Lincoln Avenue Memories: Outside

Me and my father, looking in the direction of the "foundation" on
Lincoln.  Behind us can be glimpsed the Cole's foundation, and
beyond it the Harrold's brick house. On the left, the Hetz house 
is under construction on the other side of Lincoln.

 Lincoln Avenue Extension remained a dirt road for years after we moved there, oiled in summer by huge trucks to keep the dust down.  There was a period it was covered in “red dog,” which looked like reddish stones but were the burnt remains of a purifying process for coal. 

 I suspect Hempfield Township didn’t have much of a government then, if any, but at some point in the 1950s there were elections for township supervisors and a “roadmaster.”  Eventually our street was paved, and officially became South Lincoln Avenue.  We got a street address: 228. (This was no earlier than 1952.)

 Some time after that we got a few street lights, and our septic tank under the front yard—and the tank truck with a huge hose to clean it out—was replaced by a sewer line. I vaguely remember adults talking about the politics of getting a sewer line, and getting taxed for it.

In the meantime, our house had been joined by many others, on our street and on the four streets behind us to the west.  Houses were being built throughout my childhood, and though we ran to watch the latest bulldozer or cement mixer in action, I soon lost interest.  I was more involved in spotting the ice cream man in time to get a root beer or banana Popsicle before they ran out.

 Fortunately for me, throughout my childhood there were open areas where no houses were then built.  Our nearest neighbor on the southern side of our house, the Coles, were two lots away.  Between our foundations, and then our houses, was a field left wild for several years, and later partially mowed to provide area for baseball (not big enough for a game, but good for wiffle ball) and football, At the eastern edge of this field, just before it sloped sharply down to the road, were two trees—a meeting place for me and the Coles brothers, Ronnie (who was my age) and Dickie (two years younger.)

 The Coles brothers would be my chief playmates and companions, along with the boy who lived in the brick house that bordered our yard on the opposite (northern) side of our house.  His given name was John Robinson.  He was perhaps a year younger than me. He had two older sisters and a younger brother.  His father was Ed Robinson and his mother was Frances. The Robinsons were the only black family on the street, although I believe an older black couple lived a few doors down for awhile, towards the West Newton Road.

 There were lots of other kids in the neighborhood.  Besides the boys, there were near us two sets of sisters: Linda and Susan Hetz across the road, and Linda and Jeannie Harrold, next door to the Cole’s—Mrs. Harrold was Mrs. Cole’s sister.  Directly above us on John Street was Kathy Truxall, and across from her, Cookie Greenawalt, who had a big Collie dog.  I was told that the scar I had on the bridge of my nose for some time was the result of Cookie raking it with a piece of a tin can when we were both quite young.  Fortunately I didn’t remember the incident. 

"The Weeds" in winter, across Lincoln, with West Newton Rd.
at left and behind.  The dark shape top left is Seton Hill. 

Across Lincoln from our house was a fairly large area (what would eventually become three long lots), gently sloped, that by the time I was playing in it, consisted of trees, bushes and weeds.  It extended down to the backyards of houses on Maryland Avenue.  My mother called it simply “the weeds.”  Me and my friends thought of it as the woods, or even the forest.  For instance, Sherwood Forest, or even a jungle.

 Our house was on a steep hill from the street.  I remember watching a bulldozer carve out a kind of dirt driveway, unearthing all kinds of large rocks (many of which my father and others used to build steps up to the house, and a wall beside them), including a truly huge one, that the dozer shovel pushed across the road into the trees.  A few years later, that rock would become another focal point for me and my friends, as well as just for me.  We played on it under the shade and shelter of trees, transforming it into the cab of airplanes and rockets, or a boat.  We climbed the trees above it, including a very tall one, with upper branches that swayed.  We played in a cavity under it, a foxhole, or just a secret place. 

We had a small back porch, with a silver milk box by the door.  Our milk would be delivered by Mr. “Bub” Cole, Ronnie and Dickie’s father.  He worked for Silvis Dairy, a local concern that included a dairy farm.  At first the milk came in bottles, then in cartons with a variety of strange tops before the standard was settled on.  My mother would leave a note in the box saying how many quarts she wanted, if it differed from her usual order.

 The backyard was bordered “above” (to the west) by a large garden belonging to the Petroy family, dominated by rows of tomato plants on stakes. I watched them grow until they were taller than I was.  In August there was such an abundance of tomatoes and peppers from that garden that we found bags of them on our back porch.  We often saw “Jimmy” Petroy tending this garden, as well as “Uncle Frank.” Jimmy was Vincent J. Petroy, and his wife was Katie Petroy.  “Uncle Frank” was likely Frank Petroy who had lived with them since at least 1940, when they had a couple of other boarders in their house in the city of Greensburg. 

 Katie Petroy was a member of the Cercemaggiore Association, indicating that either her family or her husband’s came from the small mountain village of Cercemaggiore in the province of Molise (Italy), the southern neighbor to the Abruzzi and Manoppello. 

 The back of their large brick house faced us. Their address was John Street. Next door to them to their south was the Cocciolettis.  Lucy Coccoiletti was Katie Petroy’s daughter.  Lucy was married to Philip “Corky” Coccioletti, and they had 3 sons: Philip, and also called Corky, born in 1953; Gary, born in 1954 and Jimmy in 1958.  Corky was a little too young for me to play with a lot, although we did fool around with his father’s boxing equipment in their basement.  However, I went with him and his father to the first real football game I’d ever attended: the Hempfield Township Spartans high school team, the year they were led by a dynamic quarterback who had a passing game (still pretty rare for high school players in those years), named Eddie Johns.  I seem to recall being told that we were related to the Petroys and Cocciolettis, but so far I haven't discovered how.

Corky—now known as Phil-- became a much photographed model of the 1970s and afterwards, and a film and TV actor.  At least once, an ad that featured his photo appeared in the same national magazine as an article of mine. 

