COLLAPSE OF OUR INDUSTRIAL HEARTLAND
Published: New York Times, June 6, 1982, William Serrin

Richard Palmer was piloting the Jay D., a ferry that shuttles back and forth across the quarter-mile-wide Ohio River between Dilles Bottom, Ohio, and Moundsville, W. Va. In many ways, it is a lovely, restful spot, one of the world's great waterfowl flyways; in the spring and fall great, beating flocks of ducks and geese go by. It is also the route of choice for hundreds of barges loaded down with coal and steel and chemicals. ''Almost anything people make,'' Palmer said, ''it comes by here.''

A round-faced 45-year-old, Palmer had worked the job since 1954, part of a riverman's tradition that goes back to 1788, when a flotilla of flatboats and pirogues, commanded by Rufus Putnam, the Revolutionary War hero, drifted past. (They were on their way to the mouth of the Muskingum River, where they founded the village of Marietta, first white settlement in what would become the state of Ohio.) The 981-mile-long river carried the settlers and then it became the chief artery of America's industrial heartland, bearing the raw materials and manufactured goods that created the most powerful nation ever known.

Lately, of course, the river has lost that importance. According to Richard Palmer, who now works for Consolidation Coal Company, making up tows, ''The state of Ohio, it's got what they call a depression. It's got 12 percent unemployment, or whatever. It's what they call bad.'' In fact, his description of what ails Ohio and the industrial Middle West was an understatement. The rest of the nation may be suffering from a deep recession or a mild depression, but the prospects are for a recovery by fall. What the Middle West has experienced is a disaster. The prospects for any real return to economic health - short-term and even long-term - are slim. And the consequences are not just local but of enormous importance for the country as a whole. For it is the industrial Middle West, with its steel, coal and cars, which has been at the heart of America's industrial base, and many experts believe that if this base declines, our nation will be reduced as a world power both in international trade and in military strength.

Tens of thousands of workers, put out of work by plant closings in steel and autos, are leaving the region for jobs elsewhere. The basic manufacturing industries, the factories where American workers and managers do what they could once do better than anyone else in the world - make things - are disappearing. Long-prosperous communities are dying, and along with them is going an attitude, a style, a set of standards that has shaped American life. And some of the crucial reasons for all this - including unimaginative management, page 44 labor-management conflict, low productivity and foreign competition -are threatening industries across the nation.

I came to know Richard Palmer and the Jay D. at the start of a three-week tour of the industrial Middle West. The goal: to get some sense of what was happening and why. Before it was over, I would interview scores of people up and down the Ohio River and in the northern industrial tier of Michigan, at basketball games and after church services - a barber in Detroit, an Elk in Findlay, Ohio, a union leader in Homestead, Pa., a coal miner 800 feet straight down. I also talked with experts in state houses and universities.

More than anything else, what came through clearly were feelings of confusion and anger. Some experts, for example, had claimed that the new computer and robot technologies would save the day. Gerald Smith is executive director of Franklin-Wright Settlements in a largely black section of Detroit. ''Robots,'' he said disgustedly. ''With this robot thing, the guy in the street knows there are never going to be as many people employed in the automobile industry.'' The guy in the street is also beginning to understand that what is going on in the Middle West amounts to a change that is more like a revolution, and that nobody seems both willing and able to do very much about it. ''We have got a lot of people who don't feel a part of anything,'' Gerald Smith said. lairton, Homestead and Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River; Weirton and Steubenville on the Ohio; Youngstown, McDonald and Girard on the Mahoning - they were the steel towns where the streets turned red at night, reflecting the fire from the coking ovens and blast furnaces and rolling mills, and where the people with sweat on their brows bragged that this part of America was hell with the lid off.

Between 1860 and 1890, says Herbert G. Gutman, professor of history at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, these cities and their neighbors created the base for an industrial growth unparalleled in history. And the neighborhood grew, until it came to include tens of thousands of square miles and parts of nearly a dozen states along the Ohio and its tributaries, on the shores of the Great Lakes and along the rivers that feed into them - north from Tennessee, west of the Appalachians, east of the Mississippi. The population soared into the millions, and came to include America's great tinkerers and entrepreneurs: Orville and Wilbur Wright, John D. Rockefeller, Charles F. Kettering, Harvey S. Firestone, Henry Ford. Out poured a seemingly endless flood of the products America used, small items and large: matches and glass, pottery and railroad cars and locomotives, cash registers and radios, kitchen appliances and automobiles.

