Dreamland Read Online Free PDF Page B

like a Bruce Springsteen song, that’s how life went.
    The town was a cradle of professional football. Jim Thorpe coached the Portsmouth Shoe-Steels. Later, the Portsmouth Spartans joined the National Football League. The Spartans moved to Detroit during the Great Depression and became the Detroit Lions.
    Some say Portsmouth’s long trip down began with the flood of 1937, when the Ohio River rose seventy-four feet after forty days of rain. What is true is that by the 1970s, Portsmouth was collapsing, along with the rest of what was becoming the American Rust Belt—a region unprepared for globalization, competition, and the cheaper labor in countries like Mexico. The shoe factories began closing. Selby Shoes was long gone. Williams Shoes hung on longer, trying to compete with Italy and Taiwan and Mexico. But soon Williams left, too, and the factories’ empty shells remained as reminders of what had been.
    Detroit Steel departed in 1980, the year Portsmouth was named an All-American City for the second time. Thousands of jobs went with it. The city didn’t recover from that. The brickyard closed, too. So did the atomic energy plant up in Piketon. The coke plant that supplied Detroit Steel, meanwhile, closed in stages and finally gave up in 2000. A Walmart replaced them both. Near the retailer still stands the coke plant’s smokestack.
    Families fled to Columbus or Cincinnati or Nashville. A group of artists moved to Austin, Texas. Portsmouth’s population deflated to twenty thousand. Unsellable houses were rented out or stood empty after landlords moved away. Stores on Chillicothe Street closed one by one until there wasn’t much left there at all.
    Remaining behind was a thin slice of educated people. They found work in the schools or the hospitals, in some way or other tending to those for whom factory closings were the beginning of an American nightmare.
    About the only new folks who came to Portsmouth then were merchants of the poor economy. Portsmouth got its first check-cashing places and its first rent-to-owns. Pawnshops and scrap metal yards opened. And David Procter expanded his practice.
    Many swore by Procter. Hard work was part of life in the area, and by then so was unemployment. The region slumped and the numbers of people applying for disability or workers’ compensation shot up. Federal disability became long-term unemployment insurance for many in the Ohio River valley. Some were legitimately hurt or disabled; some weren’t. But they all needed a doctor’s diagnosis. Procter processed workers’ comp paperwork fast. At Portsmouth’s small Southern Hills Hospital, where Procter had privileges, nurses remembered him as the top admitter to the psych ward—mostly in an attempt to make patients eligible for disability.
    Procter was married, with two sons living in Kentucky. He was also a flirt, and staff saw him out in the parking lot at times in a lovers’ quarrel with a nurse.
    At Southern Hills, Procter ran through his rounds—literally ran. He was at high speed, animated. A new attitude was taking hold in American medicine at the time. The patient, it held, was always right, particularly when it came to pain. The doctor was to believe a patient who said he was in pain. David Procter embodied this new attitude, and then some. He had a folksy style, with a little of the evangelist in him.
    “His patients loved him because he had the ability to figure out what that person believed or needed or wanted,” said Lisa Roberts, who was a hospital nurse at the time. “He was brilliant in that way, to forensically identify vulnerable people and figure out what they needed or believed. He would tell them they had all these things wrong with them.”
    Procter was paid in cash at his South Shore clinic. In the mid-1980s, the medical world wrestled with how to use the new opiates that pharmaceutical companies were developing to treat pain. David Procter was an early and aggressive adopter. He prescribed