Two Northern Panhandle mills, Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel and Weirton Steel, once had more than 20,000 workers. Now they employ only 1,300, a Public Broadcasting report noted. This sad decline follows other blue-collar shrinkage.
West Virginia had 125,000 coal miners just after World War II, but now just 15,000 produce more coal, using machines. Similarly, Kanawha Valley chemical plants shrank from 14,000
workers to under 4,000 as automation prevailed. Ravenswood's huge aluminum plant is closing, wiping out hundreds of jobs.
The message is clear: Less-educated manual labor is vanishing. Well-educated, high-tech, highskill careers are today's bright prospect. West Virginia must do everything possible to expand "mind jobs" in the snowballing Information Age.
That's why it's frustrating that Dow Chemical's superb South Charleston Technology Park - a potential gold mine for research and industrial innovation - mostly is floundering in stagnation.
Business Editor Eric Eyre reported Sunday that top chemists worry that many of the park's highquality laboratories may be scrapped. Two buildings already have been razed. Dow wants to give away the hilltop facility, but there are no takers.
Two years ago, Dow generously gave West Virginia University a large building and 58 acres of land for a "Charleston Research Campus." It was to become a teeming science center that would develop industrial breakthroughs and spawn Kanawha Valley manufacturing. Gov. Manchin predicted that West Virginia would "see great things happen." But WVU backed out, claiming it couldn't insure the research facility properly.
Earlier, WVU-Tech envisioned using the South Charleston park to train electronics and computer engineers. But that hope fizzled after hometown boosters howled against moving any operations away from Montgomery.
This year, Kanawha Valley groups asked President Obama to include $100 million in his stimulus plan to turn the Tech Park into a beehive of industrial research. But their effort failed.
"There are $200 million in facilities up here we can take advantage of," Keith Pauley of the Mid-Atlantic Technology Research and Innovation Center (MATRIC) told Eyre. "Dow is essentially
trying to give the buildings away."
Kevin DiGregorio of the Chemical Alliance Zone added: "It was arguably the top research and development facility in the chemical industry."
About 150 former Union Carbide and Dow researchers work for MATRIC at the Tech Park, developing various chemical products. That's great. But it's only a fraction of the science beehive that might be created there.
The South Charleston Tech Park is much too valuable to go to waste. Its potential to spur new Kanawha Valley industries mustn't be lost. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote that the saddest words are "it might have been." That fate shouldn't befall the Dow jewel.