Interview: Donna DeBlasio on Steel Museum and Applied History at YSU

In this interview, Donna DeBlasio shares her background, talks about steel production methods, discusses her working-class connections and argues for the Steel Museum’s future. Donna was one of the leading figures behind the Steel Museum’s establishment, and as the calendar nears June 30, when the Ohio Historical Society plans to shutter as many as eighteen sites across Ohio, she talks about its unique place in our national dialogue about work and industry.

At the interview’s conclusion, you will find information about how you can help ensure the Museum’s future. Your help is greatly appreciated.

Q: Tell me about your background.

A: I’m from Youngstown. I’m from Smoky Hollow, and I take great pride in that. I always describe myself as a working-class kid from Smoky Hollow. One-hundred-percent Italian, and I went to Catholic schools here. My Bachelors and my Masters are both from YSU in History, and my PhD is from Kent State-also in History.

I had a varied career. My first job coming out of grad school was as an oral history field resident for Indiana University. I went around and helped community groups start oral history projects. I then came back here and was hired by the Ohio Historical Society to help start a new museum in Youngstown; what everybody calls the Steel Museum, which is the Youngstown Historical Center of Industry and Labor.

I always describe myself as a working-class kid from Smoky Hollow.

That was in early ‘85, and I saw it through the establishment of the building on Wood Street, the construction of the permanent exhibit, and I gathered the collections. I was there until the end of ‘94/beginning of ‘95 when I went to Columbus to work at the Ohio Historical Center as a historian. I also worked for about three years in the Ohio Historical Preservation office doing research and doing Section 106 review where projects come in and you have to review them for their impact on historical properties.

I’ve been at YSU since ‘99 and an associate professor since 2004. I direct our Center for Applied History and run the applied history program.

Q: You call yourself a working-class gal. What did your parents do?

A: My dad was a tailor, and my mother worked in an office. She worked at Workingman’s Overall Supply Company, and they supplied work uniforms, mats and towels to various companies. They started a while back under that name, then when my mom worked there they were called Servaclean. They were bought out by Thornton’s and maybe some others. The building is still there by Westlake Terrace. After moving up by Northside Swimming Pool, they kept a stock room down at Westlake.

The owner, Mr. Bishop, lived on Fifth Avenue and died in a plane crash. I remember that. They had a plant in Louisiana or Mississippi, and he was down there at that plant. It was awful; back in the 60s or 70s.

Q: You’re also the director of the Center for Historic Preservation?

A: That’s now the Center for Applied History, though we haven’t changed the Web site. The name was really a misnomer, as oral history has always been a part of the center. The oral history program actually predates the center. We don’t just do historic preservation.

YSU’s Center for Applied History has been collecting oral histories since 1974. There are some 1700 transcripts online.

The program has been collecting oral histories with citizens of northeast Ohio and western Pennsylvania since 1974. Hugh Earnhardt started the program. I was in the class the second time it was ever offered, which we offer as a graduate-level course. We go through a variety of topics, such as workers at GM (along with the Center for Working-Class Studies), Black Monday and the Little Steel Strike.

Q: What does the process of collaborating and generating questions teach the students?

A: It teaches them how to do a proper oral history. It’s not just rounding up all the old people and sticking them in a room and saying, “Tell me about your life.” Oral history is an active process like we’re doing now between the interviewer and interviewee. You don’t need to be married to your questions. Personally, when I go to do an interview, I don’t actually write out questions, I have an outline of things I want to make sure I ask.

In addition to teaching how to conduct an oral history, it teaches students the value of collecting those stories and why they’re important.

Oral history is an active process.

Q: Do you make an audio or video recording of the sessions?

A: Yes, we have about 2200 analog tapes in our collection that the University Library is digitizing for us. All the oral history transcripts we’ve done to date are up there, too, about 1700 of them. It was the library, actually, that got us started digitizing the transcripts.

Q: Historic Preservation…

A: We do contract work for historic preservation and oral history. Before we leave oral history, we do transcriptions, too. We have several contracts with historical societies and universities to transcribe oral histories, including a set of African-American histories from Carnegie Mellon.

A lot of our historic preservation work, too, is contract. We’ve done national register nominations. For example, we completed a successful registration for Colonel Tyler’s home in Cambridge, Ohio, which is a beautiful inn.

