Love is never easy...even in easier times, like the 1950s and 1960s in the Ohio Valley with the steel industry booming.

Second-generation immigrant families were reaching for the American middle class. And Catholic schools-made feasible by selfless Catholic nuns-promised bigger lives for everyone, including Jack Clark and Laurie Carmine. As they spent years searching for their separate futures, though, they were also stumbling toward love just as their world came crashing down.

Steel Valley depicts a story of love longed for, lost, and perhaps still within reach, just as our nation's mythic yesterday became our troubled today, our last summer of innocence.