Since I have never been over that way, I look forward to you illustrating what life is like in your neck of the woods Michael.
Changes are certainly coming. There are similarities with the way you describe how the former life of federal workers could be no more and from what I remember when the steel mills closed. You made good money. You worked through some of your NUMEROUS weeks of vacation. You bought a Caddy for your wife and yourself. A boat. A hunting camp.
Then the bottom fell out! The classified section of the paper had fire sales on things like these. Including numerous Corvettes!
The most interesting and sad part? How shell shocked some of the people were! Like it was a bad dream and would be over soon. I was listening to a talk radio station when a guy called in lamenting how he was going to keep paying for all his stuff with no job. The host flatly told him I guess you'll just have to sell it all, which floored the poor guy, because it still wasn't sinking in that life as he knew it was over.
Actually I could say the same for you, since I've never been to Washington state.
When you consider that OC has the weird geography where, for decades, you couldn't get directly there from the west and those from points north (Philly, NY, New England) had an easier way to get to the beach than to traipse all the way across Delaware, you sort of see why its main market seems to be the rest of Maryland, the DC area, and PA west of Philly. It didn't really take off as a tourist destination until the Bay Bridge was built in the early 1950s - back then I think it went up to maybe 15th Street and the rest was open beach to Delaware. (OC is easy to envision on a map since most of the cross-streets are numbered up to 146th at the Delaware line.) Now it hugs the Delaware line right up to Fenwick Island.
As for your main point, in Toledo we had that issue every time they had to lay people off at the Jeep plant, which was fairly often when they were part of AMC back in the day. It was one thing to have a middle-class lifestyle and own the house in the nicer part of town, but when they decided they could live like kings with no savings account, that's where they ran into problems. My dad was a blue-collar worker, but his one luxury was buying 5 acres out in the country to build a house with a pond. By the time he achieved that, my mom had to go back to work to afford that life.
Since I have never been over that way, I look forward to you illustrating what life is like in your neck of the woods Michael.
Changes are certainly coming. There are similarities with the way you describe how the former life of federal workers could be no more and from what I remember when the steel mills closed. You made good money. You worked through some of your NUMEROUS weeks of vacation. You bought a Caddy for your wife and yourself. A boat. A hunting camp.
Then the bottom fell out! The classified section of the paper had fire sales on things like these. Including numerous Corvettes!
The most interesting and sad part? How shell shocked some of the people were! Like it was a bad dream and would be over soon. I was listening to a talk radio station when a guy called in lamenting how he was going to keep paying for all his stuff with no job. The host flatly told him I guess you'll just have to sell it all, which floored the poor guy, because it still wasn't sinking in that life as he knew it was over.
Actually I could say the same for you, since I've never been to Washington state.
When you consider that OC has the weird geography where, for decades, you couldn't get directly there from the west and those from points north (Philly, NY, New England) had an easier way to get to the beach than to traipse all the way across Delaware, you sort of see why its main market seems to be the rest of Maryland, the DC area, and PA west of Philly. It didn't really take off as a tourist destination until the Bay Bridge was built in the early 1950s - back then I think it went up to maybe 15th Street and the rest was open beach to Delaware. (OC is easy to envision on a map since most of the cross-streets are numbered up to 146th at the Delaware line.) Now it hugs the Delaware line right up to Fenwick Island.
As for your main point, in Toledo we had that issue every time they had to lay people off at the Jeep plant, which was fairly often when they were part of AMC back in the day. It was one thing to have a middle-class lifestyle and own the house in the nicer part of town, but when they decided they could live like kings with no savings account, that's where they ran into problems. My dad was a blue-collar worker, but his one luxury was buying 5 acres out in the country to build a house with a pond. By the time he achieved that, my mom had to go back to work to afford that life.