, no matter how long it takes, he leaves no trace of himself behind.
On June 6, 2010, sixty-six years after D-Day knocked Aliquippa High’s first champions off the front page, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a piece about historical salvagers picking through the dusty, soon-to-be-demolished offices of the old J&L tin mill. After reaching the third floor, they pushed open a door, and the day crashed in before them. “Last one to die,” read a scrawl of white graffiti on one wood-paneled wall, “please turn out the Light.”
Those offices are gone now. What remains on the seven-and-a-half-mile stretch that was once J&L is the U.S. Gypsum plant. employing 120; a building products concern, employing 72; the fifteen-year-old Beaver County Jail; and a few other minor industries. What remains, too, is sixty-five-year-old C. J. Betters, who controls most of the stricken land and whose son Charles II—armed with a $37,000 pistol-like instrument that can read the metal composition in the stingiest clod of earth—helped find a way to wring more cash out of it when no one else could. In nearly a century of operation, the blast and basic oxygen furnaces had produced some 200 million tons of slag—composed mostly of the residual limestone or dolomite used to purify iron—and dumped it into any available lot, crack, or stream. Half is recoverable. The other half lies under the Ohio River.
Betters’ first foray on the site, a purchase of 1,200 acres in 1993, cost him $1.25 million; he meant to build a casino until, two years later, Pennsylvania lawmakers outlawed riverboat gambling. Slag was not even Plan C. But early efforts there netted $3.50 a ton and helped bankroll the scrubbing of the U.S. Gypsum parcel, and Betters figures that in the twenty years since, Beaver County Slag, Inc., has exhumed nearly twenty million tons. Hand-tooled, air-shattering, Rube-Goldberg-like machines sift and sort the stuff all over the old J&L footprint, and magnets extract the metals. Mills buy the scrap, melt it down for reuse. Construction companies buy the remaining crushed rock for cement and subbase on road and construction projects.
It has none of gambling’s jingle or sheen: the work is dirtier, more unpredictable, and the chips are far bigger. Slag now averages about $9.50 a ton, up from the $7 per when Betters officially started—and by 2011 the business was racking up annual revenues nearing $5 million. Between all the slag, as well as a century and seven miles’ worth of reinforced rebar, “blue concrete” blast furnace foundations dropping three stories deep into the earth, and the iron “buttons” (500-ton boulders left over, like solidified sugar in the bottom of a teacup, after a ladle pour) buried God knows where, Betters and his boys figure to have their hands full for years.
One November Saturday, Betters hopped out of his truck at the sight of one such dirt-caked, massive plug of iron, now worth near $200,000 apiece. For a time, they used to burrow past such hulks to reach $7 slag. “We bring ’em, we break ’em, we knock the slag off ’em,” he said. “Then we sell these buttons to a steel mill. This product today is worth about four hundred dollars a ton.”
Betters shrugged. “We do stuff nobody wants to do,” he said. “It’s ugly, nasty, dirty, and hard.”
Then again, Betters’ Lebanese grandfather, his hard-drinking, heavy-handed father, and most of his uncles spent decades working at J&L. The family moved to Center before Chuck went to high school; he says his classmates named him “Most Likely to Go to Jail.” Betters took over his dad’s plumbing business, built a small empire with construction projects as far away as Texas and Detroit. Aliquippa always loomed, in his mind, as reminder and opportunity.
Betters spent two decades shifting cash from other businesses to launch the slag concern, scrub the J&L brownfields, build state-of-the-art docks to lure industry back. When, in 2008, bankruptcy claimed Aliquippa Community Hospital—that beloved, $3.3 million monument to management-labor teamwork, and home to 270 jobs—he bought it for $250,000, tried a revival, then tore it down. He has amassed debt in the millions, thrown money at candidates for the state house and Congress.
