The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Lorain, Ohio: The real Marseilles, sort of—and Toni Morrison’s old town, on top of that

The Wash­ing­ton, D.C., area gets the most ink in The Solomon Scan­dals.

But Scan­dals also con­tains flash­backs to the steel town of Mar­seilles, Ohio, a fic­tion­al­ized ver­sion of Lorain, where I wrote fea­tures and worked the poverty and pub­lic hous­ing beats for the Jour­nal, the local daily.

The phrase “fac­tory town” applies. In Scandals even D.C. comes off the same way, as a hier­ar­chi­cal place with the bosses in firm con­trol most of the time. Most. There is the occa­sion when Juan Gar­cia, “a mal­con­tent of a steel­worker in Marseilles…tampered with some machin­ery at U.S. Steel, so that a sadis­tic fore­man became part of a twenty-ton ingot shipped to a Chevro­let foundry.”

“Every­body in the area looked down on Mar­seilles,” recalls Jonathan Stone, the nar­ra­tor in Scan­dals with a crush on a medieval stud­ies major from Ober­lin. “The Cleve­land papers said Mar­seil­lans wed in bowl­ing shirts. Ober­lin stu­dents con­de­scended toward the Mar­seilles the way some mis­sion­ar­ies from the school must have sneered dur­ing the nine­teenth cen­tury toward the Chi­nese.” Mar­seilles is “as large a city as can exist with­out any­one hav­ing heard of it.”

Sense of humor despite bleak times

Luck­ily some natives of the real Lorain share Stone’s sense of humor, and in that vein, I recently ran across a delight­ful group on Face­book, called You Know Your From Lorain When… Here are some sam­ple entries, thrown together in one para­graph to save space. “Your idea of a lux­ury car is a Ford Escort GT. Every time you hear Span­ish music, it brings back fond mem­o­ries of South Lorain. You find your­self hang­ing out at Super K in the wee hours of the morn­ing. Before you went to Super K you were at Rebman’s Bowl­ing Alley. Your high school foot­ball team doesn’t win more than 3 games a sea­son. You cried when the last Ford Thun­der­bird was dri­ven down Broadway.”

The lat­ter line is espe­cially sig­nif­i­cant since Lorain has been in a reces­sion for years, and D.C.‘s élite-driven trade poli­cies just may have con­tributed to the shut­down of the huge Ford fac­tory. Cur­rent pop­u­la­tion is 68,652, as reported in Wikipedia. I sus­pect it was much greater when I lived in Lorain dur­ing the ‘70s.

Toni Mor­ri­son ties—plus a giant con­crete Easter basket

Lorain is also the home­town of Bill Schroeder, the ROTC cadet and ex-Eagle Scout killed at Kent State. But Lorain is much more than a city of vic­tims. Toni Mor­ri­son, for exam­ple, the Nobel Prize lau­re­ate, once lived there, and Michael Dirda, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, is a Lorain native. Lorain is even the inspi­ra­tion for a hyper­text poet. And on top of that, as shown by another Face­book group, it is the set­ting for one of the world’s largest con­crete Easter bas­kets. What’s more, I have won­der­ful rec­ol­lec­tions of the Lorain Pub­lic Library sys­tem, which, by the way, has cre­ated a mem­ory project online (source of the bas­ket photo). Per­haps there’s more than a lit­tle con­nec­tion between the qual­ity of the library sys­tem and the Mor­ri­son Nobel and Dirda Pulitzer.

About the other images: The bridge photo is Cre­ative Commons-licensed from ronnie44052, on Flickr. Lorain is in north­east Ohio, where the Black River flows into Lake Erie. Cap­tion reads, “The Yosemite from Mon­rovia, Liberia, on the west coast of Africa, enters the port of Lorain…with the assis­tance of the tugs Illi­nois and Iowa.” The steel plant image is is CC-licensed from ronnie44052, the num­ber being Lorain’s ZIP code. Wikipedia is the source of the GT photo. Toni Morrison’s pic­ture is also from Wikipedia and includes mod­i­fi­ca­tions by Entheta.

Related: ‘What Would Google Do’ with my old steel­town news­pa­per? Here’s what I’d do.

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