Ralph Madison was born on March 7, 1914, on the south side of Youngstown, Ohio — the second-oldest boy among eight children born to Isaac and Ida Madison. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood on Earle Avenue, delivered newspapers, watched his city transform through the Depression and two World Wars, spent 36 years working for U.S. Steel Corporation, served as a Mahoning County Sheriff’s Deputy for eleven years, and raised four children with his wife Florence in the Westlake Terrace Housing Project.

On October 22, 1985, he sat down with historian Joseph Drobney at the family home on Stocker Avenue for what would be one of the last long conversations of his life. He died 26 days later, on November 17, 1985. His interviewer, Drobney, noted afterward that Ralph was “an articulate, easy to talk to individual who made this interviewer’s job truly a pleasure.” What follows is a narrative drawn from that recorded conversation.

Growing Up on the South Side

Ralph’s earliest memories were of the south side of Youngstown — a mixed neighborhood where steelworkers, streetcar conductors, and tradespeople of many ethnic backgrounds lived side by side on Earle Avenue. His father, Isaac, had come to Youngstown from Pennsylvania, where he had worked as a bricklayer. When he arrived at what was then Carnegie Steel (later U.S. Steel), he was told he’d be placed in the brickmason department — but not as a bricklayer. Isaac pushed back, and eventually prevailed: he became the only Black bricklayer at the plant for years. He also spoke Italian, Slovak, and Croatian fluently, which made him invaluable at safety meetings where immigrant workers couldn’t understand English instructions. “People would be surprised,” Ralph recalled. “They would say that he spoke their language better than they did. Everyone knew Isaac because of that.”

Ralph attended Delason Grade School and Princeton Junior High before finishing at South High School in 1933. He was one of just six Black students in a graduating class of over 200. He delivered the Vindicator newspaper on his way home from school each day, picking up his papers near the school and walking his route back to Earle Avenue. He liked school — liked his teachers, liked being close to home — and would have stayed longer if circumstances had allowed.

Segregation in Plain Sight

Youngstown in the 1920s and ’30s was a city alive with activity — but it enforced its racial boundaries quietly and thoroughly. Downtown theaters admitted Black patrons but sold them tickets only for the balcony or the rear. “You knew just where you would go to sit,” Ralph recalled. “They didn’t say it. They only sold you tickets to certain places.” The Palace Theater, the Strand, and the Park Theater all operated this way. Certain restaurants would not serve Black customers at all.

“There were certain places that you didn’t go, and there were a lot of places that you could go. In some theaters and restaurants you didn’t go in.”
— Ralph Madison

Black Youngstownians had their own spaces — all-Black venues, certain beer gardens — but the broader civic life of the city was divided in ways that went largely unspoken and largely uncontested, because challenging them carried real risk.

The Depression and the CCC

When Ralph graduated high school in 1933, the Depression was still grinding on. His father was laid off intermittently — sometimes working a day or two on a pay, sometimes nothing. The family relied on soup kitchens that operated along the Sharon Line streetcar route. Ralph remembered pulling a child’s wagon to the distribution point to collect food commodities — flour, grapefruit, whatever was being given out that week.

Shortly after graduation, a classmate told Ralph about the Civilian Conservation Corps and asked if he wanted to sign up. He said yes. The next Monday they went down; Wednesday they left. Ralph spent a year and a half in the CCC — driving trucks and doing manual labor — before deciding he’d had enough. His father told him the mill was no place for a young man, but Ralph wanted steady money. He started at U.S. Steel’s Ohio Works in 1936 as a general laborer, making $3.76 a day for ten-hour shifts, six days a week, with no overtime, no union, and no benefits to speak of.

Inside the Mill

The conditions Ralph described in the mill were brutal by any measure. Workers entered open-hearth furnaces — massive structures heated to extreme temperatures — and dismantled them by hand with bars and shovels, throwing bricks while wearing only hand pads. The bricks were hot enough to burn through shoes. “Sometimes the shoes were burnt anyway when you came out,” he said matter-of-factly. If you got hurt, you were sent to a hospital — but there was no real safety infrastructure, and getting hurt might mean losing your job.

Foremen actively discouraged talk about unionizing, threatening workers with termination if they showed interest. When organizers finally began appearing at the plant gates in the late 1930s, things were tense. The big 1937 strike — which brought National Guard troops marching through Brier Hill and around Sheet & Tube — touched Ralph’s life at a distance; he’d already been laid off and watched soldiers patrolling the streets as a bystander. When the union finally came to Ohio Works around 1940, wages jumped from roughly $3 a day to $5, and the eight-hour workday arrived. “Things did get better, definitely,” Ralph said.

