Kevin Mandia on Growing Up in 1980s Pittsburgh and the Day He Knew His Dad Had Lost His Job

On the Shawn Ryan Show, Kevin Mandia recalls 1980s Pittsburgh as the mills closed, and the kitchen-table moment that told him his dad had lost his job.

On the Shawn Ryan Show, Kevin Mandia answers a simple question with a Pittsburgh story. "Where'd you grow up?" Shawn Ryan asks. Mandia turns it back on himself — "Where'd I grow up?" — and lands on the late 1970s and early 1980s, "the crappiest decades living in Pittsburgh."

Clip: Viral Podcast Shorts YouTube Short from the full source linked below.

This article sticks to what he says in the Short, in his own words.

Super Bowls and closing mills

The one bright spot, as he tells it, was football. "We were winning Super Bowls, that's about the only thing we were winning," he says.

Then he puts the decade in a single line: "70s and 80s every steel mill closing down."

He doesn't name a mill, a company, or a neighborhood. He also doesn't say what his dad did for work. The story he wants to tell is what he saw when he walked in the door.

The kitchen table

He still remembers it. "Probably 1983, 84," he says, "coming home from school."

Something about the room was off, and he realized why: "my dad never sat at the kitchen table unless he was eating." That day broke the pattern on two counts. "A, he was home. b, he was sitting at the kitchen table, and then it hit me, something's different. And he lost his job."

Nobody had to explain it. "Nonverbal communication could say it all sometimes," Mandia says. The thought arrived all at once: "I instantly thought, man, he'd pick cancer over this."

The Short doesn't say what was said next, or how long his dad was out of work. It stays on that first, silent reading of the room.

"Great people, tough town"

"Pittsburgh was a rough place to grow up," he says. He spent "the late '70s and early '80s there," then the family moved away, and later moved back. He still remembers not wanting to return. "3 years later," his dad had the news: "hey, we're heading back."

He sums it up the way he started: "formative years, Pittsburgh, great people, tough town."

The mills around him

Mandia never gives unemployment numbers in the Short, and he never ties his father's job to a particular plant. The official record, though, makes clear how hard those years were in the Pittsburgh area.

According to Rust and Renewal: A Pittsburgh Retrospective, a February 2018 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, employment in blast furnaces and basic steel products fell by about 300,000 jobs nationwide in the 1980s, more than half the industry's workforce, "many of whom were employed in the Pittsburgh MSA." The report says the Pittsburgh area's peak unemployment rate in January 1983 exceeded 17 percent.

A December 27, 1983, UPI report said U.S. Steel would close all or part of some 30 mills, mines, and other facilities, at a permanent cost of more than 15,000 jobs. The list included fabrication plants in Pittsburgh and Ambridge, Pa., and partial closures at Clairton, Duquesne, Edgar Thomson, Homestead, National, and Irvin-Vandergrift, "all near Pittsburgh."

That background is here only to show what "every steel mill closing down" looked like in the years Mandia is talking about. It does not add a workplace, a layoff date, or a job title to his father's story, because he doesn't give those details in the clip.

In the Short, the point is smaller and closer to home: a kid walking in from school, a man at the kitchen table in the middle of the day, and a city he still describes as "great people, tough town."

FAQ

Where did Kevin Mandia grow up?

He says his formative years were in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a stretch he also calls the crappiest decades living there.

What did he see when he came home from school around 1983 or 1984?

His dad was home, sitting at the kitchen table. Mandia says his dad never sat there unless he was eating, and that was how he knew, before anyone said it, that his dad had lost his job.

Does he say his dad worked in a steel mill?

No. He talks about mills closing all around him in the 1970s and 1980s, but he never names his father's job.

How does he describe Pittsburgh?

"Great people, tough town."