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    A High School Reunion Reveals: When Steel Mills Fell Silent, Fates Got Flipped

    Marilyn Geewax, who recently retired as an NPR business editor, returned to Ohio for her class's 45th reunion. The visit showed how things changed dramatically for retirees in just one generation.
    by Marilyn Geewax Sep 03, 2018 5 minutes
    A photograph of Marilyn Geewax in the high school yearbook. She went on to Ohio State and a career as a business journalist.

    The only high school in my hometown — Campbell, Ohio — was built on a hilltop just east of Youngstown.

    Behind our football field, the earth sloped away, down to the Mahoning River valley where the Youngstown Sheet & Tube steel mills stretched out for miles.

    Our school, our small town, the gritty air we breathed — they were inseparable from those blast furnaces.

    For three generations of Campbell guys, seeking work at the mill was almost automatic. And smart: You were guaranteed great pay and union benefits.

    "Go to the steel mills. That was my vision, go follow my father," my classmate Pete Nicolaou told me at his kitchen table when I returned to Youngstown recently for the Class of 1973 reunion.

    My vision was different. Just: "Go."

    Get away to college and then keep going.

    But this

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