Category: default || By jt3y

Thoughts on returning from four days and three nights in beautiful southwestern Ohio at the annual geekout:

. . .

A few years ago, I described Dayton, Ohio, as looking like a large McKeesport: "(S)ome very nice sections, some very seedy sections, and a large muddled middle that could go either way."

I am happy to report that Dayton seems to have cleaned up its act ... a little bit. There are still lots of boarded-up buildings downtown and on the west side of town, but it looks like they're trying to make an effort to address blight.

The parallels with the Pittsburgh area are still pretty obvious --- Dayton is a middle-class industrial city devastated by the loss of its major employers, struggling to support its basic infrastructure while the tax base is collapsing.

It turns out there's another parallel, according to Sunday's Dayton Daily News, and it's a dubious honor to share: Dayton, like McKeesport and Pittsburgh, is still sharply divided along racial lines:

Areas in East Dayton were up to 99 percent white in 2000, while West Dayton had tracts that were up to 98 percent black. A few tracts, mostly in neighborhoods close to North Main Street, had diverse populations ranging from about 36 to 66 percent white ...

Scroggins, who is black, said the general pattern she has seen is that most people choose to live where their families have lived ... Wietzel thinks market forces determine who lives where, and he thinks city neighborhoods will become more integrated naturally as quality housing is developed in neighborhoods that have traditionally been racially homogeneous. He said another element that is needed is an economic recovery that will bring new homebuyers into the area.

. . .

I can't speak for Dayton, but neighborhoods in the Mon-Yough area are not going to be "mixed" as long as --- and I might as well just say it --- racial attitudes remain stuck in 1940s Selma, Ala.

Some percentage of people will protest that "there are black racists, too," and that "some of their best friends are black," and blah, blah, blah. Perhaps, but it's not African-Americans who are moving away from the area because there are "too many white people."

I have heard some astonishingly racist things said by friends and relatives, and I'll bet you have, too. I have not always argued with them as strenuously as I should have. That makes me a coward, and maybe it also makes me a racist.

We have a lot of supposedly educated people standing around, scratching their heads and wondering why Western Pennsylvania is still losing population --- especially young people.

I have a theory. We have a sizable and growing African-American population in the Mon-Yough area ... McKeesport is about 25 percent, while Braddock is more than 66 percent.

I wonder how many talented black teen-agers go away to college and never return to our area because they don't see any opportunities for themselves here? Why stay in the Mon Valley when a certain percentage of people are going to treat you like you're some sort of criminal?

You don't really notice how segregated the Pittsburgh area is until you travel through the South or many northern urban areas and see more African-American professionals, more integrated neighborhoods, and more diverse groups of people having lunch, playing softball, and arguing with each other.

It's no wonder that many of those areas are booming economically while Pittsburgh, Dayton and Cincinnati (another notoriously segregated metro area) are lagging behind.

Let's think about that the next time we hear someone uncork a ripe slur. More importantly, let's act.

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Interesting, But Useless, Fact: Besides being the "birthplace of aviation" --- a fact that Dayton tourism publications, highway signs, obscene postcards, etc., point out every 10.5 seconds --- the city is also the birthplace of leaded gasoline and Freon. For obvious reasons, Dayton doesn't brag about those "better things for better living," as DuPont used to say.

Chemist Thomas Midgley Jr. developed tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive while working for General Motors' Delco division and Freon for its Frigidaire division, both headquartered in Dayton. Tetraethyl lead, sold under the trade name "Ethyl," was designed to boost gasoline octane in high-compression engines; while Freon was a replacement for toxic refrigerants like ammonia.

Around Dayton, GM Executive Charles "Boss" Kettering tends to grab the glory --- there are buildings named for him and his family at the National Air Force Museum, the University of Dayton and Antioch University, and there's also Kettering Medical Center in the upscale suburb of Kettering, Ohio.

Yet Midgley did the work that made refrigeration affordable and safe and interstate highways possible. The trade-offs for those miracle inventions were lead poisoning and damage to the ozone layer and global warming, of course, but to quote one of my favorite movies, "you can't have Falstaff and have him thin."

Or something like that. Maybe the lead has gotten to my brain. (Midgley eventually contracted lead poisoning and had to take a leave of absence from Delco to recover.)

. . .

P.S.: Incidentally, now you'll understand all of the "Ethyl" jokes in Warner Brothers cartoons from the 1940s. Gasoline with "Ethyl" was probably the most celebrated consumer product of its day. (Think "Wi-Fi" now.) And you're welcome.

. . .

You've Got Crap! While I was off-line, only 62 spam emails made it through the filters. Most of them advertised various penny-stock frauds. Anyone who invests in a stock that they heard about in a badly-written email from "Mcelroy Freda" or "Moises Klein" deserves to lose their money.

If the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math, then spam is a tax on people who are in danger of drowning in the shower.