Above: “Children in Midland, Pennsylvania” (1940) by Jack Delano. Library of Congress
M
Y MOTHER WAS TEN YEARS OLD in the winter of 1940 when photographer Jack Delano came to town. Employed by the Farm Security Administration component of FDR’s WPA, Delano’s job was to document the living and working conditions of those Americans most sorely affected by the Great Depression.
Midland, at the far end of the state opposite his home in Philadelphia, offered Delano the perfect stage for his tableau vivants of grimy, blue-collar life. It was a company town, its first houses erected earlier that century by Crucible Steel Company of Pittsburgh with the goal of providing an ongoing workforce for their profitable new mill. The company house in which my mother lived stood in the shadow of its smokestacks at 314 Midland Avenue, perhaps among the very houses shown in Delano’s photograph above.
The Library of Congress has archived over a hundred photos that Delano made in Midland, and in so many of them, Pittsburgh Crucible Steel Company’s hundred-foot stacks loom over the town, a constant reminder that were it not for steel, this little hairpin turn in the Ohio River might have remained little more than vegetable gardens.
Other photos by Delano include sobering images of tarpaper shacks and slum tenement houses in which the sole source of running water was an iron pump.
The undeniability of these mostly black-and-white photos makes my mother’s claims of a difficult childhood hard to dismiss. The photo here, shot by Delano around the same time in the nearby town of New Brighton, shows a basement with an open toilet much like the one she described to me, as mentioned on my previous page.
The protagonist in my first novel, On the Wing, is a young singer based in part on my mother, living in Lindera, Pennsylvania, my fictional version of Midland. And like my mother Marie Schioppo feels trapped in the long shadows cast by the smokestacks towering over the steel mill.
Marie’s beloved priest confronts her with a metaphysical explanation of the fear that fuels her desire to escape, but she denies it. “I’m not afraid of that place, Father. It’s just a bunch of grimy buildings.” But he presses her on it. “You want to escape the ugliness. Because you’ve seen the opposite. In fact it was the last thing you saw, in that moment just before you were born. Your soul has made a great passage, a shocking one, so you’ve forgotten.”
She asks what it was she could have seen, and he tells her, “The face of God. In all its beauty. We’re all searching to find our way back. Only the rest of us aren’t as sensitive to it as people like you. Singers, musicians, artists, writers. Poets. You feel it in your bones. When you see beauty you sense you’re drawing near once more. But when you see ugliness, like the tracks, or the mill, the soot and smoke, you know you’re moving farther away, and all you see is shadow. So that’s what you fear. What we all fear. We fear the shadow.”
