Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood

by Paul Hertneky

Overview

Paul Hertneky is one of millions of baby boomers who fled the industrial north upon fulfilling his parents’ dreams of a college education. He returns to his roots in Ambridge, Pennsylvania in this collection of stories specific to one legendary riverfront plateau and one boy’s journey, but emblematic of immigrant life and blue-collar aspirations during the heyday of American industry and its crash, foreshadowing one of the largest internal migrations in U.S. history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872332225
Publisher:	Bauhan Publishing
Publication date:	05/03/2016
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	666,456
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Over 25 years Paul Hertneky has published in every medium. His work centers on culture, food, industry, the environment, and travel, winning him a Solas Award, and two James Beard Award nominations. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he serves on the faculty of Chatham University and lives in Hancock, NH.

Table of Contents

A Turning Tide Horns in the Hollow Rust and Restlessness Milk and Honey Where Stories Went to Die The Front Pew Sanctuary The Nation's First Economy The Prurient Power of Pierogi Life as They Found It Rough and Ready, Tough and Tender Moms Who Put Out A Flame That Water Fed Popularity, Politics, and Patronage Humility and Its Opposite Sure But Not At All Certain Curiosity as Curse Light and Nature More Snoop Than Solicitor Of Heroes and Helpers Untethered Dodging a Bullet Itching All Over Like Ambridge with a C Rust: The Patina of Possibility Rescue Amid the Ruins Acknowledgments

What People are Saying About This

Ed Ochester

“Just as Thomas Bell's Out of This Furnace is the classic story of the growth of industrial Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania, Paul Hertneky's Rust Belt Boy is the story of what happened as the mills shut down. A compelling personal account, it emphasizes the strong affection that many of us have for this place and its heritage.”

Howard Mansfield

“Hertneky's hometown, Ambridge, contained multitudes: big steel works with Bessemer furnaces firing right on main street, immigrant workers, labor strife, and a forgotten past that includes George Washington and a wildly successful utopia. In this affectionate memoir, Hertneky delivers Ambridge's heart and soul, and proves that the discovery of America is never ending.”

Jim Russell

“Like Paul Hertneky, I, too, am a Rust Belt boy, but grew up a generation later. Rust Belt Boy closes a book on 300 years of history as a geography of aspiration. Newcomers defined the towns and cities. Despite having grown up in the same place, these people and their stories seem foreign and exotic to me. All I have known is leaving. Rust Belt Boy is a gift, a heritage I never knew I had.”

Editorial Reviews

05/02/2016
Essayist Hertneky focuses his first book on his childhood in the steel town of Ambridge, Pa., “with its ethnic enclaves and round-the-clock factories.” He combines his memories with sections on the history of the town to produce a memoir that is both a coming-of-age story and a social history of the growth, death, and rebirth of a rust belt community. He talks lovingly about the strong role Catholicism played in his family during the 1960s, where he “felt embraced at the heart of this world where children were seen as divine gifts.” He also provides a fascinating look at how the town itself was founded in the spirit of communal millennialism embodied by the Harmony Society, a group with origins in Germany that existed in Pennsylvania from 1805 to 1905. He is honest, insightful, and empathetic about the rough life of many of the people who worked in nearby Aliquippa’s steel works, which “gobbled up mile and mile of shoreline.” Most successfully, Hertneky depicts his own trajectory from the town to college and beyond in parallel with the history of Ambridge’s “grand schemes and redemptive dreams.” (May)

Publishers Weekly

I loved it. I haven’t read a book in many years that made me feel so wistful, and grateful, as Rust Belt Boy. Given my own family history—my grandfather was a Pennsylvania coal miner who barely spoke English, my grandmother ran a Prohibition era saloon on the banks of the Susquehanna River—I felt Hertneky was writing a love letter to my own boyhood, and at the same time a Dear John letter, telling me goodbye to all that. If you’re one of the six million baby boomers who walked away from a dying hometown, read this book and remember another America.”—Bob Shacochis, National Book Award winner and author of Pulitzer finalist, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul


“The inside truth of a life, or a culture–of anything–cannot be tricked together. It has to grow from what’s been bred in the bone and tested in the day’s real living. Paul Hertneky’s Rust Belt Boy has the savor of that living. It is a rueful, bittersweet expression of loss and a brave reenactment of memory.”—Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies and The Other Walk


“Rust Belt Boy brings to life, in loving, lyric detail, an essential but overlooked portrait of America’s blue collar heart. Paul Hertneky is a splendid writer, by turns hilarious, tough, and tender. He’s always honest, often revelatory, and never disappointing; his book deserves to become a classic.”—Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus, National Book Award finalist


“[Hertneky] is honest, insightful, and empathetic about the rough life of many of the people who worked in . . . Aliquippa’s steel works. . . . Most successfully, Hertneky depicts his own trajectory from the town to college and beyond in parallel with the history of Ambridge’s.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher