A View to the Past

Circa 2013

Returning to your roots for a visit makes most people reflective and nostalgic. Bill Seabold was no exception. It had been years since his last visit so the list of relatives, friends and places to see was long. As he drove along the winding two lane asphalt road leading from the Pennsylvania Turnpike exit to his sister's house, his mind raced from one memory to the next. A half century had passed but everything seemed to be just as it was when he was a boy.

He glanced at his watch and realized he was ahead of schedule. His sister didn't get off work until five and it was only 1:30. He decided to take the long way to her house. The long way would take him through the area where he grew up. In particular, He wanted to check out the condition of the house his family still refered to as home.

His first stop was the small community where he attended elementary school. It was an area frozen in time. There were a few new businesses here and there, the biggest being a new gas station and deli complex but everything else was the same. It could have been 1938, 1958 or 2015.

The houses, all pre-world war II vintage, would be recognizable in a 1930 photograph. A few owners had covered the clapboard exteriors with aluminum siding and installed asphalt shingles but had done little else. Though square and plain in design, many of the homes had interior staircases and wood work that would be unaffordable today.

Main Street was part of a nineteenth century turnpike that ran through the center of town. Its concrete surface a testament to a half century of asphalt cold patches, cracks filled with black tar and the general neglect it had endured. Construction of a bypass around the town after World War II isolated the community and doomed the small businesses along the street.

He drove the entire length of Main Street from east to west at 20 miles an hour. Not one car or truck passed him going in either direction.

Every building triggered at least one memory. His brother's high school girlfriend lived there, that's where the small store used to be where kids bought penny candy during school recess. The stores display window now had curtains and several green potted plants on display.

A little further down the street was a boarded up duplex building where the barbershop and Justice of the Peace used to be. The last building on the left was the old bank. It had been turned into a private home. He made a U-turn and headed for the school building.

As he approached the elementary school he was amazed at how big some of the trees had gotten. In numerous places the roots had lifted pieces of concrete sidewalk completely off the ground. The color of the exterior and the landscaping around the house across the street from the school was the same as it was in 1957.

He looked at the bushes along the side of the house. That's where he and his friend Tim hid while playing war during recess. Where had the time gone? What were his classmates doing, where did they live and who did they marry?

Bill parked so he could take a few pictures. The sounds of children playing at recess filled his head. Girls jumping rope and playing hopscotch, boys playing kick ball or running around as part of a pretend army.

His thoughts were about the first day of fifth grade, a day during which he had more than one epiphany, although he didn't know what the word meant at the time. At eleven years of age he was on the front edge of puberty. Boys in his class had peach fuzz on their faces, girls had budding breasts, hair was beginning to grow in new places and genitals were becoming functional.

These realities were not in the forefront of his mind at such a young age but he knew something had happened to everyone during the summer. The boys seemed a lot bigger, were more serious and better athletes.

The girls, well they didn't act as silly as they did in fourth grade, were careful how they sat with a skirt on and hung out together in little cliques. Some even had lipstick on. Bill felt like a little boy going to school with adults.

At the bus stop, on the bus, during recess and in the classroom, the rule seemed to be, "boys over here and girls over there". If a boy sat with a girl on the bus, the other kids assumed they were going steady.

The second day of school he sat with a girl on the bus ride home because there was no choice. Bigger boys said they were saving the seats next to them. The girl did not object when he sat down. She said hi. He said hi back. Both of them looked straight ahead for the rest of the bus ride.

Bill made sure he didn't brush against her arm or in any way give her a reason to say something to him. He was nervous and afraid of her in some ridiculous way.

What he was really afraid of was that she would be friendly and maybe ask him to get off at her stop someday to meet her family and have a glass of Kool-Aid. If her Dad discovered he was a bum from Slag Town he might chase him away. What if she came to his house and his Dad was drunk and urinating in the front lawn.

All of these crazy thoughts raced through his head as he continued to stare straight ahead. Bill and her attended fifth and sixth grade, junior high school and high school together and never had a serious conversation.

