The curious carved pillars on Wagner Ave.

Pillar with the date "1884" on Wagner Ave.
April 16, 2016
credit: Nancy Knisley

Pillar with letters on Wagner Ave.
April 16, 2016
credit: Nancy Knisley

The 200 block of Ambridge's Wagner Ave. is a narrow, one-way street in the historic district, running between Church St. and Merchant St. The block is lined with a few modest non-Harmonist houses and not heavily traveled. If you did drive through it, you might not have even noticed the two tall stone pillars, one on either side of the steps in front of 269 Wagner.

269 Wagner Ave.
Google street view
October 2013

But if you were one of the street's occasional pedestrians, and particularly observant, you might have been struck by the odd pillars and stopped to take a better look. They are worn and look old and unlike anything else in Ambridge. On them, near the top, are carvings of six pointed stars, near the bottom are what appear to be letters. In addition, below their stars, the right pillar has the date 1884; the left, the letters "H" and "L" separated by a symbol. What do the carvings and letters mean? And why are the pillars in the tiny front yard of 269 Wagner where they seem out of place?

Here's what I know:

John Frederick (Fred) Knoedler, a stonemason by trade, helped carve the pillars. Fred and his wife, Katherine Kroll Knoedler, were long time employees of the Harmony Society, performing a variety of duties, but not Harmonists themselves.

The pillars originally stood in front of Economy School, built by the Harmony Society for the area's children. The letters "H" and "L" on one pillar stood for Jacob Henrici and Jonathan Lenz, the two Harmony Society trustees at the time the school was built in 1884, the year on the second pillar. (Beaver County Times, August 20, 1974)

The Economy School was built at the corner of what is now the northeast corner of Church and Laughlin Sts. You can see it in the left foreground of the photo below. The building to the right is the Blaine House, used as a school before the Economy School was built. The building in the background between the Blaine House and Economy School is Ambridge's Fourth Ward School.

"All Three Economy Schools"
Manuscript Group 354: Old Economy Village Collection
Photo Number 2404
courtesy of Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
Old Economy Village
used with permission

The photo below shows students in front of the Economy School in 1898. You can see the pillars on the sides of the student group.

"Economy School - 1898"
Manuscript Group 354: Old Economy Village Collection
Photo Number 2369
courtesy of Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
Old Economy Village
used with permission

The former Economy School building is now an apartment building:

Former Economy School building, now converted to apartments
1514 Church St.
April 6, 2016
credit: Nancy Knisley

After the Economy School was closed, its pillars were relocated, although I don't know when they ended up in front of 269 Wagner, once the home of Fred and Katherine Knoedler's daughters, Christiana Knoedler and Katherine Brown.

Christiana Knoedler standing with one of the pillars in front of her Wagner Ave. home
Beaver County Times
 August 20, 1974

In 1945, a unicorn came to Ambridge

During the first week of September 1945, a traveling exhibit of rare and odd animals came to Ambridge, and the unicorn surely had to be the rarest of all.

An ad for the show featured a beautiful, classic unicorn as depicted in folklore, with a horse-like head and a large horn on its forehead. Wow! And skeptics say they didn't exist. It looks pretty happy too. Of course "It's real. It's alive!!" Who would want to see a fake or dead unicorn?!

Animal Oddities Exhibit ad
Daily Times
September 3, 1945

Although whoever sketched the unicorn for the announcement below, featuring the rare creature, did an awful job! Why, the unicorn almost looks like an ox or bull with a single horn, nose-ring included.

Animal Oddities announcement
Daily Times
September 4, 1945

Still, rest assured, exhibit-goers would see the unicorn of myth. From the announcement:

Among the unique animals to be shown is the Unicorn, which dates back to the wanderings of the barbaric tribes before civilization. The single-horned animal, shown here, is greatly sought after for its wonderous powers of magic and medicinal values. The miraculous horn is always described as growing on the brow of a "beast so glorious, so virtuous, so beautiful that heaven granted the earth only one specimen at a time."

Now would an ox or bull fit that description? No!

Although there was only one unicorn on earth in September 1945, if you came to the field at 17th and Merchant Sts. in Ambridge, you could see it! Only 25¢ (plus tax) for adults; 10¢ (plus tax) for kids!

If the magical unicorn wasn't enough, there were 100 more "living curiosities" in the exhibit, including Belgian Bob, the world's largest living horse.  And Nebcurhah, "The 3000-year-old man from the Valley of the Kings in Egypt." No mention of he was still living or not.