The dramatic changes in the region brought their share of problems. The Ohio River, for instance, had been a wild, free-flowing river until the big power companies built along the river to be near the coal mines and the aluminum and steel plants set up shop near the power companies and the river turned into a long backwater, a kind of industrial park. The railroads brought their own kind of change: They sought the level ground of the Lake Erie plain, rather than the hills and mountains to the south, and many a river town foundered. In the 1850's, Cincinnati was the meatpacking capital of the United States and called itself ''Porkopolis,'' until Chicago -connected by rail to the meat-production centers - took over the title.

But the people of the region accepted such penalties. In the past, for the most part, change had ended up producing growth, robustness, progress. As the historian Herbert Gutman said, the people always had a faith that a new future would emerge. This time around, they are not so sure. About all that remains of the days of glory of a few decades ago can be seen in the old advertising signs, almost unreadable, painted on the sides of downtown buildings: ''Burke Wilson General Store.'' ''Studebaker-Rockne.'' ''Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco - Treat Yourself to the Best.''

Between 1970 and 1980, United States and Middle West steel production dropped 15 percent; Pennsylvania's production dropped 21 percent; Ohio's, 26 percent. More and more, American steel production is moving to the South and Southwest, according to the American Iron and Steel Institute. Unemployment in the steel industry stands at 30 percent. Between the end of World War II and 1980, coal employment fell 46 percent; in the last decade, much new coal employment has moved to the Great Plains. Unemployment in the auto industry stands at 22 percent. Since 1950, Detroit's population has fallen 35 percent; Pittsburgh's, 37 percent. Soon, Akron, Ohio, once the world capital of the automobile-tire industry, will no longer make an automobile or truck tire.

Reid Kollins, executive vice president of the Chamber of Commerce at Lorain, Ohio, a century-old steel town on Lake Erie, tried to be optimistic. ''Lorainers are traditionally fighters,'' he said, ''and it takes more than a little unemployment to knock them down.'' It's a hard stance, he admitted, ''when your unemployment is close to 20 percent and you don't make the top-10 jobless list in the state of Ohio.'' At 7 o'clock on a Friday night, some 800 feet down into the earth, seven men were operating one of the world's most sophisticated industrial machines. They were working in the North American Coal Corporation's Quarto No. 4 mine, which is set into a high hill five miles south of Powhatan Point. The machine, a longwall coal miner, is 500 feet long and 14 feet wide. Two circular, tungsten-steel blades move back and forth along its face with a deafening clatter, cutting through the thick coal seam like a hot knife through butter. The machine gathers up the coal with astonishing speed, all the while spraying water on the surface of the coal seam to keep down the dust.

The $5 million longwall, assisted by a computer system, has its own built-in, hydraulically supported roof. That eliminates the need for those workers who have the most dangerous job in coal mining, screwing bolts into mine ceilings to guard against roof falls. It also eliminates the room-and-pillar mining method, which requires that 50 percent of the coal in a mine be left to serve as roof supports; the longwall coal miner can simply allow the ceiling to cave in behind as it advances, which means that about 80 percent of the coal can eventually be extracted. The machine's most revolutionary asset, though, is this: It can mine 1,400 tons in an eighthour shift, which makes it at least four times more productive than the mining devices used since World World II.

The men aboard the longwall coal miner in the Quarto No. 4 were a jolly crew. Though the other miners often criticize them because they seem to like working overtime on the machine, the crew doesn't seem to mind. ''This is it,'' Ernie Walker said. ''This is the future.'' Thanks largely to the longwall, the Quarto 4 has greatly increased its production.

By the time Quarto No. 4 is mined out, well into the next century, its network of tunnels and mining areas will spread more than 11 miles west from the Ohio River. And the operation is seen in the industry as a kind of model - the equipment good, the mine itself clean, well lighted and safe as possible. As a union leader admitted, privately, ''North American's not so bad.'' Then he added quickly, ''But don't say I said that.''

Yet even Quarto No. 4 has its problems, serious problems, and they speak to issues that plague the American economy in general and the Middle West coal regions in particular.

