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In my job, sometimes I walk in and immediately think, ‘This place is either going to get great press or it’s going to get horrible press.’ I walked into the Hop Bar in Springfield, Ohio on Saturday and the four guys playing pool looked at me with looks that seemed to say, in the most generous way, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
Eventually, I explained to Eddie, Brandon, and the others what exactly I was doing there, that I was trying to find out the truth about the immigrant crisis in town, and, as always, I was given an interview by the media, who always ignore their stories, and I got a nasty lecture.
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What I heard loud and clear, not just from Hop, but from many people I spoke to in Springfield, is that they want Donald Trump and J.D. Vance to come and actually see what’s going on in their town.
“Vance himself comes from a small town just like this one,” Brandon, 38, married with three kids, and who cuts wood for a living, told me. He wants the candidates to see that he’s “overwhelmed.” [Bureau of Motor Vehicles]Grocery stores, transportation, how it’s affecting our small businesses, and what all Americans think about withdrawal.”
Hop Bar in Springfield, Ohio began as a sock hop in the 1950s and is now a community institution where lifelong friends gather.
The one-story shack with a spacious backyard opened as a sock hop in 1951, hence the name. It received its liquor license in 1957, and 67 years later it still boasts a deep aura of being a community institution. Everyone I met there had lived in Springfield all their lives, and we’d all known each other since we were kids.
Earlier in the day, I had spoken to Peyton, a theater student at a local college who had just graduated from Springfield High School last year, and I asked her when the city began seeing a large influx of Haitian immigrant students.
“By the time I got to second grade, there were only a few of us and I thought it was amazing that everyone spoke French. By third grade, there were even more, and by fourth grade, it was overwhelming.”
Residents say their city is being overwhelmed and they want Trump and Vance to come and see it for themselves.
Payton explained that teachers struggled to translate lessons, and that by the end of her senior year of high school, she began to be bullied: “I don’t speak French, so I don’t know what they’re saying, but they would point at me and laugh.”
Payton also wants Republican candidates to come out and listen to Springfield residents, hear their stories and offer a ray of hope.
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Hop regulars and others I spoke to said Haitian immigrants rent homes by the amount of each adult living there, not a base rate. “They know if they rent to one person, they’re just going to get a bunch of cots,” one man said.
Of course, this has resulted in huge rent increases, making it harder to maintain this close-knit community.
As the hot flat-earth Midwest sun slowly retreated behind the trees, the backyard cooled and we talked about our kids, hobbies, and other things. It became clear to me that this was the kind of community that most professional-class city dwellers don’t really understand.
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The Hop is where these people’s grandparents had their first dance, where they went to Christmas parties as children. Could they all just disperse and emigrate to new places with better opportunities? Sure, but nothing can replace the accomplishments of the home and community they’ve built over nearly a century.
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