He's looking for the safari pinata.

It's somewhere on these shelves in his basement, amid an ordered jumble of pink feather boas and papier-mache treasure chests, hula hoops and green-rimmed star-shaped sunglasses.

He's looking for a colorful example to explain what he's up to these days, a phrase in a question asked often in North Canton — What are you up to these days? — where a lot of midcareer professionals find themselves grasping for an answer.

Steve Tirrell has an answer. On this day, he's in the final details of leasing a storefront space near Chapel Hill Mall, to move his burgeoning kids party franchise — Andy's Parties — from his basement in a quiet suburban housing development to a more visible headquarters.

He's also busy preparing for World Laughter Day, which Stark County observed in early May with a kids event — face painting, balloon animals, a drum circle, Philbee the Clown — and where Tirrell, a chemical engineer with a substantial resume, directed kids crafts and hoped some of the parents would hire him to put on a birthday party.

Steve Tirrell can tell you how his life came to this, in the sense that he can relay the sequence of events, beginning with Sept. 1, 2004 — his 40th birthday, the same day he was laid off from the Hoover Co.

He can tell you that with three children in grade school, the thought of uprooting to continue his engineering career was not an option, and the prospects of continuing it here, despite a technical background in plastics in a region that calls itself ''Polymer Valley,'' were unrealistic.

He was open to anything. He signed on as a Please see Hoover, A4

representative with Primerica in Akron, a self-employed contractor doing financial planning, mostly for people with relatively modest incomes and lifestyles. He did well, building up a client base and a decent income, although nothing near the approximately $100,000 compensation package he had at Hoover.

Now Tirrell's financial advising business is self-sustaining and he's not actively seeking new clients. That left him open to the opportunity last summer to invest in a franchise of Andy's Parties, a Maryland-based venture that has begun to expand.

His wife, Robin, who has a nursing degree, teaches part time at Fieldcrest Montessori School in North Canton. The party business is in the startup phase, not yet making a profit, but he expects that to change in due time. He expects to do better.

So that's the how, but it's not the why. That explains the parts he could control, but it doesn't explain the parts he couldn't.

The ''why'' — the reasons, the parts that were beyond his control — that's where it gets complicated. That's where it gets to the core of who we are as American workers in the 21st century. That's where, for some people, it gets downright scary.

From 2000 through 2007, the number of jobs in Ohio decreased from about 5.6 million to 5.4 million, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The population, meanwhile, remained virtually the same. Most of those losses have come in the category of ''goods producing'' jobs — chiefly manufacturing and construction.

But that doesn't mean most of the jobs lost were blue-collar.

As Steve Tirrell learned, no one was safe, from the factory floor to mahogany row.

Between 2000 and 2007, Ohio lost more management jobs — from those of shop superintendents to corner-office executives — than any other occupational category. Those positions paid an average of nearly $67,000 a year. And they're gone.

Hoover's recent history has contributed to this trend, as the vacuum cleaner manufacturer moved philosophically and eventually physically from its hometown roots, exporting production jobs beyond American borders and reordering white-collar jobs into new corporate settings.

The company was sold to Chicago Pacific in 1985, Maytag in 1989, Whirlpool in 2006 and Hong Kong-based Techtronic Industries (also called TTI) last year. Hoover's North Canton employment has declined steadily over the past decades, from a peak of nearly 5,000 in the late 1960s to 1,000 at the time of the sale to Techtronic, down to zero when the new parent shut down the North Canton facility last September.

North Canton would have celebrated Hoover's 100th anniversary in August. Now, the city is relieved simply to have sold the abandoned landmark to a partnership that will redevelop it for mixed uses.

Corporate ladder

In retrospect, it seems as though Tirrell — a manager in the manufacturing sector — had a target on his back. But Tirrell had no idea, when he accepted a promotion in 2000, the direction his life soon would take. He'd worked his whole career for Maytag, and decided to move his family from Jackson, Tenn., where he was working in a dishwashing-products plant, to North Canton, where he had the opportunity to move up into management.

Hoover, literally and figuratively a household word, was as stable a company as one could imagine in 21st-century America. Founded in 1908 and privately owned until 1943 by the Hoover family, the company was the heartbeat of its community. Whole families worked there; the concept of nepotism was not only accepted but embraced. Married couples, parents and children, uncles and cousins worked side by side. At one point in the 1980s, the employment roster included 144 married couples.