Marriage and Westlake Terrace

Ralph married Florence in 1938. The newlyweds rented a room on Harlem Street, then an apartment on Griffith Street across from where the Westlake Terrace project would be built. When construction began, Ralph watched from across the street as the old Morrison Hill neighborhood — houses called “shotgun houses” because you could see straight through them — was torn down and the new project rose in its place.

They moved into Westlake on June 26, 1940, with a young baby and furniture scrounged from Florence’s uncle’s moving company. The apartment came with a refrigerator and a stove — they brought everything else. Ralph had to present his marriage license, utility bills, and proof of employment at the office on West Federal Street to qualify. Rent was set at one-quarter of monthly income, starting around $18.75 a month.

“It was a good place to live. It was a first permanent home for you and your wife.”
“Right, and I never regret it.”
— Exchange between interviewer Joseph Drobney and Ralph Madison, at the close of the interview

Ralph served as a tenant council representative for his four-building section of the project, holding a key to the laundry room and meeting regularly with Youngstown Metropolitan Housing Authority officials — including Paul Strait, the YMHA director who made a habit of walking through the project and talking with residents. Ralph had a civic instincts and a quiet authority; he was the kind of person institutions trusted with responsibility.

War Years and After

When World War II came, the mill got Ralph a deferment because he ran certain specialized machinery. U.S. Steel shifted entirely to war production — steel going directly into materiel. Wages were frozen by wartime government policy; the union cooperated. Women came into the mill in significant numbers for the first time, running cranes, unloading boxcars, digging ditches alongside men. Some stayed after the war; most who had taken the heavier jobs left.

By the late 1940s and early 1950s, Ralph noticed the project changing. The original residents — young couples who had moved in around 1940 and 1941 and built their stability there — were beginning to leave as soon as they could buy or rent something better. Ralph worked two jobs to save enough to get out. He and Florence eventually moved to the lot they’d bought on Stocker Avenue, leaving Westlake in 1953.

After 36 years at U.S. Steel, Ralph went on to work at Bliss Manufacturing from 1972 to 1974, and then spent eleven years as a Mahoning County Sheriff’s Deputy. He was still living on Stocker Avenue — the address to which YSU mailed the transcript of his interview — when he died on November 17, 1985.

A Voice Preserved

Ralph Madison’s interview with Joseph Drobney runs to 27 typed pages of careful, specific memory. He remembered prices — the 8 or 10 cent trolley fare, the $3.76 daily wage, the $18.75 rent — with the precision of a man who had lived close enough to the financial edge that numbers mattered. He remembered names, streets, the layout of neighborhoods long since demolished. He spoke without bitterness about the segregation he had navigated his entire life, and with genuine warmth about the community that had formed in Westlake Terrace during its early years.

The recording of his voice — digitized from the original tape — is embedded above. Listen to him speak in his own words, on one of the last mornings he had to give.

Also in this series: Florence Madison — From Greenville, Alabama to Youngstown, Ohio

Florence Madison was born on August 11, 1916, in Greenville, Alabama, the ninth of ten children born to James and Alice Hilson. She was eight years old when her father brought the family north to Youngstown, Ohio — part of the Great Migration that reshaped American cities in the years following World War I. She would spend the rest of her life there, raising four children alongside her husband Ralph, serving her community in countless ways, and living through some of the most dramatic decades of twentieth-century American life.

In October 1985, she sat down with historian Joseph Drobney at her home on Stocker Avenue to share her story for the Youngstown State University Oral History Program. What follows is a narrative drawn from that conversation.

Leaving the South

Florence grew up on a farm in rural Alabama where education for Black children was scarce and often interrupted. Public schools as Northerners understood them simply did not exist for Black children in the South — there were one-room schoolhouses with few books, taught by dedicated Black women paid only what parents could afford. Children old enough to work in the fields often missed whatever sessions the school held.

Her father’s brother had come to Youngstown years earlier and wrote back about the opportunities there — mill work was plentiful, schools were better, and life held more promise. When Florence was eight, her father, James, made the decision to go. He came first, followed by two of Florence’s brothers who went to work in the mills. Then, in October 1924, Florence arrived by train with her mother and the remaining children, changing trains in Cincinnati.

“I remember the fireplace. The house attracted me. It was so nice. I think they had paved streets. When you are living on a farm, you don’t know what paved streets are like.”
— Florence Madison, on a stopover during the journey north

The family arrived in Youngstown on October 24th, at night, riding the streetcar from Pennsylvania Station on Spring Common. They missed their stop on Fleming Street, getting off instead at Jefferson Street, and Florence shivered all the way home — her coat had been mail-ordered and hadn’t arrived in time, so her mother had bought her a bulky sweater in Cincinnati. It was the first cold night of a new life.