 Across John Street from the Petroy house was a small wood frame house belonging to a Paul Gondosh and his family.  I was told we were related to them, and this time I do know how: Mary Margaret Kowinsky, the oldest daughter of John Joseph Kowinsky (my grandfather Frank Kowinsky’s older brother) was married to Paul Gondosh.  Born in 1914, he had been a miner in Marguerite.  I remember him and Mary—mostly at their front door-- and their son Johnny Gondosh, who was older than me.  (Another of John J. Kowinsky’s daughters, Clara, married Theodore Rucolas, and I dimly remember my mother knowing her, and meeting their son, Ronnie Rucolas.) 

Me and my sister Kathy on my 6th birthday in 1952.  The Petroy tomato stakes behind us.

Facing the Petroy garden from our backyard, there was a large rusted metal barrel near the left corner of our yard, in which garbage was periodically burned.  On the other side of our yard, the northwest corner bordered the rutted remnants of a north-south road from John Street that disappeared into grass over the years. The extreme northwest corner barely bordered the property of the Truxall family, who lived in a big one level gray slate house on John Street.  In that northern part of our yard was the eventual location of the swing set.

  But what I remember most now about this yard and the adjacent yards and fields is the variety of life.  The birds we could name may have been limited to robins, cardinals, goldfinches and pheasants, but there were many more.  There were rabbits and squirrels, some apparently living in the “empty” lot of trees, bushes and rocks next to the Robinson’s, which in the early morning might graze together on the Robinson’s back lawn.  

 In summer the yards were filled with butterflies—small and big, patterned orange but also blue and yellow (we learned some of these were Monarchs, and others a similar species.)  There were big and little bees, hornets and wasps.  There were crickets, spiders, caterpillars, beetles, grasshoppers and preying mantises.  At night there were lightning bugs, as well as mosquitoes. 

 There were a lot of insects in our lives.  My friends and I were fascinated by ants, perhaps not in a good way all the time.  There were “bugs” inside the house: spiders of all sizes occasionally showed themselves, and in the summer, there were flies.  Lots of flies.

 I don’t remember there being a great variety of wild flowers, and a lot of the flowers I liked were called weeds.  But there was an abundance.  Dandelions, violets, daisies. Purple flowers without a name.

 At night there were stars in a vast undisturbed sky. The Milky Way was more than a candy bar.   

 There was a tree or two in front of our house, at least for awhile.  The two trees in the field between our house and Coles were among the many that yielded berries. My friends and I used to collect saucepans full of them, and occasionally sold some to neighbors. 

We had snowy winters, beginning with the Big Snow on Thanksgiving 1950.  I was often out in it, wearing my cap with earlugs, coat, gloves or mittens, jeans (I had a pair lined with flannel I particularly liked) and rubber boots over my shoes.  The boots were always black, with a series of fasteners that locked into place. I also wore them in wet weather, for there was a lot of unpaved territory around.

my first sled

 I started out with a small sled, and when I got older I asked my grandmother if I could use the Flexible Flyer I found in her attic, that had belonged to my Uncle Carl.  That was one great sled.

 We had an extraordinary sled run.  It started on a steep hill, the remnants of a rutted road, just shy of John Street, and sped down to Lincoln.  That was the first leg.  If you dared, you could continue across Lincoln—braving the intersection, though there was a pretty clear view from the top of the hill of any cars on the street—and continuing down Grove to Maryland Avenue.  Grove wasn’t as steep, but with the momentum from the top of the hill, it was no problem reaching Maryland.

 Part way down Grove you had a decision to make—to pull off before you hit Maryland or to continue through that intersection, and down the major hill.  If a car was in sight on Maryland, I steered into a snowbank.  But if not... 

The hill beyond Maryland was steep and more treacherous.  It wasn’t paved but rutted to various depths.  So that’s when the superior steering of the Flexible Flyer came into play.  It was important to stay as close to the center as possible because it would be very hard to stop before reaching Jack’s Run—you had to hit the bridge across it, and end up in the level area behind Sacred Heart/St. Paul’s School.  But if conditions were right (roads not cleared, snow packed on the bridge) it was a great ride. 

 The best days were when it was still snowing.  On those days, if there was no school, that hill would draw neighborhood kids like a magnet.  Occasionally there were races down the hill, though not usually beyond Maryland Ave. Younger kids (like a little sister) would hitch a ride on someone’s back.

 Every once in awhile, someone started a small store on one end of South Lincoln or the other.  I remember being sent to buy bread (20 cents a loaf) and milk (25 cents a quart) at the store down towards the Carbon Road end. By that time I had a dog, Mitzi.  We acquired her by way of Katie Petroy.  Mitzi switched her allegiance to me pretty quickly.  I could be in front of our house on Lincoln, and Mitzi most of the way down towards the Carbon Road, but when I called her she came running at full speed. 

The building that started out as Sacred Heart School.
But instead of these small windows and subdivided
rooms, there was one long window and room on
either side of the central window.  Two
classrooms in the front, two facing back.

I started school in the first grade at Sacred Heart School on Hamilton Avenue, near where my mother had lived when she was a child.  This school had opened in 1923, and had four classrooms around a central foyer, and the dreaded principal’s office in a small area on the floor above.  There was a long set of stairs on each side of the central area, which led past restrooms (girls on one side, and a pretty ancient boy’s on the other) and to the basement, which was the Sacred Heart Church.  The church was abandoned around the time I started school, and eventually more makeshift classrooms were located there.

 My father may have dropped me off at school on his way to work in the morning, but I think mostly I walked.  In any case I always walked home, and often back and forth for lunch as well.  The walk was up and down that steep rutted hill that linked the Grove Street above to the school grounds.  Walking to and from school meant crossing the bridge over Jack’s Run, at that point a very shallow creek, into which some pipes emptied sewerage.  My first grade year, that bridge was nothing but some blackened old logs, rotted in places.  There were gaps we could see through.  Soon it was replaced by a bridge made of wooden boards, with wood railings.    

 As I grew older, my local world expanded.  In terms of everyday play, my range of acquaintances and activities encompassed John Street, South Lincoln and Maryland Avenue below.  There were enough kids roughly my age for the occasional pick-up baseball and football games, often on a field on John Street, bordered by tall trees that yielded what we called “monkey balls.” 