Tirrell found the level of stability almost unfathomable — when he arrived, the average tenure at Hoover was close to 35 years. He was put in charge of the materials development department, working very closely with manufacturing personnel, and soon began building his five-member team. He was able to hire two people early on. Soon, however, the reversal began.

''I personally had to lay off a lot of people,'' he said. ''I think that was the first time Hoover had laid anyone off in like 10 years. Hoover was known as the stable job. You worked for Hoover, you worked there for life. You never had to worry about getting laid off, right? And, boy, did that change. I think I went through three rounds of personally laying people off myself. And the first round, oh my God, that was the most stressful thing I ever had to do. Lay somebody off.''

Soon, however, the company's downsizing became a matter of routine.

''It got to the point where the layoff was like a nonevent. People would be like, 'OK, you know, here I am.' Everyone was expecting it at that point. The first time it was devastating. . . . And by the end, it was like, 'OK — is it my turn yet? OK, great.' It became so unemotional. It was really weird.''

On June 4, 2004, a company e-mail announced that 500 of Hoover's 650 salaried employees would be eliminated, with management operations being merged into Maytag's Newton, Iowa, corporate headquarters. The ripple ran through the company like a Buick dropped into a reflecting pool.

Tirrell knew his end was coming. He'd been looking around enough to know that, despite a master's degree and a solid two-decade work record, he would not be able to find another chemical engineering job near his family's North Canton home. He'd begun working on the side with Primerica, a job tied to his natural talent for saving and investing. In fact, he was good enough at his own financial management that he was able to pay off his mortgage just before he lost his job, giving him the flexibility to change direction under his own control.

When his pink slip arrived, he decided to commit to Primerica. He joined an Akron office where, it's worth noting, four of the nine full-time financial advisers are former engineers.

The independence and self-reliance replaced the security and higher income of his Hoover job, he says, and his only regret is that he didn't move into self-employment sooner.

He's one of the lucky ones, and he realizes that. It helps that he didn't commit to Hoover with the homegrown notion of an old trust, a philosophical agreement between corporation and community that was eroding under new ownership.

He is able to describe his job loss as an ''opportunity.'' That's mainly because he was in control of his finances and because he was willing to make a radical change in his career direction. Few were so fortunate.

Recurring story

There's a theme to the present-day conversation in North Canton that's familiar to those of us in Akron who talked to Firestone tire builders in 1978 or to Continental General Tire draftsmen in 1996, or those in Cleveland who talked to LTV steelworkers in 2001. There is a theme of loss and betrayal that is simultaneously personal and communal, the discussion of which raises important questions about what in the world is supposed to replace all these jobs that sustained us for so long.

With its net losses, Ohio has fared worse than most states, but the nation at large has experienced slow job growth. The United States lost jobs in the early part of the decade; the relatively improved growth rate of the past five years is still less than half what it was in the 1990s. With old, deeply rooted, bigger-than-life corporations disbanding or downsizing or being swallowed up by competitors, tracking the losses is something like tracking the disappearance of dinosaurs.

Most of the once-industrial cities of the Great Lakes region had a Hoover, a looming paternalistic presence that provided for its community, offering a comfortable middle-class lifestyle to its workers, who often took the notion of a ''job for life'' as a given, an entity whose good name was cast in bronze and affixed to schools and parks and streets and charitable foundations.

For all the drama, Hoover is simply the most recent strain in a resounding national theme.

Considering this shared experience, then, a surprise emerges when you begin to ask that familiar Stark County question: ''What are you up to these days?''

People don't want to talk.

Thank you for asking, they say, but no — that's not something I want to discuss.

Maybe you could talk to someone else.

Maybe when things get better.

Those are the ones who return the calls. Many don't even go that far. Messages relayed through the Hoover grapevine come back blank. This subject will not be addressed, the subject of loss.

Can you blame them? Probably not. Not when you put yourself in their position, the position of, say, a 54-year-old machinist who was laid off from Hoover last June, who found a rebound job with Timken, then was let go from there in April. Just days after this latest setback, Dennis Philippi agrees to talk because he recognizes ''there are a lot of people in my shoes.'' He is one of the few old-school ''Hoovers'' contacted by the Beacon Journal willing to share their stories.