The mines along the Ohio River produce coal by the hundreds of mil-lions of tons. Particles of coal settle on roads and forests like black talc, and during a weekday lunch hour at Emilio's Imperial Restaurant in Bellaire, Ohio, a giant coal truck passes by at the rate of one a minute. In fact, Middle West production has risen 10 percent since 1970 - but production in the Far West has risen 450 percent. One major reason: Ohio Valley coal has a much higher sulfur content, high enough so that many power plants cannot burn it under existing environmental-pollution laws. A coal boom, promised for years, has not occurred; instead, America has a coal glut. There is a market for high-sulfur coal overseas, but America's coal-shipping ports have not been modernized to accommodate the large, efficient vessels needed to take advantage of that market.

Limits on the demand for high-sulfur coal have led companies to push for greater productivity gains. But their deep mines are inherently more costly than the Far West strip-mining operations. And mine managers claim they are boxed in by antiquated work rules - including the ban on Sunday labor - and by negative attitudes of many workers and their unions.

Quarto No. 4 employs about 180 su-pervisors and 816 production workers, union men. One afternoon, Bert Gotschall, the assistant general superintendant, talked with me in his office near the mine site; two other executives, Phil Wright and Dick Rice, were on hand. Gotschall was saying that a lot of coal miners lack any incentive to work hard. He said that was because the United Mine Workers of America had extracted expensive wage settlements from coal operators in return for an end to wildcat strikes. Operators have trouble getting the miners to work overtime, he said. Absenteeism is high. Attitudes are wrong.

Jim Hepe, a union man, says this is absurd. ''A coal miner will do what he has to do and what he's told to do,'' he said. ''There may be some dead work around where a miner isn't killing himself. But management has responsibilities, too. If there's an attitude problem, it's because the companies have a boss around every corner.''

In the mine, that Friday night, Dick Rice said that, in the old days, miners were glad their supervisor had to wear a bug light - the safety flame that would indicate if there was too much methane in the air - because the beam of light warned them he was coming. Hearing the story, a foreman shook his head, spitting tobacco, splat, splat, on the floor of the mine. Nowadays, he said - he blames a lackadaisical work ethic - ''they don't even get up when they see a bug light.''

According to the executives, echoing complaints of company men in the auto and steel industries, the union exists to protect bad workers; good workers, they contended, do not need the union and often have little regard for it.

One night after the end of a shift, about 40 miners, many still in their plastic hardhats, gathered at a meeting of the union local. It was an angry session, with many of the workers distrustful not only of the company but of their own union officers, who were accused of not fighting management hard enough on safety issues.

''I want you to quit overlooking all the stuff that's going on,'' one miner said to Mike Dinello, then a union safety committeeman. The miner said the union inspectors were not spending enough time on the job. ''We need you underground, not on top,'' he said.

The company came in for its share of attacks, at the meeting and later at a tavern in nearby Bellaire called the Savoy. The longwall coal miner was Topic A. Company executives, like Phil Wright, insist that only by means of such new technology can the coal industry survive. Given the limited market for high-sulfur coal, the Ohio Valley companies claim they must cut the costs of mining, thereby improving productivity. North American has shut down some of its other mines, and Wright said that it was the longwall that was saving Quarto No. 4. Yet many miners are highly suspicious of the machine.

At the Savoy, as they consumed steak and fries and beer, several miners insisted they did not hate the longwall, but that it was receiving too much attention from the company, and the rest of the mining operation was suffering. They also felt that the men who worked the new machines were generally not good union men, but rather men trying to ''get in good'' with the company. Gary Goldsmith talked about the longwall as a major cause of subsidence, the collapse of the ground on the surface; the pillars left in place by the oldfashioned methods tend to prevent subsidence. The men said they understood that a company must mine as much coal as possible and do it as cheaply as possible - but suspicion of the company was what the conversation was about over the steak and fries.

Uncertainty about the future feeds the miners' fears. ''With the times so tough,'' said David Nething, a miner leaning against a coal face, ''you should just be glad you've got work.'' Below Pittsburgh, on the south side of the Monongahela River, sits Homestead, a town of fire and smoke. On this legendary site, in 1892, the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers took on the Carnegie Steel Company, after Andrew Carnegie ordered wages cut. Henry Clay Frick, the steel mill's general manager, ordered a threemile-long fence built around the property. The union won the first pitched battle, when 300 Pinkertons, brought upriver on barges, were attacked with rifles and cannon; 13 men died. But the strike was broken after 8,000 militiamen marched into Homestead, and the union was broken in the process. It would be almost another half-century before the steelworkers were once again organized.

