eyelash growth

Euripides claimed youth is the best time to be rich and the best time to be poor. while it’s no fun being a kid from a family without a wage-earning parent, the philosopher was onto something.

Few of my childhood pals came from well-to-do families; yet, we Hazleton-area kids were richer than Donald Trump in the ’50s and ’60s, rich in sounds and smells, and natural playgrounds, that is.

Forty years or more since hearing that throaty Ogg, Ogg, Ogg, I still recall the 10 p.m. curfew sending wide-eyed kids scurrying home, lest Officers Ferry and Manfredi catch us on the streets past the legal hour.

Price’s Dairy horses clippity-clopped past your house morning by morning, delivering bottled milk and cream while you lay half-awake in your bed. FWD plows grated ice and snow, shoving paths through falling snow in the dark, promising schools would be shut in the morning. Children laughed on playgrounds, a sound sweeter than Leichtman’s strawberry ice cream.

If I live to be 200, I’ll call to mind the aromas of Hazleton. Berlitz Bakery’s 15-cent bread loaves, crisp as a new dollar bill on the outside, soft as a baby’s sigh inside. Coconut and sugar-frosted "long johns" fresh from the ovens at Trovitch’s Bakery. Homemade pasta, tomato sauce, olive oil, sausage, oregano, mozzarella, Parmesan and Romano cheeses at Moe’s Coffee Shop, Senape’s, Marsicano’s, Carmen’s, Genetti’s Tyrolean Room, Fedullo’s and other bars and restaurants all over town.

How about the neighborhood stores? Each full of the sharp scent of ethnic food – pierogies, golombki, corned beef, halupki; matzo, gefilte fish and herring. The aroma wafted onto the sidewalks like exotic perfume.

There, you could buy locally-picked mushrooms, onions, carrots, cabbage; the basil, paprika, caraway, dill, tarragon, rosemary, chives, and other herbs and spices for dishes that only your grandmother could make. it was real food: freshly dressed chickens and turkeys; butchered beef, pork, lamb, veal and ham. Sausages made on the premises – cooked, smoked or fresh. This was in the days before scentless meat, shrink-wrapped in plastic, and served up on Styrofoam trays by fey teenagers who wouldn’t know a chop from prime rib.

Each section of town had natural playgrounds. The Mile Rocks behind the old Hazleton High School building pulled kids like mice to cheddar cheese. I recall sitting on the Queen Rock dangling my feet mid-air, watching Ronnie, Frank, Mark and Joey Maddon take turns flying a bright yellow kite. they raced through knee-deep grass like young bulls as the tethered paper, wood and string strained up and up into deep blue infinity until the line snagged on a telephone wire.

The DiBonifazio kids were there: Louie, Dave, Dean and Judy, kicking a football around, their laughter rising and falling like the pigskin, echoing against the steel-gray glacial moraines. How those kids could laugh. I still hear it.

Summers we laid shirtless on lichen encrusted outcroppings tanning ourselves; in winter we huddled behind them wrapped in wool, roasting hot dogs on sticks over a campfire that blistered our knuckles and cheeks while the wind and snow froze our hindquarters and backs.

Swift creeks, bottomless reservoirs, and foaming waterfalls dotted the area beyond West Hazleton. Rubbing elbows with Ritzes, Planutises, Hoeflings, Platukises, Abernethys, and others, we swam, swung, flipped or plummeted from rocks, ropes, cliff-tops and trestles into the blue, green and sometimes black waters.

I still see Dave McGeehan, Joe Yatko and Frank Repanshek stripped to the waist at the "Cliffs," springing from an unsteady ledge into the bottomless mineral-blue lagoon 20 feet below.

Maybe memory plays tricks on me; yet people often write, telling me of childhood adventures, similar to mine.

Hazle Township resident David Quinn says, "there used to be a long flume that brought wash water from Pardeesville to the Latimer colliery. We used to take our shoes off and ride the giant water slide for almost a mile. After things closed down and we saw the condition of the flume with rusted nails and rusting, protruding steel bands, we knew there had to be Guardian Angels with us.

"I also remember what the bottom of the bathtub looked like after frolicking in all that coal and dust. there was about a quarter-inch of silt on the bottom of the tub and my mom would have to clean it up. We were little dare devils, and if one of us was not taken to the ER at the State Hospital for sutures or worse, it was a mild week to say the least."

Those township guys. they put us city kids into the shade when it came to combining fun and danger. Sure. We had to get stitches sometimes. Yeah. We ran wild in the woods and strippings.

But we never sluiced headlong down a nail-lined flume, rusted and full of pointy metal objects in wash-water from a coal breaker. The township kids combined drowning, lock-jaw, torn skin and broken bones in one go. 

(Kids, don’t try this game. Ever.)

Former neighbor Sue Yenchko wrote recently to say, "I loved growing up in Hazleton. so much to do!" her words reminded me that our fun wasn’t always hazardous.

Sue’s cousins Tommy and Stevie Yenchko offered springtime recreation between 1957 and 1965: epic baseball games played in their vacant lot. I see that old gang of ours now: Butchy Strack, John (Dooley) Frye, Ned Delaney, Gerard DeBellis, Billy Dura, Larry and Robert Kushmider, David Sell, Louis Kubik, Burt Youngcourt, John and Richard Piehota, John Pearson, Michael and George Puhak, my brother Frank, Tommy Schefer, Jeff Bigler, Chris and John Aach, Kevin and Bernie McMonigle, Dana and Barty Brooks, Gerard and John Longo and all of the Yenchkos. We played until it got too dark to see the ball.

We thrived in the big snows of the late ’50s and early ’60s, sleigh-riding down Branch Court from 11th St. to the woods at 15th. Kids with snowflakes on their hats and eyelashes flew down the ice-covered alley and raced back up towing sleds past wary adults with cherry noses; the scene resembled a 16th century Flemish winterscape painted by Brueghel the elder or some other Dutch artist.

And that thatch of wood on 15th and Lincoln? it was deepest, darkest badlands inhabited by Native Americans who offered sacrifices to Kishelemukong, the god of the Lenni Lenape tribe, still hunting grizzly bears in the woody shadows as late as 1959. at least that’s what Steve Yenchko used to tell us little kids.

There we played hide ‘n’ seek, army, and follow the leader. on the night before his first Holy Communion, my brother Frank wore his new white "buckskin" shoes without telling Mom and lost one in the woods. He had to make do with old black lace-ups on his big day. We caught "greenies" and toads; picked huckleberries and June berries; men with big bellies grunted and bent low, picking mushrooms. We played every sort of running game until our stick-like legs ached.

Rich? Nope, but fun didn’t cost a plug nickel in those days, either.

I guess that old Greek philosopher was right after all. A Hazleton childhood was the best time to be rich and the best time to be poor.

Former Hazleton resident Michael Apichella is a writer living in Europe. He may be contacted at apichellaspeaker@yahoo .com

Childhood, Hazleton style