Lately he’s been buying up what he calls “yellow iron”—heavy construction vehicles for rent—to cash in on the natural gas boom, sure that the fuel giants will soon be harpooning acreage all over Beaver County. He’s also angling to develop a long-term health care facility on the old hospital site—and as many residents trust his motives as don’t. Betters does want to make money. He insists that isn’t all. “There’s something relative to my legacy, and my family’s legacy, in this town, working in this mill,” he said. “The day that I put USG over there? I felt real good about it. It didn’t create a fraction of what used to be here, but there were three hundred direct jobs and several thousand indirect jobs. I felt pretty fucking good about that.
“I’m pretty comfortable; my kids are going to be okay. I’m worrying about my grandkids. Because I think about when I was growing up, the opportunities, and the lack thereof now, so I very much care about doing this. People tell you about air pollution: I lost a daughter, thirty-seven years old, from colon cancer who never smoked and drank. We have no history of that in our family. How’s that happen, the cancers? Young kids getting these different diseases, and you wonder, Is this environmental? Believe me, that made a profound impact.
“But I also look what’s out there, and the biggest employers are meth labs, trafficking drugs. I’m going to let you talk to a couple employees today. And you tell me when you leave, is it just monetary? Because no fucking person in his right mind would do what I’ve done.”
He drove to the J&L site’s northern tip, up a dirt grade onto a vast plateau: windswept, sun-washed, and empty but for two men. They were goggled, wielding acetylene torches amid a landscape of jutting rock and gnarled metal. A rusted ladle squatted ten feet away, unhinged, the kind they cut and buried when a worker fell screaming into the molten pour. Here—thirty years after it closed—the mill was producing product still, belched up through the crust like splinters working through skin. Up here, somewhere, serial killer Eddie Surratt supposedly dumped a body. Not far off, a dying Eddie Humphries was found.
The six-hundred-acre site was once considered so toxic that the state’s Department of Environmental Protection ordered it capped with dirt, fenced, and padlocked; Betters’ crew has been toiling away on it for more than a decade. As he approached, the two men dialed down their torches. The oldest, a forty-nine-year-old white man named Fred, stole once from Betters and served time; after his release, Betters rehired him. The second man was twenty-five-year-old Tony Gaskins, who shot ex–Aliquippa running back James Moon four years before Moon killed Diedre Walker and then himself. Though far younger than Fred, Tony seemed to be in charge.
“Did we hit it?” Gaskins said.
“Yes, you did,” Betters said.
“I didn’t know that till right now.”
In September, Betters had dangled a proposal to Gaskins and his crew of thirteen: cut and sort seven thousand tons of pitscrap by the end of the year, and you’ll get a $100,000 bonus to split among you. For men making $13 an hour, that $7,142.82 apiece would come in handy. Of course, Betters didn’t bother telling the men they had hit their number the month before. That’s good management, old school: If they’re pushing hard, why give them reason to let up?
Gaskins didn’t mind. Betters had saved him. After serving his sentence for shooting James Moon, Gaskins had fallen back into the old corner rhythm: hung out, hustled drugs. But the birth of his daughter, Jayde, and the fact that “my buddies kept getting killed” proved a sobering combination. Gaskins took a job washing dishes at Betters’ country club. Walking away from the street’s faster money wasn’t easy.
“I’ve thought about it, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “But I can’t go that route, because I have a family. It’s not about me anymore. When I was out doing all that, I didn’t have a kid or a girlfriend or wife or whatever. I was by myself and I didn’t have a caring bone in this world but to make money and take care of myself.”
Betters eyed Gaskins for months at the club, heard about his criminal record. Gaskins didn’t pretty up the tale. Betters liked the honesty, his intelligence and hustle. “White people in this town don’t like to give blacks a chance to show what they can do,” Betters told him. “I’m willing to give you a chance.”
It was also one old man’s chance to reset the American Dream, wind it back to its roots: hand a desperate man a shovel and see how much he digs. That was 2010. “It took a year to beat that jive-ass shit out of him,” Betters said. “But once he got past that I knew he was going to fly.” Gaskins has worked for him ever since.
“I stay there because I got things now in life that I thought I would never have,” Gaskins said. “I got a home I never had before of my own, I’ve basically got my family going, getting ready to have another kid here in February. My parents weren’t that fortunate, but once I started working for Chuck? Basically everything I ever wanted? I’m getting it.”