Family history and the steel mill inform this coming-of-age story

By Max Bowen

Jerry Madden’s new novel “Steel Valley: Coming of Age in the Ohio Valley in the 1960s” (Potomac Publishing) touches on his life in the Steel Valley. Madden’s book reflects on his time Ohio and includes staples like Friday night football, dances in the school gym and unforgettable first loves.

In this interview, Jerry talks about star-crossed lovers Laurie and Jack and how their relationship starts and grows over the years, how his background informed the story, and what readers can expect next.


Tell me about Jack Clark and Laurie Carmine’s romance and how it begins and grows?
The story begins in 1960 when Jack Clark and Laurie Carmine are 12 years old. The setting is Steubenville, Ohio, a steel mill town of 40,000 along the Ohio River about 30 miles south of where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet at the foot of Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. Large numbers of AFL-CIO union workers were Catholic Irish, Italian and Polish. Because of the cheap labor of the nuns, parishes operated tuition-free elementary schools (grades one through eight). A number of those parishes were predominantly Irish, Italian or Polish with the others being a combination of those three nationalities.

Jack Clark, the oldest of nine children, whose father worked at Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, lived in a small town, Mingo Junction, a town of 5,000, three miles downstream from Steubenville.

Jack’s first five years of life, however, took place in a new upper middle-class neighborhood in East Memphis, Tennessee. Both of Jack’s parents grew up in the Ohio Valley, but when WW II started Jack’s dad dropped out of college, joined the Navy, and served with distinction in the South Pacific. After the war, his dad did not return to college and his mother dropped out of nursing school.

They moved to Memphis to start a new life outside of the valley. His dad was an only child and with both parents recently deceased, they bought a house with his dad’s inheritance and his dad started a successful business. But because of fraud by his dad’s business partner, the family is forced to move back to the Ohio Valley, penniless. His dad finds work in the steel mill. Jack feels like he has landed on an alien planet. He yearns to grow-up and leave the Ohio Valley behind. He attends St. Agnes Elementary School in Mingo Junction, whose students are a mix of Irish, Italian or Polish.

Laurie Carmine, Italian and youngest of two girls, attends St. Anthony’s located in the south end of Steubenville, almost entirely Italian. She is the daughter of a physician in Steubenville and lives in an upscale part of town. Her dad is a first generation American who worked his way through school and after storming the beaches at Normandy, took advantage of the GI Bill’s education benefits. Her dad raises her to look beyond the limited horizons of the Ohio Valley so as not to get trapped in a life of living paycheck to paycheck.

Jack and Laurie first become aware of each other in the seventh grade when St. Agnes plays St. Anthony’s in basketball. Jack is a good player and Laurie is a cheerleader. Jack couldn’t keep his eyes off her.

All the Catholic grade schools fed into the Catholic high school in Steubenville (Catholic Central High School), and Jack and Laurie end up sitting next to each other in homeroom for four years because homerooms and seating was determined alphabetically. Jack is painfully thin, has All-American looks, and is a good athlete. Laurie is a confident, self-possessed teenager who is a straight A student. Despite his shyness, Jack manages to at least dance with her occasionally at the weekly school dance and their sitting next to each other in homeroom ensures that they are constantly in each other’s orbits. The reader learns through Laurie’s best friend that Laurie finds something attractive about Jack—unbeknownst to her the result of spending the first five years of his life outside the valley—that is different than the other boys she meets.

Jack realizes his dream of leaving the Ohio Valley when he lands a basketball scholarship at a top basketball college, while Laurie goes to the local college on a full academic scholarship.

When Jack’s dad is temporarily paralyzed by an accident in the mill, Jack is forced to leave college and return home to help the family. Jack transfers his college credits to the local college. The transfer provides him with another chance to pursue Laurie but their paths never cross due to Jack working part-time in the mill. Living at home and working in the mill take a toll on Jack’s grades and jeopardize his dream of going to law school.

