By investing my newspaper's efforts on improving Bethlehem, Pa., the city improved

I became editor of the Globe-Times at age 32, called back home, in effect, after I was well into a career at the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. Having grown up on a farm outside Nazareth, Pa., and enrolled at Moravian College until World War II took over my life, I had definite ideas of what was wrong in Bethlehem.

It was a dirty city. Residents woke up mornings to find red dust covering their automobiles, sidewalks and porches. But only malcontents grumbled. Red dust meant that the plant was making steel. Parents told their children to be grateful: No dust, no paychecks. Besides it did no good to complain. Over the years, city government had been riddled with petty corruption and beholden to handouts from its dominant industry, Bethlehem Steel. As long it did not affect its interests, Bethlehem Steel seemed more than willing to tolerate the status quo.

A newspaper's first job is to report the news, particularly the local news. But my own gut feeling told me that I had to do more. If Bethlehem was to become something more than a smoky company town, the Globe-Times had to challenge the forces of power hindering the city and its editor had to get personally involved in improving it. This concept today is called "civic journalism," though at the time I never knew there was a definition for it.

Fortunately, when I took over in 1956, the changing mood of the times helped immensely. Many who had been away in World War II returned with higher expectations. Among those were faculty members (and their wives) at Lehigh University and Moravian College, and many middle management people at Bethlehem Steel who also wanted a healthy environment for their families.

We challenged the petty corruption at city hall and the political spoils that pervaded the school system - sometimes at considerable pain to my family. But more importantly, the Globe-Times provided a voice to the class of civic leaders rising out of Bethlehem's civic organizations and the church leaders, among others, who also sought to energize the city.

What followed was a renaissance. With a new chairman at Steel, one married to the daughter of a prominent Bethlehem family, a new spirit of community began to replace benign neglect in the higher echelons of the city's dominant industry. Consider the changes that occurred swiftly as we all began to pull together:

• The blighted historic district, whose centerpiece had been a junk yard, was brought back to its rightful life from the overgrown thickets. A historic preservation group was born and began to restore buildings, attracting culture and tourists.

• In the early 1960s, Bethlehem voted out the commission form of government, which we had criticized for enabling political fiefdoms. Then, incensed by a news story about a gun-brandishing commissioner trying to recover his uncle's trousers from a house of passion, voters completed the sanitizing by voting every incumbent out of office. A fresh generation of leaders was invited to run the new, strong mayor-council system of government.

• Though deeply in debt, the new administration tore down the old city hall, an ugly firetrap, and replaced it with a modern government center.

• When the city was unable to raise the money to build a library, the final component of the city center complex, Publisher Rolland Adams stepped forth with his own style of civic journalism: He revived the project with a personal gift of $250,000 and urged the public to match it. We launched a fund drive that went over the top, including a whopping state grant that matched our local effort. The result: a $1.5 million new library that remains a testament to the will of the people.

Expansion of the college campuses, plus private investments that gave downtown an 11-story bank office complex, helped the turnaround. Steel's building of a 21-story tower and its costly program to clean up stack emissions completed it.

While the newspaper gave voice and editorial encouragement to these builders of modem Bethlehem, I am proudest of all for the support we gave in one other direction.

I refer to those we joined in fighting against racism and for greater human understanding in the new wave of diverse populations that seemed to engulf thriving industrial cities. Our editorials won a Pulitzer Prize for that in 1972. This honor could not have been possible without the support, in turn, of Bethlehem's many caring people who believe as we did that a community's real value is measured by how it treats its fellow man.

Strohmeyer, editor of the Bethlehem (Pa.) Globe-Times from 1956 to 1984, is the writer in residence of the University of Alaska in Anchorage.