Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Ira Smith - Not your typical "Boy loses the farm, boy goes to war" Story

I first became acquainted with Ira F. Smith back in 1999, when I found the book “Eyes of the War,” published in May 1945. Skimming through the 600 pictures, I noticed only a few soldiers identified: Private Harry Emmack of Long Beach, California, Private First Class Howard E. Riller of Portland, Oregon, and a local man named Private W. Chickersky of Bethlehem. But it was Ira’s picture that caught my attention. Beyond his bandaged arm and contused scalp, I could see his story floating in the air. Just what was he gesturing to General Leonard? After a call to directory assistance, I discovered a man who had more than just an interesting story to share.

Other Ira links:
~Honoring Two Work Horses
~Going Home After 72 Years
~I'm Lucky to have known Ira


Part 1: Home Front:
The Jonathan and Ida Smith family farm, Kistler’s Valley near Kempton, Pennsylvania:

Ira, his parents, and older brother Elam, worked their eighty-acre farm of wheat, potatoes, corn and hay. With some cattle and cows for beef and butter, and twenty-wooded acres for harvesting chestnut for their cook stove, their work was industrious and inauspicious.

They worked cycle to cycle, like the rest of the world works paycheck to paycheck. They got in the fields as soon as the ground was warm and firm enough from winter’s thaw, waited for a dry day to knock down the hay, stored the summer’s silage, and shucked the corn for the crib in Fall. Cool weather beckoned the butchering and curing of pork. Then they sat and waited with old man winter and prayed they salted enough away.
Today, the former rail-bed is a paved rails-to-trail for bikers and joggers, taking one from
New York Tunnels of the former slate mine out below the Turnpike near Emerald all
along Trout Creek.  Ida Smith had trouble affording the $9 per month for each of her
boys to attend school, the nearest high school from Kistlers Valley was Slatington High.

But the steady sameness changed one day in 1932 when his father unexpectedly passed away. Ida couldn’t afford both her boys in school at the same time. Nor could she afford more than one $9-per-month Berksey Short-line train fare from Kempton to Slatington High School. So Ira had to wait for his brother to graduate before he could resume his schooling. When he did return to school, his morning chores came first, before he set out for the station three miles away. Some days, a dairy farmer would give him a lift and some days, he’d walk.

But Ira never finished school. Ida’s health had been declining for a few years. Not seeing any improvement, she eventually went to a doctor in Hamburg. He took one look under her eyelids and optimistically said, “You’re full of gallstones.” Her home doctor scoffed at the foolish diagnosis. The surgery uncovered twenty gallstones.

Still, her vigor did not return and by 1937, Ida was gone. Elam wished to continue running the farm along with Ira.  But Ira’s half-brother from his father’s first marriage became the executor of the estate. He did not attend the funeral, yet one week later arrived to take Ira to see a lawyer. He had no interest in running the farm and Ira helplessly watched his 100-acre home sold. It was the height of the Great Depression. It sold for $5,000.

“He didn’t do the right thing by me and everyone just went on their own way,” Ira recalled. Loved ones and school were now luxuries. He found shelter, food and work on a neighboring farm as a hired hand. He earned $30 a month and a room to himself above the stables.

It was early 1940, when Ira enlisted. He trained for the life of an infantryman in support of field artillery. In an army still moving field pieces with horses, he soon realized the army had even less than he did. “They didn’t have a pot to pee in, or a window to throw it out,” he said.

He trained in Arkansas, Shreveport, and Texas. Then it was Fort Myer, at Arlington National Cemetery. Ira worked with the horses used for pulling caissons in military funerals. He was back in Shreveport in December of 1941, when the Japanese attack lured the United States into the Second World War. Soon Ira was in Europe, fighting for his homeland, though he had no hearth or home to call his own.

Part 2: European Theater: December, 1944 -
St. Vith, Belgium – Precursor to the Battle of the Bulge -


Ira F. Smith of New Tripoli, Pennsylvania is attached to the 16th Armored Field Artillery Battalion, part of General Leonard’s 9th Armored Division. Their objective: advance forward with all haste to take the last remaining bridge leading to Germany, a bridge the Nazis intend to demolish before the Americans can cross it. This is the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge.