When your forty years old, not much changes over a season, but a lot changes between the ages of ten and eleven. He wasn't a child exactly, neither was he an adult, but that year he began to see the realities of life in a more discerning way. Adults were no longer perfect and in some ways more irresponsible than children.

Being more aware was a curse in some ways because he started to worry about things a boy should not have had to deal with. Things that had always been there but were now in the forefront of his consciousness. Living off welfare, surplus government food, coal delivered by the Salvation Army and wearing the neighbor kid's hand-me-down clothes makes you stoic, serious and ashamed. Especially when they recognize their clothes and tease you about it.

Like a Phoenix rising up from its own ashes, the worries were reborn on a daily basis. Everything from his Dad's drinking and bare cupboards to his Mom's loneliness, lack of money and the constant faking about their situation to people outside the family.

It didn't take much to trigger a low self-esteem event. He noticed, or maybe cared for the first time, that other kids wore different cloths each day to school and always had paper money in their pocket to buy ice cream and candy bars at lunch. They had lunchmeat sandwiches, store bought deserts, bananas and potato chips in their fancy lunch boxes. It made him angry, disappointed in his Dad and worried.

There were humorous happenings though. He had one good pair of shoes which were reserved for school and church. They were black, high top shoes that some people called Boon Dockers and others incorrectly called engineers boots.

His Mom had the shoe repair man put cleats on the heels and toes. It made them last all year. With the cleats installed, he could run and slide ten feet on the terrazzo floors in the school hallways. Of course it sounded like he had tap dancing shoes on when walking normally.

At lunch he thought he was taking advantage of certain kids who would trade him a Hostess three pack of cupcakes or a banana for a piece of his Mom's homemade cake with no icing. Sometimes he wasn't sure who was taking advantage of who.

Everything Bill's family wanted to do, needed to do or wished they could do depended on how many quarters and dimes they could or could not scrape together. Lack of money constrained everything.

Fifth grade was also one of those years when play time became an exercise in more serious endeavors like baseball, playing war at recess and wanting to impress girls instead of pure imagination driven fantasy games. No more riding Mom's broom pretending it was a horse, playing with clothes pins or driving a pretend car using a pie pan. It was the beginning of a long transition into adulthood.

It's ironic that his father, the man he was most disappointed in, was the person largely responsible for making him who he became - a stoic, serious as death, over achiever who kept his emotions and feelings to himself, wasn't a very attentive spouse and spent most of his life trying to prove something to his Dad. He was not proud of it but it was what it was.

Déjà vu soon evaporated as he realized the school playground was covered in asphalt.

Signage on the building clearly indicated it was now an office complex. The school had a new purpose and no longer required periodic visits from nostalgic people like Bill.

That day was in fact the last time he visited the building. He stopped at the deli, bought some gas and a hot dog and headed for his second objective, Slag Town, which is the closest thing to a home town he had.

Slag Town

Circa 2013

Bill arrived in Slag Town and pulled into the volunteer fire department parking lot. From there he could see the main part of town, the Catholic Church and the lot where the Fourth of July carnival and fireworks took place. The church, fire house, commercial buildings and homes were pretty much as they were in 1960. He rolled the window down to let in the sounds and smells of the town.

There was little activity. He could see two men talking outside a small store located on the main road though town. The quiet was periodically interrupted by the sound of a car or a dog barking. The smell was a mixture of the aroma coming from a pizza shop across the street and the diesel exhaust from a passing garbage truck. In his head, he could hear the booms from the July fourth fireworks and the music from the carnival merry-go-round.

He looked at the entrance to the Fire hall and wondered if anything had changed inside. The sound of his father's voice emanated from within. He wasn't there of course, but Bill could hear him just the same. Finding him in any bar was easy because he had a loud penetrating voice when he was drinking. Like a bat homing in on a bug, his voice led Bill to the stool he was sitting on every time.

The fire hall bar was a place where he spent many an afternoon eating potato chips and drinking soda pop while his Dad played poker and got drunk. Bill's job was to help drive the car home, either by sitting next to his Dad and steering or by actually sitting behind the wheel.

