My parents grew up in the coal-mining city of West Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Both of my grandfathers were first-generation American coal miners, and both died of coal-mining related diseases. One lived in Old Cranberry, while the other lived right up the road on the corner of S. Broad St. and the new-fangled road (“Can do Expressway!”) that brought cars from the then-new interstate into town.
When we visited, I have many fond memories of sitting on that front porch doing what people did back then — watching the cars go by and talking (although, when you’re a kid, it’s mostly the adults doing the talking).
If you looked across the road, all you could see were the shale banks of the long since-abandoned coal mines.
A waft of pipe smoke drifted up from my grandpap’s (pictured above) pipe.
And like most kids, I wanted to be anywhere but there.
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Thank you for your memories. I’m 61 and memories of my maternal grandparents are from the 1950′s and 60′s. They lived in a small picturesque S. Calif. desert city, with lots of train tracks (or so it seemed to me, when I was a child). When they moved to the edge of town and raised chickens, hearing the distant train whistle as I fell asleep was so comforting to me. I will never forget watching my grandfather chop a chicken’s head off and watching the body run around for a minute. My cousin and I filled our summer days with adventures climbing hay bales in the neighbors barn, walking through the rocky hills, wading in the creek (we called it the “crick”), feeding the neighbors horses handfuls of grass. Kids should be required to have summers like this, using their imagination to entertain themselves. My grandparents both died in 1968, within a few months of each other, and there’s no family left in that city. I miss them to this day.
Beautiful blog post with lovely memories. Happy birthday!
I feel like I just read my own childhood. My family is from Centralia and Mt. Carmel. I to remember the simpler days of the coal mines and shale piles. It was us who truly knew what getting coal in your stocking at Christmas truly was. It never failed to get a piece in our stocking, also some goodies, but a rememberence of where we came from and hard work of our grandparents generation. For many years my grandparents homes where the only two homes left on the Logan in Centralia.
I still return once a year to visit family and although it’s not the same as when we grew up, you still get that simpler life feeling. This time always allows for reflection of what is important, family. It’s not what you have but who you are as a person that matters. These visits revived me and let me see that there still is that place I can go to free my mind and relive shucking peas and corn on my great-grandmothers porch!
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!!
Dr. Grohol, Cranberry and the rest of the area around Hazleton haven’t changed all that much since your childhood. Slate banks, mine pits and rail lines still give even adults like me who still like a play on mountain bikes a place to escape. Your larger point rings true, I suspect, not just here by across the US that we parents have done so much to protect our kids that they don’t feel free to explore the world around them.