Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Finding Love

June 4, 2016June 3, 2016 / rtrube54 / 10 Comments

My wife and I on our wedding day. The minister was Rev. Robert Mulholland. That tux is a real fashion statement, isn’t it! Gotta love the 70’s.

This week, my wife and I celebrated our anniversary. It made me stop and reflect on how friends in Youngstown found love, or love found them, or not. The truth is that while some, like us, have been blessed with marriages that have endured (and I don’t think of myself as particularly deserving but rather gifted with a very patient wife!), it didn’t work out that way for everyone. Some have witnessed the end of marriages in divorce, and perhaps have married again. Some of my classmates have already fulfilled the “til death do we part” portion of their vows and have outlived a spouse, a special form of heartache. Some never married, sometimes because there was something else that was truly a life passion.

I know of people who married their high school sweethearts. It just wasn’t that way with me. The girl I took to my senior prom was one I dated throughout my senior year. We broke up a month after the prom. I did end up marrying a Youngstown girl though. Lots of people went away to college and met people from other cities. I didn’t, which made a lot of things simpler, everything from our idea of what makes good pizza, to a more basic outlook, which we have come to call, “thinking like a Youngstowner.” We also didn’t have to figure out which set of relatives to visit on holidays–we just visited them all!

O.K., so here is the story of how we met. Friday, September 22, 1972 was a very significant day in my life. At noon that day, I went to a meeting of the collegiate ministry that I have worked with throughout my adult life. At 1 pm, I met my future wife. I’m very glad for both of these, but I still think it is a good thing that we don’t know such things ahead of time.

It was the second day of our freshman year at Youngstown State. If you remember Youngstown State back then, it was mostly under construction and there were relatively few places to eat on campus. They only became a state university in 1967. There was a Red Barn restaurant on Lincoln Avenue where I went to eat that day. After getting my food, I spotted the one person I knew in that restaurant, a girl I had met that summer, eating with another girl. That girl is now my wife! It wasn’t love at first sight, but rather the lack of dining options that brought us together. I ate there regularly and so did the two of them. As I got to talking with this girl, I discovered that not only was she attractive, but also interesting, and that we shared common convictions about the important things of life, including our faith. Of course, we guys are slow. About the time she gave up on me being interested in her, I asked her out. That was the way it was done then. These days, she might have asked me! The rest as they say, was history. We dated through college, and waited to get established in jobs to get married.

In the early years, we would go out on September 22 and get a burger to celebrate meeting. Over the years, anniversaries have tended to become the bigger deal. But perhaps this year we need to go get a burger on September 22 to remember that significant day in our lives. Too bad we can’t get one at a Red Barn anymore!

What was your experience of finding love (or not)? How and where did you meet your spouse or significant other?

Growing Up In Working Class Youngstown — Dom Rosselli

March 5, 2016August 25, 2025 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

Photo by Chuck Melnick, 1976 Neon

Both my wife and I went to Youngstown State. At that time, if you were going to see a winning team, you went to a basketball (or maybe baseball) game coached by Dom Rosselli. During the 1975-76 season, our last at YSU, Rosselli won his 500th victory in basketball

The write-up about this milestone in the 1976 Neon (the YSU yearbook), said this about Rosselli:

“All the credit for win number 500 and every triumph leading to it were given to his players past and present by the humble Rosselli who especially recognized his assistant Bob Chuey, who also played under Dom at Y.S.U. He also gives much credit to his wife, Connie, who understands her husband’s work and has been a big factor in Dom’s success.”

Rosselli’s humble character didn’t prevent him from being a passionate and inspiring coach who found ways to win. I still remember an epic game against Cleveland State during which Jeff Covington scored 41 points. [I played a small part in Jeff Covington’s success at YSU as a tutor for him during his freshman year–great guy!].

According to the YSU Athletics Hall of Fame website, Roselli ended his coaching career in 1982 with a career record of 600-393 (a .604 winning percentage). He had eleven 20-plus win seasons including a 24-3 season in 1963-64 and a 23-14 record in his final season. He also coached the Penguin baseball team from 1948 to 1982 to a 490-314 record (with no baseball team from 1951-1957). He coached Major League pitching star Dave Dravecky during college.