Q: What’s the process involved in historic preservations?

A: It’s a very large field. It can include everything from the actual hands-on repairing of wooden windows to writing a nomination. The focus of our program is more writing and analysis. Our students are taught what can happen to a building. For example, water damage: you have to figure out where it’s coming from, number one. If it’s in the ceiling, it’s probably coming from the roof, et cetera. Now, what do you do to mitigate these things? They don’t actually do mitigation, but they can tell you what needs to happen.

This semester, the ten students are analyzing three different places. Six students are working on the Burt building downtown, the new Historical Society building. Two students are working on what’s left of the State Theatre: the façade. Two students are working up in Amherst on the town hall. The second floor has a theatre [served as the opera house] that they want to restore. Their final reports are delivered to these organizations as to a client.

Q: What kinds of career paths follow from this education and training in historic preservation?

A: They can go all kinds of places. They can work in a state historic preservation office; there are fifty of them. Some of the territories, like Guam, have historic preservation offices as well. There are also tribal historic preservation offices. The Native American sites offer additional work, such as archeology, which is covered under preservation law.

There are private cultural resource management firms (CRMs) that do architectural surveys or archeological testing. This would happen, for example, if they were putting in a highway and would need to determine the impact to historical properties above ground, as well as anything that might be underground.

So, there are people who want to study history, but they don’t want to teach. There are an array of options besides teaching for historians, and I have students who now work in state historic preservation offices as well as private CRMs.

We have engaged in erasure. I don’t know why they tore the Jennie down.

Q: Why was the Jennie torn down, and could we have kept it up as a monument? What other things can we be doing even now to ensure more doesn’t disappear?

A: We have engaged in erasure, because there’s nothing more distinctive to the steel industry than a blast furnace. Nothing else looks like that. I don’t know why they tore it down. Before they built the Museum, they were talking about redoing the Jeanette blast furnace and making that the site. Back in 1981, they had an estimate just to clean and stabilize the blast furnace; it was $1 million. Plus, the maintenance would be a pain in the neck. It would have been nice to have it at least stabilized so you could look at it.

Now Warren has the closest blast furnace, in what was the Republic Steel Warren plant. The reason it survived and Youngstown didn’t was that Republic had modernized it with basic oxygen furnaces (BOF) to convert iron into steel, which the Youngstown plants didn’t have. It also has a continuous caster and is a fully integrated mill.

The former Republic Steel plant in Warren is still around because it had been modernized.

You can make a heat of steel in a BOF in about twenty minutes. It takes eight to ten hours in an open hearth, though there are some types of steel the latter process is better for.

Q: What is the future of the Steel Museum?

A: Right now, as it stands, they’re trying to initiate a partnership agreement with YSU. The Museum’s parent organization, Ohio Historical Society (OHS), is suffering greatly from state budget cuts and the recession. They’re a private, not-for-profit organization, not a state agency, but they get funding from the state. They’re also the home of the state historic preservation office and the state archives. So, they have functions that they perform for the state of Ohio, and they have almost sixty sites all over Ohio.

The Steel Museum is one of their bigger sites, in terms of size. It’s also the only site outside of Columbus that has its own archives of any substance.

What the OHS has done so far is to establish agreements with partner organizations to manage the sites. OHS gives “x” dollars to the site, and the partner has to pick up the rest.

The Steel Museum already has a working relationship with YSU, so it makes sense to establish a full partnership. My colleague in applied history, Tom Leary, spends ten hours per week down in the archives working with students. We also have two graduate assistant interns. They get a stipend plus a tuition remission, so the value is very high. We’ve already found outside funding for those positions for the coming year.

June 30^th of this year is the deadline for eighteen of the OHS sites, and if they don’t find a partner for the Steel Museum, it will close. Our friends group is a wonderfully committed group of people, and that’s certainly helpful.

Q: How can the general public, in addition to getting involved with the friends group, help ensure the Steel Museum’s future?

A: Call anybody you know. Write letters to the higher-ups in the University: the President’s cabinet, the Trustees: this is an important institution for our community. And it is; this facility is the only one of its kind in the country. Ever since the Heinz Center redid its permanent exhibit, which used to focus on the iron and steel industry, the Steel Museum has become unique in the United States.