Animal Oddities Exhibit ad
Daily Times
September 6, 1945

Lest you think that the ads might be making stuff up about the animals in the exhibit, here's  a photo of Lone Star, the world's largest living steer.

Lone Star
World's Largest Living Steer
Daily Times
September 5, 1945

The text under the photos said:

Beaver Countians will have the opportunity of viewing, "Lone Star" (pictured above) world's largest living steer, 9 feet tall and weighing around 3,000 pounds, showing with "Animal Oddities" exhibit, on transcontinental tour with the earth's strangest living oddities, now located on the showgrounds at 17th and Merchant streets, Ambridge.
   This unusual exhibit is on display through Sunday, September 9th in a large tent, and included in the oddities is the world's largest living horse measuring 19 1/2 hands, along with 100 other rare animals.
   Included in the exhibit are strange animals featured in "Believe It or Not", by Robert Ripley.

Surely, if Lone Star was that big, the unicorn was real!

Haunted Byersdale

Used by permission of the artist.

by Robert Giles

Some of the old timers who put up their own homes on top of the hill in Byersdale must have built without benefit of plumb or level.

I’m talking about the houses just beyond the water tower where the road straightens out just before the dogleg to the left. They were all jammed in cheek-by-jowl, like row houses. Maybe they held each other up. Or perhaps the thick tangle of woods on the hillside kept them from rolling over backwards into Legionville Hollow.

That row of six or seven houses always seemed to be holding on for dear life.

I may exaggerate. It is one particular pair of houses I remember from fifty years ago. The others suffer from guilt-by-association.

I delivered the morning paper to the occupants of the two houses. The two families were related and shared a single copy of the Post-Gazette.

There were two brothers – one married and one a bachelor. The bachelor lived with his mother. When it came to paying for the paper, I collected from the married brother; but if he and his wife were absent, I was instructed to call on the bachelor.

The bachelor seldom spoke. The mother I saw only once.

In autumn the days shortened. It was dark when I got home from school. I delivered papers in the morning but did bill collection in the evening. Who wants to get out of bed at sunrise to do business with the paperboy?

That stretch of road wasn’t my favorite place. There was one streetlight. If you looked closely you could spy out a bat or two circling the water tower. Beneath my right shoulder were the black depths of the hollow. The pavement was neglected and broken away at the edges.

I shuffled through a cover of fallen leaves. The night air was frosty.

I turned onto a boardwalk that forded the frozen ditch in front of my customer’s front porch. The house sat right on the road. It was just a few feet over the ditch and onto the porch. There was no room for a lawn. The two houses were separated by a gap of twelve inches. The families shared a single porch as well as a single newspaper.

The decking of the porch gave perceptibly with each step. I felt as though I was aboard an old ship that was groaning in a heavy sea. One false step ...

I approached the door. It seemed no one was at home. There was one dim light on, back in the kitchen. I knocked once, then a second time. I waited. No one answered. I walked over to the bachelor’s door.

I knocked at the second door. I knocked again, then a third time, more forcefully. I turned to leave. Just then there was an answering knock – more aptly, a tap, slowly repeating and becoming louder.

I looked into the small window high up on the door. A creature with a thousand legs scurried across the glass.

I peered in. Tap … tap … tap. A figure in black came toward the door. The room was unlit. I could see that the figure held a cane.

Slowly, slowly, slowly towards the door it came. The knob turned. The door opened wide. Before me was an ancient head in a heavy black babushka, its owner clad in widow’s weeds. Someone had dressed for a funeral thirty years before and had never undressed.

The apparition looked at me blankly as it opened its mouth to utter something unintelligible in a foreign tongue.

It was time to screw my courage to the sticking point. Screw courage.  I turned and fled.

The Dead-End Swing

If Roy wasn’t a jagoff he wouldn’t have jumped like he did onto the Tarzan swing beneath the Legionville Bridge.

Couldn't he see there were already two kids holding onto the rope? They were swinging out over the pit under the north end of the bridge. Below them was a whole bunch of broken concrete that some chiseler had left scattered on the ground when he replaced the deck.

There was an open sewer line down there. It always stunk.

We saw that Billy was scared bad. You could tell by the way he clung to Dave’s waist. The rope swung back towards us like a pendulum beneath a cuckoo clock.

