How many can tell a similar story?

[Brigid]

I live in a small blue-collar city in a Rust Belt state that once upon a time was a thriving, lively place to live. There was nightlife and plenty of blue-collar jobs on which you could raise a family. There were lots of restaurants and even a nationally famous hotel. John Dillinger used to come here to drink and party sometimes (though he wouldn't rob banks here because he was afraid of the trains). There were warehouses and factories downtown. My brother-in-law's father says he remembers people going to work in the mornings with their lunch pails to the workplaces along the Wabash River. Then, around about the '60's, the jobs started to dry up. The Columbia House became BMG and is now slated to close. The Quaker Maid plant? Long gone. By the time we moved here in 1978, the downtown area looked like London during the Blitz -- big craters where foundations of buildings used to be, rubble all over the place, and empty buildings. The aforementioned hotel stood empty for 30 years and was torn down to build a Hilton Garden Inn (I wonder how long it will last). Today, you work part-time at some fast-food place or through a temp agency at the Sony plant (if they have orders to fill, that is). Once-lovely homes in Farrington's Grove have been cut up into cheap apartments or are so run-down they are barely shadows of what they once were. There are weedy lots where houses that have burned down once stood. A company moved in here with call center jobs at cheap wages and lousy benefits and people practically fall at their feet to get on there (until they see how the comapany actually treats them; then they leave). And that's as good as it gets around here these days.

So -- do you live in a town that has seen better days, too? I don't have too much hope that it will improve. How about you?

[Tangerine LaBamba]

1. My home town -

It is an old coal town in east central Pennsylvania. When the immigrants came at the beginning of the twentieth century, they became coal miners - Poland, Lithuanian, Czechoslovakia, Italy, a few from Germany, but not many. The Irish owned the mines, but they didn't work in them.

The place thrived. One mile square, it was once home to 15,000 people. And it had the distinction of having more bars per capita than any other town in the United States. It was called the only "wild west town in the east."

Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey were born and raised there

When I was growing up there, the place was still thriving, but things were slowing down. There were a lot of women's dress factories, and the wives of the miners who were gradually losing their jobs worked there. They made a living wage, and everyone could afford to buy a small house - the little places that had once been "company houses" - a car, do some fixing up, go hunting a couple of times a year, go fishing all the time, and have some beers at the fire house on Saturday night.

A plastics plant opened up nearby and lot of the former miners found work there. The economic condition seemed stabilized.

The air was clean, the mountains around the town that had been stripmined before I was born were being reclaimed by nature, a miracle I got to witness first-hand, and we were safe. Virtually no crime. Sometimes, someone broke into a car, or maybe a fight got out of control, but that was about it.

"The Saint" was a physician in a town a few miles away. He was known all the world over as the doctor who did abortions, and no matter how they tried to nail him, a couple of juries acquitted him, and he was never convicted. He never stopped doing what he did to help women, and when he died, his widow burned all his records so that no one would ever be embarrassed.

By the time I left for college, the dress factories were starting to close down, the work going overseas.

The economic deterioration continued. Things closed, nothing opened.

When I'd go home to visit my parents, I'd see more and more unoccupied buildings, residences. Yes, they looked like remnants of a Blitz. Men loafed on street corners, looking angry. Collecting unemployment was the main occupation.

After my parents died, I no longer had any reason to go there. Everyone had done what I'd done - we left and built lives elsewhere. But, I kept up a friendship with the man who'd been the editor of the local paper, a man who'd been one of my biggest booster when I was a kid, and who continued to put big pictures of me in his paper when I graduated from college, law school, got married, became a novelist.

I wanted to go there to visit him, but he told me not to. He said that he didn't want me to see the place the way it had become. He wanted me to hold on to my memories, even if it meant he couldn't see me.

Bill died, and now I have no one there.

The town's become a stopover point for drug runners, an ideal place, since it's equidistant between NYC and Philadelphia. A lot of the abandoned row houses have been taken over by squatters, and I think more people speak Spanish than English now.

Last year, a trio of high school football players beat to death a Mexican man who had been living there for a couple of years. He was here illegally, had fathered two children with a local woman, and had also knocked up her younger sister. The fight got ugly, the Mexican man got knocked down, someone delivered a kick to his head, and he died a day later without ever regaining consciousness.

Finally, my home town was international news.

A few months ago, the thugs went on trial. They were acquitted of all but an assault charge, and they were sentenced to a minimum of six months in the slammer.

The vitriol I've read on the newspaper's website has been sickening. Apparently, the town's most vocal residents believe the man deserved to die because he was here illegally.

My old editor friend was right - I'm glad I didn't go home. I'm glad he stopped me.

Home isn't there any more..........................

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

2. Same story with where I grew up. That's why I left.

There was nothing to keep me there, economically speaking.

[juno jones]

3. I grew up in a similar town.

It got gutted in the early eighties by Reaganism. I haven't been back in a long time. Too depressing. The people I used to know have traveled from boredom through malaise and on to decay since I've been gone.

It used to be a really nice town. I guess only rich people deserve nice towns now.