On Saturday, just outside Butler, Pennsylvania, gunshots rang out, thrusting the small town into the international spotlight. This is my hometown.
Chris SolariDetroit Free Press
At the foot of South Main Street — across the Connoquenessing Creek, just above the train tracks — sits a piece of property with a picturesque view of small-town America.
They put a stoplight there and a new bridge bends to the left. On the right side of the road stands a sign that went up during that construction. “The City of Butler,” it reads. “A great place to live.”
My great-grandfather thought so.
On Saturday, just outside my hometown of Butler, Pennsylvania, gunshots rang out, thrusting the town into the international spotlight. Ending a celebration. Ending at least one life. Changing countless others.
The place where I grew up finds itself part of the political zeitgeist. Once again.
In the early 1900s, an Italian stone mason named Luigi “Louis” Solari chose to settle in America, right near that split of the roadway in Butler with that newer stoplight, down the hillside behind the guardrail. Today, there's only a brush-covered parcel barely visible through the thicket.
Louis built his home there. He married his wife nearby in 1905, and they returned to be “tendered a serenade by their American neighbors," in celebration of the nuptials, "in which a shotgun was the principal noise maker,” according to the Butler Citizen newspaper. They raised their children there before he died.
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What Butler, Pennsylvania, once was
The Butler County oil boom of the 1800s gave way to the modern commerce of the 1900s, with a bustling, vibrant downtown. Fortunes were amassed on the backs of hardworking settlers of various ethnicities in the isolated city 35 miles north of Pittsburgh.
Ask anyone there and they’ll tell you that Butler, not Toledo, Ohio, was the birthplace of the Jeep, a product of the American Bantam Car Co. They hold a festival every year now to celebrate that place in history. The specialty steel mill and railcar factories in town also played major roles in World War II production, the town providing its sons for service. Those heroes are remembered with banners on street lamps lining Main Street and a memorial in Diamond Park across from the courthouse.
In 1960, John F. Kennedy stood on the steps of that courthouse as a Democratic candidate for president in the staunchly Republican town and delivered a campaign speech, less than a mile away from our old house. Local lore has it Kennedy looked at a sign on the Nixon Hotel directly across the street and quipped: “Nixon Lodge? When I’m elected president, they’ll change it to Kennedy’s Inn.” He wasn't the first president to visit. Per local historian Bill May, area oil and gas tycoon T.W. Phillips hosted William Taft at his home in 1918.
By all accounts, Butler — much like Detroit and Flint back then — was a great place to live. Before Bantam's production line dissolved. Before the Pullman railcar factory shut down in 1982 and left many unemployed. Before Armco (now a Cleveland-Cliffs specialty steel plant) downsized and changed ownership. Before street drugs took their toll as in many old steel towns up and down the Three Rivers.
Before many of my friends and their parents left and never returned.
And before Saturday’s assassination attempt of former president and Republican candidate Donald Trump. It was his second visit to the area at a critical juncture of an election year.
Trump's first visit came in the waning days of the 2020 election cycle, to a place a few miles south near the Butler Country Club, where the stone fireplace my great-grandfather built still stands. The Italian-Catholic artisan could not even have been a member at that time.
Trump that evening four years ago stood before a massive crowd at the height of the pandemic on a runway at the Pittsburgh-Butler Regional Airport. He delivered his final message to voters and his enthusiastic faithful that evening. I knew many who attended, many who supported Trump then and now.
“We win Pennsylvania,” Trump’s runway plea went on Oct. 31, 2020, “we win it all.”
He did neither.
Less than 12 hours before polls opened, on Monday night Nov. 2, political commentator Tucker Carlson opened his nightly show on Fox News and delivered a soliloquy about Butler, a town about 35 miles north of Pittsburgh where about 13,000 people still live. The Wikipedia-informed monologue turned a decaying town into a political prop: Butler clearly is America, in need of being made great again. And Trump was the only politician who cared about its people. His people.
Republican strong
Trump’s return Saturday to Butler served as his final public appearance before the Monday start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. The July 3 announcement of another rally in Butler — the first former or current president to ever visit Butler twice — came at the height of the biggest event of the summer, the Big Butler Fair. I was home that week visiting my mom and relatives with my wife and kids, and the buzz whirred as loud as the Gravitron every summer on the fairgrounds.
Butler always has been a Republican stronghold. In April 1976, the Washington Post sent a reporter there to gauge the public interest in the Ford-Carter election later that year. The headline? “Butler, Pa., Yawning as Election Day Draws Near.”
“Butler’s no better nor worse than any other place,” one longtime resident told the paper 48 years ago.
Though the Post pointed to a growing number of Democrats, many of whom benefited from the steel and rail unions at the time, most of the rich businessmen and Average Joe farmers in the surrounding rural areas leaned heavily Republican. A photo cutline of the courthouse where Kennedy spoke accompanied the Washington Post story and called it “almost a cliché of small-town U.S.A. and chosen as an election bellwether.”
So it remains.
In recent years, Fox News has broadcast live multiple times from Mac’s Café, a breakfast restaurant a few hundred yards away from where our old house stood. The inroads Democrats made disappeared with the blue-collar jobs in the 1980s, and the political climate today has shifted well beyond the “5-to-1 Republican” ratio it was in the 1940s, as a family friend told the Post in 1976.