Today, the town of Homestead looks much the same as it did when steel was king. Houses run in rows up the hills that rise from the river; the business district, though a bit down at the heels, still has a flavor of Fourth of July festivals and buckets of beer -Iron City brand is favored at Lapko's Bar and Grill, where the steelworkers gather. The sprawling, blackened Homestead works continue to dominate the town and the river.

But there are serious troubles in Homestead. In the boom years of the 1960's and 70's, the works employed some 10,000 workers; today, the works employ 5,200. Of the 13 open-hearth and blast furnaces at the works, only three are currently in operation. But the United States Steel Corporation maintains that the works have a bright future if the industry recovers.

Workers say they have heard that song before, that in spite of years of such promises the plant is still antiquated. The central question, posed by workers and security analysts alike, is just how deeply U.S. Steel and American steel companies in general are committed to steel production as opposed to other investments. Just this year the company succeeded in buying up the Marathon Oil Company for $6.4 billion. U.S. Steel now has 62 percent of its assets in interests other than steel - including real estate, coal and shopping centers as well as oil - compared with 43 percent before the Marathon purchase.

''You can see they want to get out of the steel industry,'' said Ronald W. Weisen, the militant president of Local 1397 of the United Steelworkers of America. A welder in addition to being a union leader, he was sitting in his spartan office across the railroad tracks from the Homestead works. ''They want to get into other things where they can make more money. They are interested in making money, not making steel.''

Weisen is a cantankerous man - a standard feature of the local's monthly newspaper is a monthly ''dumb foreman'' contest - and his outspokenness on the investment issue has earned him the enmity of both the company and the national union. Lloyd McBride, president of the United Steelworkers, says it is easy for a man like Weisen, without major responsibilities, to criticize; McBride says he and the international union must look for answers. They are not easily come by.

In the years leading up to and during World War II, the American steel industry reaped big profits, but they really soared after the war; the destruction of steel plants in Germany and Japan left the American manufacturers with almost no international competitors. But eventually the German and Japanese industries were rebuilt, their new plants based upon the most up-to-date technology, and they proceeded to chip away at the world steel market. American companies sat on their wallets. The industry has not constructed a major integrated steel mill in almost 20 years.

William J. De Lancey, former chairman of the American Iron and Steel Institute, the industry trade association, and chairman and chief executive officer of Republic Steel Corporation, said that there had been little steel-industry profit, and therefore little capital for investment in modernization. He blamed the Federal Government for working to hold down steel prices and for requiring the installation of expensive environmental equipment. Lloyd McBride, the union president, made the same points, almost word for word. Whatever the reason, Federal intrusions or lack of corporate interest, the American steel industry is floundering. In 1980, Ameri-can steel workers produced 14.1 percent of the world's steel; at the end of World War II, the industry says, it produced almost 50 percent. One sunny day, poking about the flat farmlands of northwest Ohio on a long detour from my river route, I found myself driving past the Elks Lodge Number 75, of Findlay, Ohio. There may not be a handsomer men's club anywhere. Erected in 1915, the three-story structure boasted a broad veranda and a huge elk's head high on the building front. The interior turned out to be full of old cherry-wood and tile fireplaces with a massive stained-glass skylight in the center.

Paul Schlencher, manager of the club, which has 1,179 members, was sitting in front of a window looking out upon Main Street. He wore tuxedo trousers and a white shirt in readiness for an Elks Lodge gathering that night. How was the town facing up to the economic doldrums? ''As far as dollars and cents go, we haven't seen much change,'' he said. Real estate was slow and unemployment high, almost 9 percent, but most Findlayans continued to live the good life.

The town was founded in 1821 and boomed with oil and gas finds during the 1880's. For years the Marathon Oil Company held sway, and Findlay was, for all practical purposes, a company town. Cooper Tire & Rubber Company, Dow Chemical Company, Eastman Kodak, Whirlpool and RCA have since constructed facilities in or near the city, but Marathon still looms large. During the intense fight between Mobil Oil Company and U.S. Steel over who would buy control of Marathon, much confusion arose. Marathon executives would leave their big, stone headquarters building and cross Main Street for a nightly beer and worry session at the friendly Elks Lodge bar. Would they be fired if Mobil won the fight? Should they sell their Marathon stock as it soared ever higher? In March, when Marathon stockholders approved the U.S. Steel purchase of the company, calm returned - but not before Harold D. Hoopman, the Marathon president and chief executive officer, wept at the prospect of an outside company taking over.

