Dreamland (2 page)

The pool was the size of a football field. Over the decades, generations of the town grew up at the edge of its crystal-blue water.

Dreamland was the summer babysitter. Parents left their children at the pool every day. Townsfolk found respite from the thick humidity at Dreamland and then went across the street to the A&W stand for hot dogs and root beer. The pool’s french fries were the best around. Kids took the bus to the pool in the morning, and back home in the afternoon. They came from schools all over Scioto County and met each other and learned to swim. Some of them competed on the Dreamland Dolphins swim team, which practiced every morning and evening. WIOI, the local radio station, knowing so many of its listeners were sunbathing next to their transistor radios at Dreamland, would broadcast a jingle—“Time to turn so you won’t burn”—every half hour.

The vast pool had room in the middle for two concrete platforms, from which kids sunned themselves, then dove back in. Poles topped with floodlights rose from the platforms for swimming at night. On one side of the pool was an immense lawn where families set their towels. On the opposite side were locker rooms and a restaurant.

Dreamland could fit hundreds of people, and yet, magically, the space around it kept growing and there was always room for more. Jaime Williams, the city treasurer, owned the pool for years. Williams was part owner of one of the shoe factories that were at the core of Portsmouth’s industrial might. He bought more and more land, and for years Dreamland seemed to just get better. A large picnic area was added, and playgrounds for young children. Then fields for softball and football, and courts for basketball and shuffleboard, and a video arcade.

For a while, to remain white only, the pool became a private club and the name changed to the Terrace Club. But Portsmouth was a largely integrated town. Its chief of police was black. Black and white kids went to the same schools. Only the pool remained segregated. Then, in the summer of 1961, a black boy named Eugene McKinley drowned in the Scioto River, where he was swimming because he was kept out of the pool. The Portsmouth NAACP pushed back, held a wade-in, and quietly they integrated the pool. With integration, the pool was rechristened Dreamland, though blacks were never made to feel particularly comfortable there.

Dreamland did wash away class distinctions, though. In a swimming suit, a factory worker looked no different from the factory manager or clothing-shop owner. Wealthy families on Portsmouth’s hilltop donated money to a fund that would go to pay for summer passes for families from the town’s East End, down between the tracks and the Ohio River. East End river rats and upscale hilltoppers all met at Dreamland.

California had its beaches. Heartland America spent its summers at swimming pools, and, down at a far end of Ohio, Dreamland took on an outsized importance to the town of Portsmouth. A family’s season pass was only twenty-five dollars, and this was a prized possession often given as a Christmas present. Kids whose families couldn’t afford that could cut a neighbor’s grass for the fifteen cents that a daily pool pass cost.

Friday swim dances began at midnight. They hauled out a jukebox and kids spent the night twisting by the pool. Couples announced new romances by walking hand in hand around Dreamland. Girls walked home from those dances and families left their doors unlocked. “The heat of the evening combined with the cool water was wonderful,” one woman remembered. “It was my entire world. I did nothing else. As I grew up and had my own children, I took them, too.”

In fact, the cycle of life in Portsmouth was repeated over and over at Dreamland. A toddler spent her first years at the shallow end watched by her parents, particularly her mother, who sat on a towel on the concrete near the water with other young moms. When the child left elementary school, she migrated out to the middle section of Dreamland as her parents retreated to the grass. By high school, she was hanging out on the grass around the pool’s ten-foot deep end, near the high dive and the head lifeguard’s chair, and her parents were far away. When she married and had children, she returned to the shallow end of Dreamland to watch over her own children, and the whole thing began again.

“My father, a Navy Vet from WWII, insisted that his 4 children learn not only how to swim but how not to be afraid of water,” one man wrote. “My younger sister jumped off the 15-foot high diving board at age 3. Yes, my father, myself & brother were in the water just in case. Sister pops up out of the water and screams . . . ‘Again!’”

For many years, Dreamland’s manager, Chuck Lorentz, a Portsmouth High School coach and strict disciplinarian, walked the grounds with a yardstick, making sure teenagers minded his “three-foot rule” and stayed that far apart. He wasn’t that successful. It seems half the town got their first kiss at the pool, and plenty lost their virginity in Dreamland’s endless grass.