Roy landed high up on Dave’s back, missing the rope completely. How did he think Dave was going to hold on? Dave was the strongest kid in the neighborhood but Roy must have weighed two hundred pounds.

What was he thinking? A big fat zero. To think you have to have a brain.

Three kids were taking a ride and only one had a grip on the rope. Something had to give. Roy may have panicked and started to kick. Maybe Billy was trying to grab the rope to help Dave. Anyway, something made Billy lose his grip. He started to slide down between Dave and Roy. Dave tried to grasp him with his legs in a scissors lock to save him, like the way The Flying Wallenda had saved his partner on the high wire.

Dave tried his best but down Billy slid. It all happened in a second though it seemed like forever plus one day. Everything was quiet except for the wheeze of the rope against the steel of the bridge.

Billy grabbed at Dave’s foot but it was bye-bye Billy. He went down like a load of bricks. Luckily Billy missed the concrete - he landed feet first between two huge chunks.

Couldn't those highway contractor bastards pick up after themselves?

Billy’s legs buckled, then his ass hit, then his back and shoulders, finally his head. Everything bounced as it hit the clay.

We looked down. Was Billy dead? What would we tell his mother?

Frieda

We took a shovel and a galvanized steel container down into the woods to dig some topsoil for Dad. “Get some good black earth”, he instructed.

We descended the path that cut across the steep hillside of the hollow. About half way down the ground leveled out, down by the “gold mine”. That was where we were going to dig for dirt.

The “gold mine” was perhaps a stone quarry back when the Harmony Society owned the land. Maybe they dug into the hillside poking around for minerals. Who knows? (Farther up the hollow in Economy Park was a “silver mine”.)

We looked for a spot a good distance from a large tree. We wanted to get twenty gallons of dirt quickly and go home. We didn’t have time to fool with tree roots.

My brother called out, “Over here. Someone may have already loosened the dirt.”

We dug down about two feet, filling our “bucket” with light, friable earth containing lots of naturally composted oak leaves and mast.

Just then the shovel struck something hard. Chuck reached into the hole. He pulled out a skull and a jawbone.

“There’s a whole skeleton down there, he exclaimed. Maybe someone was murdered.”

It was too small to be an adult. Maybe it was a child. The skull was narrow and elongated.

“Why this must be a big dog, like a collie.”

Just then something made us all look up the hillside toward Anthony Wayne Drive. On top of the bluff stood Old Mike, glowering at us through the trees.

“Christ almighty, I think we just dug up Frieda,” Chuck mumbled beneath his breath.

Frieda was Old Mike’s beloved pet.

Six Ghouls in an Olds 88

One evening after dark Mom sent me over to the Isaly store for a half-gallon of milk. When I came out of the store and headed up the alley, a big car pulled up alongside me.

The man at the wheel rolled down the window. There were six men in the car.

I wasn’t savvy enough to know that six men in one car always meant trouble. Still, I got a little nervous.

“Hey kid, is this where the girls are?” the man asked.

“Do you mean in the hotel?” I asked, puzzled at the man’s question.

“Yeah, in the hotel, you know …” The man’s voice trailed off and he began to wink at me. He moved his arm as though giving me a nudge even though I was outside the car and three feet away.

“Yeah, I guess there are ladies in the hotel. I’m not allowed to go in.”

A man in the back seat started to laugh. “Let’s get out of here, the kid’s still a virgin”, he said. They all started to laugh.

When you put your finger on a phonograph record, everything slows down and gets distorted.

“Haw, haw, the kid's stilllllllllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaviiiiiiiiiiiiiiirgin,” someone cackled again as the car pulled away.

I told Mom what had happened when I got home. She turned almost as white as the milk I handed her.

“You stay away from that place, you hear me. Stay out of the alley.”

One thing about moms – they always order you to do the impossible.

Miracle of the Fishes

My brother and I were fishing for catfish down at the old lock wall when we noticed that the water below us was teeming with tiny silver minnows. We put down our rods to make a survey.

The minnows seemed to be coming from the stream that flowed into the “lock” from a tunnel that led back to the swamp that pooled just below the Byers plant.

Those minnows must have taken a shine to swamp water. There were millions of them.

Dave had an idea. “Let’s go home and get Dad’s seine out of his fishing tackle. We’ll get some big plastic buckets too.”

Soon we were back at the river properly equipped with minnow gear.

