When Dundalk had its 15 minutes of fame ten years ago — because crazy Joseph Palczynski went on a killing spree and then held his girlfriend’s family hostage for 97 hours — the Baltimore County community didn’t come off too well.

Toothless-and-trashy was the stereotype that the television “man on the street” crews seemed to be looking for, in their  interviews, some in the community recall.

“Well, that’s one Dundalk,” writes author and Brew contributor Deborah Rudacille, in USA Today. “The other is the place where I was raised at the height of the postwar boom — a proud, prosperous working class stronghold built by the sweat and blood of our families and neighbors at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point plant.”

Check out Rudacille’s essay on the decline and fall of Sparrows Point as a kind of parable of America’s betrayal of the working class, something she captures in greater depth in her new book “Roots of Steel: Boom and Bust in an American Mill Town.”

Watch for a Brew interview with Rudacille, coming soon…….