Growing Up in Youngstown

Florence began school at Jefferson Elementary at the age of eight — starting in kindergarten despite being years older than her classmates, but quickly skipping grades thanks to older siblings who had taught her at home. She completed twelve years of schooling in ten and a half, graduating from Rayen High School in June 1935. She would later attend Youngstown State University part-time from 1968 to 1978.

She loved school deeply. “I loved it,” she recalled simply. “It was a challenge to me. I just loved learning.” Jefferson Elementary was run with a firm but kind hand by Miss Margaret McNabb, the first woman principal in Youngstown. Florence remembered her with admiration: the school was quiet, orderly, and her brother Raymond’s eighth-grade graduation was a proud family milestone — the first in their family to reach that level.

To help the family financially, Florence and her younger sister Cora delivered newspapers for the Youngstown Telegram. Florence’s route took her up Fleming, across Coral, up Jefferson, back down Worthington, and through a sprawling web of streets — all on foot, every afternoon, at around thirteen years old. She earned 18 cents a week per customer and calculated her commissions with careful arithmetic. “It was safer in those days,” she noted with a wry smile. “You didn’t have the problems then that you have now.”

Downtown Youngstown in the 1920s and ’30s was a bustling place — bright lights in the evening, store windows always beautifully decorated, sidewalks so crowded you could scarcely walk. The family rarely took the trolley, at a cost of 8 or 10 cents, because her mother couldn’t afford fares for five children. They walked. Everyone walked.

The Depression Years

When the Depression struck in 1929, Florence’s father — who had been working at Republic Steel Mill — was laid off, as was much of the city. But the Hilson family fared better than many. Florence’s mother was a matriarch in the old sense: any money earned came into her hands first. With brothers in and out of work at the mills, at bakeries, and briefly in the West Virginia coal mines, there was almost always something coming in. Her brother Jasper worked at what the family called the House of Hathaway bakery on Hubbard Road, and day-old bread, rolls, and baked goods found their way home in abundance. Neighbors envied the family their large number of earners.

Florence’s mother also kept a garden in the backyard, and neighbors shared surplus vegetables with one another freely. “In those days neighbors helped each other,” Florence remembered. “If they had something extra, they would share it with you.”

Marriage and the Westlake Terrace Years

Florence married Ralph Madison in 1938. Housing in Youngstown was extremely scarce, and the young couple’s first years together were spent moving from rented rooms to borrowed spaces. When Ralph couldn’t keep a job at Hathaway Bakery — the baker’s union would not admit Black workers — they moved in with his mother on Earle Avenue. Florence was working for her uncle’s Spring Common Transfer and Storage Company on Federal Street, answering phones and keeping the office.

In June 1940, they moved into the brand-new Westlake Terrace Housing Project, apartment 130 at 850 West Federal Court, with their baby and a few pieces of furniture. The rent was $18.75 a month — one-quarter of their combined income, as the rules required. Florence was thrilled. After years of moving from place to place, it felt like a home of their own.

“The project was nice in those days. Everybody was so proud. The apartments were clean; they got new furniture, new curtains. Everything was brand new; everybody was glad enough to have a place.”
— Florence Madison

They lived at Westlake for thirteen years, eventually moving to a larger two-bedroom apartment after their second child was born. Florence observed and participated in the life of the project closely — the laundry room schedules, the assigned grass-cutting weeks, the tenant council meetings, the inspections by project manager Paul Strait who would walk through the grounds talking with residents. She noted early on that the project was racially divided: the section south of Madison Avenue was assigned to Black families, north was white. “The children called it the ‘white project’ and the ‘colored project,'” she said. “We noticed it, but the ‘powers that be’ had established that. What could you do?”

By 1952 and 1953, the character of the project had begun to change — more conflict between families, less care for the shared spaces, the original pride slowly fading. Florence and Ralph had already purchased a lot on Stocker Avenue. In June 1953 they moved out, staying with family until the house was ready. Florence summed up her thirteen years there with characteristic directness: “I was very glad to move in, but by 1953 I was even more glad to move out.”

A Life of Service

Throughout her years in Youngstown, Florence was deeply involved in her community — as a PTA member, Sunday school teacher, member of the North High School Band Boosters, and active participant in the NAACP. She worked for the Youngstown city school system, carrying forward the love of learning that had been kindled in her as a young girl on Fleming Street.

When Joseph Drobney thanked her at the close of their interview, Florence had given him nearly two hours of vivid, precise memory — a woman who had watched Youngstown transform over six decades, who had lived through the Great Migration, the Depression, World War II, and the slow decline of the steel economy, and who remembered all of it with clarity, warmth, and an eye for telling detail.

Also in this series: Ralph Madison — Steelworker, deputy, father — Youngstown born and bred