A special feature the summer daily by howard kohn FRIDAY, JUNE 13, 1969 NIGHT E DITOR: NADINE COHODAS a Rubbish and garbage clut- ter the banks of the Mahon- ing River promoting a rat population explosion (left). Sometimes the furnace preci- pitators fail and soot-filled smoke wafts across the Repub- lic Steel skyline (upper right). A young boy sits idly on an abandoned- car in the fore- ground of the unattended Mc- Bride Park (lower right). Rats and industry - together 4 living in scenic Ohio WARREN, OHIO WFARM PASTORAL nights are ideal for going down to the banks of the Mahoning River a n d shooting rats. Thick dark rats, with fierce cres- cent e y e s and without the scurvy ghetto look, breed contentedly here in beds of rubbish and garbage. On summer nights a bright lollipop moon silhouettes them against the 1Aver as they peer eagerly into Campbell's pork and beans and Spam cans. They stagger only a f e w inches when shot and then idly roll over. A .22 without a scope is good sport- with a scope is too easy. The Mahoning originates in Pen- nsylvania - a n d winds 108 miles to Lake Erie. Just across the Pa.-Ohio line, outside the city limits of War- ren, the Mahoning River Valley me- nagerie of empty milk cartons and raw garbage begins. ]BRACEVILLE TOWNSHIP sets the pace. Here rats f a c e population prob- lems and are moving from the river- side to tunnels under nearby houses. Rats also face competition from packs of dogs that feed on the gar- bage and dig them out of thei nests. Vince Capalin says he's been chas- ed by the dogs, which run in packs of three and four. Once he had to out-race them back to his house af- ter picking up the mail. Walter Johnson says he doesn't go outside without a holstered -45 and his 120-pound German Shepherd. Johnson has lived near the river for 19 years. "People come down from Warren and even from Pennsylvania to 'dump their j u n k," he explains. "It's been piling up for years." He's tried 'to stop some of them. One guy, who'd r e n t e d a U-haul trailer to pack a basement-full, tried to beat him up. Another promised Johnson he'd "get him." In the last year shotgun blasts have pelted his house three times. The township owns most of t h e woodlands along the river but has made no effort to clean up the trash. "I used to be able to go swimming and fishing in the river when I was a kid," Johnson complains. Now, of course, only carp live in the grimy and clogged river. Brace- ville is less than 20 miles downstream from Newton Falls where edible fish still survive. But pollution is moving rapidly upstream. Farther downstream , from Brace- ville is Warren, the hub of the Val- ley, home of the world's largest steel- producing complex- Republic, Copperwell and Rockwell Standard crouch on the city limits and spew out a daily column of fiery ferric soot into the air and industrial acids into the water. THIS IS A valley of filth. This is the way it's been for a long time. Roofs and house sidings through- out the Valley reflect a ferric tinge. Sheets hung on a clothesline for more than 30 minutes are forever hued. Even the trees have red-stained leaves. The steel industry is notorious. But other smokebellied factories, 43 in the Warren area, also contribute. Un- der t h e s e conditions Warren resi- dents have evolved a habit of stash- ing everything leftover from the gar- bage disposal and then carting it to the river, thereby saving $34 a year in trash collection costs. Some of the Walter Johnsons rem- inisce about better days and grouch for somebody to do something. But the Mahoning is in such wretched shape that no one really seems to care about its banks. Besides, Warren residents, at least many w i t h upper middle-class in- comes, can spend t h e i r weekends away from the Valley. Naturally the blacks, who h a v e lower-class incomes and are only 20 per cent of Warren's 70,000 popula- tion, can't. Racial resentment toward t h e BLACKS A R E especially bitter about the city's apparent apathy toward their recreational problem. First, the city has less than one-fifth the federally recommended acreage. Second, the city pays little attention -to the neighborhood playgrounds on the South Side. McBride Park on Cedar St. is piti- fully inadequate to begin with. And the McBride swings still aren't up, the grass is waist-high - with two months of warm weather already gone. Mrs. Pearl Jackson is the voice of river where it snags all the debris coming down." Perich heads an ad hoc commit- tee now 'all white after two black members left. He says' he's been at odds with them since 1 a s t spring when t h e y objected to holding a meeting on the day of Dr. Martin Luther King's funeral. "Frankly I didn't want those kind of people on my committee," he ex- plains. Perich is also distressed because black leaders haven't cracked down on teenage vandalism. One black probably guarantee a new adminis- tration. BACK IN 1960 a community group protested Warren a nd Youngs- town's policy of flushing 40 million gallons of raw sewage into the Ma- honing each day. After warnings from Ohio's health department, the