Eventually, Jack’s dad’s paralysis resolves, and he returns to work. Jack earns a basketball scholarship as a walk-on and moves to campus. Meanwhile, Laurie decides to study abroad in Paris for her junior year. Jack finds that because the basketball season spans both semester his grades continue to suffer.

Early in his senior year, he bumps into Laurie on campus and learns that she is dating a student, Michael Costa, who also studied abroad in Paris during the last semester of his junior year. Jack learns that Costa’s father is an executive in New Jersey with a Fortune 100 company.

Soon after basketball season ends in early February, Jack bumps into Laurie downtown and learns she is engaged to Michael and the wedding is set for late June 1969, just a month after graduation.

At that point, Jack feels as though he has hit rock bottom. He decides that if he is going to realize his dream of going to law school, he’s going to need to retake both semesters of his senior year. Because the U.S. has 500,000 troops in Vietnam on one-year rotations, Jack is sure that if he goes ahead and graduates in May 1969, he will be drafted and sent to Vietnam. He decides to proactively deal with his draft situation and signs up to go to Marine Officers’ Candidate School in Quantico. He drops out of college just before the end of the semester.

The news that Jack quit school and is headed for the Marines—and almost certainly Vietnam—catches Laurie off guard and forces long-held emotions to the surface.

When his fraternity brothers arrange a farewell get-together at a place called The Creeks, a remote spot about five miles from campus where college students occasionally congregated to socialize, Laurie, whose fiancé is in New Jersey, decides to go with her best friend Emma. No longer having the luxury of time, as the party starts to unwind and the sun starts to set, Jack asks Laurie if she would like to go for a walk with him up a grass field, where they can watch the sun set. As they are climbing the gently rising hill, Jack finally tells her he has been in love with her since the first time he saw her in seventh, and Laurie realizes her strong feelings for Jack. They end up making love.

However, the next day—the day before Jack is to leave for Quantico—Laurie tells Jack that it was a mistake that she gave in to her feelings for him and that it’s just too late for them because she is to marry Michael at the end of June.

Jack goes off to OCS and then to Vietnam. Laurie marries Michael and they settle in Shadyside, a suburb of Pittsburgh, where they are high school teachers at different schools.

Soon Laurie realizes that her period is late and that the father could only be Jack because she did not have intercourse again with Michael until after their wedding day at the end of June.

From there, both Laurie’s and Jack’s lives take off in different directions neither could have anticipated nor desired. Although the life that supported their youth is falling away, the values instilled in them have prepared them to participate fully in the American mainstream, either together or apart.

How do they re-enter their lives and what happens?
Laurie decides that the least bad option is to tell Michael she is pregnant but not tell him about paternity. He is overwhelmed with joy. Although she feels immediate relief, as the months pass the conflict between not wanting to hurt Michael and her values grows. She seeks both spiritual and psychological assistance and is preparing to tell Michael when he is killed in a freak car accident. This news aggravates her preeclampsia, and the condition becomes life-threatening. She has an emergency C-section. She then moves to North Arlington, Virginia, to live with her sister, Alessa, who has a 3-year old daughter. Both sisters are working part-time—Alessa as a lawyer at the Department of Justice and Laurie as a substitute teacher at St. Rita’s Elementary School—and share childcare responsibilities.

Just as Laurie is about to start teaching full time in the fall of 1970, she learns that Jack is missing in action and presumed dead. She had written several letters telling him he was the father of Olivia but could not bring herself to mail them. The news sends her into emotional freefall. She eventually convinces her sister, who is having difficulty having a second child, to raise her daughter, Olivia, as her own. Laurie then goes off to join the Carmelites, a denomination of cloistered nuns in Loretta, PA.

Three years later, as she is about to take her permanent vows, she learns that Jack was on the last plane of POWs released from Hanoi. She decides to take a year’s leave of absence and returns to live with her sister in Arlington. Olivia now believes that Alessa is her mother. Meanwhile, Jack retakes his senior year and gets straight As. He is accepted to law school at Georgetown University in D.C.