Paul Schlencher is optimistic about his town and about the national prospects. ''I think enough money as ever is out there,'' he said. ''But people are sitting on their purse strings. I think the feeling of most people is that we are through the worst and things are going to get better.'' He looks for a turnaround this summer.

That kind of upbeat attitude is part of the Middle West character, even during these days of hardship in the re-gion. And of course the hardship hits unevenly. There was no arguing with the fact that, viewed from the large, ornate window of the Findlay Elks Lodge, on a sunny afternoon, America looked rather good. From his showroom windows, Jim Beckman, owner and operator of Beckman Chevrolet in Defiance, Ohio, sees another America. I spent a winter's morning with him there on the banks of the Maumee River, some 50 miles northwest of Findlay. Beckman, a trim, tidy man of 56, a former marine, was wearing five layers of clothing, including shirt, cardigan sweater and tweed sport jacket; he kept the temperature in his dealership at 62 degrees. The temperature at his home, he said, was 50 degrees. That was what he could afford.

The Chevrolet dealer was always an important man in America, particularly in the America of a Middle West town. He lived in a fine house in the best neighborhood. His sons could afford a corsage for their dates at the high-school dances. His daughters were lovely to behold -blond, blue-eyed, fresh-faced - and decked out to match. When sons and daughters reached driving age, they received that most important and envied of gifts, an automobile. No one could be a greater success, more the apotheosis of the American Middle Westerner who has arrived, than the Chevrolet dealer.

When Jim Beckman took over the dealership in 1979, he and his wife, Pat, realized a lifelong dream. For years Beckman had been on the road, working with General Motors dealers. Now he could settle down, be his own boss, his own man. And the situation seemed perfect. Chevrolets always have sold well in Middle West towns, and Defiance was almost a captive market because it was the site of a big General Motors foundry and the workers, like many G.M workers elsewhere, were loyal to their company's products.

The month Beckman took over the dealership, the revolution in Iran shut off the flow of Iranian oil to the United States, and a few months later gasoline lines developed in California and started moving east. Sales of American-made cars dropped dramatically. For a decade, small, well-designed cars from overseas had been nibbling away at the United States market, and Detroit had chosen to ignore their inroads. Now, the foreign autos were snapped up, and the American companies had to start from scratch to develop their own small cars. They have yet to catch up. Consumers continue to be impressed by the design, engineering and quality of manufacture of the foreign cars, which have seized 28 percent of the American market. Moreover, in trying to meet foreign competition, G.M. has reduced the size of its Buicks and Oldsmobiles, cutting into a market category that Chevrolet had dominated for decades.

G.M. expects Beckman Chevrolet to sell 680 new cars and trucks a year. In 1981, Beckman sold 274 new cars and trucks. He hopes to raise that figure to 300 in 1982, and that - along with sales of used cars and trucks - would earn the dealership a profit of $30,000. But, as of a couple of months ago, his cash flow was only a few thousand dollars above operating needs.

How long would General Motors go along with him? ''They can blow the whistle any time,'' he said. ''I can't make any money. Once I run out of cash, I'm down the tube. Sometimes it's almost more than you can take.''

A devout Roman Catholic, Beckman in recent months has also begun going to a pentacostal church. Sometimes on Sunday he and his wife will go to mass at the Catholic church, then attend a pentacostal service. They also have daily Scripture readings at home.

''We have turned to the Word,'' Beckman said. ''You won't believe the bleakness that has come into our lives after having had a reasonable amount of everything.'' In Detroit - 115 miles and light years from the quiet, tree-lined streets of Defiance - I heard the voices of Middle Westerners who have spent their lives with considerably less than everything. They, too, spoke of the Word. One Sunday morning, about 500 parishioners, most of them black, made their way through a driving snowstorm to the Sacred Heart Church, established in 1875. In his sermon, the Rev. Norman Thomas told them that whatever problems they encountered, whatever further disasters the economy might have in store, they possessed dignity - and they must not let themselves be robbed of this dignity. The choir wore green-and-black robes and, accompanied by organ and drums and tambourines, sang an anthem from the time of slavery: ''Wade in the water/God's going to trouble the water.''

Then the parishioners left church and walked out into the blizzard. It was in June 1896 that Henry Ford knocked down the brick wall of his shed and drove his first car, the quadricycle, through the streets of Detroit - a jaunt that changed America and changed the world. Detroit sucked men from the hills of Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia and gave them jobs on the assembly line and enough pay to buy little frame houses for their families. ''Detroit, The City Where Life Is Worth Living'' was written in flowers on the City Hall lawn, and that was true for many thousands of blacks who joined in the migration from Appalachia and from the South. Detroit has, for the large part, been a place where a black person might feel himself a nobody and still believe that he could become a somebody - and often he did. He got a job and relatively good pay and a house and a car.

