THIS WEEK’S BOOK
“Scrappers: Dayton, Ohio, and America Turn to Scrap — A Documentary in Photographs” by Steve Bennish (89 pages, $45)
A few years ago longtime Dayton Daily News reporter Steve Bennish was conducting research for some reports on the erosion and decline of our manufacturing sector. The Dayton region has been reeling from the disappearance of hundreds of employers and thousands of jobs.
Bennish noticed something. You have probably seen it, too. Have you observed that when you put out your trash that passersby will go through the discarded waste looking for metal to sell to recycling plants?
Bennish discovered a subculture of people that subsists by selling scrap metal. Don’t confuse these people with the thieves who strip and steal metal from vacant buildings. Bennish has a term for these law abiding but down-and-out citizens. He calls them “scrappers.” He just published a book about them.
In “Scrappers: Dayton, Ohio, and America Turn to Scrap — A Documentary in Photographs” the author provides evidence of how some residents of Dayton are getting by these days. The photographs in “Scrappers” capture these scrappers at work. Some of these people used to have good jobs. Some have been unemployed for years. These stark black-and-white photos show them working hard to find the scrap metal they need to survive.
These photos remind me of the work of Dorothea Lange, the photographer who documented the struggles of Americans who were dislocated during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Bennish provides the grim narration for what we are seeing.
He writes: “On a stretch along the railroad tracks, men with picks and shovels work year-round digging in a confused landscape of turned earth and rusted shards. This place is checker-boarded with shallow foxholes dug at random. It’s an old scrap yard — Patterson Iron & Metal Co. It was abandoned and closed years ago. Today, it is a surface mine.”
These urban miners are excavating discarded waste metal, the rusted, decaying residue of our former manufacturing might. The scrap that they are digging up will be sold for a few dollars, melted down, then shipped overseas to fuel the demands of bustling overseas factories.
One man, a Navy veteran tells Bennish: “A lot of us who go scrapping, we do stick together. If we see somebody stealing anybody’s stuff, we track ’em down.” He adds: “You have to go to Mexico or China to get a job after President Clinton signed NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement).”
Bennish provides some hard numbers: Over the course of a decade Montgomery County “lost $3 billion in annual inflation — adjusted private sector payroll — the steepest slide of any Ohio metro county.” This litany of brutal figures tells how “Ohio’s annual private sector payroll shrank by $22 billion from its level a decade earlier.” He states that “the losses are a modern-day destruction of productive industry that is beyond comparison, no matter what any pundit or political type says.”
“Scrappers” assembles some deeply disturbing evidence of just how far our once solid American manufacturing base has fallen. You can hear my interview with Steve Bennish at 11 a.m. today on WYSO-FM (91.3).
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