 It was probably in fourth grade that I joined a newly organized Cub Scout den.  There were about six of us, all from our neighborhood on the hill, but also all going to St. Paul Catholic school.  We were one den in a pack of dens, also from Catholic schools.  We met every week at Greg Jankowski’s house on Maryland Avenue.  His mother was our den mother.

  Our monthly pack meetings were in the Cathedral basement.  We were supposed to spend the month on a project and make a presentation at the Pack meeting.  When Mrs. J found out I’d written plays, we became a drama troupe, and put on skits every month.  We even built a cardboard ship for one skit.  We blew those other dens away. 

I got the Scout books: Wolf, Bear and Lion, and I got a subscription to Boy’s Life magazine. I got some of the uniform that year, from the Scout department at Troutman’s, starting with the neckerchief, and definitely the belt, and eventually the shirt.  I liked the blue and gold colors.

 

But my prize possession was my Cub Scout flashlight.  All of us in my den liked these, and asked for them as our birthday present from other members of the den. 

 This lasted around a year.  Mrs. J didn’t want to be den mother anymore, and apparently neither did anyone else, so our den dissolved.  I kept up with Boy’s Life, though.  Later I tried the Boy Scouts and the Explorers briefly, but those were very mixed experiences.  The Cub Scouts were fun.

 By fourth grade my local world expanded even further, down across Hamilton Avenue and up Grove Street, past Anderson’s Market, to Spring Street, where I had several school friends. I eventually got my hair cut in a tiny barber shop across from Fifth Ward School (an Italian barber, of course.  My mother sent me there, so she probably knew the family.)

 Once I followed Spring Street to its northern end, surprised to find the top of the hill on Pittsburgh Street.  I knew Aunt Pearl’s, where Tom and Jenny Butina and my cousins Mary Jane and Jennifer also lived, was at the bottom of that hill.  When I told my father this, he claimed I was wrong.  To prove it I walked this route, and surprised Tom Butina by turning up unannounced and alone, though Mary Jane and Jennifer seemed pleased.  My father wasn’t happy about driving down to pick me up, but I’d made my point. 

Sister Editha, my 5th grade teacher and principal 
of St. Paul, a job she held in the new school with
its fancy equipment.  This is the only known
moment in which she was seen smiling.

 The first time I remember attending Mass was in the Sacred Heart Church, then in the basement of Sacred Heart School, shortly before I started first grade in the school upstairs.  Soon a new parish was created, called St. Paul’s, that included some of Greensburg in the Hamilton Avenue area and the new homes in Hempfield Township, such as ours.  For its first St. Paul’s church it adopted the old white frame church between Hamilton Avenue and Madison, that had been St. Anthony’s.

 When I was in fifth grade I began serving Mass there, in the same building where my grandparents probably attended their first Mass in America, or at least in Greensburg.  When my time on the rotation came up to serve early weekday Masses, I would walk down there from home, and then walk to school.  These were the days when the Mass was in Latin, and there would be at least three Masses every weekday morning (half hour each) beginning at 6:30 or 7.  There would be two altar boys, and not many more parishoners.

 In the summers, my core neighborhood friends and I roamed also in other directions. Staying up on our hill, we explored the woods and fields across Carbon Road—walking into the forbidden Hideaway bar to use the men’s room, or stopping into Danny’s Dairy Bar— as far as the area where Greensburg Central Catholic High School would be built.  There was a big tree there over a steep wooded hill, with a rope attached to it, so we lined up with kids we didn’t know to swing on it, out over the tree-dark below.  But the combination of Central Catholic and the new east-west bypass built at the end of the 1950s, completely wiped out this particular landscape.

 For a brief time some of this area on the other side of Carbon Road had been an airfield. The Greensburg/Carbon airport operated in the late 1940s and closed in 1954, so I might have seen a DC-3 landing, though I don't remember that. (During those years Greensburg actually had two airports.  The Greensburg-Pittsburgh airport southwest of town operated from the 1920s until 1955.)  A small plane had tried to land at the Carbon airport's coordinates after it was closed, and wound up crashing into the Hideaway parking lot. By the time my friends and I explored there, the field was gone and the big aluminum hangar was being used by a concrete block company. Once nearby we found the rusting skeleton of what we took to be a small plane fuselage. 

The area just across the Carbon Road from John Street was eventually the site of the new St. Paul’s Church and later its attached school. Greensburg Central Catholic had been built by then—my 8^th grade was on its first floor, and the next year I became part of its second graduating class.

 But just before these buildings went up, in the area between them, two baseball fields were created.  The now well-peopled streets behind Lincoln and elsewhere west and south joined to form a community called Carbon.  These fields would be home to the Carbon Little League and Pony League teams.  I played one season with the Pony League, as a left-handed pitcher, used mostly in relief to scare the opponents who rarely saw a southpaw, particularly one with a natural curve he only partly controlled.   Still, I started a few games and finished with a 3-0 record.

 

Once I got interested in baseball, we played catch or “bases” every day in our field, and looked for games elsewhere.  At first I didn’t have a glove, but one day around the backstop to the diamond down on Grove Street near where my mother had once lived, I “found” a glove that had been left behind.  Unfortunately, like most gloves, it was for a right-handed thrower.  So for at least a summer, I caught fly balls with that glove, took it off my left hand, and threw the ball back.  If we played actual games somewhere, I’d see if the other team had a left-hander so I could borrow his glove while his team was batting. 

 Eventually I got my own glove.  It may be the one I still have.  I used to lubricate it from a tube of blue paste that I kept on a narrow ledge along the steps leading down to the cellar.  That tube stayed there for decades.

1951 Studebaker

 Cars passed through the neighborhood throughout these years, and airplanes flew over it.  My friends and I became expert at identifying the make and years of cars by shape and front grills, which always looked to me like faces.  Some afternoons we would sit on a little hill at the end of South Lincoln and observe the cars going up and down the two lanes of the West Newton Road, shouting out the names and years: Fords, Chevies, Dodges, Oldsmobiles, Studebakers, (Bub Cole had a futuristic silver gray 1951 Studebaker), Mercurys, Buicks,  Pontiacs, Chryslers, Lincolns, Cadillacs, Hudsons, Nash, Packards, Ramblers (the new car on the block), and maybe even the twinkling of an Edsel.

