A Working Woman

I've always loved this photo of my Baba taken probably in the 1940s. She would have been in her mid-40s. Her purposeful stride down the boardwalk with a bucket in each hand shows a woman tackling her chores head-on. She never shied away from hard work, and neither did her husband or children.

The house behind her is the company house my grandparents bought from the Frick Mining Company about 1936. Where they put all the family bodies, I don't know. It was a tiny place. When Dad was maybe in his teens he and his brothers dug a cellar underneath, but it was for storage, not for sleeping. By 1936 Aunt Mary had moved to New York but that still left six children and two parents in the place. Back in the day if a family member had requested privacy they would have been sent out with the cows.

After World War 2 the family bought additional acreage to farm. They had a truck garden, and also grew tomatoes for the Heinz company. Not much later the State of Pennsylvania took about half the acreage for the new state highway, and the family got more money for that portion than they had paid for the entire piece a few years earlier. On their new highway frontage they built a gas station, grocery store, diner, and a beer distribution business. The photo appears to be from before those structures were built.

The current term "working woman" means something quite different than Baba's type of working woman. Physical labor didn't do her any harm. She lived to be a hundred years old with all her faculties!

Perryopolis Terrorist Attack

 

 the Perryopolis drug store is the beige stone building on the right

I have the blessing to be the aunt of a very nice, and now sensible young man, who I'll call PD here. From a very young age he has been a busy, active boy, a classic case of an ADHD child. He is known in the family for the crazy ridiculous things he did as a child. Actions such as jumping on the back of a moving pickup patrolling the zoo when he was about 3, come to mind. When a mud puddle was handy, he knew just what to do: plaster himself from head to toe and brightly declare, "I'm a mud-dauber!" One day I was talking on the phone to his mom when she suddenly announced she had to hang-up as "PD is ironing the carpet." He was maybe 18 months at the time.  The iron shape on the floor remained until re-carpet time.

When PD's family moved to an obscure small town in Pennsylvania, my sister Alice commented, "That boy is going to put Perryopolis on the map." And that's just what happened several years later.

 One day Alice picked up her newspaper--we're talking the bulky big-city tome known as the Los Angeles Times here.  She gasped on seeing a small article announcing a possible terrorist incident in Perryopolis, Pennsylvania. She skimmed through it, gasped again, and immediately got on the phone to me, announcing "he's done it!". Yes, PD had put this "has-been" coal-town on the map.

The previous afternoon PD and a friend had stopped at the town drugstore for candy on their way home from school. Both were carrying their science experiments home, which resembled fishing poles with various wires snaking out of them. Fifteen minutes later when the boys left for home, pockets bulging with candy, they neglected to grab their science experiments and left them leaning against a wall in the greeting-card section of the store.


A few hours later PD was at home watching TV. A news flash reported that a suspected bomb had been planted in the local drugstore in the tiny town of Perryopolis. The area around the store had been evacuated, the bomb squad was deployed, and a special robotic bomb-disarmer had blown up the suspected bombs. PD was half paying attention when suddenly he yelled out loud, "O my gosh, O my gosh!" He ran for the phone to call his friend, then spilled the beans to his parents.

bomb squad

He and his friend confessed that the "bombs" were their science experiments, no malice intended. It was certainly the most lively, interesting day Perryopolis had seen, probably since Colonel George Washington himself strode over the woodsy acreage while scouting out a site for his grist mill . . .

bomb robot

 

Honoring Veterans

 Perryopolis, Pennsylvania War Memorial

In the area of my Dad's hometown (Perryopolis, PA) are plenty of has-been small towns that thrived during the era of the coal and steel industry,  but now appear listless and forgotten.  They are pocked by deserted buildings, including once-proud schools now derelict and crumbling.   Abandoned coal mines and tipples and mills of every type slump like skeletons stripped of their flesh.  Slag heaps overwhelm the landscape, an in-your-face testimony that these towns once had a reason for being.

Forlorn they may be, yet they have a grand, noble common thread: almost every town has a war memorial honoring their home-grown boys who served in past wars.  These memorials are not new; they were built after World War 2 well before the belated trend praising our veterans took hold.  The names on the memorials are more often Italian, Polish, Ruthenian, Slovak and other varieties of 'Hunkie' names than Anglo-rooted names.  After all, it was penniless European immigrants who kept the mines and the mills running during their heyday.

