in need of dramatic repairs. I believe that, regardless of political party association, once again government, business, and community leaders must come together and have the courage to reinvent education for a new era, or future generations will pay a steep price. This was true in West Virginia but now it’s true across our entire country.
I’m lucky to come from a family of optimists. I never heard my grandparents complain. Even in tough times, they talked about opportunities and were motivated by curiosity, the excitement of a challenge, and a desire to help. My mom and dad acquired those values and passed them to us. They’d been married 57 years by the time mom died of Alzheimer’s in 2005. They didn’t just love each other; they respected and supported each other’s dreams and aspirations, too. My dad was an obstetrician and an entrepreneur who delivered 6,000 babies over the course of his career, about a fourth of them for free. He worked all hours while my mom kept a more regular schedule as an internist and psychiatrist. My sisters, Patty and Cindy, and I were all expected to work hard, treat others like family, and never stop learning about the world.
For a lot of families in West Virginia, education was something you did through the end of high school. You didn’t need a college degree to make a decent living in the coal mines or in a chemical plant. You’d learn on the job. While the benefit of spending four years in college might not be clear to families who’d worked for generations in the mines, the cost in tuition fees and lost wages sure was. For a lot of them, that kind of investment just didn’t make sense. It’s an understandable economic calculation and one reason West Virginia still has the lowest percentage of college graduates of any state in the nation. The people were ambitious and hardworking. They’d just tied themselves to one way of making a living.
Things change—that is the only real constant in life after all. Ravenswood didn’t remain a sleepy little haven. Soon after I arrived on the scene, in fact, the town tripled in size. I’m all about driving growth, but I can’t claim any credit for this! I was about five years old when two major events hit Ravenswood: a state road that had stopped 30 miles short of town was finally extended and a shipbuilding industrialist named Henry J. Kaiser decided to build the world’s largest aluminum refinery about six miles away. All of a sudden, our quiet community became a boomtown. With jobs and development came new families and kids and bulldozers and buildings. Ravenswood needed traffic lights, roads, sewers, homes, services, and bigger schools right away. Grandpa Bood stepped up to meet some of those needs for new roads while Grandpa Pierce helped with financing and planning for an unprecedented degree of disruption. The downtown became the “old town,” and new development was built around it. Kaiser Aluminum built the new elementary school and leased it to Ravenswood for a dollar a year. Everything seemed to be happening at once. For a kid, riding your bike past rows of trucks and bulldozers was exciting. It felt like the future. I loved it. For people who’d lived in Ravenswood their whole lives, it must have been a shock.
When Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation opened its plant in Ravenswood in 1957, it was hailed as a state-of-the-art facility that would help transform the state of West Virginia. It certainly altered the landscape and created a lot of jobs. But Kaiser’s glory days lasted barely a generation. About two dozen years after it opened, Kaiser shut down the last of its aluminum production lines as demand for aluminum cans slowed. It eventually sold the facility to Century Aluminum, which idled the plant in 2009 before permanently closing it in July 2015. Among other things, the company blamed cheap aluminum imports from China. As production moved to lower-cost centers, the company struggled to reinvent itself, to develop new talent and areas of expertise. Not only was the company reeling but also the community that had sustained it. Without a major commitment to innovate and train people for a new era, Ravenswood got left behind. People moved away. Businesses closed. Once again, the town grew quiet and starved for opportunities. As the coal industry faded amid competition and a switch to new forms of energy, that pattern would be repeated in towns across the state.
I wanted to stay in West Virginia when I graduated. Instead, for West Virginians like me and a vivacious speech pathology major named Elaine Prater who stole my heart in high school, the opportunities had dried up. After two years at Duke University in engineering and then completing an undergraduate degree and law degree from West Virginia University, I married Elaine and moved on to get an MBA from Indiana University. We never moved back. I still feel a little wistful when I think about it. My sisters and their husbands also moved away after college. One brother-in-law, Gary Park, runs a large hospital system in North Carolina and my sister Cindy builds houses there. My other brother-in-law, Vince Anido, has been CEO of multiple successful pharmaceutical companies and lives in Florida with my other sister, Patty. I think all of us would have stayed in West Virginia in a heartbeat if the opportunities had been there.
My state used to be a land of opportunity. After my brief early stint in Ravenswood, I grew up in Kanawha City, a middle-class neighborhood just across the river from downtown Charleston. In the 1950s, West Virginia’s Kanawha River Valley was the chemical center of the country, if not the world. It was home to companies like Union Carbide, Dow, Monsanto, and DuPont, a place that attracted brilliant chemists and engineers from everywhere in the world. If you were in Kanawha City or Charleston back then, you felt like you were sitting in the engine room of the next industrial revolution. We were producing the fuels, the cutting-edge polymers, the disease-resistant seeds, and many of the other materials that an optimistic and fast-growing nation was hungry to consume. West Virginia was on the cutting edge of change. You couldn’t imagine a day when that would change. But the same pattern that had played out in Ravenswood almost 200 years ago played out in Charleston. The market shifted and West Virginia was left behind.
What I learned from witnessing the shift in West Virginia’s fortunes wasn’t so much the challenge of dealing with a downturn but the perils of success. The state fed the world’s appetite for chemicals and coal for so long that it failed to recognize when its recipe for winning would no longer work. We did the right thing for too long. New competitors were coming along to beat us in many of the areas where we thought we were untouchable. As our resources were depleted, it became easier and cheaper to mine coal in western states than in West Virginia. Owners started to use machines that resulted in fewer injuries from mine accidents but also fewer jobs. Meanwhile, energy alternatives like natural gas, solar power, and wind became more feasible and therefore more popular. Antipollution regulations that targeted carbon emissions didn’t help matters much. What also killed those industries were the unions that fought to protect old jobs instead of working with companies to create new ones. Don’t get me wrong. I admire what John L. Lewis did to improve working conditions and pay as head of United Mine Workers in the 1930s. The union served a very important purpose. People were being mistreated. However, over time, union leaders lost sight of the bigger picture and became inflexible about protecting jobs, only to watch them disappear. Much like the businesses they fought, unions struggled to reinvent themselves to stay relevant.
Individually, none of these trends came as a surprise. Each of them has been discussed and debated for years. Some factors were blown out of proportion; others were underestimated. Together, they pointed to an outcome for West Virginia that was clear and inevitable. My brother-in-law Jeff Prater got a college degree in mining engineering and technology but then moved on to a different field for the reasons we discussed. The coal industry wasn’t coming back, nor were the aluminum and chemical industries—at least in their current form. Instead of facing that harsh reality and investing in new areas to adapt to it, as my brother-in-law did, a lot of leaders doubled down on a losing bet. They focused on trying to save old jobs instead of creating new ones. They blamed our hardship on outsiders instead of those who seemed determined to maintain an unsustainable status quo. These leaders gave false hope to good people who had worked hard, only to find they could no longer make a living. Instead of trying to stoke excitement and a shared commitment to prepare for a different future, they became wistful for the past. I can’t blame them. Government leaders are usually not rewarded for taking major political, economic, and social risks. Company leaders confronted a lot of challenges. There are no easy fixes for West Virginia, just as there are no easy fixes for the industries and communities being disrupted by technology today.
At the same time, I wouldn’t bet against my home state. In fact, I’m betting on it. If your car is ever stuck in a ditch and you must look for help in the middle of the night,