 In the skies over our neighborhood we saw an occasional helicopter, known as “whirlybirds.”  But mostly we spotted the airplanes flying into and out of the Pittsburgh Airport at least 40 miles away.  The passenger planes were all propellor-driven, and we could distinguish the DC-3 from the DC-6 and DC-7 by the number of engines. We would be especially excited by the sudden sight of a jet, leaving its contrail—usually a military plane. 

In earlier years, my friends and I had a few adventures outside our neighborhood. Once when we were tramping around the fields beyond Jack’s Run (“the crick”), we puzzled over a cement building with no windows.  Suddenly a man came out of it, but instead of shooing us away, he told us it was a dairy, and took us inside to watch the milk go into bottles and especially the big vat where white milk became chocolate milk.  We each got a small bottle for free.

 I found—or learned of—a kind of secret passage through bushes across the West Newton Road that led to an area I later discovered was below the hill behind home plate of the ball field at Mt. Odin Park.  It was a strangely deserted and weirdly spooky place that reminded us of television versions of other planets.  It was bare as a desert, with one leafless tree.  Just beyond it, at the bottom of adjacent hills, were tunnels, or (we thought, judging from western movies) mines.  Later I realized we stumbled across an abandoned coal mine or strip mine.  Today it probably would be described as a toxic waste site.

Off to Chicago with the paperboys on my first
train trip from Greensburg

 I saw a good deal more of the streets around my house when I began delivering the Tribune-Review.  This was probably after the Greensburg Evening Tribune  merged with the Greensburg Morning Review in 1955. I delivered the evening edition after school, except on Saturdays when there was only a morning edition, so I had to get up early to deliver that. 

 A bundle of papers would be dropped off in front of the Sacred Heart School on Hamilton Avenue.  I carried wire cutters to cut the wire that bound them, then stuck the papers into my cloth bag slung over my shoulder—after reading the front page. (For some reason the one headline I remember is: “Congressman Kelley Dies,” which would make it 1957.)  Later my drop-off point was the corner of Hamilton Avenue and West Newton Road.

 My first route was primarily on the other Lincoln Avenue, with a few on my street of South Lincoln.  I started with 27 papers. We were supposed to solicit more subscriptions, and were gathered together for instructions and pep talks in the Tribune-Review building on Main Street, and given lots of incentives, like free movie tickets just for sitting through the talk.  I wound up with 35 papers on this route. 

When I was in sixth grade, I sold enough “starts” to earn me a free trip to Chicago with other paperboys, and a bored circulation director. We stayed at the Morrison Hotel, and ate ourselves silly at the Forum Cafeteria across the street.  We saw Hitchcock’s Vertigo at a Chicago movie theatre, and spent a couple of days at the Great Lakes Naval Training Base, where they didn’t seem to be expecting us and we didn’t have much to do.

 My second route was bigger, 55 papers, and farther away, down around Hamilton Avenue in Greensburg. I may actually have delivered to the Nardizzi home, where my grandparents first lived in America.

  But I gave that up for a slightly smaller route closer to home—mostly on South Lincoln, John Streets and the streets up from there.  For awhile I also delivered TV Guide magazines. I almost always walked my route—there were too many hills and too many stops to make biking practical.  But I figured out ways to bike this last route so I could cruise down the last big hill. 

  With these routes (especially the first two) I saw some real poverty, and some real kindness (a woman who let me warm up by her furnace on a frigid Saturday morning when I could barely feel my fingers.)  

But I was not much of a businessman.  I looked the part: I had a metal change dispenser and a card with perforated receipts for each customer, and I paid for my papers and dutifully made my “collections” every week. But I tended to spent too much of my meager earnings on ice cream sandwiches, chocolate bars and bottles of Vernors ginger ale at the little stores along my route.  And I had to keep a lot of information in my head, so these routes were sources of nightmares for years afterwards.

 In the later 1950s, my neighborhood friends and I saw the highway bypass that had been announced as a threat to our turf, and we waged guerilla war on it by pulling up surveyor’s stakes wherever we found them. 

Building the bypass. At top left is Greensburg
Central Catholic High School.

It was to no avail—soon the bypass and related highway construction wiped out the West Newton Road and some houses along it-- as late as the 1970s it was possible to look down from the new West Newton Road and see the now isolated Beehner’s Garage where it had been along the old road, and still see the same gas pumps out front registering 39 cents a gallon.

 It also erased parts of the old Route 30, the big hill down Grove Street past Maryland Avenue where we used to ride our sleds and where I walked to Sacred Heart school, and much more of the adjacent landscapes.

 But before that happened, we ranged farther into Greensburg, and might stop at any of the many little stores for a nickel candy bar, a nickel bag of potato chips, or a bottle of root beer or Coke, also five cents.  Though the mainstay of summer was still the Popcicle, we might buy an ice cream sandwich (10 cents), an orange creamsicle or dreamsicle or fudgsicle (probably 7 cents.)

 Buying comic books could be an expensive habit (they were ten cents, with double issues a quarter) but some little stores sold them for five cents, with the top half of their covers torn off.  Some of the old comics we found were the pre-code horror ones.  But I also began to get a few Classics Illustrated, which were my doorway to writers like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and others.

 Apart from the bubblegum standard (Bazooka), at a certain point we started buying the bubble gum with baseball cards, which we collected, played with and sometimes traded.  We listened to Bob Prince and Jim Woods announce the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball games, which was no problem in the daytime—they would be audible from every radio on every porch we passed.  A bloop and a blast!  And you can’t kiss it goodbye!  We had ‘em all the way!

 Probably around the time I was in fifth grade we all got bikes and had more distant adventures.  We once cycled as far as Mt. Pleasant.  I was very surprised when the road we took to return suddenly came out at the railroad tracks in Youngwood. 

