While our family in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, was mining the coal that fired the furnaces of the steel industry -- which then supplied the Detroit car industry -- relatives in Akron were making the tires.
It was here, in a rubber factory, that my great-grand-uncle John William Smith got a job after he returned from World War I.
Goodyear still operates a facility here.
And it was here that my great-grandfather Thomas Nicholas Smith drank himself to death in 1933, during the Great Depression. 
Thus, my grandmother was left without a father from the time she was 17. Exactly was impact that had on her, I can't say, but it certainly couldn't have made things any easier for either her, her twin sister Mary, her younger brother Clarence, her younger sister Eleanor, or her mother Virginia, who then had sole responsibility for supporting them all.
As a kid, I never realized the kinds of experiences that shaped my grandmother's life, and how that shaped her view of the world. I'm only beginning to appreciate that.
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