Lorentz’s son, meanwhile, learned to swim before he could walk and became a Dreamland lifeguard in high school. “To be the lifeguard in that chair, you were right in the center of all the action, all the strutting, all the flirting,” said John Lorentz, now a retired history professor. “You were like a king on a throne.”

Through these years, Portsmouth also supported two bowling alleys, a JCPenney, a Sears, and a Montgomery Ward with an escalator, and locally owned Marting’s Department Store, with a photo studio where graduating seniors had their portraits taken. Chillicothe Street bustled. Big U.S.-made sedans and station wagons lined the street. People cashed their checks at the Kresge’s on Saturdays, and the owners of Morgan Brothers Jewelry, Herrmann’s Meats, Counts’ Bakery, and Atlas Fashion earned a middle-class living. Kids took the bus downtown to the movie theater or for cherry Cokes at Smith’s Drugstore and stayed out late trick-or-treating on Halloween. On Friday and Saturday nights, teenagers cruised Chillicothe Street, from Staker’s Drugs down to Smith’s, then turned around and did it again.

Throughout the year, the shoe factories would deduct Christmas Club money from each worker’s paycheck. Before Christmas, they issued each worker a check and he would cash it at the bank. Chillicothe Street was festive then. Bells rang as shoppers went shoulder to shoulder, watching the mechanical puppets in displays in store windows painted with candy canes, Christmas trees, and snowmen. Marting’s had a Santa on its second floor.

So, in 1979 and 1980, Portsmouth felt worthy to be selected an All-American City. The town had more than forty-two thousand people then. Very few were wealthy, and the U.S. Labor Department would have gauged many Portsmouthians poor. “But we weren’t aware of it, nor did we care,” one woman recalled. Its industry supported a community for all. No one had pools in their backyards. Rather, there were parks, tennis and basketball courts, and window-shopping and levees to slide down. Families ice-skated at Millbrook Park in winter and picnicked at Roosevelt Lake in summer, or sat late into the evening as their kids played Kick the Can in the street.

“My family used to picnic down by the Ohio River in a little park, where my dad would push me so high on the swings I thought I’d land in Kentucky,” another woman said.

All of this recreation let a working-class family feel well-off. But the center of it all was that gleaming, glorious swimming pool. Memories of Dreamland, drenched in the smell of chlorine, Coppertone, and french fries, were what almost everyone who grew up in Portsmouth took with them as the town declined.

Two Portsmouths exist today. One is a town of abandoned buildings at the edge of the Ohio River. The other resides in the memories of thousands in the town’s diaspora who grew up during its better years and return to the actual Portsmouth rarely, if at all.

When you ask them what the town was back then, it was Dreamland.

Introduction

In the middle-class neighborhood on the east side of Columbus, Ohio, where Myles Schoonover grew up, the kids smoked weed and drank. But while Myles was growing up he knew no one who did heroin. He and his younger brother, Matt, went to a private Christian high school in a Columbus suburb. Their father, Paul Schoonover, co-owns an insurance agency. Ellen Schoonover, their mother, is a stay-at-home mom and part-time consultant.

Myles partied, but found it easy to bear down and focus. He went off to a Christian university in Tennessee in 2005 and was away from home for most of Matt’s adolescence. Matt had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schoolwork came harder to him. He started partying—smoking pot and drinking—about his junior year in high school.

The two brothers got to know each other again when Matt joined Myles at college for his freshman year in 2009. His parents were never sure when exactly Matt began using pills that by then were all over central Ohio and Tennessee. But that year Myles saw that pills were already a big part of Matt’s life.

