LETTER: A step back in time
I remember growing up in the patch at Vesta 6; the late 1950s were not a good time in Western Pennsylvania economically. The coal mines and steel mills were laying off workers or only working two or three days a week.
My mom and dad never “owed their souls to the company store,” like the old Tennessee Ernie Ford song, but came close on a number of occasions, as most of us in our late 70s can recall. This was the time of the great exodus to Cleveland, Akron, and other manufacturing cities that were big in the day. We still made most of our own stuff back then. Pity! Look at it now.
There were no malls, of course. My mother would take us on a bus to Brownsville, our main shopping venue. Its business district had everything we needed. I remember that GC Murphy Co.’s five and dime store was huge by my 7-year-old standards. It had a lunch counter, and a roasted nut counter that you could smell as soon as you entered the store. My dad always made a beeline to the nut counter when he took us to town, which wasn’t too often. He always had a side hustle to make ends meet.
The toy section at Christmastine was huge in my eyes, and my sister and brother made our beeline to that department. I remember my dad buying me a gun that fired little corks. It was spring loaded, and you pulled down on the lever just like a Winchester 75. He wanted to see if the spring could hurt us, and in an unthinking moment stuck his finger in the barrel and pulled the trigger. That hurt!
I read a review of an old 1935 English movie that’s being rereleased on Netflix or some other streamer. A wealthy young woman played by the great Wendy Hiller was waiting at a dockside waiting room in a Scottish port to take a ship to a private island off the coast. She was to be married to a wealthy young man.
She struck up a conversation with a local young man during her long wait for the weather to clear. She made the comment that all the village folk looked so poor.
He said to her they weren’t poor. “They just haven’t got any money.”
That is as profound a statement as I’ve ever heard.
And that was the way it was for many workers’ families back in my day. We were never poor, either. We had love, faith, and discipline in our homes. It helped us eventually overcome and make something of our lives.
Paul Lesako
Carmichaels