Ira’s unit arrives at the temporary U.S. headquarters at St. Vith, a Dutch farm that had been hit by German artillery. The remains of several U.S. officers are still lying frozen in the blood splattered snow outside the barn. Soon they join up with the 106th at Schnee Eifel, “Snow Hill”. At one point, Ira went into an open field, to retrieve a half-track abandoned by a U.S. G.I. who was afraid to get it himself. Once it was brought to safety, the G.I. quickly reasserted his claim on the vehicle and Ira needed to find another.

Pressing forward in a convoy of jeeps, under German artillery fire, Ira could see the unsteady leadership of the lieutenant driving the jeep in front of him. “I said to myself, I hope to hell he doesn’t stop at that intersection.” He did, and a shell dropped so close that Ira could taste the powder’s after-burn in his mouth.

Soon after, Ira got pinned down in the crossfire between the 106th and the Germans. A bullet strikes his left hand and wrist. And before he could react, he was in the hands of the enemy.

But the Americans do cross the bridge. The Germans responsible for detonating the charges had been drinking. And as Ira later learned, were promptly executed for their noncompliance.
(Jeep convoy moving past St. Vith.)




Ira describes being taken to a “hospital, a dirty old shack” where a German surgeon removed a .30 cal bullet, an American one. A fact not wasted by the surgeon who waved it in his face, telling him how his own men had shot him. He remembers taking sulfur pills and getting “cooties” from the straw mattress he recovered on. Ira still has the bullet and a fused left wrist.

On December 23rd, he was taken to Gerolstein, Germany, to the third-floor of a warehouse. It was a large barren room save a table at its center where the German guards sat. The American P.O.W.s were on the floor around the perimeter of the room, until a German officer entered. He didn’t like his men with their backs to their prisoners and ordered them to sit along the wall, putting the Americans in the center of the room.

No more than five minutes later, Ira heard the sounds of US planes overhead. He heard the bomb hit the side of the warehouse, killing the guards who had just exchanged places with him. Ira and some of his fellow P.O.W.s fell down through the rubble to the first-floor, breaking his back.  He had extreme pain in his back, later to discover he had two crushed vertebrae and should have been in traction for weeks. But this is war in the enemy’s hands. The other G.I.s forced him to walk. They worried he would be killed rather than cared for if he were left behind.

After waiting almost a week, Ira finally arrived at Limburg and Stalag 12A, Germany’s largest POW camp. One man, a civilian doctor from Poland, imprisoned since 1939, pressed the Germans to move Ira and others to a hospital for better care. But not before each were interrogated.

Ira noticed some of the G.I.s coming out of the interrogation room with cigarettes, rewards for providing useful answers. “If I could’ve stood up straight, I would’ve kicked the kids’ butts for talking.” When his turn came, he didn’t let the interrogator ask a question. Ira rotely gave his name, rank and serial number. But the prodding continued. The guard used information Ira knew to be wrong. Ira said, “If you know all this, why the heck are you asking me?” Ira was released to the infirmary without a cigarette.

Once he recovered, Ira become sociable with a German guard at Stalag 12A. With Ira’s Pennsylvania ‘Dutch’ and the guard’s ‘Deutsch,’ the two were able to talk, often times chiding each other. The guard would say how much better the German planes or tanks were, but for want of ‘benzene,’ Germany would command the field. To this Ira replied, “Tough.”

The fatherly guard even took Ira’s empty lighter home with him at night to fill. Eventually, the guard began making daily reports about the approaching Allied forces. Then, one morning, the P.O.W.s awoke unguarded within the locked gates. Soon they heard the sounds of American tanks and jeeps, leading to their liberation and Ira’s encounter with General Leonard.

Upon returning home, Ira recuperated at Valley Forge Hospital and was told how lucky he was to heal as he did and certainly lucky to be walking at all. The bones had fused together by themselves under inhospitable treatment. A recent bone scan didn’t reveal any old trauma, though his current posture has a hint of a question mark shape.

Ira returns “home” from the war, settling in Allentown and working at the Trojan dynamite factory near Greenawalts. He raised a daughter and son, retired at 63, and is now surrounded by many grandchildren. He later learned the sheriff who bought the farm from his half-brother, sold it for $60,000 sometime after the war.  Years later, when Ira's half-brothers were infirm and had no other family to care for them, it was Ira who saw that they were shaved and comfortable.  This I learned from Ira's daughter.