Q: It’s not just about the iron and steel industry; it’s also about labor and working class.

A: That’s right; it’s about people. These are the men and women who powered the industry. Everyone from the guy sweeping the floor to James A. Campbell is in that exhibit. It’s got to be about the people, because they’re so integral to the community.

I hope people can see themselves in the Steel Museum.

Q: What can people find in the permanent exhibit?

A: Themselves, I hope! And their families. You begin the story on the Wood Street level, and it is a cohesive story of the iron and steel industry in general and with the emphasis on Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley. So, they’re going to see a stone stack charcoal furnace replica; they’ll see tools.

Q: Ginormous tools!

A: Yes, exactly! What’s so cool is if you look at those tools and then you look at the illustrations from Dieter Rose encyclopedia from the 19^th century, the tools aren’t that different. The wrenches and all that, they haven’t really changed in 200 years. The process hasn’t really changed, even if the technology has evolved. You still need some form of carbon, you need iron ore, and you need a flux to make pig iron. You’ll see why the Bessemer Converter is so revolutionary. You’ll look at company housing.

Everybody’s favorite place on that level is the locker room. Children love it; they like to look at all the clothes and newspapers.

It also looks at organized labor. Organized labor is kind of tough. It’s hard to exhibit it apart from union buttons and delegate badges and photographs, but there is material there.

Another popular element is the blooming mill pulpit, and when you go down to the Commerce Street level, you can walk around it. I like to tell people the story of bringing it into the Museum. Everybody looks at it and how big it is, and they wonder how we got it in there. There are two doors in front of it, and it was brought in with about six inches to spare. That came from Cleveland, and there’s a video of the blooming mill process.

Also look there for the three mill models. The hot strip model supposedly works, but we’re trying to figure out what to put through it. It wants lead, but we don’t really want anybody handling lead. There are some oral histories on the Commerce Street level, too.

We’re very interested in bringing in new technologies, and our students are proposing some options for redesigned exhibits. We’ve talked about doing an interactive display with a worker, manager and owner, perhaps with actors speaking some of the oral histories, to provide different perspectives on the experience. The material, the responses, are there.

Q: What are your memories from a childhood in a steel valley?

A: Orange skies. The sky seemed to always have that glow of orange. That and the graphite that was everywhere. One of my jobs was to sweep the porch off from all the residue from the mills. The sky, the dirt and the smell. There was this sulfurous smell. You’d get used to it, but if you left and came back, it was like, ‘There’s that smell; I’m home.’

Of all the kids that I knew, my father was one of the ones who didn’t work in the mill. His father had worked at Sheet & Tube, though. None of my mother’s family worked in the mill except for her. She was a Rosie the Riveter during World War II. My maternal grandfather was a stonemason. So, I guess he wasn’t a steelworker but stone masons can also lay brick, and he used to do some work in the mills. Even if you didn’t have some direct relationship to someone in the mills, you had a connection to the industry.

Get Involved

If you haven’t visited the Steel Museum, make it a priority this month. Open Wednesday through Friday 10am – 4pm and Saturday and Sunday noon – 4pm.

You can write to your legislators to express your support for the Museum and for a partnership with YSU. Ask them to make funding for Ohio history a priority. Below is text from a letter Suzyn Schwebel Epstein sent that you may use as a template:

I am writing to urge that you increase Ohio’s investment in the Ohio Historical Society in the state budget now under consideration. The state’s historic sites are authentic and cannot be replicated. The state budget, as it now stands, proposes cutting funding for the 58 historic sites for which the Society and its local partners are responsible. Please consider restoring $703,000.00 to line 509 and $750,000.00 to line 502 to the budget for OHS historic sites and operations.

I know funding is tighter now than ever before. Nevertheless, a small investment in Ohio’s history now will have a meaningful long-term impact for Ohio’s future. The Ohio Historical Society contributes positively to helping achieve our state’s educational and economic development objectives. Following a decade of state budget cuts, now is the time to stabilize the Ohio Historical Society’s state budget before it is too late. Thank you for your consideration.

YSU Trustees are listed at http://www.ysu.edu/trustees/, and their support is critical to the Museum’s future. Thank them for their support thus far, and urge them to fully partner with the Ohio Historical Society to ensure its continued operation.

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