cities backed down and installed a primary treatment plant which only cuts the flow to 25 million gallons a day. - ]7HE STEEL industry has even less to fear since many of its pollu- tion practices are protected by weak- willed state regulations. Only solid wastes a r e outlawed. Most liquid and gaseous wastes are perfectly within the law. Steel companies u s e a chemical process to settle particle compounds to the bottom of leeching p o n d s. Then they drain the water back into the river. Most particles do sift to the bot- tom. Some don't. They go into the river. Rockwell Standard has an espec- ially imperfect process. Rockwell, however, spends more time on shoot- ing out press releases on the process than in refining it. Few steel companies make any pre- tense about infiltrating air and wa- ter with legal waste. In 1964. when Republic expanded its plant, it installed BOF furnace precipitators mostly for the benefit of gaudy press conferences. Old stacks continue to belch out red and black clouds. Precipitators on t h e new ones have only changed the col- or of the smoke, not t h e level of acidity- Sometimes the precipitators don't work and the entire plant is engulfed in stinging smoke. "POLLUTION isn't pollution until you don't want it," sighs Mike Zockle, a special education teacher and newly-elected president of the Conservation and Outdoor Education Association (COEA). COEA numbers a goodly assort- ment of birdwatchers and tongue- cluckers, many of whom are more excited about nature studies in the hinterlands and anti-sex purges in the drugstores than in cleansing the Mahoning. 4 -4 In the early 60's the temperature of the river rose as high as 140 de- grees Farenheit near Lake Erie. Cleveland steel mills objected be- cause the water was unusable f o r cooling. So the sibling steel compan,- jes politicked for a reservoir. Federal and local monies financed the West Branch -Reservoir, which now empties cool water into the riv- er whenever its temperature reaches 110 degrees. Of course the river never freezes. VEGETATION along t h e river is lush green early in spring and late in fall. But the river is a steam- ing, stinking mess. "For the Mahoning to clean itself up would take almost 100 years now, even if industry stopped dumping in wastes today," Zockle says. No Valley factories are likely to do that - today, tomorrow or next year. "Almost everyone in Warren has the feeling he owes something to in- dustry, either his education or his job," explains Zockle. "So pollution is just a necessary evil." Valley industries do pay nearly 90 per cent of the Warren school taxes and employ several thousand War- ren residents. As in all middle-class, urban in- dustrial spas, Warren whites have a tendency to associate the increasing trash piles with the increasing black population.' "They see only what they want to see," Zockle bristles. "The junk in - A new high school was built over their cries. Then last fall banners flared and bands marched. The two teams had finished fifth and ninth in Ohio's Class A. The new school also has a large $5,000 greenhouse located near the back. Directly behind the greenhouse, school janitors empty the school's wastebaskets on the ground. The same symptoms of this gar- bage neurosis pop up all over the city, even in the church yards. Still downtown businessmen prat- tle on abdut the South Side "where those colored people live and breed juste like the rats." Many South Side blacks have been quartered in World War II-era bar- racks, packed into the cheap lumber boxes under Republic's smog skyline. The barracks have been condemned for more than 10 years. Now aided by the federal public housing act they're moving to new low-rent apartments. The apartments had bright yellow sidings. But they are already dirty from the pollution punishrnent. All of the public housing sites are well within range of Republic's stacks. DON'T THINK I wanta move," says Mrs. Jackson, whose wash- and-wear house is immaculate. "Don't seem like anything really be changing." Mrs. Jackson is a heavy woman with dark welts on her arms where A McBride Park. "I call down there to city hall every year for them to come cut the griss," she says. "They don't pay attention less it's election year. "Then they hurry on down so they can get their seat in the city hall. But once they get it, they just sit on it" City officials say the p a r k isn't used enough to warrant regular at- tention. Perkins and Packard are the two main inner-city parks, both of which border on the Mahoning and both of which are despoiled by rubbish. Pete Perich is Phamnionina a ,lone- gang recently stripped down a bull- dozer which a local contractor had brought in to level ground for a new playground- BLACK LEADERS say t h e black community resents being left out of the decision on the playground. "These colored kids are just put- ting us a step backward," Perich says. "But I think they're in a minority. Most Warren kids are good kids . . . and belong to the Boy Scouts and so forth." Rather than asking the black gangs to join in his clean-up cam- .4 ::.. I