One family’s decadeslong story of working life led to a Pittsburgh picket line

On Tuesday morning, Oct. 18, 2022, I drove to the borough of West Homestead to photograph TV doctor Mehmet Oz with a half-dozen small-town police officers endorsing his bid for a U.S. Senate seat. A typical news assignment. Afterward I sat in my car to edit and transmit the picture to the Post-Gazette photo desk, then drove to Pittsburgh’s North Side.

I parked on Ridge Avenue. From there, it’s a 20-minute walk to PG headquarters on the North Shore. I needed that time to think about my next move, which I knew would cause pain for me and my family.

The day before, members of my union, the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, had spent hours in a Zoom meeting, debating whether to go on strike against the Post-Gazette. It was not a happy time. People were angry. The guild is a small local, and we all felt backed into a corner by powerful and well-financed organizations — the Communications Workers of America, of which the guild is a part, and Block Communications, parent company of the Post-Gazette.

Members of the four PG production unions already walked the picket line. Their strike began 12 days earlier. Now it was the newsroom’s turn. The CWA gave us little choice, and little time to consider the consequences of a strike. Without paychecks, what would we do for money? Who would pay for our health care? Would the strike last a week? A month? Six months?

After the debate, we voted by a slim margin — two votes — to authorize the strike.

I was a vocal proponent of the action. It felt good to cast a “yes” vote, to stand up against a company I felt had been breaking labor laws with no consequences and abusing its workers for years. But the next morning, it was time to back up that vote with action. Could I follow through and walk away from a job I’d held for more than a quarter of a century, one that helped sustain my family?

I’ve been photographing and writing about everyday people in this city since joining The Pittsburgh Press staff in 1989. I’ve worked at the Post-Gazette since 1997. Like most other working folks, I considered my job a worthwhile endeavor and sometimes even important. I threw myself into the profession. At times, it felt as much a part of me as a flesh-and-blood appendage. How would I navigate life without it?

Those who planned to join the strike were told to gather on North Shore Drive, outside the PG entrance, at noon. I stepped out of my car on Ridge Avenue at 11:30 and began the 20-minute walk. It was just one small part of a decadeslong journey.

I was born with no union blood in my veins. No one in my family ever carried a union card or called out “Solidarity!” on a picket line. My father, son of a movie projectionist in tiny Louisa, Kentucky, flung himself from the hills of Appalachia when he was a young man. He landed in Southern Indiana, and took a job at an automobile dealership in nearby Louisville, Kentucky.

He was the guy who helped customers finance their car purchases. He did well for himself. Once the dealership featured him in a Louisville newspaper ad. “Meet Mike Mellon,” it read. “Our new finance manager, who brings with him 13 years of experience.”

My father worked his way up. By 1973 he was named “new car manager.” A few years later the boss promoted him to “business manager.”

One March day in 1976 a man and a woman entered the dealership, expressed interest in a car and requested a test drive. A salesman named James Harper was assigned to accompany them. Harper worked on commission and hoped to make a sale. The couple drove the car to the K&I railroad bridge, which connects Louisville to the town of New Albany, Indiana. The bridge had a single narrow lane for cars, with red lights at the bridge’s ends to control traffic. Part way across, the couple stopped the vehicle. The man pointed a gun at Harper, forced him out of the vehicle and told him to climb a bridge railing. The man then shot Harper three times. Minutes later, police received reports of a body falling into the waters of the Ohio River.

The murder rattled my father and left him feeling vulnerable and alone. He quit his job and took a position as manager of a smaller dealership across the river from Louisville, in Jeffersonville, Indiana. His troubles didn’t end. With gasoline prices on the rise, people stopped buying big American-made cars. The salesmen worried about their futures and talked about selling Datsuns instead of Chervolets.

My mother, Wanda Wilson, grew up in Marion, Indiana. Her parents divorced when she was young. Her mother  — my grandma Grace — worked as a clerk in a hardware store and made little money. This was in the 1940s. Life then was especially tough for a single mother in a small town. She and her daughter and son left their family home and moved into a small first-floor apartment.

One night, the man who lived in the apartment above them flew into a drunken rage. The man cursed and threw things in his apartment, then bounded up and down the steps. My grandmother could hear everything. Alarmed, she grabbed her biggest kitchen knife and sat all night by the apartment door, in case she needed to defend her family. She was alone but not powerless.

My parents met in the early 1950s and quickly married. They raised three children in a development of cheaply built houses in Jeffersonville. Their neighbors worked as teachers, truck drivers, mechanics, salespeople, contractors and pastors. This was their first taste of middle-class life, and they brought with them habits and traditions of earlier lives. One of our neighbors sat in his driveway late at night, playing a guitar and belting out country songs. On summer nights I’d lie in bed with the lights out, listening to his heartfelt renditions of Hank Williams tunes.

The stresses of middle-class life claimed casualties, people overwhelmed by frustration, anger, unmet yearnings, alcoholism. My father nearly became one. For a while, his life was a wreck. He drank heavily. He was rarely home, and when he was around, tension often filled the house. I stood in the living room holding a Dick and Jane book and watched my mother weep.

One Sunday evening a group of men from a neighborhood church stopped by and asked my father to accompany them to a prayer group meeting. He resisted, but they were insistent and wouldn’t leave. Unhappily, he relented in order to get on with his evening. He traveled with them a half-mile to the church. There, something profound happened to my father. He returned from the night’s session a changed man, imperfect but willing to struggle with his flaws.

What happened to him? I didn’t care, I was just happy to finally have a dad who’d throw a football with me. It took years for me to understand: Caring people in the community worked together to keep my father from destroying himself and his family.

