DOWN AND OUT IN PENNSYLTUCKY: Train for a career as a baggage handler or pray for a Fischer-Tropsch boom
DD keeps tabs on his old homestead, Schuylkill County, Pennsyltucky. Apparently the Internet has hardly come to old Schuylkill. If you search for it you find pathetic and wishful placeholders like this bureau for tourism.
"Our special [Schuylkill County] attractions include America's Oldest Brewery -- 'The Yuengling Brewery,' [a coal mine], [a raceway], Rausch Creek Motorsports Park ... " reads publicity material, somewhat forlornly.
It is also claimed that Schuylkill County has "three wineries." This is probably sort of true if you expand the definition of a winery to include grapes thrown in a field and left to the mercy of nine months of reliably cool or cold weather seasoned with massive snow and ice storms.
The entire county's population is about the same as Pasadena's -- around 150,000. And it has lost less to the Iraq war -- two dead, I think, to three here.
However, Schuylkill doesn't contain one decent book store, library or college worth mentioning. One piddling branch campus of Penn State University serves the county and it is located outside Schuylkill Haven. (The branch campus purpose is to serve as a combination waste bin/training ground for high school graduates too inferior for immediate placement at State College.)
A couple of business schools for secretaries are in Pottsville.
Career opportunities are few in Schuylkill County.
There is the military but education is poor and the county's mean family income is only about 77 percent of the national average. Service and retail is about all that's available.
Since the Nineties, Schuylkill County has seen its small garment industry progressively destroyed by overseas slave labor pools. Pine Grove, my home town, decided sometime during that period to attempt augmenting its tax base by allowing a big company to come in and set up a gigantic landfill within the township. So now Pine Grove is known as a destination for garbage from big cities in neighboring states.
Schuylkill County has had famous citizens.
Author John O'Hara hailed from Pottsville, the county seat, and became notorious for literary work which cast his hometown very poorly, under the alias "Gibbsville."
Schuylkill County was also home to the Molly Maquires, a secret organization within the population of coal mine workers which stretched across Schuylkill, Carbon and Luzerne counties in the late mid-to-late 1800's. They fought for better treatment of miners and engaged in sabotage of the local coal industry, gaining a reputation which attributed murders, assaults and theft to them.
A number of the Maguires were tried in Jim Thorpe, Carbon County, then a coal capitol. They were subsequently hung, "probably wrongly," according to one account here.
Maguirism was made a crime because it meant sticking up for the small man inside the mine at the expense of big business interests. However, the glory days of coal eventually ended and Jim Thorpe suffered decay and ruin, as did virtually everything in the eastern part of the state tied to that industry.
In the Sixties, when local public school history classes in Pine Grove dealt with the Maguires, they were essentially portrayed as Irish terrorists.
With existence dire and prospects nil, bringing opportunity to Schuylkill County has always been important. It's now so important, local efforts take on airs of utter desperation.
Locally, there has been great interest in bringing in a company to employ old Nazi technology for converting waste coal, of which there is plenty in Schuylkill County, to oil.
The first "Fischer-Tropsch process" coal-to-oil factory "would be [built] in Schuylkill County in eastern Pennsylvania, an economically depressed anthracite coal mining region whose economy revolves around waste dumping, [subsistence] coal mining, waste coal burning and prisons," writes a Schuylkill citizen opposition group here.
"This facility would be a heavily subsidized experimental demonstration project that could pave the way for many more of these refineries throughout the U.S."
Ideally, the wish is to locate it in a place called Gilberton near the poverty-stricken towns of Mahanoy City and Shenandoah. The idea -- one supposes -- is that if a Fischer-Tropsch plant employs some people, there will be somewhat fewer locals winding up warehoused in one of the other growth county businesses, SCI-Mahanoy state prison.
Schuylkill County has the potential to be a leader in the country once again -- in pollution. As it led, alongside its other neighbors in Pennsylvania, during the heyday of big coal.
But it is only a potential and the project appears stalled, probably because "Fischer-Tropsch" conversion plants for coal to oil have never been such great ideas.
In Nazi Germany they made some sense because the country was run by a ruthless dictator and at war with the world, cut off from oil resources and with its infrastructure under heavy bombardment. So more ruin and pollution weren't really big negatives in the larger picture, one in which the Third Reich's heavy industry could pull its workforce from slave labor procured in occupied countries.
Other employment opportunities for Schuylkill are needed. One possibility, developed today in an article in the Pottsville Republican, calls for "airport cargo workers."
There is no regional national/international airport which serves Schuylkill County.
"High school graduates who get jobs at the proposed cargo airport could expect salaries in the $30,000-a-year range, while those with college educations will command that figure as a minimum, and perhaps into the six-figure category," stated an article in the newspaper.
"That's what state Rep. Todd Eachus, D-116, told a group of educational leaders during a meeting last week. Eachus said the low range of the salaries for the proposed facility currently represent the per capita income in the Hazleton area - $17,200 a year," continued the piece.
Ah, but the airport does not yet exist and it is by no means certain that it will.
Remember, we're talking about Schuylkill County, a place with no obvious resources to raise it above other tracts of similarly depleted and exhausted interior in America's heartland also competing for futures in baggage and box handling.
The politician told "educators that he examined existing cargo airports in the country and listed nine typical positions and the salary range for those positions which would require only a high school diploma or its equivalent ... "
Regrettably, even bear hunting appears to be in something of a decline in Pennsyltucky.