Perryopolis's memorial is built of warm beige and brown stone inlaid with metal tablets inscribed with veterans' names.  The VFW keeps it in good shape.  To the right in the photo above is an addition to the memorial that I think was built after the Korean War, or maybe Vietnam.  I haven't been there in a while.

The detail below shows my Dad and two of his brothers, World War 2 veterans.  An asterisk is placed next to the name of soldiers who did not return from the war.  Another uncle of mine served in Korea and has his name on that plaque.  Still another uncle did not serve at all, because by the time the Korean War was in full swing, my grandpa had been paralyzed in a coal-mining accident, and that uncle stayed home to help with his father's care.

Our veterans gave years of their lives to protect the cause of freedom.  May we never forget them.

The End of An Era

in memory of a generation past

This past summer a distant cousin, Margaret Evans, passed away in Florida.  She was 94 years old.  I never met her personally, but had corresponded with her.  She knew my Baba and Aunt Mary well as she was a first cousin to my grandfather.  Margaret E. was the last living member of my grandfather's generation.

Here's a simple chart to show relationships:

John Szorokacs             married             Anna Kalyanin

1864

 they had 8 children:

John 1866, Mary 1868, Anna 1871, Michael 1873, Eliz 1875, Andrew 1878, George 1881, Paul 1883

The Mary born 1868 is my great-grandmother, her son John was my grandfather

The Michael born 1873 had 10 children; Margaret E. was the youngest 

The 8 children listed above had a minimum 39 children between themselves, and Margaret E.  outlived all her siblings and cousins.   There are very likely more than 39 children of that generation, but some remained in the old country and I don't yet have information on them.  It's extremely unlikely that any of that generation in the old country is still living--life spans are significantly shorter there.

The 39+ children of those 8 siblings were all born between 1889--1930, a 41-year span.  Margaret E. was on the younger end, born 1922.

The Szorokacs's native village, is called Valaskovce or Valyaskocz in Slovak, or Pasztorhegy in Hungarian (shepherd mountain).  It was situated on the north slope of the extinct volcano called Vihorlat.  I say "was," because in 1938 the Czechoslovak government moved the village population into a city down below the mountain, called Humenne.  The village was razed (except for the tiny Greek Catholic Church) so the army could use the area for military training.  Vihorlat was the highest mountain in the central Carpathian Mountains (think wolves and bears and yikes, vampires!).

Because Margaret E. was one of the younger children of her generation, she never met her grandparents; they were long gone before she came along.  It's remarkable to note that the grandparents of this 94-year old who died this past summer were born in 1843 as serfs on the great estate nearby.  What obscure, rustic, rude lives they must have lived on top of that mountain in what was then the middle of nowhere, in a time when peasants were still bound to the lord of the manor.

May the generations to come carry on the reverence for family, the work ethic and the religious devotion exemplified by those who have gone on.

 Eastern Slovakia.  Poland is to the north, Ukraine barely off the map to the east, Hungary to the south.  The arrow shows the location of Valaskovce.

Perryopolis, Fayette County, Pennsylvania

This mural is painted on the wall of a commercial building in my Dad's hometown of Perryopolis Pennsylvania.  It pretty much sums up the diverse history of this small town that few have ever heard of.

Hundreds of years ago Western Pennsylvania was a remote wilderness peopled by Indian tribes.  During the French and Indian War, George Washington was stationed at Fort Necessity, about 20 miles down the road from the future site of Perrypolis.  He was so taken by the fertile land that he bought 1600 acres in the area about 1770.  You can see venerable George's familiar portrait in the mural.

Just to the left of George is a structure called Washington's Mill.  Construction was finished in the mid-1770s.   Washington never lived in the area, and he eventually leased out the land and mill.  When Dad was young the mill was in ruins, though still mostly standing.   In my childhood memory the mill was a total ruin.  I remember playing in the creek that once turned the mill-wheel.  20 years ago Amish carpenters were brought in to rebuild the mill, but not to be used for grinding grain, of course.  It is now a fascinating tourist site.

