Last summer, with the nattering of congressional debt-ceiling debates and reports of ballooning corporate profits making headlines, Max Fraser went in search of Middletown. This story is part of Dissent magazine's special issue on Workers in the Age of Austerity. Look out for more in the coming week. For more great coverage from Dissent, check out their website.
“When I graduated from Muncie Central High School, you could go just about anyplace and get a job—a decent job,” says Dennis Tyler. Tyler has represented Muncie’s Delaware County in the Indiana State House since 2007, and this past November he became the first Democratic mayor of Muncie in two decades. Before embarking on a political career, Tyler, who is sixty-nine, spent more than forty years in the fire department.
For most of that time, he worked out of a firehouse just a mile and a half from where he grew up on Muncie’s Southside. “You could go to Borg Warner, and if you didn’t like Borg Warner you could leave and go to Chevrolet; if you didn’t like Chevrolet you could leave and go to Delco; if you didn’t like Delco you could leave and go to Acme-Lee, or dozens and dozens of other little places that were spinning off mom-and-pop tool-and-die shops.” Read More