I first called Ira ten years ago. And through those years, I discovered his was not your typical life story. The unexpected turns, the insults, the friendly fired injuries from both home and abroad could have filled any man with bitterness. What I hear from him is different. In the affable ease of this straight talking Dutchman I hear unexpected treasures of contentment. His tune whistled like a man who lived and lives a happy, healthy life.

Ira Smith passed away May 13, 2011 after a short struggle with a broken hip from a fall at his home.  He was 91.


Sunday, March 28, 2010

Shoving the Joy Away from the Table...Place Your Hope in the Bells

(Part two of three:)
Pull and pull the sleeve, expose the watch, watch him with care,

Stab the air, tickle with thrusts, tickle in blank death’s air,
Live lovingly out, live, contest, love without,
He loves he thinks, he loves in the least, loves those least who sit at the feast,
He indeed needs so deeply, he indeed feels love in the least,
Rudely he points, points and he shucks, he thrusts, points, and drones,
Shoving the joy away from the table, he shucks, thrusts, and moans.

Let the will form, its own little chamber, futile red lub-dub,
The will of the blood, ba-dumm, tun-tumm, red blood lub-dub,
Let will help the flow, in blood, lub-dub it flows,
Bells sound the joy, a futile tun-tumm of hope, sweet hope,
Mouth full of hope, ‘til hope a’flutters a tin lope-dope,
With teeth set on teeth, ring folly the folly foretells,
Place your hope, all of your hope, place it in the bells.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Fertile the Folly of Blunders that Settle in Slow

(First of three parts:)

Fertile the folly of blunders that settle in slow,
Limber the folly flows to tucked virgins’ toes,
One slow row, in low cold water will hasten the flow,
Into the creeks to fill and seep, fill and filter down,
Wearing it down, slow it down, wearing the slow flow down,
Slow the flow of low cold water, over the one slow row,
Hasten and sew, sew a few buttons but save,
Save all the clear buttons to seal up the grave.

Machten the sheissen, makin’ it tougher, to toughen will make it fit,
Just makin’ tough scheissen, the sheissen is it.
In scarlet in color, your love lies inert,
Devour the color and cover in dirt.
Live in deep in cluttered life cadence,
He takes down a life, to one slow roll,
He eats less, yes he lives longer, yes on and onward entreats,
Enrolls, entreats those in seats, entreats all those who eat.

(Part two tomorrow...)

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Discovering Family

Zaleschitz's Silk Mill - Where Leroy was killed 1910

Some of my fondest memories of growing up were the memories my grandmother shared with me. Her seemingly disconnected and at times contradictory stories, often left me with more questions than answers.

Everyone has special memories of their grandparents, but I believe that I was truly blessed to know my grandmother “Mammy,” Mary Strauch Rabenold. Not only did she share stories of her upbringing in 1880s Carbon County, but more importantly, she inspired a curiosity in me to learn more.

I’d hear things like, “Poor Leroy was only fifteen, when the shuttle on the loom struck him on the head and killed him.” In my mind, the ghostly vacant silk and weaving mills in Lehighton and Jim Thorpe came back to life to me. But just as the story began to form, she’d switch gears saying, “And your grandfather was raised by a one-armed Civil War veteran in Mahoning Valley.”

How could that be? Where were his parents? “They farmed him and his sister out.” Then it was, “Oh poor Jenny was killed by a trolley at Glen Onoko at a Sunday School picnic.”

Rapidly shifting gears and forgetting to clutch, she’d take off with, “Your grandfather, Zach Rabenold, was a servant to the sheriff in the county jail.” I thought you said he lived in the Mahoning Valley with that Civil War guy?

These unresolved conflicting stories remained as lingering questions until Jack Sterling, former president of the Mauch Chunk Historical Society, found the 1900 census records showing Zach as the servant of a Mr. Jonathan Gombert. Gombert had a farm in Mahoning Valley. In 1861, he enlisted in Company “G” of the 81st Pennsylvania Regiment, losing his right arm at the battle of Antietam in 1862.

But how did Zach get to the jail? Betty Lou McBride, owner of the Old Jail Museum in Jim Thorpe explained that Gombert was the Sheriff of the county jail from 1900 to 1903.

