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.