Other parts of life didn’t change so magically. The American auto industry continued its decline. Struggling to pay the mortgage, my father tried new ways to make money. He invested in a printing press and lost more than $1,000. He became a lay pastor and preached in small rural churches. Later, my father tinkered with starting an insurance company. One Sunday morning in the fall of 1983, he woke early, fixed a pot of coffee and then died of a heart attack. He was 52.

My widowed mother sold the family house and bought a smaller cheaper place. She worked as a secretary and took on boarders. She had little privacy, since she shared her kitchen and bathroom with strangers. Sometimes after work she’d hang out at a shopping mall to avoid going home. I was newly married to my longtime girlfriend, Brenda Murphy, and beginning a journalism career, so I wasn’t around to help when my mother’s car broke down or something went wrong in her house. She struggled like this for a decade, until she fell in love with, and then married, a childhood friend with whom she’d reconnected at a class reunion. 

In 1989, I accepted a job at The Pittsburgh Press. Moving up, just like my father. I saw the Press as a unique place and formed strong bonds with my co-workers. After work, we hung out at Sanremos on Market Street to drink beer and talk about our jobs and dreams of the future.

Everything changed in May 1992. Contract negotiations between the Teamsters and Press management broke down, and a strike shut down newspaper production. After several months, the Press owners sold the newspaper to the Post-Gazette rather than settle the dispute. Dozens of Press journalists migrated to the PG. I wasn’t one of them.

Winter 1993 arrived cold and brutal. I struggled to earn money as a freelance photographer and writer. Brenda worked during the day, so mostly I sat at home, feeling disconnected from a world that was moving on. I had a great life partner, yet felt alone and depressed. What was going on?

When spring arrived, I began visiting the Monongahela Valley. I knew something about the old steel towns there. Homestead, Duquesne and Braddock had been a part of my first beat at the Press. People in these places, I knew, struggled to maintain their communities in the midst of abandonment. 

Why did I go there? I had no plan, just a yearning for connections, a sense of belonging. And since I was a journalist, I took a camera and a notebook.

One August day I walked into a small print shop on Eighth Avenue in Homestead. It was owned by Mike Stout, a former craneman at the legendary steel mill that once dominated the town. Mike told me he’d lost more than 80 friends and former colleagues since the mill closed. These were workers who considered the mill a special place, their work important. They died of heart attacks, strokes, cancers. Seven died by suicide. All were under the age of 60. The psychological devastation of losing the job was worse than the economic damage, Mike explained.

I was shocked at this accounting of human wreckage. Did it have to be this way?

Over the next few years, I traveled to other abandoned towns: Matewan, in West Virginia’s coal country; Lewiston, Maine, once home to textile and shoe factories; the auto town of Flint, Michigan. Places where people once earned enough money to raise families and maintain communities filled with shops, clubs, churches. Then things changed — or, rather, powerful people who often lived in distant cities made decisions that changed the towns’ fortunes.

People in these places still worked — as diner cooks, barbers, housewives, doughnut makers, bank tellers. They were proud of their work but struggled with meager paychecks. Businesses with deep pockets no longer invested in these communities. Stores, churches and social clubs stood empty and cold. Where were the people and community institutions that could save people like my father?

Mike Mellon labored his entire adult life in a profession that cared nothing about his or his family’s well-being. He had no protection, no representation, no organization he could turn to when he ran into trouble. He was pulled from a downward spiral because there were enough resources in the town to maintain a caring faith community. My mother remained trapped in low-wage jobs and was forced to share her house with strangers in order to pay her bills. She had few pathways to a better life.

Must we accept this world and pass it on, unchanged, to our children? Are we powerless? I think of my grandmother, sitting in that first-floor apartment while her neighbor raged. She remained vigilant, ready to protect those things most important to her. Grandma Grace was a tough lady, and I like to think she’d be proud of her grandson and his striking co-workers for taking a stand, despite the stresses and costs.

Ours is the longest strike in Pittsburgh history. What’s it like? Let me tell you: It’s 12 months without paychecks, of suspecting your career is over, of standing on picket lines, sometimes at 1 in the morning, in the rain, and wondering if this will be the night the police get fed up and throw your ass in jail. Twelve months of praying your aging car doesn’t break down, of pleading for money to replenish the strike fund, 12 months of checking on fellow strikers struggling with depression and sleeplessness and anxiety, 12 months of wishing it would all end.

What sustains us? It’s a long list: patient and understanding family members and friends, the unionized Starbucks workers who consistently stand with us on picket lines, the hundreds of people and organizations that contribute to the strike fund, all the folks in the United Steelworkers Building who organize cookouts and bake sales and send messages of support, the people at Bottlerocket Social Hall who consistently open their doors to us, labor unions and labor councils that invite us to speak and then literally pass a hat to raise hundreds in donations, the lawmakers and pastors and community organizers who march and rally with us.

Also: the Labor Choir and Mike Stout and Allie Petonic, all of whom bolster our spirits with music. Barney Oursler of the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee spends hours assisting us with unemployment claims. I could go on and on.

Early on, our strike felt like a singular struggle, but in the past several months we’ve watched in awe as other union workers voted to take their own stands. Writers, actors, autoworkers, health care workers, retail and food service employees, even university students. More than 450,000 U.S. workers have participated in 312 strikes this year, Time Magazine reports. From our small corner, it looks like a movement. My three daughters, all now working age, may one day be called upon to make their great grandmother proud and join the fight.

Steve Mellon is co-chair of the guild’s Health & Welfare Committee and a co-editor of the Pittsburgh Union Progress. His book “After the Smoke Clears: Struggling to Get By in Rustbelt America” was published in 2002 by University of Pittsburgh Press.