On a recent sunny and cold day, I decided to go for a drive. Because I am self-quarantining due to COVID-19, one of the few times I leave the house is when I decide to go for a drive to alleviate the boredom.
On this particular day, I decided to drive to Warren, Ohio, about a 45-minute trip via the Ohio Turnpike and Route 5. I haven’t been there often and the last time I remember visiting this city was in the early 1990s when I produced and directed a TV show for Channels 45/49 about the city’s annual summer festival on square surrounding the Trumbull County courthouse. The highlight of that weekend was two free performances by the Ohio Ballet, a once nationally recognized dance troupe based in Akron.
The night we videotaped the performance there were thousands of spectators and the weather was nearly perfect. During the festival weekend, streets surrounding the square were closed to vehicles and there were dozens of food and arts and crafts booths. It was an interesting mix of those selling everything from corn dogs to artists selling hand-crafted jewelry and paintings. City officials estimated that tens of thousands of residents visited the festival.
The first time I visited Warren was in 1969. Pam and I went to see a production at the Packard Music Hall by the Kenley Players. Producer John Kenley attained fame in the 1960s and 70s by putting together a summer stock touring company to present Broadway comedies. The tour usually began in Warren and then moved on to Akron, Columbus and Dayton. Kenley’s formula was to cast a prominent actor from Broadway, TV or the movies to draw crowds.
That night Pam and I saw “You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water is Running” starring Arte Johnson—who appeared on “Laugh In” as the wise-cracking Nazi solder peering out from behind a bush with a cigarette dangling from his lips. That hall did not have air conditioning and it was so hot the crew opened a large back door of the stage during the second act to provide some cool air.
Fast forward to 2021 and the picture was entirely different. As I drove down West Market street towards downtown, I was struck by how deserted the street was on the cool but dry Saturday afternoon. A couple of convenience store-gas stations, a single restaurant and a dollar discount store were the only businesses open.
There were a large number of vacant lots with remnants of parking lots for business buildings that had been torn down. Off to the north, I could see the dilapidated remains of what looked like a large steel mill. There were some large houses lining Market Street, but many of them looked abandoned with broken and boarded-up windows and peeling paint. It wasn’t always this way in Warren.
Originally settled as a mill-town in 1798, the original 400-acre plot of the town was once part of the Western Reserve section of Connecticut. Warren remained a small city until the first half of the 20th century when Republic Steel and the Packard Electric Company produced steel and electrical components for auto manufacturers. These companies and others provided thousands of well-paying manufacturing union jobs and Warren’s population swelled to more than 63,000 by 1970.
Then Warren suffered from the de-industrialization that affected hundreds of other towns and cities in Ohio and the Midwest. Companies closed up factories and mills and moved production to non-union states or other countries. And many Warren residents also left, too. There are now about 39,000 residents according a 2019 estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly a 40-percent decrease from 1970.
The economic and social problems caused by the loss of jobs and shrinking population of cities like Warren can’t be minimized and I think this is the major cause of the turnabout in the politics of Trumbull County and Warren. In 2012, the county provided Barack Obama with 60 percent of the votes in his re-election victory. Four years later, 50 percent of the voters went for Donald Trump and the President won that county by more than 10 percent last year.
In the 1976 hit movie “Network”, actor Peter Finch won an Oscar playing straight-laced newscaster Howard Beale. He became a rabble-rousing TV personality, a precursor of current cable news network hosts and garnered huge audience ratings. During his show, Beale would urge his viewers to get off the couch, open the window and yell: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
My guess is that sentiment put Trump in the White House in 2016 and angry voters in depressed cities and towns like Warren are likely to continue to roil the electoral landscape until their economic lot improves.