The evening of his graduation, Jack attends a graduation dance and scholarship fund raiser along with some fraternity brothers. Late in the evening, he sees Laurie coming down the steps to the dance floor where she sits with her friend, Emma, and her date. She is fashionably dressed, and Jack thinks she looks more beautiful than ever. Laurie came to the dance knowing that Jack would be there and determined to tell him that he is the father of Olivia. But, when he tells her of his plans to attend law school, she decides not to tell him, because she knows that going to law school has been his life-long dream. If she told him, she believed he would give up law school and marry her instead, and in time he would come to resent her.

The story continues to unfold from that point.

Tell me about the backdrop of the 1950s-1960s and what influence it has on the story?
In the 1960s, Steubenville, like thousands of similar towns in the United States, was a thriving city, supported by an industrial or manufacturing base. First and second generation Americans with European ancestors were rising into the middle class thanks to the well-paying union jobs and tuition-free parochial schools. The downtown consisted of over 90 businesses from national department stores, local clothing and jewelry stores, banks, furniture stores, restaurants, and much more. Class distinctions were nearly non-existent because most families were mill families or were supported by the resulting thriving economy. Juvenile delinquency was rare, as Life Magazine reported in a feature story about the Upper Ohio Valley in the early 1960s, because sports kept most of the male students in school and off the streets. Hundreds of them earned a ticket out of the valley in the form of college sports scholarships, predominantly football, to schools like Ohio State, Nebraska, Indiana, Notre Dame, and Yale.

That is the backstory.

You grew up in Steel Valley. How did this help you when it came to worldbuilding the story?
They say write about what you know, so having grown up in the area was essential to writing this story. If you looked at the valley from the outside at the time, all you would see is smoke and soot in the air. You would not see that the steel industry and the parochial schools were supporting and shepherding a whole generation of post-WWII children on their way to the American mainstream.

How does the disappearance of the steel industry and parochial school impact the area and the nation at large?
In the late 1960s, simultaneously but for completely different reasons, both the steel industry and the parochial schools became financially untenable. Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, like most steel mills in America, was slow to modernize. As the rest of the world recovered from the devastation of WWII by building new and more efficient mills, the U.S. industry could no longer compete effectively, exacerbated ironically by the well-paying union jobs. The decline was exasperated by the rising use of plastics to replace the use of steel.

At the same time, after the conclusion of Vatican II, when the Catholic Church did away with many of the vestiges of the middle-ages, including relaxing the requirement that the nuns wear habits, the nuns began a mad dash for the exits. From a high of nearly 200,000 nationwide in 1965, their ranks dropped by 70,000 within 10 years, and continued to freefall from there. Today, the vast majority of the approximately 30,000 Catholic nuns are over 70 years old, and less than 5 percent are under 50 years old. As a result, the parochial schools were no longer financially viable and closed.

The twin punches led to deep declines in population, resulting in hopelessness among the unskilled laborers that remained. The 2000 census noted that the Steubenville area lost more population than any other area of the country.

When J.D. Vance, in “Hillbilly Elegy,” writes about the hopelessness in this area of the United States, he is writing about what remains of this once vibrant way of life. My book is to remind the nation of what was lost by outsourcing our industrial base overseas. The costs have been incalculable.

What’s next for you?
Parts of my Irish ancestors—the Clarks and the Blees—came to the United States in the early 1800s. They were among the very first pioneers to populate the upper Midwest, in particular Indiana, where their only neighbors were Native Americans. The Maddens came because of the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s. Several of my ancestors fought in the Civil War on the side of the North, like many Irish.

I am fortunate that anecdotal family histories, stemming from about 1820 to the early 1900s have survived. Some of these stories are priceless and nothing like them exists in novels that I am aware of about life during that period of American history. So that’s my next project. To bring that history to life in a way that reflects more closely what it was really like.