My daughter was six when her grandmother, my mother, died and twelve when her granddad went. They spent their lives in and around Cleveland, Ohio where I grew up. My daughter is thirty now, and it is longer than that since I lived there. So we took a three-day trip to visit my point of origin and her grandparents’ graves.

When I was young, from Pittsburgh and Buffalo through Cleveland and Detroit to Gary, Indiana, the industrial Midwest was America’s Ruhr. Ore boats brought iron from the Mesabi Range to mix with coal from the huge Appalachian deposits nearby to fuel the blast furnaces that made the steel that built the country.

At loose ends on a Saturday night when teenagers, we might drive down to the Flats and see the furnaces turn the sky scarlet, the arc-light orange of molten steel being poured as switch engines shunted incoming raw materials, outbound finished ingots, rolls of steel. There was no OSHA, no EPA, occasionally the river caught fire, and the air was pungent and thick enough to chew. But we knew these mighty pyrotechnics had produced the arms that had won our fathers’ war, the skyscrapers and the T-Birds and GTOs that Californians sang about.

The one-time Cadillac tank plant near my home now hosts paltry trade shows. The Ford Engine plant rusts on abandoned acres. Along Brookpark Road where my father and the fathers of my school friends worked three shifts a day, flat out, wide open, the Chevy assembly plant is a rotting hulk. My Dad’s speed-nut plant is gone, as are those where Nelson Weber’s tool-and-die maker dad worked with a craftsman’s pride Jim Norton’s engineered industrial valves.

The gritty neighborhood called Tremont where my grandparents raised my mom and her tubercular brother is now half-decayed and half-resurrected by gentrification and hipster restaurants. It got so cheap and is so close to downtown that some people are taking the risk it can be salvaged. It even boasts a tourist attraction, the house where Ralphie lived in “A Christmas Story.” If you remember it, you remembers how my people lived in the 1930s and ‘40s.

An East Side neighborhood where my mom lived when she was five was apparently too far gone to try to save. By the time I was growing up, in the suburban town of Berea, her inner city neighborhood had become a bleak ghetto and has now been effectively razed. Block after block along Euclid, Superior and Chester are empty lots, punctuated occasionally by abandoned churches.

Further East is an exception to all this decline and destruction. On land that was once blue collar, then black slum, the vast campus of The Cleveland Clinic covers 140 acres and almost two dozen city blocks. It ranks as the fourth best medical establishment in the country with an endowment of $2 billion and a glittering clientele. In addition to Arab sheiks, it presumably also caters to the geriatric needs of the last remnants of my parents’ generation. How will it survive if mine is the last generation to receive Social Security and Medicare?

Cleveland was once among the most ethnically diverse cities in the country. My mother’s grandfather and great grandfather came from Wales to wind up as puddlers in the steel mills of Youngstown and Cleveland. Cleveland had over a hundred thousand Italians and Germans, more Hungarians than any city other than Budapest, more Poles than anywhere but Warsaw. Catholic, Protestant and Greek Orthodox steeples towered above the Flats, but so did onion domes worthy of Kiev. All those diverse peoples came for the jobs that are now long gone. An echo of their presence survives in the capacious West Side Market which still sells Hungarian poppy seed pastry, polish sausage, pierogis and the like.

When I was young, this was the sixth largest city in the country. It is now the 31st. The Emerald Necklace of parks is still beautiful and boasts newfangled bike and running trails. My little home town of Berea looks tidy, though many landmarks have vanished, including half the downtown, my elementary and junior high schools.

The area around University Circle is still grand if you don’t stray too many blocks away into encroaching slums. The Art Museum is better than ever, Severance Hall still hosts the Cleveland Orchestra. The grand mansions up the hill from there survive, as do prosperous parts of neighborhoods to the west — Lakewood and Rocky River. Some Fortune 500 companies endure – Eaton, Progressive Insurance, Lubrizol, Parker Hannifin, Sherwin-Williams, Cliffs Resources.

But many more have packed up and gone away, or expired. John D. Rockefeller’s first refinery was here as was his home, but long ago Sohio merged with BP. Local banks have been gobbled up by distant predators. The steel industry – Otis, Jones and Laughlin, Republic — is gone, as are local names like TRW, Stouffer’s, Fisher Foods, Halle’s, Warner and Swasey, and the rails – the Nickel Plate, the Erie, the C & O. The grandest downtown department store, Higbees, is now a casino. One of the few places to see traces of the Cleveland auto industry now is the Crawford museum of the Western Reserve Historical Society. There are the sleek cars – gas, electric and steam-powered — made by Ohio manufactures whose day is long gone – White, Baker, Jordan, Winton, Hupmobile, Peerless, Packard, Willys-Overland and many more.

I know Heraclitus says all is flux, change is the nature of existence, Schumpeter says creative destruction is good for the economy, and old men bemoan a vanished past. But a lot of what happened to my rust belt home looks like careless destruction. Management was stupid, greedy and short-sighted. Unions may have helped cut their own throats. The government had ideological objections to protecting American jobs, to tariffs. The promise was cheaper goods for the many at the Walmart and fatter returns for the few on Wall Street. But the cost of free enterprise hasn‘t been free. It turns out the Faustian bargain was damned expensive in human, aesthetic and economic terms. As Ralphie’s mother might have warned, we have shot our eye out. Or shot our society in the foot.

One wonders if any other powerful industrial country in the world – Germany or Japan, say, or China today – would have stood by and watched their industry vanish without a peep, allowed its people to lose their jobs, their pensions and their future, and then blamed them for being on the dole. I don’t pretend to know all the answers, but when I look at what happened to a huge swath of the country where I grew up, its fate certainly raises a lot of questions.

In conclusion, I append a little elegy for my Dad’s generation I haven’t previously shared here. Perhaps they weren’t the greatest, as Brokaw would have it, but I greatly fear we shall not look upon their like again. And I also fear they would not be well-pleased to see how we have managed the prosperity they earned, by the sweat of their brows, and bequeathed to us.

Bowling at Midnight

When I was a boomer college kid,
Dad worked the third or second shift.
He slept all day, so I’d go watch
As he bowled in the middle of the night.

The bowl-a-drome held a hundred alleys.
It catered to leagues of unionized labor.
They came from Ford Engine, Chevy Assembly,
A myriad plants, like the works where he toiled.

On all of that, we’ve turned the page.
The full-blast furnaces and rolling mills
Rust along the Cuyahoga.
The jobs long gone, the unions with them,
The cold war prosperity a fading glimmer,
The clamorous alleys an anachronism.
The age of steel has given way
To these insubstantial silicon days.

Yet sometimes at midnight, I see them all,
Those tough and funny blue collar guys
With surnames from every nation in Europe.
Between swigs of beer and picking up spares,
They’d offer to find the kid a slot
On the Chevy line for a decent buck.
I declined the offer and stayed in school.

By now, all those World War combat vets,
Who swapped their khaki for bowling shirts,
Have lost their last fight. At midnight,
I miss both them and their vanished life.
As strange, as distant as ancient Rome,
Yet close as yesterday, as home.