To the left of the mill you see Oliver Hazard Perry, a victorious naval officer active in the War of 1812.  His surname was selected as a name for Perryopolis when the town was laid out in 1814.

The woman in the mural is Mary Fuller Frazier who was born in Perryopolis.   When her will was read in 1948 Perry was shocked and thrilled to find out that she left $1.5 million to the town.  I have asked my relatives what the money has been used for.  As I understand it, the capital remains untouched, and the investment pays for utilities a citizen would ordinarily be billed for--street lights, water, sewer, etc.  Perhaps some of it was put into civic improvements long ago.  The school district was renamed in honor of this generous woman.

On the right of the mural are the famous coke ovens that once burned so brightly that you could read a newspaper by their glow, when inside your house at night.  Coal was reduced to coke in these ovens, and coke is what powered the great steel mills of Pennsylvania and Ohio.  There were once about a thousand coke ovens lined up in a row along the tracks that bore the coal cars.  Coal cars were able to dump their load right into the ovens.  During hard times such as the Depression, a few homeless families occupied unused coke ovens.

A unique outstanding feature of Perryopolis is the layout--it is a wheel with 8 spokes leading out from the center, and is called The Diamond.   In the photo below if you focus on the dark traffic circle in the upper right quadrant, you'll see the 8 roads heading out in every direction from that center point.

 

Here is another view of the layout.  Note the names of the streets.  They all pertain to the theme of colonial American history.

An Arranged Marriage

when I think of arranged marriages I think of Tzeitel and Lazar Wolf and how the family wiggled out of that one 

That sounds so quaint--"an arranged marriage."  It  conjures up images of lace-bedecked veiled brides meeting their husbands for the first time at the altar. What a priceless experience to have been a fly on the wall on those occasions. Would the bride's expression on seeing her husband for the first time have been:

Relief?  (he's dreamily handsome and/or prosperous)
Revulsion? (the local skirt-chasing seducer)
Dismay and disgust? (weighs 300 pounds and/or intolerable BO)
Terror?  (previous wives died in mysterious unexplained circumstances)
Despair? (a passel of motherless children)
Crushed and crestfallen? (60 years old)

In my family "an arranged marriage" was a reality only two generations back from me. My own Grandmother, my Baba, was given away by her brother to my Grandpa, an immigrant Pennsylvania coal miner. Here are the earliest photos we have of them, from about 1918. They were married in 1912 but lacked money for a wedding photo.

John Bubnash

Suzanna Csornej-Maczko

Baba was not put off by her prospective husband. She had seen him around her home village in Eastern Europe. He was  handsome, five years older, and earning about what could be expected for a young 20s little-educated Slavic immigrant. Baba did not want to marry. She was barely 16; in the old country she wouldn't have married until age 19 or 20. She had been in the US for only six months. She worked a menial job and loved the power and independence. But her brother Michael was responsible for her, and had his own family to support. When Grandpa approached Michael to ask if he could marry Michael's sister, Michael gave consent and made arrangements, and there was not a thing in the world Baba could do about it. In Michael's defense, he was simply carrying on an old-country tradition. He knew of John from home and that he was a decent fellow.

The wedding occurred July 20, 1912, at the Byzantine Catholic Church in Clairton Pennsylvania. Rocky bleak times plagued this family: frequent moves as mines closed and workers were laid off, poverty, strikes, drinking, the death of a child, my Grandpa's peevish ways, overloaded lives when they ran a farm when Grandpa still worked a full shift at the mine, black lung, and the worst, Grandpa's crippling accident at Colonial #3 mine at Rowes Run Pennsylvania. That was the last day he ever worked as a miner. He was hospitalized for nearly a year, and paralyzed for good.

For the next 15 years Baba took care of her almost home-bound, almost helpless husband. The strenuous daily work took its toll, and it never got easier. Grandpa's health further declined when cancer took over his life. He died in 1966, 54 years into their arranged marriage.

Almost 30 years later I sat in Baba's kitchen, my cassette recorder running, asking questions about her childhood in the old country, and her experiences as a immigrant with a large family during the Depression and two world wars. In a very matter-of-fact tone she related the hardships of her life, and then focused on the intense and tedious care of my Grandpa in the years of his disability leading to his death.