These nuggets of information prompted me to travel to Lehigh University, where my great uncle Carl Strauch, Mammy’s youngest brother, was a professor from 1934 to 1974. Upon his death, he bequeathed his written works to the Linderman Library.

Among the collection are his unique notes, manuscripts, first-hand accounts from Thoreau and Emerson, a letter from Orson Welles, and references to friendships with Robinson Jeffers and H.L. Mencken. It contained a treasure-trove of family letters that helped connect Mammy’s stories, giving them a rich mosaic with color and emotional depth.

Among the collection, I discovered a set of letters from our distant family in Germany, including correspondence with Else Adolph of Friedberg Germany, the future Mrs. Otto Muller. Could Else and Otto still be alive and living at the same address?


I sent off a letter. A few weeks later, I received a letter from Else Muller. She and Otto, both 82, were doing fine. I learned how my great aunt Elizabeth Strauch, endured great pains to reconnect with her family in shattered Germany after the war, sending her family “very precious care packages that were not very cheap.”

My Aunt Elizabeth, whom I never met, helped her struggling cousins in Germany, whom she never met. Because of her graciousness, there’s a sweet six-year-old granddaughter of Else and Otto Muller, named Elizabeth—after her distant American cousin whom she never met.
Caroline "Lena" (she died of TB shortly after this photo was taken), Heinrich, Carl (the youngest in the front), sister Anna Margaret (behind Carl), then mother Anna Margaret (Foesch) and Elizabeth "Lizzie."  Back row is Henry, Leonard, Kate (who married Floyd Harrier), Louie, Willy, Mary, and Edwin.

It was then, as if some tattered pieces of a fine lace were miraculously rejoined, when several generations of Strauchs were connected in a new web of human of understanding.

Else (Adolph) Muller was an English teacher in Germany.


Post Note:
After eight short months and a few letters retracing some vague family connections, I was sad to receive a letter from Else Adolph Muller's daughter Hanna, who fortunately found my letters and took the time to regretfully inform me of her mother's passing.

According to Hanna, a few months before her death Else selected the following poem from Gertrud von le Fort.  It is loosely translated by Hanna:

"Do not welcome me
When I am arriving
Do not bid me farewell
When I am leaving.
For I am coming
Whenever I am coming
And I am leaving
Whenever I am leaving."

Monday, March 22, 2010

"Dents and Scratches - My Life in Rhyme" Complete by Ronald Rabenold

Not too deep within our skin, seamless stuff we’ve all taken in.

Things that made you, made me, and these bystanders between.
I mean, we all have dents and scratches, strains to surmount,
We just don’t know how, they’ll work themselves out.

Little impressions become expressions, like the mess I made in the second grade.
At our store, stuck my thumb, one by one, red ripe tomatoes, oh the fun!
Why did I do it? “What have you done?”
My moment of truth, my lies had begun.

What got in her head, and led Sue Butchko to eat,
Those round rabbit droppings, she brought back to her seat?
“None for me, thanks for the offer.”
Taken in, how did it alter?
How did my mocks, hurt and pock?
Could she shove it back, push it off with a grin?
Did she take it deep in, or just in her skin?

How deep was my action, to think of dear Charlie, in cheap satisfaction?
One day I delayed, walked home with a cupcake, I had put away.
His smiling didn’t slow down my try, sure and swift, stuck it right in his eye!
Why would I shove it so hard? We loved that knock-kneed crossing guard.
There are wonders in the stuff we thrust upon those who trust in us.
How does it feel, as the truth lies, apart, asunder, a’bust?



Once again Charlie took it hard, missed his dear Barbie, he let down his guard,
Helpless, the frozen panic, the blood in the street, that truck just struck! Sent her twenty-five feet!
Holding that drunk, alone in my eyes, I watched from the curb, his pus-gut rise.
What was the harm? We shared just one breath.
What drove him so far? What was the welcome he got at the bar?
She recovered, ailing all summer, the mulish grace the impact could not erase,

Though sad to see, her gleam it seemed, now washed from her face.
As the look of Tex, a doggone, far gone look of calm, he, my meat-end vagabond,
His face, a mix of power and pain, with surrender above, simmered fire below, his smoldered strain, a lone sparrow in the rain.
Going nowhere, in his ’63 Valiant, silence, blank stares, are the moments we shared.
Lit beneath ivory gold skies, I’d watch him a’rope, plastic ponies in the rye.
Each day I’d want more, to connect with ol’ Tex,
‘Til the day, sitting still without snore, impressions to take from him no more.
In stilted silence, I wished I’d been there.
When dying alone, who takes in your last stare?