We waded into the stream. We wore our tennis shoes to protect our feet from glass and metal. 

Our feet sank in the muck. Soon the water was cloudy and we couldn’t see the minnows. We could only feel them bumping into our bare legs, hundreds at a time.

Dave instructed me to go upstream and walk towards him as he held the seine across the run.

All of a sudden he raised his net. There must have been ten pounds of minnows thrashing about inside the seine, their silver sides reflecting the sun. We scooped them into our buckets.

“This is way more fun than catching catfish.”

We sat and made plans to open a bait store. Why pull night crawlers from the grass when we could scoop up a thousand minnows with one sweep? We calculated we would need two 50-gallon aquariums.

I put my arm up to my elbow in one of the buckets. It was all squirming flesh. “This is what a doctor must feel when he opens up someone’s belly and probes around for an appendix.”

“Yeah”, Dave agreed, “it feels just like life.”

What happened to our bait store?

We returned to the river many times to catch “shiners”. We never again caught more than a handful.

The Three Sams

Microsoft Word

by Robert Giles

About 1965 my friend started calling me “Sam”. I guess he got tired of “Bob”. Maybe he just liked making up names. He called his mother “Babe” and his father “Uncle Joe”.

I figured turnabout was fair play. We started calling one another “Sam” and almost forgot our true identities.

I first met Jean at the Baden Little League field on the bleachers sitting near the end - second row down from the top. She held a cherry Popsicle. Sam already knew her. His attentions were romantic.

She was watching her little brothers play for my old team. I think Jean’s Dad was the coach. Jean’s Dad had played semi-pro baseball in his youth. So had her uncle – he had almost made it to the big leagues.

I don’t know who won the game.

Jean was pretty. She had brunette hair worn in a popular style – cropped short at the back of the neck but with plenty of body up top, bangs in front and two sharp points swinging at you from the area of her ear lobes.

Jean had no trouble with conversation and always had something interesting to say. She noticed right away that my friend and I called each other “Sam”. We couldn’t satisfactorily explain why. She didn’t press the question – she just had one request.

“Why don’t you call me “Sam” too? That would be cool.”

It sounded cool to us too. That’s how we became the three Sams.

“Sam, what do you want to do tonight?”

“I don’t know, Sam, what do you want to do tonight?”

We frequently had the same problem as Ernie Borgnine and his friend in “Marty”. We didn’t know what we wanted to do.

“Let’s go up over the hill and see Sam.”

We headed up Dearborn Street and down Essex and through the Guttison Homes to the “projects”. That’s where Sam lived – in a neat concrete block house above the little league field.

If Sam was home, she would usually come out and the three of us would sit on the steps that led down to the sidewalk along Harmony Road. There was a railing made from metal pipe along one side of the steps. It was a short flight – maybe a half-dozen concrete steps.

We would sit there and talk until after it got dark.

“You know that song of Howling Wolf’s – ‘Smokestack Lightning’? Sam asked. “I wonder if he was singing about those flashing lights on top of the smokestacks.”

“Maybe. There’s a steel mill on the south side of Chicago near where Howling Wolf hangs out. I bet they have the same kind of smokestacks and lights at the South Side Works.”

The lights flashed back and forth in a zigzag fashion – “They sure do look like little lightning flashes”.

“They have to put those lights on smokestacks because they are so tall that airplanes might crash into them. Even in the daytime sometimes there is so much smoke a pilot might not see them.”

“I like the way he starts to howl in that song. Oh, wha hoo, hoo.” Sam tried in vain to sing like Howling Wolf.

“Well, I better go home. “Fang” doesn't like me sitting out here with boys even in the daytime. She says it “doesn't look nice”. “Fang” was Sam’s name for her mother.

Sam’s taste in music was a little different than ours. She really liked Jan & Dean and the whole California surf thing.

One time we went inside and she played a new album she had by a guy named Rod McKuen. Rod read or sang his poems in a flat voice reminiscent of Chet Baker, the jazz trumpet player and singer, himself a chilled-out Californian. The poems were accompanied by the recorded sounds of the Pacific Ocean. It wasn’t surf music, it was the surf itself.

Sam knew I liked poetry so she insisted I take the album home which I politely did. I found I would go right to sleep by the third cut in on either side. There was something about the squawk of seabirds that made me drowsy.

I did like one song of McKuen’s – I’m not sure if it was on Sam’s album – “Jean” – the theme song from the movie “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”.