The narrative of his recent life, he has to agree, sounds a little like a country song — wife left him, he lost his job, house got robbed, he found anPlease see Families,A5

other job, got laid off from that one. You could leave it there as an ironic little sketch, one even he can chuckle over (albeit painfully), until you trace the line out his North Canton front door and up the sidewalk, find it thickening into the neighborhoods and subdivisions and discover these sketches piling one on top of another, lives shaken sideways and upside down, lives upset initially because a big dependable employer has up and gone, but then cast into deeper trouble by a harsh fact: There's nothing to replace it.

That's not to single out North Canton, nor to suggest that the city is completely depressed. It's not, and that's as much testimony to the people and leadership there as anything else.

But across Ohio, the prospect of finding a decent middle-class job to replace one that's been lost has declined. Those disappearing, well-paying factory jobs are being replaced by jobs in nursing homes, hospitals, warehouses and restaurants, often without the attractive pay and stability that helped define Ohio in past generations.

One former Hoover worker, a man who calls himself a ''lifer'' (or, in Stark County parlance, a ''Hoover''), whose parents both retired from the company and who worked there 37 years himself, has finally given up. He's planning to leave Northeast Ohio, no longer able to disagree with something his wife, a Chicago native, has been saying since she moved here about 20 years ago:

''She would tell me, 'This is a depressed area. Things are going to get worse.' Now she says even the people here can finally see it.''

Philippi says he doesn't know anyone, even those who landed on their feet, who's doing as well as when they left Hoover.

You can read that however you like. Maybe the pay and benefits at Hoover were beyond what a modern American worker should expect. Or maybe something has been unfairly removed. Whatever the interpretation, hundreds of families continue to reorder their lives.

Change in plans

Philippi has his own personal version of an American dream. Ever since he was old enough to seriously consider what he wanted to do with his life, he knew he wanted to fly.

His parents thought his goal to become a medical helicopter pilot was unrealistic. So after graduating from Hoover High School in 1973, he took up with Hoover and, except for a brief layoff in 1975, he never left. It was a good life, and one he doesn't regret. Even with the turmoil and eventual disintegration under way at the company, he did well. By this time last year, he was making more than $23 an hour, working six or seven days a week, pulling in around $70,000 a year.

But he still hadn't given up his dream. He had bought a piece of land in Marlboro Township with plans to build a hangar there. He was working on a kit helicopter at a friend's garage and building hours and flight experience toward a commercial license. The plan was to stay with Hoover until he was in his late 50s, then retire and start his own flight instruction business.

Last July, amid waves of final layoffs, Hoover shut down the tool room. Philippi and about 40 others were cut loose, but with an unusual tether. They still had a year left on their contract, and TTI agreed to pay them and continue their benefits until it expires on June 28, 2008, a date that comes up over and over in these conversations.

Philippi, feeling ''kind of between a rock and a hard spot,'' went looking. He had a side job as a North Canton volunteer fireman, paid by the run — $13.72 per hour for a fire call — enough to make him feel like he was at least doing something. Last Halloween, while he was gone for several hours on a fire department training exercise, his house on a quiet cul-de-sac was broken into and ransacked.

The thief took a computer, cameras and other items, including rare coins representing years of careful collecting. Philippi even lost one of his remote-controlled model helicopters. His home was trashed and he was left feeling completely empty.

But a short time later, he hooked on with the Timken Co., doing grinding work in the Canton plant, where he recognized a lot of skilled tradespeople displaced from Hoover. He was making about $16 an hour, not as much as he'd made with Hoover, but he knew he'd never get that kind of income again anyhow, and he was relieved just to be back to work. Then, last month, just two weeks short of the 120-day probation period to achieve full seniority protection, he was released.

Ask him about the current job market, and he just laughs.

''Wow,'' he says. ''Every time you look at the paper, you see all these layoffs, factories shutting down, jobs move overseas. It's a scary time right now, and I feel sorry for these young people right now.''

Plenty of uncertainty

His house is still out of sorts. An ongoing settlement with his insurance company leaves him unready to put everything back together. In the family room, a large, curved piece of clear plastic rests against a box — the windshield for his unfinished helicopter. The coffee table is stacked with books — Military Aircraft; They Walked on Wings: A History of Stark County Aviation.