Memories, like people there for the taking, some get recalled, others forsaken,
Like dear Mrs. Weiner, why did we sneak around, why’d we pick your lines to cut down?
No sense, no reason, how did you dry? We never gave pause, did you wonder why?
It was only a game, something made me push, his face to fence to squoosh “Catman” Lusch,
We were just kids with some anger and street hockey sticks, soon he found jams, ones he just couldn’t fix,
His life turned to robbing, found windows to slide in,
Found dear Mrs. Weiner, alone in her bed, in one gutless slash, transformed living to dead.
What runs through your mind, what leaks in the air, when blood, spit and teeth, fill in your last stare?

I was stuck in my life, blurred in feeling, each strife upon strife,
‘Til set up before me, my Mom’s final days, I’d be lucky to gain, some sight from her gaze,
I searched for expressions, one lucid impression, anything, something, just one last connection.
Both struggles and contentments, have long seared my skin,
Lessons now learned and welcomed within.

Ronald Rabenold –

(Author’s note: These stories are true except, one name was changed and though I was mesmerized by Tex and would get him meat ends from the butcher block at our store, we were not that close and to my knowledge he did not die, but lives on with his plastic ponies in fields of rye. We did cut wash lines down at that end of town as part of our late-night mischief and we often played in the pines near Mrs. Weiner’s property, but I can’t say that I ever spoke to the woman while she was alive. And the day Barbie was hit and run at 4th and Coal, I had already passed through hearing about it once I got home. And seven years after losing my temper in that slushy game of street hockey at Third Ward with Eddie Lusch, “Catman” murdered Mrs. Weiner in 1987, in a burglary of her Orioles home. She lies with her husband in the Temple Israel Cemetery.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Drunk Hit and Run and My Old Friend Tex - Part 3 of 4 "Dents and Scratches"

Once again Charlie took it hard, missed his dear Barbie, he let down his guard,
Helpless, the frozen panic, the blood in the street, that truck just struck! Sent her twenty-five feet!
Holding that drunk, alone in my eyes, I watched from the curb, his pus-gut rise.
What was the harm? We shared just one breath.
What drove him so far? What was the welcome he got at the bar?
She recovered, ailing all summer, the mulish grace the impact could not erase,
Though sad to see, her gleam it seemed, now washed from her face.

As the look of Tex, a doggone, far gone look of calm, he, my meat-end vagabond,
His face, a mix of power and pain, with surrender above, simmered fire below, his smoldered strain, a lone sparrow in the rain.
Going nowhere, in his ’63 Valiant, silence, blank stares, are the moments we shared.
Lit beneath ivory gold skies, I’d watch him a’rope, plastic ponies in the rye.
Each day I’d want more, to connect with ol’ Tex,
‘Til the day, sitting still without snore, impressions to take from him no more.
In stilted silence, I wished I’d been there.
When dying alone, who takes in your last stare?

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Rabbit Turds and Other Stuff We Thrust of Those Who Trust...Part 2 of 4: Dents and Scratches

What got in her head, and led Sue Butchko to eat,
Those round rabbit droppings, she brought back to her seat?
“None for me, thanks for the offer.”
Taken in, how did it alter?
How did my mocks, hurt and pock?
Could she shove it back, push it off with a grin?
Did she take it deep in, or just in her skin?

How deep was my action, to think of dear Charlie, in cheap satisfaction?
One day I delayed, walked home with a cupcake, I had put away.
His smiling didn’t slow down my try, sure and swift, stuck it right in his eye!
Why would I shove it so hard? We loved that knock-kneed crossing guard.
There are wonders in the stuff we thrust upon those who trust in us.
How does it feel, as the truth lies, apart, asunder, a’bust?

Friday, March 19, 2010

Dents & Scratches - Part 1 By Ronald Rabenold

Not too deep within our skin, seamless stuff we’ve all taken in.
Things that made you, made me, and these bystanders between.
I mean, we all have dents and scratches, strains to surmount,
We just don’t know how, they’ll work themselves out.