Jean, Jean, you're young and alive
Come out of your half-dreamed dream
And run, if you will, to the top of the hill
Open your arms, bonnie Jean

I’m not sure how the lyrics related to Miss Brodie’s story, but that is true of a lot of movie theme songs. Maybe they don’t want to give away too much of the plot.

I liked the words to that song though – very romantic – maybe that is the link to Jean Brodie. But I don’t think she was so much a romantic as an eccentric – really daft in that understated British way that lulls you and keeps you guessing. All that stuff about her “prime” – she was over-the-hill and couldn’t see it - until her favorite young disciple betrayed her.

I started to date one of Sam’s classmates at Mount Galitzin Academy. The other Sam was going steady with a girl in our class at Ambridge High School. We still hung out with Sam as much as we could. We stayed friends.

Sam laughed when we told her about going to the North Park skating rink. A girl named Jane had invited the other Sam along on her skate date even though he had broken his ankle and was on crutches. Sam invited me in turn – he had to have some company sitting by the ice in his cast, didn’t he? What better company for someone lame than someone who didn’t know how to skate?

Imagine how surprised the guy was when Sam and I climbed into the back seat of his car? I don't think he spoke one word all the way out to North Park. I'm sure that was his last date with Jane.

Why she just didn’t say “no” to the guy in the first place I’ll never tell. She must have been afraid of him.

Sam was always developing sudden crushes on boys – it may be a pathology endemic among girls that attend convent schools. One night she asked us if we knew the good-looking guy who worked at the Isaly store in Byersdale.

“You mean the athletic-looking guy with the wavy dark-brown hair – a little bit shy?”

“That’s him – who is he?”

“That’s my brother.”

Sam asked my brother to the prom at Mount Galitzin. We double-dated. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. For one thing, it solved my transportation problem. My brother had his license.

My brother had started dating someone else and never reciprocated Sam’s attention by asking her out on another date. Just as suddenly she got moony over one of the basketball players on the Ambridge High Championship Basketball Team. He wasn’t a starter on the team.

“Why do you want to go out with a second-stringer?” we teased. Besides they weren't champions yet – they had quite a few games to go. “That guy may end up a nobody on a second-rate team.”

Sam was undeterred. Once she made up her mind, she was tenacious. She had to have her champion.

I think Sam and the second-stringer did wind up dating for a while. We weren’t jealous. We had girl friends of our own.

Another thing Sam could never let go of was her surfer-beach-Pacific Ocean dream. She loved the Beach Boys. Sam and I were R&B devotees. We tried to turn her and she did start to dig a little Stax and Motown, only to revert to form when something new blew in from the west, like “The Endless Summer”, a movie about a bunch of surfers who traveled the globe searching for the “perfect wave”.

Somehow Sam cajoled us into taking her to see the movie, which was more a “mockumentary” than a real movie. I have one thing to say about “The Endless Summer” – it did seem endless. Once you’ve seen one hotdogger hang ten all the way in to shore riding the crest of a gnarly wave, well, who wants to see that again? Paddle out, surf in, don’t wipe out and live to do it over again.

Besides, wasn’t that quest-for-perfection hook already used in “The Glenn Miller Story”.

Sam’s Dad lost his job in perhaps the first mill closure to hit contemporary Ambridge. She was studying to be a nurse. The other Sam and I had started college. I guess things were pretty shaky at Sam’s house until her Dad landed a new job.

We still managed to get together once every couple of months. Sam would be home on weekends. Sometimes we rode back to school with her on Sunday evenings, her mother at the wheel. It was a long time back and forth in the car.

We got to know “Fang” pretty well. She wasn’t so bad, really.

The next thing we knew Sam had a nursing job in Pittsburgh. The other Sam was in the Military Police, of all things – out in Fort Collins, Colorado. I was about to take a job in Baltimore.

We weren’t surprised a few years later when we heard that Sam had moved to Hawaii. She had made it real. When she seized on an idea, like I said, she was tenacious. I don’t know for sure if she ever climbed on a surf board, but I bet she did.

Me, I never go near the beach. All that water. It’s worse than a desert.

Bowling dux at Ambridge Alleys

Stettler Motor Company building,
entrance to second floor Ambridge Alleys at far end,
Bridger yearbook, 1968

There were other towns that had a bowling alley. There were other towns that had a Cadillac dealership. There may have been other towns that had both a bowling alley and a Cadillac dealership. But I'd be surprised to learn that any town other than Ambridge had a bowling alley above a Cadillac dealership.