Trump is deified in Butler, a town where longtime auto dealership owner Mike Kelly (who married into the T.W. Phillips oil and gas family fortune) loudly serves as a controversial U.S. representative. Kelly — whose office was implicated in and denied accusations it took part in the fake elector scandal following the Jan. 6 insurrection — was instrumental in bringing Trump to town on the eve of the 2020 election. His brother, Richard "Ike" Kelly, ran the airport at the time. Small-town politics to the core.
Trump did not stop Saturday to woo new voters or sway the undecideds on his way to Milwaukee. He arrived in Butler to soak in the fervor of his base and build momentum toward a third straight Republican Party nomination.
Then shots rang out.
I know these roads
Outside the city limits in Butler Township, Benbrook Road snakes through the western Pennsylvania hills and fields, crossing Route 68 and becoming Meridian Road. There is a stoplight at the Whitestown Road intersection.
Turn left, and you head toward my mother’s home in nearby Lyndora, on a hillside overlooking the grayness of smoke from the steel mill. Turn right, and a few hundred yards away on the left-hand side of Whitestown is American Glass Research. The late prominent scientist and noted local conservationist Frank Preston started the firm, and also created a serene and beautiful public nature park not far away. Go straight, heading toward Meridian, and the dirt-road entrance to the Butler Farm Show grounds is a few hundred yards away on the right-hand side.
It's a complex where many kids in town, including me, learned to play soccer. The place annually hosts one final summer celebration scheduled to begin in less than three weeks, the last bash before school begins anew. It's a carnival where, in 1992, I worked for Denny and Pearl’s Pizza dishing out slices and stromboli to fairgoers.
This is where Trump was shot Saturday.
Reportedly, the shooter scaled the AGR building, which abuts the Farm Show grounds, perched on the rooftop and opened fire, grazing Trump’s right ear with a bullet before a Secret Service response killed him. At least one other person, Corey Comperatore (a childhood friend of one of my cousins), died after being shot. The FBI identified the shooter as a 20-year-old man from a south Pittsburgh suburb, Bethel Park, which is 55 miles and more than an hour away from Butler.
A message pinned to the top of the Butler Farm Show website late Saturday night read: “The farm show office will be closed Sunday July 14th. Livestock entry deadline has been extended until Wednesday July 17th.”
Because the location is now a federal crime scene. It’s hard to believe the once-joyous place will ever feel the same again.
Pain, revisited
I was born in Dearborn and moved to Butler before my second birthday in 1976, not long after the Washington Post’s visit, and lived there until returning to Michigan for college in 1993. I still cherish my hometown, as troubled as it is and despite my love-hate relationship with it. For such a small town, it has plenty to make me proud.
There is Notre Dame football legend Terry Hanratty, three Saul brothers who played in the NFL (two of them, twins Ron and Rich, starred at Michigan State University), Olympic medalist and former University of Michigan standout swimmer Eric Namesnik, wrestling icon Big John Studd (or John Minton, Butler High class of 1966). There’s my longtime friend, classmate/teammate and former MLB pitcher Matt Clement. Longtime Detroit Tigers standout Don Kelly was born there, too, and his dad, Tom, played baseball with my uncle for Butler High in the early 1970s. There are many other notable pro and college athletes, male and female.
You may know some of our great entertainers, too. Bret Michael Sychak, also known as Poison lead singer Bret Michaels, spent his young years in Lyndora and still returns to see family. Josie Carey helped Fred Rogers start on his path to TV greatness at WQED in Pittsburgh; our family and those on the Italian-dominated south side of town called her by her real name, Josephine Vicari. Barbara Feldon, Agent 99 of TV's “Get Smart” fame, grew up there as well.
Butler produced a former chief of naval operations (Adm. Jonathan Greenert) and a former secretary of defense (William Perry). Politician Rick Santorum and 1971 Miss USA Michele McDonald.
After Saturday, it now will be known as the place where former President Trump survived an unthinkable act of political violence, erasing the past, leaving behind a stain and compounding the pain the past five decades have heaped upon the town.
Our old house is gone, like so much else
My grandfather, Ido, took over the family homestead after Louis died. He and his two brothers were bricklayers who helped continue their father’s building tradition in town after World War II. He married and raised his children there, my mother and her sister and brother. Trains loudly chugged by every day and night at the bottom of their property, downstream from the Armco mill and Pullman factory a mile or so away.
You won’t find our old house anymore. The state used eminent domain in the late 1960s, forcing my grandparents to tear down Louis Solari’s masterpiece, along with the two precisely crafted stone fireplaces and imported Italian marble floors. I never saw it in person, only in home movies my family took before it was demolished. The remnants of the foundation and garage still sit somewhere under all the overgrown grass. I haven’t tried to wade through the brush to that spot in 25 years.
Now and again when I return to Butler, though, I work my way along the tracks to the bottom end of what remains of our property. I look across the Connoquenessing toward town but can no longer see the courthouse or the city. The once stunning view is blocked now by the ugly, tan concrete of the bridge running overhead. I turn and look up the hill, toward where the old house used to be, trying to imagine where my mom and grandfather spent much of their lives.
I think about how Louis Solari once stood there doing the same, remembering the tiny village he left in Pesariis, Italy, for good (I finally got to see it in person two years ago) and finding a place that reminded him of home — a place where he could chase his American dream.
I imagine how great it must have been.
Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him@chrissolari.