Memories: Downtown Greensburg in the 1950s

Apart from when I was carried as a baby, I had begun going to the Main Street area of Greensburg with my mother in the early 1950s.  Usually my father would drive us.  Occasionally we walked around as a family.  One time I recall was an unusual event—a huge “Old-Fashioned Bargain Days” celebration.  Stores were charging early 20^th century prices. I remember sawdust on the floors of Murphy’s five and ten, and wood planks on the sidewalks, with the trolley tracks still visible on Main Street.  Also there were hundreds of people milling around—more than I would ever see again at one time in the downtown. 

 But most times, my father would go back to work while my mother took us shopping.  Sometimes it might be just my mother and me, if we had to get some specific items of clothing for me, like a suit or shoes.

S. Main St. with trolley. On right the red facade
of Murphy's 5&10 next to Craig Shoes

 
When we weren’t driven, we went to town by bus. That’s when we’d moved to South Lincoln Avenue. Though Greensburg and western Pennsylvania were among the first to adopt electric streetcar systems in the late 19^th century, trolleys within Greensburg began fading away in the 1930s. City buses began taking over some routes immediately.  A few streetcars, including one from Greensburg to Youngwood, lasted until 1952.  But buses were the main public transportation in Greensburg.

 Our bus was the Hamilton-Stanton, which ran two or three times an hour.  We—my mother, my sister Kathy and I—might walk down West Newton Road towards the corner of Hamilton Avenue and West Newton Street to catch it.  

Greensburg buses looked like this standard GM
bus of the 1950s

Ahead of us we might see the green city bus coming from town and turning off West Newton to Hamilton. It would drop off passengers and then proceed down Hamilton for the rest of its route, then turn around and eventually return to this corner in ten or fifteen minutes, to pick up passengers waiting on the other side of Hamilton.  As we walked down the hill from South Lincoln, my mother might point to the bus making the turn from town, which gave us an idea of how much time we had to get to the corner.  

There were times my mother went to town by herself, and I recall being posted at the picture window to see when the bus made this turn, so she could then hurry down to meet it coming back.

 My mother shopped for the family at the Main Street department stores: Troutmans, the Bon-Ton, and occasionally the more expensive Royers, as well as the five and tens (Murphys and McCrorys), Joe Workman’s, Sears, Penney’s and the many small shops, especially shoe stores.  I liked the Bon Ton neon sign hanging out from the structure, with a clock in one “O” and a temperature gauge in the other.  And Royers had those pneumatic tubes that sent metal capsules with sales slips zipping up and across the ceiling to wherever.

 We might stop to eat at one of the small lunch places, some with their entrances below street level, such as the Chat & Chew, or a drug store soda fountain counter or the counters at the five and tens.  We might also visit the carpeted interior of the Singers (Sewing Machine Co.) store, in the years my father worked there, before going into the Penney’s next door.

 Later I would walk into town, alone or with friends. We would start down the tree-lined West Newton Road (before it was relocated to feed into the east-west bypass highway), past the sign marking the Greensburg city limits, then past Beehner’s Garage, which was a gas station and the local dealership for American Motors Hudson, Nash and Rambler cars—and where I got my free autographed photo of Fess Parker as Davy Crockett (“When you’re out to win, try the Crockett grin.”) 

 Then we would cross Hamilton and walk up the leafy sloping West Newton Street, past Paul’s Pharmacy (where I was sometimes sent to get medicines, though they also delivered), to the V at the crest of the hill where West Newton met Pittsburgh Street, and the old mansions started (by then relegated to being insurance company headquarters and funeral parlors) as the street plunged downward. 

Pittsburgh St. looking towards downtown. House
on left with columns (green then) was Aunt Pearl's.

 It evened out a bit at Aunt Pearl’s house, next to Butz Music Store, where I’d briefly taken clarinet and later a few guitar lessons, before it sloped steeply up to Pennsylvania Avenue, with Main Street at the next crest, one short block farther. (Aunt Pearl was the former Prosperina Iezzi of Manoppello, my grandmother Gioconda's younger sister.)

 We didn’t usually make the right turn to the southern part of Pennsylvania Ave, except to go to the Post Office at the end of the Pennsylvania Avenue business district, a grand old Beaux Arts building with impressive columns, and a long history.  Designed as a twin to the Charlottesville, Virginia post office, it opened in 1911—just in time for onlookers to stand on its steps to watch one of the last Buffalo Bill Wild West Shows parade through Greensburg. 

Greensburg Post Office around 1950

 The Post Office building was essentially doubled in size during the New Deal 1930s. As the county’s Federal Building, it housed the congressional office, the U.S. Navy office and other federal officials during World War II.  It might well have been where my uncle Bill Kowinski enlisted in the Navy (or at least where it was processed), and perhaps where my mother Flora Severini worked briefly as a secretary for a New Deal project of the U.S. Agriculture Department, also represented in the Post Office.

 In 1965, a new and smaller post office was built across the street, and the old Post Office building became the new public library.  But when I needed stamps in the 1950s (when First Class cost 3 cents), I entered its hushed official recesses. 

I had an active relationship with the U.S. Mail, thanks partly to Boy’s Life magazine, which revealed exciting stuff you could get sent to you—like color photos of train engines—just by writing and asking for them, which I did.  Then there were all the toys I sent for with cereal boxtops and maybe a dime or a quarter (plastic frogmen that bobbed in the bath if you put baking soda in their feet) or the inner seal of a jar of Ovaltine (various Captain Midnight devices, including the signet ring and the famous decoder badge.)

 Then later, in high school, I might head down this way to the new Greensburg Photo Supply.  But most of the time, if my friends and I didn’t continue directly up to Main Street, we turned left on the corner of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania at Thomas Drugs (which held this spot for more than a century) and we headed north—the shortest route to the movie theatres.  

Manos Theatre when it opened 1930

 Walking to town probably started with the Saturday matinees at the Manos movie theatre on Otterman Street.  Typically that would be cartoons (sometimes more than 30), a newreel, maybe a serial, previews of coming attraction, and a special double feature to appeal to our age group.  The afternoon show started at 1:30 p.m. but with all these extras, doors opened at 11 or 11:30 a.m.

