My father was not interested in old things. He did not save any heirlooms. It was hard to get him to talk about the past, and impossible to get him to write anything. Except for one piece. One vivid memory that he was willing to put down on paper.

When he was growing up in Tyrone, in a house built by his grandfather David, the furnace ran on coal.

Here is what he wrote about it. It was such an evocative piece that it makes me sorry I could not persuade him to write more.

“… the coal was delivered to our house one ton at a time.  The coal was hauled by a horse team and wagon, up the steep hill to a point above our house.  Chutes were then placed from the wagon to the cellar, via a window, and the coal was shoveled onto the chute and then rolled down the chute into the cellar.

One memorable instance:  winter day, snow on ground, cold wind, horses straining mightily to haul the wagon up the hill, slipping and sliding backwards sometimes.  Teamsters shouting and whipping, the horses steaming and, finally, the wagon reached to the top of the hill.  What a scene!”

The four brothers, Dick, David, Harry, and Joe at their mother Ada’s funeral in Tyrone.

My father Harry was born in Tyrone, in the hills of central Pennsylvania. His family had been there for three generations. He was born in the house his grandfather David built on Lincoln Avenue, a white frame house that still stands there. David lived in that house first and raised his children there. When David’s son John grew up and married Ada and started a family, David built another house up the hill and moved into it, leaving the lower house for John and Ada and the four boys. My dad said that they traded because the lower house had a bigger garden, very important for raising food for four boys, to supplement John’s salary as a clerk for the Pennsylvania Railroad.

My dad was the third brother, after David and Joe and before Dick. They all had very different personalities. David was outgoing and affable, with a booming voice and a hail-fellow-well-met style; he made friends easily. Joe was sweet and funny. Harry, my dad, was a little reserved, likeable but not as outgoing as David. Dick, the youngest, always seemed shy, but sweet. I would say that David was the friendliest, Joe was the funniest, my dad was the smartest, and Dick was the quietest.

The picture shows the four of them, taken at their mother Ada’s funeral, the last time they were ever together. They had very different life experiences. Dick was the only one of the four who served in the Second World War, and was wounded while in the far east. My father wanted to enlist, to serve his country, but his poor hearing made him ineligible. Joe was deferred because of his work in an air depot in Connecticut, and David was deferred as a minister.

Dick and Doris had two children and the great sadness of their life was that Janet died as a young woman, the first of the cousins to die. Dick and Doris’ son Tommy never married and stayed in Hastings looking after his parents and working as a laborer. Some people would say he never amounted to much, but he was greatly mourned by his friends in the town when he died. Joe was sweet and funny and loved music and dancing. He and Helen had three sons. David would give you a big bear hug when you met him. He went to college, the first in the family to do so, and became a Methodist minister. He and his wife Veda moved around central Pennsylvania, as he was posted to different churches. I lived with them and their two children for a few years when my mother was ill, and after she died, but that’s a story for another post, as is Harry’s story.

The four brothers and their wives are all gone now, and no one from our family still lives in Tyrone. The cousins are scattered and we don’t keep in touch. It’s a shame, but it started when the brothers left Tyrone. There was nothing to keep them there.

My grandmother Ada lived most of her life in Tyrone, a drab town nestled in the hills of Blair County, Pennsylvania. It was the kind of place where everybody knew you and who your parents were, as in “the Herkimer girl married John Lukens’ boy.” The town had seen better days. The boom years of the railroad had long passed by the 1950’s when I first went back to visit my family. Several lines of the Pennsylvania Railroad converged in Tyrone, carrying coal from the northern mines to the cities, and in the thriving years of the early 1900’s many of the men in town worked for the railroad as engineers, car repairmen, or telegraph-men. My grandfather John had worked for the “Pennsy” as a clerk, a steady, respectable job. But as the cities turned to other fuels, the trains stopped running through the town.

By 1950, Ada lived alone, as a widow, in a little apartment house just off the main street. She stood on the front porch and watched for us when we drove to Tyrone to visit on weekends. During the week she worked as a clerk at the Benjamin Franklin store, the “five and dime”, around the corner. I remember seeing her in the aisles there, in the department for hairnets and shoe polish. She was cheerful and spry, with slender legs and a full bosom encased in mysterious garments with rows of laces. She was always turned out in a colorful print dress, never a housedress, even at home. When she took the train to visit us, she wore a hat and white gloves and carried shopping bags full of luscious chocolates from Gardner’s Candies, Tyrone’s most successful store.

Ada and John had raised their four sons in a white frame house on a run-down street on the outskirts of town. Beside the house stretched the extensive family garden, tended by the four boys. After the family savings were wiped out in the Depression, my father raised pepper and tomato seedlings and sold them wrapped in newspaper to earn spending money. Tomato seedlings cost ten cents a bundle; peppers cost fifteen cents since they were harder to grow. But most of the vegetables from the garden ended up in the family kitchen. Ada canned green beans, tomatoes and other vegetables, and cut up cabbage and salted it to make sauerkraut. She picked Concord grapes from the family vines and pressed them to make tangy grape juice.

By the 1950’s the pulp and paper mill employed many of the men of Tyrone. On the east end of town along the Juniata River, it announced its presence with a pungent sulfurous odor that wafted through the town on warm summer evenings. Ada, like many of the townspeople, was used to this, and hardly noticed it. It was the price to be paid for jobs. She did not live to see the closing of the mill in the 1990’s, which sent Tyrone even further into sleepy decline.