Growing Up in Pennsylvania

(as told by Vernon Work Myers)

I’m the youngest. I have two brothers, Marion and Cecil, and two sisters, Lois and Marjorie. I had a dog growing up. His name was Jack. He finally got very old and stiff. Then we had another dog, Judge. He was actually Nippy’s dog but he followed my father everywhere. Judge was a wired-haired fox terrier.

Electricity was put into the house in before I was born. It probably came when the inter-urban car line was there. It had problems because sometimes the power might be off for two or three days before it could get repaired. The inter-urban car line probably went into bankruptcy. I can’t remember how the power got taken over. We finally had running water in the house because my father dug a well. But we didn’t drink that water. We had water from a spring for drinking.

When I was growing up, the postal service didn’t come right to the house. You had to walk a quarter mile to the mailbox because they were rural routes. More people are living in that area now so they get mail right to the house.

When I was younger, I had an aviator’s cap. I thought I could fly like Charles Lindbergh. He was a hero then. For entertainment we would listen to the radio. Eddie Cantor had an hour-long program. He used to sing, “I’d love to have this hour with you, just friend to friend.” This was before TV.

I went to the movies a lot. The first picture that I saw in color starred Nick Lukas. He sang Tiptoe Through the Tulips with Me. Now that’s a corny thing but it was in color. And if you’d only seen a black and white picture before that, it was the most wonderful thing to see. When I was growing up there were a lot of silent pictures. Before I knew how to read, someone would read the titles to me.

[Myers Family Home "Duck Run"]

I went to a one-room school house. It was hard to believe how the teachers managed that. By the time I started school, I knew how to read. I was seven years old but I started in second grade and then I had third grade. I didn’t go to fourth grade. I went to fifth grade. This was before school busses or anything. I walked to the grade school. It was a half mile away. I remember one time it snowed and these two guys came along with one horse and pulling a sled. They let me ride with them.

There were some automobiles around, believe it or not. We were getting more and more cars. A lot of the farmers used horses, you know. They were very small farms. You’d call ‘em subsistence farms now. It was a hard place to make a living. There were a few people that had farms but then they also had jobs in the factories when we had an inter-urban car service. Not the city street car. It was more like a railroad passenger car. That went out in 1930 sometime. They had more automobiles by that time.

I remember going to a football game when I was about 10 or 11. Geneva was playing Grove City. These were small colleges. They were archrivals. It was a very good game. Geneva beat Grove City 13 to 12. And I do remember that when Geneva scored, the coach, Howard Harpster, who later coached at Carnegie Tech, was wearing a hat. And he made a kind of a flamboyant gesture. He threw his hat up in the air and caught up. I thought it was the greatest thing to be able to throw your hat up in the air and catch it!

When I was 13, I got a bicycle for my birthday. That was the biggest present I ever got. I didn’t know how to ride a bicycle but I finally learned. The terrain was very hilly. Not mountainous but hilly. Another fellow and I ran our bikes into each other and there was no one else around. I had to get the thing fixed so I went to our neighbor James Lutz. He had a Germanic name.

I remember one of my friends was Charles “Chuck” Bates. He was a friend from school. It was interesting because I think his father raised him because his mother had died. I think there were three boys. The oldest one died of TB. Tuberculosis was not uncommon in those times.

In eighth grade, I went to school in Ellwood City. That was a place where you got out of the one-room school house. Then I went to high school. There were no school busses. You had to get there any way you could. You could get a ride with someone. I very seldom walked but there were a couple times that I had to.

I had a newspaper route for six days of the week. I had to pay for the paper and then sell it to my customers. I didn’t make big money in that. My route spread out. There weren’t many papers. And I learned about people whom I couldn’t trust. Some would run up a bill and didn’t intend to pay.

There was a dairy store called Isalys which served ice-cream cones. They moved their location about a half a block to be closer to the main street. As a promotion, they gave away free ice cream cones. This was during The Depression. And you never saw such a crowd lined up! There were a lot of men and people who were out of work. There had a huge line of people waiting for free ice cream cones. Isalys also sold Klondike ice cream bars. If the Klondike bar had a pink center you got another one free. I got a pink center a couple of times. It was kind of a come on.

My father didn’t like to go on vacation or to church because he was rather shy and liked to stay in the house. But we once went up to Lake Eerie. It had these cottages which had no running water in them. They had an outhouse right out in the front. Those places probably don’t exist anymore. One time we rode the train to Ohio when Lois was graduating. It was about a four or five hour trip each way. Train travel was a common thing then because of the road conditions. Even if you did have an automobile, the tires weren’t good like they are now.