 The Manos was a large, ornate but musty old movie palace that to us looked immense, like something out of the movies itself. When I first started going, it even had a few ushers in faded uniforms.  I recall looking around at the building as I anxiously waited for the show to start—at the mysterious cornices and phantom balconies, the peeling paint on the distant ceiling, the heavy, dusty drapes. 

 The Manos eventually became the Palace Theatre, hosting live performances only.  Much of the interior has been restored, including some of the elaborate murals that were hidden behind the grime of decades, yet even back then something suggested there was more to this theatre than met the eye.  Even in its 1950s faded glory, it was the biggest, most ornate public space in town that we knew, except for the Court House, which was pretty much off limits.  And at some point in the 50s, it was air-conditioned, a real rarity in those hot summers.

 At the Saturday matinees we saw all the new science fiction and “bug-eyed monster” movies  (The Creature From the Black Lagoon, This Island Earth, War of the Worlds, It Came From Outer Space, Forbidden Planet etc.), the newest westerns and some of the comedies, plus older adventure classics.  Even though these matinees catered to the throngs of a baby boomer audience, they linked us to previous generations who attended similar Saturday matinees in the 1940s and 1930s.  But by the 1980s and the malls and multiplexes on the highway, this link was broken. 

restored Manos/Palace as we never saw it

Greensburg had three movie theatres, though usually only two of them were open at a time.  For much of the 50s they were the Manos and the theatre next door, the Strand.  On our way to one of them, we would walk past another theatre on Pennsylvania Avenue that was closed up and abandoned, called the Grand. Sometimes we would peer through the dirty window into the darkness to try to make out what was still inside.

 Then at some point, probably not until the 1960s, when the Strand closed for repairs, the Grand was refurbished and suddenly reopened.  It lasted into the 1970s, as the downtown deteriorated after the shopping malls arrived, and it started showing raunchy movies before it closed forever.  

ticket booth etc. exactly as we saw it

 The Saturday matinees cost 25 cents, the usual admission for children.  We lined up to buy a ticket at the marble booth outside, under the marquee and at the front of the outside lobby with its black and white checked stone floor. 

 Photos from the movies being shown or coming attractions were on the walls out there, as well as in the long inside lobby. We walked through multiple heavy glass and metal doors and up the gently sloping, long tiled indoor space. Then another set of glass and metal doors, with curtains over all of them except the one at the far right.  There the ticket-taker stood or half-sat on a stool.  Past those doors was the carpeted and darkened inner lobby, with the bright concessions stand dead center ahead. 

 With a mirror behind it, where the big popcorn machine popped away, the concession stand itself was a long glass counter over a display case.  Inside, arrayed by price, were the available treats.

 If I’d been given 35 cents, I had to choose how to spend that extra ten cents to fortify myself for several hours. There were items that themselves cost a dime, and popcorn was 15 cents.  But there were nickel boxes of candies: Good & Plenty, Dots, Jujy Fruits, root beer barrels, Spearmint Leaves, Black Crows, Chuckles and more. Not boxed but often a nickel included a Turkish Taffy (vanilla and chocolate), varieties of licorice, bag of M& Ms, and rolls of Tootsie Rolls and Necco Wafers.  Two nickel boxes, spaced over time, often seemed the right choice.

steps from lobby with wedding
model in restored Palace

 There were dark maroon curtains pulled back from the entrances to the theatre auditorium itself on both sides of the concession stand.  Across this inner lobby to the left of the stand was a set of wide, carpeted marble stairs.  They led first to the largest men’s room I’d ever seen, with lots of marble and mirrors, and also to the balcony, which was often closed with a “velvet” rope and a sign, but not always.  On the landing there were vending machines, one of which had boxes of some of the same candies as the concession stand, but with an additional choice: a window covered with cardboard and the words “Take A Chance.”  Since I figured it was just another box of candy, and might be one I didn’t like such as the Boston Baked Beans, I don’t think I ever did.  Maybe once.

 If I started out with 50 cents, then popcorn could be on the menu, or maybe a walk up to Isaly’s for an ice cream cone after the show. There was a water fountain outside the men’s room so I was not tempted to buy what we called “pop.”

  When I was a bit older—perhaps after I had a paper route--I discovered the restaurant in the nearby Greensburger hotel where I could get a hamburger, fries and a coke for a total of 55 cents.  That briefly became an after the movies destination.

 My other major destination in town was the public library, when it was on South Main Street, taking up the former home of the prominent Greensburg citizen, Richard Coulter. This Richard Coulter had been a General in World War I.  His family was wealthy from banking and coal, and he donated his old home for the library. It opened in June 1940.  Built in 1881, this brick building may have previously been the home of his father, the first Richard Coulter, who was a Member of Congress and a state supreme court judge. (The library has moved but the building remains.)

My mother took me there to get my library card.  The librarian explained the rules: I could take out no more than three books at a time from the children’s room, for two weeks, renewable for two more weeks.  The overdue fine was on the order of a penny or two a day.

  I took my first book out that day: a novel entitled The Space Ship Under the Apple Tree, a kind of precursor to E.T., by Louis Slobodkin.  It was a little over my head and I didn’t finish it within the two weeks, but I soon was walking to and from the library on my own, taking out all manner of books, including volumes in the Winston Science Fiction series for young readers, and Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novels for that same readership.  (Heinlein had stories in Boy’s Life so I knew about him.)

 By fifth grade I was heavily into the Hardy Boys.  I read novels about sports by Joe Archibald and John R. Tunis, as well as biographies of sports figures like Jackie Robinson.  Inspired in part by a couple of service academy television shows (West Point Story and Men of Annapolis), I took out Midshipman Lee of the Naval Academy and similar books.

  I read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, The Three Musketeers, some Robert Louis Stevenson and other authors of sea stories.  Eventually I branched out to the adult stacks as well as (in high school) the periodicals room, the reference room (with its big standing globe), and I discovered the second floor listening room, with an up to date collection of folk music albums.