The Cadillac dealership was Stettler Motors at 916 Merchant Street; the alleys were Ambridge Alleys at 914 Merchant Street, owned in the '50s and '60s by Duke Larnish and George Maletic. 

When I was young, my grandparents would sometimes take me bowling at Ambridge Alleys. I only remember duckpins*--"dux" in the sports pages--although at some point, tenpin lanes were added; however, we always bowled duckpins.

To bowl, you entered a door on the south end of the Stettler Motors building (in the above photo, the door isn't visible, but it's at the far end of the building under the small, dark sign), and then climbed stairs to the building's second floor.

From the moment you entered the door, you could hear the loud crack of wooden pins being hit by bowling balls, then clattering as the pins hit the wooden floor.

And, from the moment you entered the door, you could smell the smoke of many cigarettes. When you got upstairs, you could smell ashes from the many ash trays too. In the '50s and '60's, so many people smoked just about everywhere except, possibly, in church during services.  

At the top of the stairs was a counter where you paid for your games and the alley rented bowling shoes and sold snacks and smokes. My grandparents would buy me a bottle of pop. My favorites to buy there were Squirt and "chocolate pop," otherwise known as Yoo-hoo chocolate drink, but never called that by anyone I knew.

In those days, lanes didn't have automatic scoring. I was good at math, learned how to keep score, and enjoyed doing it. [Update: April 13, 2014: But keeping score at Ambridge Alleys was easier than at most duckpin lanes because at Ambridge, duckpin bowlers only bowled two balls per frame, just like tenpins.**]

Bowling duckpins at Ambridge Alleys,
Bridger yearbook, 1953

Ambridge Alleys didn't have automatic pin-setting machines either. Instead, they had pinboys, boys as young as pre-teens, working for five or 10 cents a game (or per hour, depending on who is relating the story of their pinboy stint) who set up the pins and sent bowled balls back to bowlers.

While waiting for a bowler to roll the ball, the pinboy scrunched up on a ledge above and to the side of the pit area behind the pins. After the ball hit the duckpins, the pinboy would jump into the pit and step on a pedal which would lift a pin into the bottoms of any still-standing duckpins to hold them in place. He'd put the ball onto the ball return track so it would roll back to the bowler and cleared off any duckpins that had been knocked-down. Then the pinboy would release the pedal and jump back onto his seat.

Once the frame was over, the pinboy would then setup all ten pins for the next bowler.

Being a pinboy could be hazardous what with flying pins--which is why the scrunching was necessary--and balls that came rolling down the alley before the pinboy had returned to his perch, sometimes accidentally because the bowler was inept or inattentive, and sometimes not accidentally by a bowler who thought hitting the pinboy with a ball and pins would be amusing.

I don't know when the Ambridge Alleys closed. I believe it was still open in the late '60s when I went away to college. If you know, please leave a comment.

The Stettler Motors building is still standing. The lower floors have been subdivided and occupied by businesses. Here's what the building looked like last year. The door to enter the stairway to the bowling alley would have been at the right side of the photo.

Former Stettler Motors building,
914-916 Merchant Street, Ambridge
June 23, 2013

_____

* In case you're not familiar with duckpin bowling, it's similar to tenpin bowling, but with lighter balls that are smaller and have no finger-holes, and squat pins that are shorter and lighter than in tenpins. You'd think that duckpin's shorter, lighter pins would be easier to knock down than the bigger, heavier tenpins, but in fact, it's harder. To compensate for the greater difficulty, the scoring in duckpins allows three balls per frame, but even with the additional ball, the final scores in games are typically lower than in tenpins.

Duckpins were/are bowled in only a few areas of the country, Pennsylvania being one of them. By coincidence, the Baltimore area where I've lived for over 40 years also has duckpin alleys, although fewer of them now than there were when I first moved to the area in 1971.

** My mother, an avid bowler who still bowls at age 87, confirmed that duckpin bowlers only bowled two balls per frame at the Ambridge Alleys. She said that the two ball per frame was also the rule for duckpins at Beaver Valley Bowl in Rochester. 

Steelworker Picnic - Part 3

Courtesy, the Author

by Robert Giles

What a curious thing memory is. All those steelworker picnics and I remember four things. We've covered three of them - Dad making a "Huey" on the turnpike, urban blight in the sticks, and the Wildcat. What is the fourth?

