FORBES @ 100: NOVEMBER 15, 1947: the POSTWAR DREAM

Snapshots of a boomtown, now a bust.

AS AMERICANS RETURNED home from war, the suburbs were born.

Published the same year the first 350 homes were sold in Levittown, New York, Forbes’ 30th anniversary issue spotlighted Lancaster, Ohio, a “progressive American” city of 24,000 people 30 miles southeast of the state capital. It had “all the advantages of a rural as well as an urban life.” Small-town commerce thrived at the intersection of Main and Broad Streets. EXG. I.’S such as the “conscientious, unassuming” Jack Fisher filled jobs at local manufacturers. Fisher, a brawny six-foot-three, had once excelled on the local high-school basketball team; now he tended machinery at Anchor Hocking, a glassware maker that was the biggest business in town, with annual sales of $64 million (some $700 million today).

Just as the Lancaster of 1947 offered a snapshot of postwar success, the Lancaster of 2017 is a picture of the drastic change of fortune suffered by parts of industrial America ever since. More than 20% of Lancaster sits below the poverty line today, compared with 14% in Ohio overall. Anchor Hocking has recently been through bankruptcy and traded hands from one private-equity owner to another. And earlier this year, Lancaster’s local newspaper, the Lancaster Eagle-gazette, published an investigation titled “Seven Days of Heroin: This Is What an Epidemic Looks Like.” It featured two numbers uglier than any from even the most indebted balance sheet: In just one week, in greater Cincinnati, 180 overdoses and 18 deaths.