The Pine Grove and Schuylkill County archive at Dick Destiny.
DD keeps tabs on his old homestead, Schuylkill County, Pennsyltucky. Apparently the Internet has hardly come to old Schuylkill. If you search for it you find pathetic and wishful placeholders like this bureau for tourism.
"Our special [Schuylkill County] attractions include America's Oldest Brewery -- 'The Yuengling Brewery,' [a coal mine], [a raceway], Rausch Creek Motorsports Park ... " reads publicity material, somewhat forlornly.
It is also claimed that Schuylkill County has "three wineries." This is probably sort of true if you expand the definition of a winery to include grapes thrown in a field and left to the mercy of nine months of reliably cool or cold weather seasoned with massive snow and ice storms.
The entire county's population is about the same as Pasadena's -- around 150,000. And it has lost less to the Iraq war -- two dead, I think, to three here.
However, Schuylkill doesn't contain one decent book store, library or college worth mentioning. One piddling branch campus of Penn State University serves the county and it is located outside Schuylkill Haven. (The branch campus purpose is to serve as a combination waste bin/training ground for high school graduates too inferior for immediate placement at State College.)
A couple of business schools for secretaries are in Pottsville.
Career opportunities are few in Schuylkill County.
There is the military but education is poor and the county's mean family income is only about 77 percent of the national average. Service and retail is about all that's available.
Since the Nineties, Schuylkill County has seen its small garment industry progressively destroyed by overseas slave labor pools. Pine Grove, my home town, decided sometime during that period to attempt augmenting its tax base by allowing a big company to come in and set up a gigantic landfill within the township. So now Pine Grove is known as a destination for garbage from big cities in neighboring states.
Schuylkill County has had famous citizens.
Author John O'Hara hailed from Pottsville, the county seat, and became notorious for literary work which cast his hometown very poorly, under the alias "Gibbsville."
Schuylkill County was also home to the Molly Maquires, a secret organization within the population of coal mine workers which stretched across Schuylkill, Carbon and Luzerne counties in the late mid-to-late 1800's. They fought for better treatment of miners and engaged in sabotage of the local coal industry, gaining a reputation which attributed murders, assaults and theft to them.
A number of the Maguires were tried in Jim Thorpe, Carbon County, then a coal capitol. They were subsequently hung, "probably wrongly," according to one account here.
Maguirism was made a crime because it meant sticking up for the small man inside the mine at the expense of big business interests. However, the glory days of coal eventually ended and Jim Thorpe suffered decay and ruin, as did virtually everything in the eastern part of the state tied to that industry.
In the Sixties, when local public school history classes in Pine Grove dealt with the Maguires, they were essentially portrayed as Irish terrorists.
With existence dire and prospects nil, bringing opportunity to Schuylkill County has always been important. It's now so important, local efforts take on airs of utter desperation.
Locally, there has been great interest in bringing in a company to employ old Nazi technology for converting waste coal, of which there is plenty in Schuylkill County, to oil.
The first "Fischer-Tropsch process" coal-to-oil factory "would be [built] in Schuylkill County in eastern Pennsylvania, an economically depressed anthracite coal mining region whose economy revolves around waste dumping, [subsistence] coal mining, waste coal burning and prisons," writes a Schuylkill citizen opposition group here.
"This facility would be a heavily subsidized experimental demonstration project that could pave the way for many more of these refineries throughout the U.S."
Ideally, the wish is to locate it in a place called Gilberton near the poverty-stricken towns of Mahanoy City and Shenandoah. The idea -- one supposes -- is that if a Fischer-Tropsch plant employs some people, there will be somewhat fewer locals winding up warehoused in one of the other growth county businesses, SCI-Mahanoy state prison.
Schuylkill County has the potential to be a leader in the country once again -- in pollution. As it led, alongside its other neighbors in Pennsylvania, during the heyday of big coal.
But it is only a potential and the project appears stalled, probably because "Fischer-Tropsch" conversion plants for coal to oil have never been such great ideas.
In Nazi Germany they made some sense because the country was run by a ruthless dictator and at war with the world, cut off from oil resources and with its infrastructure under heavy bombardment. So more ruin and pollution weren't really big negatives in the larger picture, one in which the Third Reich's heavy industry could pull its workforce from slave labor procured in occupied countries.
Other employment opportunities for Schuylkill are needed. One possibility, developed today in an article in the Pottsville Republican, calls for "airport cargo workers."
There is no regional national/international airport which serves Schuylkill County.
"High school graduates who get jobs at the proposed cargo airport could expect salaries in the $30,000-a-year range, while those with college educations will command that figure as a minimum, and perhaps into the six-figure category," stated an article in the newspaper.
"That's what state Rep. Todd Eachus, D-116, told a group of educational leaders during a meeting last week. Eachus said the low range of the salaries for the proposed facility currently represent the per capita income in the Hazleton area - $17,200 a year," continued the piece.
Ah, but the airport does not yet exist and it is by no means certain that it will.
Remember, we're talking about Schuylkill County, a place with no obvious resources to raise it above other tracts of similarly depleted and exhausted interior in America's heartland also competing for futures in baggage and box handling.
The politician told "educators that he examined existing cargo airports in the country and listed nine typical positions and the salary range for those positions which would require only a high school diploma or its equivalent ... "
Regrettably, even bear hunting appears to be in something of a decline in Pennsyltucky.
The Pine Grove and Schuylkill County archive at Dick Destiny.
posted by George Smith at 6:35 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home