The auto industry's trauma of the last few years has hit Detroit's black community particularly hard. At the Mack Seyburn Barbershop on Mack Avenue, in the heart of the largely black east side, the elderly proprietor shook his head over auto cutbacks. ''It's dark, the economy,'' he said. ''It doesn't seem to me it's going to get better soon.''

The barbershop has always been an important institution in the black community, and never more than on Saturday afternoons, when the men of the community wandered in to sharpen up for their night out and to hang around and trade stories. That was why I had made it my business to stop by on a Saturday afternoon. But there was no action at the Mack Seyburn that day; a total of two customers sat sullenly under hair driers.

At the Franklin-Wright Settlements, Gerald Smith, the executive director, comment-ed, ''The people I know all talk hard times. It's a matter of survival and hanging on.'' The settlement house was founded 100 years ago to help European immigrants get used to America and to tutor them for citizenship texts; today it helps blacks get by, serving 5,000 people with programs on nutrition, community organization, careers. What strikes Smith about Detroiters, particularly black Detroiters, is that they seem to know as much as the economists about the forces at work in America. ''The guy in the street knows there are never going to be as many people employed in the automobile industry as there once were,'' he said. Historians tend to neglect the Middle West. So do movie makers. The writers who were spawned there - Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson - often seemed eager to leave and, once arrived in New York or Boston or Europe, they spent their time disparaging the Middle West on paper. ''I used to live in Indianapolis,'' a friend once told me. ''After dinner, the women in Indianapolis take toothpicks and pick their teeth.''

The Middle West has a bad press, yet it is the quintessential touchstone of American life. It has given the country a style, a definition of virtue, a standard by which the rest of the nation is judged. The very qualities that its writers denigrate - the Middle Westerner as hayseed, as friendly (read, ''nosy'') and helpful neighbor, as devoted to traditional virtues (read, ''provincial'') - are what distinguish the American. Middle Westerners aren't stuck-up and they're not quitters and they do the work of the world. Now the world is changing around them, and the Middle West and Middle Westerners may never be the same.

Meanwhile, in places like Sistersville, W. Va., some 40 miles north of Parkersburg on the Ohio River, the species is still on display. I drove into town on a damp, gray afternoon, and arranged to spend the evening doing what most other Sistersvillians, young and old, would be doing on any given Tuesday night -watching the high-school basketball game.

Charles Wells founded Sistersville in 1802, building his cabin on what is now the town's golf course and seeing to it that the town was named for his 18th and 19th children, Sarah and Delilah. When oil was discovered there in the 1890's, churches and schools were shoved aside to make way for derricks, and rigs added new hazards to the golf course. The boom passed, but prosperity lingered, and the members of the town band dressed up in handsome uniforms for the Fourth of July parade.

According to Douglas Male, the Sistersville principal, many towns along the Ohio have consolidated, but his institution with its 350 students retains the flavor of the typical small high school. The girls of the cheerleading squad in their white shoes arrived before game time, all aflutter over where to put their coats and what the order of the cheers would be; they smelled of cologne and chewing gum. The pep band played Sousa marches. The football heroes in their thick letter jackets walked the sidelines proudly, but all eyes were on the gridiron hero on crutches. His expression made it seem that it was almost good - surely not all bad - to be a football player on crutches, at least for a brief time.

A crowd of 400 people began to pour in about halfway through the junior-varsity game, packing the gym. Meanwhile, the varsity squad was assembling in a small, cement-block locker room with a black and white carpet. When the junior varsity game was over, the varsity took the floor to thunderous applause for warm-up drills, then returned to the locker room. As the junior varsity showered, and steam rolled through the room, the nine-man varsity squad sat in a long row with stern faces, listening to their coach, Randy Shuman, a short, feisty man with a black mustache. He reminded them how badly they had felt when they lost the single game that spoiled their perfect season.''You quit once,'' he said. ''Don't quit again.''

