In the decades afterward, those communities got to know too well the pain of prosperity gone by.
That doesn't make it any easier now.
The projected March closings of the Sunoco-Marcus Hook and ConocoPhillips refineries, with the direct loss of about 1,500 jobs; the insolvency of the Chester Upland School District; the shuttering in June of a beloved 95-year-old Catholic parochial school - all are ratcheting up the already ingrained stress in these faded industrial towns.
Yvonne Vest, 60, a ConocoPhillips worker with three children in the failing Chester public schools, never had high blood pressure. Now she does.
"I have more worry on me now," she said.
Joe Kistler, 56, of Marcus Hook, a Boeing sheet-metal assembler, has several nieces and nephews who were among about 200 children headed next fall for Holy Saviour-St. John Fisher School in abutting Linwood. But the Archdiocese of Philadelphia will close the school as part of its master plan to preserve parochial education amid declining enrollment and growing debt.
Under a proposed school merger, Kistler's kin will have to travel about four miles north to St. Joseph School in Aston.
The archdiocese, Kistler said, "is asking a lot."
Craig Galante, 44, who in his job at ConocoPhillips turns crude oil to gasoline and diesel, next will try his luck with the barbershop he plans to open in Broomall. Seated in his union's hall in Marcus Hook last week for a severance briefing, he predicted "a ghost town between here and the state of Delaware," along with devastation to the local tax base, when the last good jobs leave town.
Property tax rates in some communities in this part of Delaware County are among the highest in the nation - higher even than New York City.
'Quite worried'