All told, Rosselli won over 1,000 career victories at Youngstown State, more than any coach in Penguin history. His coaching career started before World War II where he served as an Air Force captain and then returned to coaching. He took the YSU basketball program from the NAIA to NCAA Division II and finally to Division I.

Ironically, while Rosselli grew up in Youngstown, he played college sports at Geneva College, where he led their football team to victory against the Youngstown College team in its first season. Thankfully, after graduate work at the University of Pittsburgh he came back to Youngstown as an assistant coach under “Dike” Beede before taking over the basketball coach job in 1940-41.

He was elected to the Curbstone Coaches Hall of Fame in 1978 and to the YSU Athletics Hall of Fame in its charter class of 1985. He died on October 7, 2008 at age 93.

Dom Roselli is a true hometown hero for Youngstown. My memories of home games at Beeghly Center were memories of victories. I don’t remember the losses. Most of all, I remember Dom Roselli as a real winner and a class act.

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Youngstown State

June 21, 2014December 7, 2014 / rtrube54 / 2 Comments

I am proud to say that I am a graduate of Youngstown State University. I thought about attending other universities but kind of felt (or was made to feel) I really wouldn’t fit in. Not that I couldn’t compete academically. It’s just where I came from in terms of class. (I write about this in “What’s Missing from the Diversity Discussion?”, a post that was responsible in a way for this series as an answer to the question at the end of the post.) I also realized that if I went to one of these schools, I would saddle myself or my parents with significant debt. Debt wasn’t looked at positively where I came from, so I decided I would go to Youngstown.

Youngstown State had become a public university five years before I enrolled (1967) and that state support among other things made education very accessible for many of us. Tuition (in 1972 dollars) was $180 a quarter. Because of a scholarship, and savings in high school and working through college, I was able to graduate without any student loans. That was so for many of my classmates. Today, that is almost impossible.

One of the things that made Youngstown State such an interesting place when we were students is that we were there because we wanted to be. Many of us were paying for our own education. Many of us knew that if we wanted a different life from our parents that this was our chance. And one of the things that I was grateful for was that there were a number of professors who knew that as well, and gave of themselves and taught. My love of history came out of a couple required courses in history taught by people who made it come alive, not as lists of dates to be memorized but as a story of underlying causes, of competition for political power, and more that not only helped me understand the past better, but the present as well. A course on Romantic Literature introduced me to an English professor who hosted Lenten discussions on C.S. Lewis at his church, and allowed me and my girlfriend (now my wife) to come.

Jones Hall (Public Domain)

Yes, I met my wife at Youngstown–actually on the second day of our freshman year. She grew up in Brownlee Woods and went to Cardinal Mooney High School. That happened for a number of us as well. She worked on the Jambar in the midst of the Watergate era when journalism was big. She even had a chance to hear Carl Bernstein, who gave a lecture during that period.

The big sport when we were at Youngstown was basketball. This was during the Dom Roselli years and I think he had winning seasons throughout our time there. Football was generally pathetic. The Penguins used to play at a high school stadium. Obviously, this was before the Jim Tressel days. The brightest spot at the time was that we had a quarterback by the name of Ron Jaworski, who went on to an NFL career with Philadelphia.

Youngstown was a university in transition when we were there. For much of our four years, it was a mud pit as land was cleared and excavated for several new buildings including an expanded student union, Kilcawley Center and the then new Maag Library. Today, it is a beautifully landscaped campus, that is kind of an oasis of beauty in a city struggling to remake itself. One of its distinctive programs is its Center for Working Class Studies, one of the first of its kind in the country.

Maag Library (c) Robert C Trube

Youngstown is a working class university. Its graduates will probably not occupy cabinet posts in any national administration. Those mostly come from the Ivy League, which may be part of the country’s problem. But many of us fulfilled the dreams our parents had for us of a better life working in engineering, computer science, public service, business. One of the real questions in the era of rising tuitions, and college aid programs that have not kept pace, is whether this kind of opportunity will continue to be accessible to young men and women from the working class in the future or lower socioeconomic classes in the future. Perhaps it is up to those of us who had these opportunities to advocate and work to make it so for the next generation. That, too, is a Youngstown value. We want our children to have the chance at a better life.