It was a splendid game. The gymnasium bubbled with light and noise and the Sistersville men moved out to a 14-point lead. Then the Williamstown five, the Yellow Jackets, began to come back. By the end of the third quarter, the score was 57-49, and with two minutes to go, the Yellow Jackets went ahead, 67-66. Sistersville fought back; at the end of regulation time, the game was tied 70-70. During overtime, Mike Salmons scored with six fast points, and suddenly Sistersville caught fire. They were friends, and out past the boys and girls and the big brick high school, beneath a black and starry sky, the Ohio River flowed in the night. The changes that are occurring in the center of the nation, according to such experts as Herbert Gutman of the City University of New York, constitute a lit-tle-recognized revolution of immense proportions - comparable in importance to such past developments as the introduction of the automobile and the spread of the suburbs after World War II. This region, with its coal and steel, its water and rail transportation, its entrepreneurial and manufacturing genius, has been the great industrial and manufacturing center of the world. Now a new order is at hand, and the region is in desperate straits.

In part, that reflects trends that are national in scope. There has been a dramatic movement of population and industry from all the older manufacturing areas to the so-called Sun Belt, the southern tier of states stretching westward from Florida to California. There has also been enormous emphasis, re-flected in investment patterns, on high-technology industries at the expense of basic manufacturing - and on high-productivity operations at the expense of jobs. The tensions between management and labor in Middle West industries find their counterparts elsewhere in an economy ridden by recession, and so do the inroads of foreign competition. But nowhere are these problems so extreme as in the Middle West, and they are made worse by special regional difficulties, such as those in the coal industry.

Some observers retain their optimism. Ohio's Gov. James A. Rhodes hopes that programs to control high interest rates, rein in Government regulation and expand oil and coal development will turn the tide. In 20 years, the Middle West will be healthy, he says, adding, ''No one will ever remember what is going on now.'' William J. De Lancey, senses a new climate in Washington that, among other things, might lead to a reduction of the imports of cheaper foreign steel into the United States. And that kind of climate, he says, could return prosperity to the steel industry. Bert Gotschall of the Quarto No. 4 coal mine, says: ''Nothing in the world will make me disbelieve in the American people. We are in the middle of a cycle and I believe once that cycle is completed we will achieve greatness we have never seen before.''

Most experts, however, take a different tack. They see the Middle West as a disaster area with, at best, limited prospects. ''The first thing that terrifies me,'' says Felix G. Rohatyn, the New York City investment banker and consultant on urban affairs, ''is that everything that is happening is accelerating rather than slowing down regional shifts.'' He points, for example, to the awarding of big new defense contracts to Sun Belt companies. ''The second terrifying thing,'' he says, ''is that nobody seems to be paying much attention.''

Those with high hopes often look to technology to save the day - what Harley Shaiken, a work and technology specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls a ''high-technology fix.'' Some would close down many of the old industries and replace them with high-tech, nonindustrial companies. Other optimists would introduce, across the board, robots and all the latest computeraided systems into existing plants as a way to save the Middle West as an industrial base. Yet both approaches have serious flaws - among them, the fact that neither would provide for anything like the number of jobs the region has traditionally offered. As Shaiken says, ''Every state can't be Route 128 or Silicon Valley.''

Meanwhile, many economists and political scientists see large national and international trends as sealing the economic fate of the Ohio Valley and the industrial Middle West. On the global side, there is the theory that the undeveloped areas of the world should be assigned the task of operating the world's basic industries while the Western nations concentrate on service and technology. On the national level, there is considerable sentiment for allowing and even encouraging the movement of people and resources from ''sunset'' to ''sunrise'' parts of the country.

The ''fashionable notion'' of letting the market have its way - of backing winners, not losers - is attacked by Felix Rohatyn. ''The losers today,'' he says, ''are automotive, steel, glass, rubber and other basic industries.'' He wonders whether the nation can continue to function while writing off basic industries to foreign competition. ''We cannot become a nation of short-order cooks and saleswomen.'' High-tech companies and service companies cannot stand alone; they still require a healthy industrial base, plants to produce the energy and the steel that go into a computer. De Lancey, the steelmaker, sounds a similar note: ''I think it would be a great misfortune for this country to become a nation of shopkeepers and electronic-chip makers.''

From the point of view of such experts as Harley Shaiken, the basic answer to America's ills is a return to the nation's days of innovation: ''We must design products so imaginative, so extraordinary in what they do, that they either create their own markets or capture other markets - for example, a car that gets 80 miles to a gallon of gasoline.'' American companies have lost the basic ability to create quality products, Shaiken says. ''Management has taken a leap away from the mundane world of making things and into the glorification of management as a science.''