After a lengthy pause she said, "Oh, how I miss him . . . "

Antique Postcards

A few years ago I began buying up old postcards of places that were important to my family and our history. We have few photographs of our ancestors, so the next best thing to pictures of our people is a picture of the places they lived, worked, and worshipped. Companies created postcards of the most average mundane scenes, which is a bonus for people like me who buy them for family reasons. I don't need a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance, because it doesn't have significance to my family. But a postcard of a the coke ovens in Star Junction, Pennsylvania? I'll pay bucks for that one!

Ebay is ideal for this. There's many for sale and if you wait long enough, a postcard of the exact place you want will pop up. Some examples:

Powers Institute, aka Bernardston Academy, is where my great-grandfather Michael Henry Toomey attended high school circa 1876. It still stands, now as a museum. The photo is probably from the early 1900s.

 A view of South Vernon, a railroad junction that straddles the state line of Massachusetts and Vermont. The building on the left is the old hotel, which is still there, and was new when my Toomeys lived in South Vernon in the 1870s and 80s. This quaint view has been altered by a modern a highway.

The dangerous intersection of three bridges north of Brattleboro, Vermont, late 1800s. The writing on the bridge says "Walk Your Horses." This junction was modified after some terrible accidents between trains and horses. My Toomey and Sullivan ancestors would have passed through here once in a while.

The Brooks Free Library, Brattleboro VT in 1910. It was built in the 1880s when some of my family would have borrowed books (I hope). What a pretty picture of the first real library in town. It has long since been replaced by a modern, but less attractive library.

A public school close to my Grandma's house in Brooklyn, NY. She lived on the corner of 4th Ave. and 78th, so this may have been where she attended. If not this one, then one a lot like it.

Even photographs of events such as parades and fairs were sold as postcards. This one of the local county fair in Brattleboro, called Valley Fair, I believe was taken pre-1910. Fairs, lectures, church socials, traveling circuses, and post-Civil War GAR events were our ancestor's entertainment, and you can find postcards of just about all of those events.

My Mom grew up in Washington Heights on Manhattan, not far from this library, immortalized in a postcard circa 1900.

The Dellbrook House in Perryopolis, PA, circa 1950, built by my step-mom Hazel's then-husband in 1948. In 1996 Dad married Hazel and moved into this house. In 2001 the stairs became too much, so they sold it to my brother who lived there until 2007 ish. This postcard is entitled Modern Perryopolis, the Carl Dellbrook House and is still sold in the local drugstore.

Monessen PA's Greek Catholic Church, which my grandparents attended about 1918-1921. Nice that someone thought to make a postcard of it.

This postcard pertains directly to my life. Beale Cut, aka Fremont Pass, aka San Fernando Pass or Newhall Pass, near Newhall, CA. When I was growing up it was a major thrill to climb down into this cut which was made for the Butterfield Stagecoach Line, about 1863. This was the original road from Los Angeles to San Francisco. On the other side of this cut was the local oil refinery. I remember the thrill of finding shell fossils in the side of the cut. It is badly eroded now. And it is seen in plenty of old western movies.

"Nine for Nine!"

Yesterday this blog was about Flight 93 which went down north of Somerset, Pennsylvania on 9/11. Curiously, less than one year later, masses of media and the world’s attention focused back on the same area when nine coal miners were trapped in the flooded Quecreek Mine, not 10 miles from where Flight 93 went down 10 months before. For over three days the world was at the edge of our collective seat around the clock, waiting for news of the trapped men.

The anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania, and the bituminous region of western PA combined have experienced an astounding 51,000 deaths from coal mining since 1877.  That's 32 deaths every month when averaged over a 130 year period, shocking numbers for only one US state.

