Every now and then in my line of work, you walk into an establishment and immediately think, I’m either gonna get great coverage here, or I’m going to get my ass kicked. This was my experience Saturday as I entered the Hop Bar in Springfield, Ohio, and the four guys shooting pool looked at me with an expression that at its most generous said, "What the hell are you doing here?"
In time, I explained to Eddie and Brandon and the rest what the hell I was actually doing there, trying to get the truth about the town’s migrant crisis, and as usual, given the opportunity to be heard by a news media that routinely ignores them, well, I got an earful.
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One thing I heard loud and clear, not just at the Hop but from many people I spoke with in Springfield is that they want Donald Trump and JD Vance to come and see exactly what is happening to their town.
"Vance himself came from a small town just like this one," Brandon, who’s 38, married with three kids and cuts down trees for a living, told me. He wants the candidates to see, "the overwhelmed [Bureau of Motor Vehicles], the grocery stores, the traffic, what it's doing to our small businesses and how all the American citizens are thinking about leaving."
The one-story shack with a large backyard was opened in 1951 as a sock hop, hence the name. In 1957, it acquired a liquor license and 67 years later, it boasts the profound aura of a community institution. Everyone I met there had lived in Springfield for their whole lives, and they had all known each other since childhood.
Earlier in the day, I had spoken with Peyton, who is studying theater at a local college. She graduated from Springfield High School last year, and I asked her when she started seeing a big influx of Haitian migrant students.
"Sophomore year there started to be a few and we were like, hey they speak French, that’s cool. Then junior year, it was more, and by senior year it was kind of overwhelming."
Peyton explained that teachers struggled to translate lessons and that by the end of the senior year she was being bullied. "I don’t speak French, so I don’t know what they were saying, but they’d point at me and laugh."
Peyton also wants the GOP ticket to come and hear from the people of Springfield, to listen to their stories and offer a ray of hope.
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According to patrons at the Hop I spoke to and others, Haitian migrants are renting houses not at a base rate, but per adult living there. As one guy put it, "they know if they rent it to one person, there’s just gonna be a ton of cots coming in."
The upshot of this, of course, is that rents are way up, making it harder for this close-knit community to stay intact.
As the hot Midwestern sun of flat earth slowly hid behind the treeline, the backyard cooled, and we spoke of other things, like our kids and our hobbies. It became clear to me that this is the kind of community that most professional class urban dwellers really don’t understand.
The Hop is the place where these people’s grandparents had their first dance, where they went to Christmas parties as a kid. Could they all scatter and move to new places of better opportunity? Sure, but they could never replace nearly a century’s work of creating their home and community.
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