1970s

In the novel, the 1970s are a retrospective measure of what the Mon Valley once seemed able to provide: jobs, public resources, and a recognizable place in industrial life. The decade’s remembered confidence sharpens the contrast with the insecurity that follows, while the characters’ recollections connect regional economic change to family choices and diminished prospects.

A remembered moment of public confidence

The decade appears in a conversation between Bud Harris and Patacki. Patacki recalls that, during the seventies, the police department bought new cruisers with Corvette engines perhaps every three years. The detail makes local prosperity tangible through municipal spending: the department could regularly acquire conspicuously powerful vehicles. In the same conversation, Patacki contrasts that memory with the eighties, when the loss of jobs also meant that people had fewer opportunities to take pride in what they did for a living.

The recollection is not presented as a complete account of the decade or as evidence that prosperity reached everyone equally. Instead, its force comes from comparison. A past in which a small-town police department could replace its cruisers stands against a later period of reduced employment, declining incomes, and tightening municipal budgets.

Steel work and constrained choices

The novel sets this public memory alongside Grace Poe’s account of her own entry into industrial work. After graduating from high school, she found a new car and a book of pay stubs arranged by her father; she was expected to start at Penn Steel on Monday. She worked on the rolling line, where she met Virgil Poe. After becoming pregnant, she married him and continued her education while caring for a baby, coming close to completing an associate degree before layoffs ended that effort.

Grace’s recollection shows how work, marriage, and education were intertwined with economic circumstances and decisions made by others. Her story does not establish that every event occurred within the 1970s. Rather, it contributes to the novel’s wider account of a generation whose options were shaped by the steel economy and its contraction. When layoffs reached Virgil, seniority offered no lasting protection: he had five years, while keeping a mill job increasingly required ten and then fifteen.

From industrial strength to regional decline

The decade is also a hinge in the novel’s longer history of steel. The Mon Valley had been a center of steel production for a century, but by the time Isaac English and Billy Poe were born, the area had lost 150,000 jobs. The accompanying losses extended beyond mills: towns struggled to fund basic services, and some could no longer afford police. The novel links that contraction to the network of smaller industries that had depended on steel and supported it, so the closing of mills weakened an entire regional system.

Henry English’s account of industrial investment adds another dimension to the decline. Penn Steel, he recalls, had failed to invest in its factories for fifteen years; many American mills remained reliant on single-process production, while German and Japanese producers had adopted basic oxygen steelmaking decades earlier and continued investing in their plants. This comparison locates the Valley’s fortunes within broader industrial decisions, not simply within the personal choices of its workers.

The decade’s afterlife

Later consequences include foreclosure, unemployment, and migration. Grace recalls that her family’s trailer entered foreclosure before neighbors began picketing sheriff’s sales; after a banker’s Cadillac was overturned and burned, a judge imposed a moratorium that eventually became law. The family kept the trailer and relied on food-bank supplies and poached deer. Virgil’s later retraining in robotics did not lead to the expected jobs, and a subsequent barge-making plant also closed.

Through such recollections, the 1970s function less as a self-contained historical chapter than as a reference point for loss. The remembered cruisers, the rolling line, and the promise of steady industrial work are set against a region still living with the consequences of industrial contraction. The novel’s emphasis falls on that contrast—and on how economic change narrowed household choices and weakened the public institutions meant to serve the community.