JOHNSTOWN, Pennsylvania — Despite having to admit he’d never seen the movie Slap Shot, the cult classic starring Paul Newman about a down-on-its-luck minor league hockey team in a dying factory town, Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) literally was standing at the center of the rink where it was made as he pronounced himself bullish about this town’s prospects.

“What is happening here in Johnstown is happening nowhere else in the country,” said Casey, who was here to begin the Showcase for Commerce Defense Industry Expo, an event that began 33 years ago when the late congressman Jack Murtha was in office. Casey was joined by local elected officials including Rep. John Joyce (R-PA) of Altoona.

Murtha brought defense contractors to the Johnstown area, which in turn created countless jobs and brought a needed influx of money to local residents. “It’s just unparalleled,” Casey said.

The host site — the Cambria County War Memorial Arena, which was the home of the real team, the Johnstown Jets of the Eastern Hockey League, on which the Paul Newman movie was based — was filled with booths from the different defense contractors in the area and decorated with red, white, and blue balloons and flags throughout the 17,000-square-foot rink.

Casey said that when Murtha started it 33 years ago, the event was really small.

“Every year it got bigger,” Casey said. “But then there were other members of Congress, literally, and not freshmen members, well-established members of Congress. Some of them, if not committee chairs, had been in the House a long time, [who told me] we tried to replicate this and we couldn’t pull it off.

“It just speaks to the unique nature of it and [Murtha’s] ability to start something no one else could. And then years later, I was part of the group that got the handoff, and I’ve been trying to keep it going all these years.”

Casey said it is important for small cities such as Johnstown to continue to find ways to reinvent their economies.

“It is not like you can go to the library and go online and get a playbook. They’ve had to do it themselves. Pittsburgh did it in probably the grandest way by transitioning to a tech economy and Ed’s and Med’s,” Casey said of that city piggybacking on the resources of the universities and medical facilities to reinvent its economy.

“In some ways, smaller versions of that, or more scaled-down versions of that, have taken place in places like Johnstown, where, yes, they thankfully had and developed those healthcare jobs … but also having this part of their economy flourish as well,” he said. “Manufacturing economy, the defense and industrial-based economy, an economy that’s impacted by universities and the dynamism of that research.”

Last year the financial website SmartAsset used data from the U.S. Census Bureau, real estate site Zillow, and the IRS to compile rankings of the 10 poorest counties in the state. Cambria came in as the fourth-poorest based on median income and home values.

Casey said Cambria County has been helped by a lot of federal investment research, “but it has to come from the people who live there who want to create that new economy to literally invent their future.”

For much of its existence, coal has been king in Cambria County, but that energy resource has fallen out of favor and been phased out, thus costing jobs and causing many people to move away for other opportunities. But some things are looking up: A solar farm recently opened where a coal mine once was in Portage Township, the Allegheny Ridge Wind Farm has been operational since 2007, and the county is part of the natural gas shale extraction boom in the state.

Casey said he is also encouraged by the recent groundbreaking news of analysis of compliance data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection showing that if extracted with complete efficiency, lithium from the wastewater of Marcellus shale gas wells in Pennsylvania could supply up to 40% of the United States’s demand.

“It is another resource that allows us to be competitive in a world economy where China, if we allow them to keep stealing our technology, to keep trying to run ahead of us, lithium is another opportunity for us, just like natural gas,” he said.

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“Obviously, out here in this part of the state as well as the northeast and the north-central part of the state, natural gas has been another dynamic that it’s allowed some stability,” Casey said.

Casey is up for reelection this year. He first was elected to the Senate in 2006, a very good year for Democrats, and has won twice since, also in good years for Democratic candidates. He faces businessman and Army veteran Dave McCormick, a Pittsburgh Republican. The latest RealClearPolitics polling averages show Casey earning 46.7% of voters’ support over McCormick’s 41.8%.