Matt hoped school would be a new beginning. It wasn’t. Instead, he accumulated a crew of friends who lacked basic skills and motivation. They slept on Myles’s sofa. Myles ended up cooking for them. For a while he did his brother’s laundry, because Matt could wear the same clothes for weeks on end. Matt, at six feet six and burly, was a caring fellow with a soft side. His cards could be heartfelt and sweet. “I love you, mommy,” he wrote the last time to his mother, after his grandmother had been hospitalized for some time. “All this stuff with grandma has made me realize you really don’t know how long you have on this earth. You’re the best mom I could ask for.” Yet the pills seemed to keep him in a fog. Myles once had to take him to a post office so he could mail their mother a birthday card, as Matt seemed otherwise incapable of finding the place.

Myles was a graduate teaching assistant and saw kids his brother’s age all the time. It seemed to him that a large chunk of Matt’s generation could not navigate life’s demands and consequences. Myles had taught English in Beijing to Chinese kids who strove ferociously to differentiate themselves from millions of other young people. American kids a world away had enormous quantities of the world’s resources lavished on them to little result; they coasted along, doing the bare minimum and depending on their parents to resolve problems, big and small.

At year’s end, Matt returned home to live with his parents. Myles spent the next years at Yale getting a master’s degree in Judaic and biblical studies and never knew all that happened later. At home, Matt seemed to have lost the aimlessness he displayed in college. He dressed neatly and worked full-time at catering companies. But by the time he moved home, his parents later realized, he had become a functional addict, using opiate prescription painkillers, and Percocet above all. From there, he moved eventually to OxyContin, a powerful pill made by a company in the small state of Connecticut—Purdue Pharma.

In early 2012, his parents found out. They were worried, but the pills Matt had been abusing were pharmaceuticals prescribed by a doctor. They weren’t some street drug that you could die from, or so they believed. They took him to a doctor, who prescribed a weeklong home detoxification, using blood pressure and sleep medicine to calm the symptoms of opiate withdrawal.

He relapsed a short time later. Unable to afford street OxyContin, Matt at some point switched to the black tar heroin that had saturated the Columbus market, brought in by young Mexican men from a small state on Mexico’s Pacific coast called Nayarit. Looking back later, his parents believe this had happened months before they knew of his addiction. But in April 2012, Matt tearfully admitted his heroin problem to his parents. Stunned, they got him into a treatment center.

Myles hadn’t spoken to his brother for some time when he called his parents.

“He’s in drug rehab,” said his mother.

“What? For what?”

Ellen paused, not knowing how to say it.

“Matt is addicted to heroin.”

Myles burst into tears.

Matt Schoonover came home from three weeks of rehab on May 10, 2012, and with that, his parents felt the nightmare was over. The next day, they bought him a new battery for his car, and a new cell phone. He set off to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, then a golf date with friends. He was supposed to call his father after the NA meeting.

His parents waited all day for a call that never came. That night, a policeman knocked on their door.

More than eight hundred people attended Matt’s funeral. He was twenty-one when he overdosed on black tar heroin.

In the months after Matt died, Paul and Ellen Schoonover were struck by all they didn’t know. First, the pills: Doctors prescribed them, so how could they lead to heroin and death? And
what
was black tar heroin? People who lived in tents under overpasses used heroin. Matt grew up in the best neighborhoods, attended a Christian private school and a prominent church. He’d admitted his addiction, sought help, and received the best residential drug treatment in Columbus. Why wasn’t that enough?

But across America, thousands of people like Matt Schoonover were dying. Drug overdoses were killing more people every year than car accidents. Auto fatalities had been the leading cause of accidental death for decades until this. Now most of the fatal overdoses were from opiates: prescription painkillers or heroin. If deaths were the measurement, this wave of opiate abuse was the worst drug scourge to ever hit the country.

This epidemic involved more users and far more death than the crack plague of the 1990s, or the heroin plague in the 1970s; but it was happening quietly. Kids were dying in the Rust Belt of Ohio and the Bible Belt of Tennessee. Some of the worst of it was in Charlotte’s best country club enclaves. It was in Mission Viejo and Simi Valley in suburban Southern California, and in Indianapolis, Salt Lake, and Albuquerque, in Oregon and Minnesota and Oklahoma and Alabama. For each of the thousands who died every year, many hundreds more were addicted.