Originally Posted by
big chainring
One of the disturbing bits in Breaking Away is Daves father Mr Stoller. ... A foreshadowing of the great midwestern rust belt and the demise of the the middle class working man. And that was 1979?.
From your description, the movie really seems to turn about totally different things than bicycling and I can see I stepped on some toes going only by that clip. Mind you, I visited friends in Pen state around 1983 and by then, it was a rustbelt for many years. Never before have I seen so many abandoned steelworks that have long gone to dogs. But buying house in Pittsburgh was cheap, just very few or decent jobs around to live there, must have been full of tragic stories. In 79, all that would have been well underway.