 

But there were also plenty of times that my neighborhood friends and I walked to town with little or no purpose at all. For a couple of years, we might immediately go into Murphy’s five and ten and down the stairs to the first floor (or basement), and look at the model airplane kits.  These were boxes of plastic parts you glued together with “airplane glue,” carefully affixed the decals (which we called “deckels”)and attached the plane to a plastic stand.  The kits cost 98 cents, which with tax came to $1.01.  That was pricey for us, so I had just three planes that I remember: a dark red Messerschmitt ME-109 from World War II, which I probably bought just for the color; a silver F-100 Super Sabre jet and a black fighter jet, possibly the Navy Panther.  I think I also had an intricate silver model of a helicopter.

 Later, when I started buying 45 rpm records, I often bought them in Murphy’s basement.  For awhile there was an actual record store on Pittsburgh Street, across from the Court House and the county jail with its steeple-topped tower, where I met and got the autograph of Conway Twitty, who had a hit record with "It's Only Make Believe."  Not my biggest thrill.

 There were other toys and sporting equipment to interest us in Murphy’s basement, but our forays into town weren’t much about shopping.  We would take the elevator in Troutman’s department store just to ride it, at least until the operator stopped cooperating.  Or we might race up and down the back stairs from floor to floor. 

Troutman’s was as it had been for decades, the largest department store in Greensburg, though the Bon-Ton gave it competition for awhile.  There were six floors of merchandise (the Bon-Ton had five), and its own restaurant. It remodeled and added an annex across the side street (Second Street) behind Bon-Ton in 1955, celebrating its opening with an appearance by Vaughn Monroe, a popular singer in the 50s, originally from Jeannette. (As a child I thought I could imitate his style, mostly by keeping my tongue in the back of my mouth.) Troutman’s got the first escalator in town in 1958, and  would expand down to Pennsylvania Avenue in the 60s. In the 50s it was always busy, so it drew us like a magnet for mischief.

 After our wanderings we might end up at a soda fountain for vanilla cokes, or a booth at Thrift Drugs, where we might rig the salt shaker to invisibly dispense pepper. Several places had ice cream sundaes and milk shakes. Isaly’s had the skyscraper cones and their Klondike bars for a dime, but for a good nickel ice cream cone there was the Silvis Diary store a half block east of South Main. 

 Our mischief-making was somewhat tempered by Greensburg being a small town full of relatives and parental acquaintances.  At one time or another, for instance, my Aunt Carmella worked at Hoffman Drugs on North Main, and my Aunt Rella was behind the sandwich counter at Thrift Drugs on South Main. 

 But there was plenty of legal amusement. Sometimes McCroy’s five and ten had a contest in which you picked a balloon hanging over the sandwich counter which the waitress pricked with a pin, and read the price on the paper inside, and that was the price you paid for a banana split, the most expensive ice cream concoction.  It was never more than the usual 35 cents, but it could be less—less even than the 25 cent sundae or milkshake. 

At first South Main Street pretty much ended for us at the library. But a block or so beyond it was the large, long brick building that had been the West Penn Railway trolley headquarters since 1927.  By the time I was walking that far down, the trolleys were gone (though for awhile the tracks were still embedded in Main Street and other downtown streets) and the building housed City Hall (pretty small at the time) and at the other (western) end, the bus station.  Apart from city buses, there were buses to other nearby towns (like Youngwood) and to Pittsburgh, and Greyhound buses that went everywhere. The bus station may have been quite large, including a restaurant, but I mostly recall the nondescript waiting room from as late as the late 1960s. 

a generic Spudnuts from the 50s

 But in the 1950s I was most impressed by another feature there.  I’d read in the Readers Digest about this amazing new kind of donut called the Spudnut, which would be sold exclusively in a chain of stores across the country.  I was thrilled when one of them opened right there at the bus station.

 

A little further south on Main was a large vacant lot that briefly became a baseball field.  After tryouts for Little League baseball that seemed to attract every Baby Boomer boy in the Greensburg area, those of us who didn’t make one of the proper teams were exiled here in a Minor League.  We didn’t get uniforms, just caps.  The teams were named Vampires, Zombies, Ghouls etc. My team was appropriately the Ghosts.  I remember hot afternoons exiled in the outfield, watching occasional balls hitting stones and weeds on the sloping field as they made their meandering way towards me.

 This lot wasn’t vacant for long.  Reputed to be the site of Greensburg’s public hangings, it soon hosted the town’s first strip shopping center.

 Back up South Main Street, past Troutmans, the Bon Ton, McCrory’s, Joe Workmans and Royers and across Pittsburgh Street was the immense and ornate gray Westmoreland County Courthouse.  We didn’t have much to do with this building as kids, except for a couple of things that don’t exist anymore: the public water fountain spilling into a round silver dish out in front (paid for, it said on its stone base, by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union), and down a set of stone steps: the ample public restrooms.

The original gold dome of the Court House started to flake off at some point, and was replaced with a darker material.  Still gold, but not the same.

 As for North Main, we hardly ventured up the hill past the Sears store. Also on this block was Lee’s Restaurant, where my mother had frequently dined, she told me.  It was a fashionable place for some decades.  I didn’t discover it myself until its last days when I returned in the late 1970s.  I usually sat on a stool at the counter and drank coffee in the afternoon, always tempted by the excellent coconut and chocolate cream pies.  But the tables still were covered in thinning tablecloths, with real cloth napkins, though in delicate condition: testaments to the standards of its fading past.

 

photo from 50s of Cathedral School students running for
their buses, with Greensburg High across the street.

The only place north of Sears I frequented was in 6^th and 7^th grades when I had paper routes. I was often in the Greensburg Tribune-Review building a few doors up. However, by then I was going to school at the top of that steep hill.  Sacred Heart School—called St. Paul’s by then—stopped at the fifth grade.  For 6^th and 7^th we were sent to the Cathedral School on North Main, across from Greensburg High School.   In the mornings I caught the school bus in front of Sacred Heart/St. Paul’s; after school I walked home with friends, dropping them off at their houses in the city, stopping for penny candy along the way.