Rohatyn holds that no desirable solutions are possible without the formulation of regional goals that are in turn tied into national economic planning. He points, for example, to the current wasteful competition between states for new industry. And he wonders about the wisdom of abandoning one set of schoolhouses and fire stations and transit systems in the Middle West and building a whole new set of them for the former Middle Westerners flocking to the Sun Belt.

There is, however, overwhelming public distrust of anything described as Government planning, and distaste for the Government subsidies that inevitably accompany planning - wherein subsidies are defined as money that goes to someone else. That prejudice exists though many American achievements grew out of Government planning and assistance to the private economy, from the use of Federal troops for some 100 years to assist settlers in moving West to the construction of the energy and watershed projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Says Robert Goodman, author of ''The Last Entrepreneurs,'' a study of American industrial development, ''We have national economic planning now. We just don't call it that. It's done on an ad hoc basis. And it is wasteful and chaotic.'' Lacking organized and intelligent planning, Goodman says, the industrial Middle West faces a sad future. What is saddest about the industrial Middle West, Goodman says, is that the area will, even in the bleakest scenarios, not die, but will continue in a kind of death in life.

Some of the region's big cities are laboring to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Detroit, for example, has raised taxes to pay for school improvements, anticrime programs and rehabilitation of its business center. Other cities, too - Pittsburgh, Youngstown and Akron, among them - have spent millions of dollars improving their downtown areas. There is a push on to establish urban enterprise zones to attract corporate investment in depressed areas. And according to Ed Kelly, research director of the Ohio Public Interest Campaign, a coalition of labor, religious and community groups, many smaller towns and neighborhoods are involved in bootstrap operations, ranging from new housing projects to energy-conservation programs.

Throughout the Middle West, parts of downtowns and many suburbs, green and cool and pleasant now, will continue to be fine places to work or live. But vast areas in between, industrial areas, workingclass neighborhoods, will face immense problems.

''This is a troubled land and I do not see it turning around quickly,'' says Douglas A. Fraser, president of the United Automobile Workers.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, is a former city councilman in Detroit. He feels that the city has been facing up to its problems, and he believes that a state like Michigan has a lot going for it, including recreational resources and a highly intelligent work force. But the Senator is worried about the future, and he is convinced that the cities, states and region had better come up with their own solutions because, based upon his three and a half years in the Senate, solutions were not likely to be forthcoming from Washington. ''I just basically don't put a lot of reliance on the Federal Government,'' he said, ''because I don't think the Congress is designed to be sensitive to one area; it's designed to try, with some rough equity, to do something for every area.'' The Middle West, he said, cannot surmount that kind of ''geographic competition.''

Many of the scores of people encountered on my tour of the embattled Middle West had unhappy feelings about Washington. At the Mack Seyburn barbershop in Detroit, the proprietor was angry at his Government in general and at President Reagan in particular. ''This guy,'' the barber said, ''he ain't thinking about the poor.''

My journey through the region and along the Ohio River ended in Cairo, Ill., where I chatted one afternoon with Bill Calvin, editor and publisher of the local newspaper. When Charles Dickens floated past Cairo on a steamboat in 1842, he thought it was a miserable place, but the townspeople have always been a resilient breed. Cairo was swept away by floods three times before it grew to be a major river-traffic and railroad center. Handsome buildings lined downtown streets, and its peak population, in the 1940's, was almost 18,000. But the downtown Cairo I saw was desolate; building after building had been razed, and piles of bricks lined the streets. The population is 6,000.

Yet Bill Calvin was optimistic about his vision of Cairo and about America. ''I think things will get better,'' he said. When? ''I think in about five or six months,'' he said. It was hard to understand such faith.

Two miles south of Cairo, the Ohio River joins the Mississippi River at a bleak and windswept grove of cottonwood trees. That day, the Ohio was wild and almost frightening. The wind lashed the skin, and the current was so fast, so fierce, that I wondered how the pioneers possessed the courage to set out upon such a river with their families and their pigs and chickens and cows. Then I thought about Bill Calvin and his attitude toward the troubles facing this part of the country, and his optimism seemed to make more sense.

Illustrations: photo of U.A.W. headquarters in Detroit photo of job-seeker in Pontiac, Mich. photo of Ohio River barge passing Pittsburgh at dawn photo of 3 workers at General Tire & Rubber in Akron, OH photo of destruction of four blast furnaces in Youngstown