Let's go back to that residential street that led us into Idora Park.

“Dad, stop the car. Are those apples under that tree?”

If they were apples, they were the biggest, yellowest apples I had ever seen. Maybe they were grapefruit. My brother got out of the car and fielded a couple.

He passed them around. They were heavy and solid. Their skins were folded and bumpy like the hide on an elephant’s elbow.

We had never seen anything remotely like them.

“Those are Osage oranges”, Dad said authoritatively. “They’re not really oranges. You can’t eat them.”

“What are they good for?”

“Put one under your bed and it’ll keep away bugs. Grandma used to think so anyway. The tree has to be very strong and flexible to bear all that heavy fruit. That's why Indians made their bows from the wood.”

Dad isn’t around anymore to tell us more. We'll have to make do with a link to Wikipedia - maclura pomifera.

...

Besides the one in Youngstown, the only other Osage orange tree I have ever seen stands on the edge of the Delaware Bay in Battery Park, New Castle DE.  I took the photograph at the top of this article at Battery Park. Some day I hope to see a tree in its natural habitat - the Red River Valley.

Courtesy, the Author

Before then I will have to be content with chucking an "orange" into the Delaware Bay when I visit New Castle DE (pictured on left).

...

I moved my family to New Castle PA (that's Pennsylvania, not Delaware) in 1978 and lived there for ten years. 

My wife and I went scouting before the move. We drove north on Route 18. The same decrepit building I first met in 1956 - 1957 greeted us near Wampum. A light bulb still gleamed in a window.

In the 80s Lawrence County began selling itself as a good location for new business. Corporate representatives visited to weigh the pros and cons of locating there. Naturally, when they saw the Wampum area they were taken aback. 

The crumbling apartments along Route 18 were certainly not representative of the entire county, but what did they say about the effectiveness of county, borough, and township governance?

The at-grade railroad crossing further up the road at Mahoningtown didn't help. Railway crossings may be picturesque, but they are outmoded and accidents do happen. 

Route 18 was then the county's southern link to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Not exactly modern, is it? This town is a bit of a backwater, don't you think? How about a game of checkers while we wait on the train?

In the early to mid '80s, the "eyesore" at Wampum was finally torn down because it was bad for business.

It had been unfit for human habitation for a very long time before that, as even a child could see.

Take a look for yourself at Lawrence County Memoirs.*


*Jeff Bales, Jr., site creator and author.

Going downstreet

postcard
600 block of Merchant Street
circa early 1950s

When I lived in Ambridge and was going shopping on Merchant Street, I went "downstreet." What a curious term. Yet, it didn't seem odd to me, as everyone I knew went "downstreet" to shop in Ambridge. It was only after I moved away, never used "downstreet" again, and never heard "downstreet" used anywhere else, that I realized how unique "going downstreet" is.

When we said we were going "downstreet," we meant we were going to places like the 600 block of Merchant St. shown in the postcard above.

Growing up in Ambridge, I had assumed that "downstreet" was simply a way of distinguishing a shopping trip to Merchant Street from one in Pittsburgh. Because in addition to shopping "downstreet," we also went "downtown"--into Pittsburgh.

Perhaps "going downstreet" is just a shortened version of "going down to Merchant Street."

On the other hand, maybe the "down" in "downstreet" refers to direction, since some people who grew up on Park Road, to the west of Merchant Street, have told me they went "upstreet" to Merchant. While the numbered streets in Ambridge run west to east and cross Merchant Street rather than run parallel to it, the building numbers go "up" as you go from Park Road to Merchant Street.

Or maybe the "down" in "downstreet" simply reflects the reality of living in Ambridge. If you go to Merchant Street from most of Ambridge, you go "down." As in "downhill."

But then, folks who lived on Park Road, which was between the Ohio River and Merchant Street, who said "upstreet" didn't need to go "uphill" very much to get to Merchant Street, as Park Road isn't much lower than Merchant Street, especially compared to streets uphill from Merchant. But I'll grant that Merchant Street is "up" from even Park Road as opposed to going "down" to the river.

I thought perhaps that "downstreet" was unique to Ambridge until someone pointed me to the "Pittsburghese" website. Is "downstreet" used in Pittsburgh? If so, is their "downstreet" also "downtown"? Or is "downstreet" primarily a Beaver Valley/Beaver County expression?