With a steady stream of immigrants lined up for available jobs, miner’s lives were pretty cheap in the early days. My great-uncle George was killed in 1908 in a slate-fall in a Stockett, Montana coal mine. My own grandfather was crushed in slate-fall at the Colonial #3 mine at Rowes Run, PA, in February 1951. If a miner survives an injury he is typically gravely hurt. Grandpa should not have lived, but he pulled through, spending the next seven months in a body cast and another few months after that in the hospital, then two or three months in rehab learning to navigate his paralyzed self on crutches. My Dad said that in the early days of mining the companies took no responsibility for a miner’s injuries. They threw the injured in the bed of a wagon and left them on their doorstep for the wife to patch up. The work went on.

So why is it that with personal challenges and suffering in our own lives, we can suddenly find ourselves praying for total strangers, or sending messages of hope or condolence to people we don’t know in relation to an event that has nothing to do with ourselves? That’s what happened when Jessica fell into the well, and it happened at Quecreek in 2002. I think it is partly the inherent goodness in people. We stretch our capacity to love and care for others. Someday it could be our turn to need the best wishes and compassion of folks all around. In Somerset County expressions of faith and hope were heard from the families and friends, rescuers and reporters, and the governor.  Marvelous miracles happened such as when a broken drill part was tooled and replaced in three hours instead of the customary three to four days. People everywhere recognized answer to prayer when they saw it.

In this case, when the governor gratefully announced, “nine for nine!” the world rejoiced. A few months later, on the same day our family visited the Flight 93 site, we stopped at the Quecreek rescue site. My step-mother’s father once worked in this mine, and she was born here on Christmas Day 1921 in Acosta, just up the road. A few years ago a memorial to this tragic event with a happy ending--of a miner immersed in the Bible--was put in place. I don’t think we too often see memorials erected to commemorate positive events.

Shanksville, Pennsylvania

Y’all know what happened here on September 11, 2001. It was a bright spot in an otherwise unimaginably terrible day—that is if you can call it a bright spot that 40 people fought the terrorists, and then hurtled to their deaths at such great speed that there wasn’t much left of them or the plane either. You know what I’m talking about though.

About a year after 9/11 Steven and I visited my folks at their home in Belle Vernon PA, about an hour drive from the Flight 93 crash site. In fact, Flight 93 had flown to its fate not too far north of their house. My Dad decided to take us over there on a wintry November day. As often happened on a George Bubnash outing, we took country roads instead of the highway towards Somerset, PA, the nearest city to the site. The hoarfrost on the trees was cracking branches everywhere. It was a magically, frosty, pretty day.

From Somerset you drive north on country roads to the site. I don’t know if Pennsylvania has a corner on unmarked windy country roads, making places difficult to find, but they do a good job at it. I’ve had the experience of taking an hour to find a place three miles away. Even locals get lost sometimes. It was the same this day. Kind folks in the Somerset area though, had created these little red-white-blue markers that simply said “Flight 93” with an arrow pointing either straight or right or left. We followed those for a while but a few were missing so it was a while before I spotted the place on a hill near a farmhouse.

The hill is where the makeshift memorial is located. The crash site is in a draw in the valley below, maybe a mile away. The hand of God laid this plane down in a peaceful site away from houses and buildings. They say this was once an open-pit coal mine so that when the plane hit, it was instantly swallowed up. Down in the draw at the center of the site is a solitary American flag marking the spot. I like that. It’s a simple symbol that says much. The makeshift memorial contains homemade markers and messages received from the world over, and also some metal and stone plaques sent by other countries. You can leave a souvenir there or write a message in permanent marker on the guard rail.

I was just reading on the internet about the National Park Service memorial that will be ready for dedication in two years. It has various features that symbolize what happened on Flight 93. The site is largely outdoors. I like that. But perhaps it’s overdone. The reference below contains the drawings and descriptions of the various aspects of the memorial. The bowl with the walkway around it seems enough (minimal can convey peace). I don’t know if the concrete walls add anything—perhaps I’ll change my mind when I see it. But there is one thing that bugs and I will take the flak of being called unfeeling. There is private access for the “Flight 93 families” in the area that is basically a graveyard. I’m not sure why that is. When we go to Pearl Harbor or Gettsyburg or Flanders Fields, or any number of places where people have fought and died, we remember that they did it for their country. And so their country comes to pay them honor. In my book it's odd to be exclusive at this memorial.

http://www.nps.gov/flni/upload/Design%20presentatioN2.pdf