Philippi wants to get back to working on his helicopter, back to his plans, the things he dreamed about as a reward for all those years of hard work. But too much is uncertain for now.

His relationship with Hoover will officially end on June 28. Less than two months later, he'll turn 55, just missing the threshold to qualify for his full pension and benefits. Even at that, he'll get about 80 percent of the retirement package. But this is not at all where he'd expected to be in his mid-50s, after giving all his working years to a company which, in North Canton, had always offered security in return.

He's experiencing something a lot of contemporary, seasoned American workers have experienced — something that feels like personal failure, even though it was caused by forces beyond their control. This is what all those people don't want to talk about. This is what scares them. A force that has overtaken their career and changed rules they thought were mutually understood.

''It's like, man — what do I do with the rest of my life?'' Philippi asks. ''I'm too old to go back to school and too young to retire. I'd like to go back as a machinist. . . .

''It really puts you back. And I'm one of the semifortunate ones. I'm not in as bad of shape as a lot of them, especially the ones with kids. But my 'kid,' basically, is this helicopter,and — ''

He gestures toward the unattached windshield.

'Middle' slips away

When you ask Steve Tirrell and Dennis Philippi if their life as Hoover employees was ''middle class,'' they both answer the same way — that they considered themselves in the ''upper middle.''

Now, Tirrell says, ''I'd say I've probably moved down into the middle class temporarily, but hope to get back up to that level or higher. But I do agree that there is becoming separation, a lot more separation. Especially in an older area like Northeast Ohio, because the real super-duper high-paying factory jobs are going away.

''I think that was the core of the middle class, so you've got the entrepreneurs who are developing something and moving up, and you have the other ones who are moving down because the new jobs they're finding that aren't paying as much as the old ones. So, yeah — the middle, I think, is going away because of that.''

Philippi knows he's moved down. He knows everyone he worked with has moved down, describing the final chapter of Hoover as ''a train going downhill with no brakes.'' He's looking around now, trying to untangle a confusion of optimism, pessimism and realism.

''I'll get back into the work force somehow,'' he says. ''But I don't think I'll ever get back to where I was.''

So we leave Tirrell in his newly leased, 1,200-square-foot storefront on Buchholzer Boulevard, a temporary banner strung across the front window:

Andy's Parties

We do it all . . . from set-up to clean-up!

He'll have an office here, a storage area in the back and a large room where he can host parties and kids events.

He borrowed against his paid-off house to start this business, and started it in part to include his family in his working life. His twin 16-year-old daughters help with the parties; his 13-year-old son can expect to be involved eventually. His wife will be painting a mural on the walls before the opening, expected at the end of the month.

He enters through the glass front door with a book of carpet samples, opening it and laying it on the floor to examine the color he's chosen. When it is suggested that he might want to choose a darker shade, considering the cake and juice his clients are likely to spill, he looks up and smiles.

''Well,'' he says, ''it's polypropylene. Remember, I'm a plastics engineer. I know it'll clean up. Plus, I worked for Hoover. I've got the SteamVac.''

And we leave Philippi with the final weeks ticking down on his Hoover years, with a thread of hope that he can get back in at Timken. Whereas he once planned to retire by his late 50s and start his own business, he expects now that he'll have to work well into his 60s to prepare for a proper retirement.

The idea of a ''new beginning'' is defined by job fairs and online resume postings, a job search that feels like darts thrown blindly at a target.

And we leave them with an understanding that this is just one snapshot in a vastly changed — and changing — economic landscape.

You hear these stories and you listen to other stories from other places, stories that sound like this one — jobs moved overseas, services outsourced, middle managers downsized, mergers and acquisitions — and you wonder what you would do if the e-mail dropped tomorrow at your company, staff being cut to the bone.

You ask yourself what your resume's worth right now, what good it will do you. You look at the Ohio job market and you wonder what you'd do in their position, if suddenly you needed to find another job. You wonder if you've prepared yourself well enough. The apprehension that comes with that thought is strikingly similar to the notion of suddenly having to sell a house in this area's deeply depressed real-estate market.

You just don't want to go there. Not now. Maybe when things get better.

Beacon Journal reporter David Knox contributed to this report.
David Giffels can be reached at 330-996-3572 or dgiffels@thebeaconjournal.com.