 

old St. Benedict, then Cathedral School, now
Aquinas Academy

 My 6^th grade classroom was actually a curtained off area in the basement of the Cathedral itself, an impressively large and spooky reproduction of a 14^th century English Gothic cathedral of blackened sandstone and limestone, built in 1928.  For 7^th grade I moved over to the school itself, with most classrooms in the stately brick school that had been St. Benedict’s when it opened in 1904 or so, and other classrooms in a newer building on the street below, connected by an enclosed walkway.  Some of my classes had 40 or 50 students. I don’t think in all my schooling in Greensburg I had many classes of fewer than 35.

 

The YMCA on Maple Ave.

We occasionally ventured east of Main Street, to Silvis Dairy or Serro’s Diner, and down to the next major street, Maple Avenue, to the YMCA building on the Pittsburgh Street corner.  This had been the location of a public spring, where women filled their water jugs and exchanged news in the late 1700s.  Ronnie, Dickie and I took a weight training class there one summer, and I occasionally used their indoor pool and basketball court.

 

Main Street had a number of banks, including the stately First National and the majestic Barclay Bank, but my first savings account was halfway down a steep hill between Main and Maple at the modest Greensburg Savings and Loan.

 Also down this way, at 15 East Otterman was Vince Di Pasquale’s tailor shop (listed in the Greensburg  Directory in 1959), and at 24 E. Pittsburgh Street, Rocco Mazzaferro’s tailor shop (listed 1951), both long-time friends of my grandparents Ignazio and Gioconda Severini.  

Greensburg train station grand entry

 At some point in the summer wanderings of my neighborhood friends and I, we discovered the Greensburg train station.  To get there from Main Street, just as it started making its northern ascent, we walked down W. Otterman St., past the movie theaters and the cigar store/newsstand on the corner, which formerly was a pool hall.  Now it had cigars and cigarettes, candy and gum, newspapers and magazines, and revolving racks of paperback books.

 We were warned against this corner cigar store as a disreputable place, so it wouldn’t be until the early 1960s that I ventured inside for long, to search those paperback book racks.  It also had a long row of dark wood phone booths along its western wall near a side entrance, opposite the Rialto bar, which at the time may still have been a venue for gambling, especially “the numbers.”  Those phone booths might also have been involved.  (The Rialto bar may have gotten its name from the Rialto Theatre, which was replaced by the Manos.)

 Down Otterman past another newsstand, Greensburg News (where in later years I bought the Sunday New York Times, as did the man who wrote mysteries about Rocksburg under the name of K.C. Constantine), then to the right was Harrison Avenue.  The row of buildings on that narrow street where the tailor shop that had once employed Ignazio Severini was still there, though the tailor shop was not.

  The only business in that row that interested us was the Greensburg radio station WHJB (620 on your radio dial.)  For some years there was a display window behind which the announcer then on the air could be seen from the sidewalk.  

When I was in 6^th grade, I had a radio in my room on the bookshelf above the old desk I’d inherited, next to my globe. My father had put it together from a kit.  It was supposed to be a short wave radio but the only station it reliably got was WHJB in Greensburg.  I often listened to the WHJB “Night Watch” music program while I did my homework. I listened to it on the ominous night that the country got a shock when Russia launched the first human-made satellite, Sputnik 1 in 1957.

  My other memory of WHJB is also from the 1950s: a commercial for a shop on South Main Street called Nancy’s, which had an orange facade over its entrance.  Frank Sinatra had a hit in the mid 1940s with the song “Nancy (With the Laughing Face.)”  The commercial parodied that line from the song, with several men singing off-key, “That’s Nancy’s, with the orange face.”  I remember as well that it was WHJB that broadcast the news of the fire on Main Street that gutted Nancy’s.

 

At the end of Harrison, past the stately Penn Albert Hotel on the right, was the Greensburg train station. This impressive brick station with stone trim and a tall clock tower decorated with copper was built in 1910 to 1911. 

 This particular corner of Greensburg was practically unchanged from the 1940s or even earlier, except that the station was closed and partly boarded up.  I can vaguely remember a visit inside the station when it was open—the waiting room with its dark wooden seats, and attendants pushing carts to the adjacent freight office.  In the late 1970s it would be listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and even later, part of the inside would be restored for a series of bars and restaurants, but in the mid to 1950s it was beginning its decades as a ghostly, slowly deteriorating and beautiful phantom of the past.

 However, the cement tunnel between what had been the waiting room and the baggage building that led to the tracks above was still open and functioning in the 50s.  Up either of the two sets of cement stairs, there were two brick islands across from each other, with two sets of tracks running parallel between them, one eastbound, one westbound. On the other side of each island was another single set of tracks, usually reserved for freight trains.

 These brick islands were still used by people waiting for passenger trains.  It was not yet the era of Amtrak, so these were still Pennsylvania Railroad and B & O Railroad passenger trains that stopped here, going east and west. (In 1958 or so, I would take my first train from here, to Chicago, on a reward trip with other paperboys for the Greensburg Tribune-Review.)

 Along these islands there would usually be a few large wooden baggage carts on wheels with high platforms, up against a steel column supporting the open-air roof. We discovered that if we climbed onto a cart, there was nobody to make us get off.  

In this fairly recent photo of a special train visit, the old brick
platform can be glimpsed in the foreground left. The tracks
that were on the outside of the platform are gone.

We then might spend hours sitting or sprawled on the cart waiting for trains to come through.  Most of the time it was quiet, but often enough we would spot a train in the distance.  If it wasn’t stopping, sometimes the train didn’t even slow down but blew through the station as though it wasn’t there.  This caused a windy roar that had us clutching onto the cart frame and the column. And then it was gone, until the next one.

 Once, while our attention was fixed on the train rushing through in front of us, another train ran past behind us on the other side.  We were in a speeding train sandwich—double the thrills!

 One summer when my Aunt Toni was visiting from Maryland, my cousin Dick Wheatley accompanied us on one of our forays into town, ending up at the train tracks.  He remembered that people gathered on the platform to board a passenger train, including the Mayor of Greensburg, who told us to take care of the town while he was gone.