He directed his eyes to the right and could see the church recreation hall. The hall was used for many purposes including basketball, wedding receptions, chaperoned dances and Saturday evening roller skating.

It was a three mile walk from Bill's home to the hall but he made the one hour hike on many Saturday evenings to go roller skating. It was a mixed crowd and he liked the way they did couple's skates. You didn't have to ask a girl to skate. On cue the boys and girls formed separate lines. The adult in charge then paired up the next boy and girl in line until everyone had a partner. If there were too few girls, you were given head of the line privileges for the next couples skate.

Boys would jockey positions trying to match up with the girl they liked. The church rule was you could only hold hands, no arm around the waist. Nevertheless, it was pleasurable. Most of the time a couple's skate started with a smile and ended with a thank you with no conversation in between.

When Bill was a boy, Slag Town was on the other side of the proverbial railroad tracks. It's a place where children who grow up there never forget but rarely spent their adult lives there. It was a place where many people struggled through life using imagination and a lot of hard work but had very little money.

The people in Slag Town did not consciously think in terms of a philosophical Ben Franklin lens but they certainly all had one. They judged themselves, others and the larger world around them very harshly at times, a world they knew mostly from magazines, television and the movies.

They criticized politicians but often forgot to vote, the police were a necessary evil and taxes were avoided by doing jobs on a cash basis. Parents of the high school star running back or an all-state wrestler were celebrities. On the other hand, people who created a successful small business and made some money were treated differently, almost as outsiders, for the rest of their lives.

Slag Town was originally a mining and coke producing community built by a coal company before World War II and got its name from the huge mountain of sulfur-colored coal slag that sat like a monument at the edge of town. People called the slag Red Dog. Some of it was used on mine roads and driveways but mostly it sat there like the Pyramid of Giza, visible from a mile away.

Near the entrance to the old mine stood a huge coal tipple, a multi-story boiler complex and other engineering buildings. Every structure looked like it had been painted black. Cookie cutter coal company row houses lined both sides of the road north of the tipple. The company store provided anything the miners and their families needed. Everything from clothes and shoes to food, tobacco and Kerosene.

Every miner had an account at the store which was rarely paid off. Miners were often paid in script that could only be spent at the company store. The coal company controlled everything and everyone.

The mine closed in the mid-1950s. The company provided little to nothing in severance benefits at that time. The consequence for many workers, most of them card carrying members of America's greatest generation and World War II veterans, was free membership to the ranks of the working poor and for some, poverty.

When the mines shut down, the entrances were walled up with heavy timber to keep adventurous explorers from taking Sunday tours. The company houses and store were sold but the coal tipple, boiler building and other structures were left standing like relics from a ghost town. After a few years, beehive coke ovens sat like Incan ruins with scrub trees, weeds and vines in and around them creating a scene from an Indiana Jones movie.

In the mid to late 1950s, people bought cheap lots in Slag Town and built modest homes, opened two small stores that we call quick stops today, an Italian restaurant, pizza shop, two taverns and one gas station.

An unexpected legacy of shallow room and pillar mining used back then was sink holes. In many places the mines had less than one hundred feet of overburden which made them susceptible to cave-ins that created sink holes on the surface. One spring the dirt road Bill lived on developed a sink hole big enough to swallow a car. Sink holes could occur anywhere, in the woods, in the middle of a corn field or underneath a barn.

Options in those days for laid off miners were to move to a better place which was easy to talk about but very hard to do; stay and become a part-time drunk and marginal tradesman; get a minimum wage job or if you knew someone on the inside, secure a county or state civil service position. The civil service positions didn't pay much but they provided health and retirement benefits.

The majority of Slag Town children who came of age in the late 1950s and 1960s, left town as soon as they graduated high school, or sooner. Options were limited for most of them but they had better choices than their parents.

The fortunate children in the township were those with parents who had the means to send them away to school. Some earned athletic or academic scholarships to college. Many stayed in the region finding work in places like Pittsburgh, Johnstown and Harrisburg and returned only for holiday visits. Some were lucky enough to get into one of the union apprentice programs at big companies like Westinghouse, Kennametal or Jones and Laughlin Steel.