Little impressions become expressions, like the mess I made in the second grade.
At our store, stuck my thumb, one by one, red ripe tomatoes, oh the fun!
Why did I do it? “What have you done?”
My moment of truth, my lies had begun.

(Stay tuned as the saga continues tomorrow!...Some Bat time, same Bat channel!)

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Six Verses of Thoreau Along the Lehigh by Ronald Rabenold

Here's to the Advent of Spring:

Blue and green, white
Contrasts red, black and white
Wind, light and water
Against bough, girded steel and rock

Things are not the same
Paltry puddle against aching thirst
Immoral versus immortal
Colliding visions lifted
Above grassed plain

I know the rock sings
Not the “babbling brook”
The steel does not bend
Yet the light does slant

Sounds carried
Leafed life lifted
Expanding universal law
“Solitude will not be solitude”
Winds will push along
Turning green white

Eternal singing rocks
Tinkering smattering plashing patter
Softening tinkling splashing
Rippling dashing

Alone among amid
Contrasted
Harmony
Colliding adrift
Rigid and free

Saturday, March 13, 2010

How Marauding Indians Built the Pretzel Industry by Ronald Rabenold

Most local Pennsylvanians know a good pretzel. And many here on the Eastern end of the state have made the trip to Litiz, Lancaster County to the oldest pretzel bakery in the nation (world?).
Once there you can still hand twist your own pretzel and have it baked in the original bake oven built by Er Bauet Von Peterkreiter in 1784.

Along the long chain of my whimsical meandering historical readings, I found one newspaper source from the 1970s that claimed Julius Sturgis, who began commercially baking pretzels in 1861, was the great grandson of Joseph Sturgis.

Who was Joseph Sturgis you ask? He was the 17-year-old youth who was the first to jump from the burning roof of the Meeting House during the Gnadenhutten Massacre here in Lehighton on November 24, 1755. (This incident was incited by General Braddock’s defeat from the French at Fort Duquesne in July of 1755.)

The original burial site is beyond between the barn and the tree.





According to the Lehighton Centennial book of 1966, “He leaped to the burning roof and thence to the ground, his hair singed and his cheek bleeding where a rifle ball had grazed it. He escaped, and lived to tell the horrible story for many years later.”

 Many of us around here enjoy a good pretzel. When traveling outside the area, it doesn’t take long to realize the wealth of pretzels we enjoy here. Visiting my brother in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was struck that they only had “Rold Gold” pretzels from Frito Lay.

We have many local companies that make a quality product: Unique Splits and Martins are my top two favorites. There’s also Faller’s, Snyders of Hanover, Utz, Sturgis, Bachman’s and more.  Had Joseph died in those flames, what would have been the impact to the Pennsylvania pretzel industry?

It brings us to the modern day Litiz, Pennsylvania, to the Tom Sturgis Pretzel factory.  It is also interesting to note that the original sturdy Sturgis Bakery was built with heavy wooden doors with iron strap hinges and with cellar windows built with gun slats to wardoff Indian attacks.  I connect in my mind the harrowing experience of a young lad and the accompanying hypervigilance that came in his older age.




Left - The original Sturgis pretzel oven still in use today.
Above, Right - The original Sturgis pretzel bakery from 1861.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Excerpt "How We Start, How We Finish" By Ronald Rabenold

How we start, how we finish,

I’m not sure,
I have no idea when the Seer saw me,
I do know the prickly push I felt when the One Who Shares tried to create an exchange,
I don’t want to be that Pantheist, who curses the rain with the wind.
Struggle and contentment need not oppose the Woman Ironing,
I prefer the human still life, to be touched by the upturned corner of her mouth...

...To randomly accept it, and the astonishing speckled sparkles of the greasy Starling.
I can’t decide upon the will in it, or the resigned settling, the deference.
Can we settle on the faults, exult defeats, or do we just sneer our knowing sneers,
At the sinewy desires of the circling zeitgeist?
I want to try it, let me wobble without those wheels.
Let this generation “go forth,” three more times, to complete the migration.
Can we start and finish together, start again, finish again, start then finish together?

Even the greasy starling can do that.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Mount Pisgah and the Switchback Railroad - My Sunday Hike

I simply love this area.  Its rich history makes for a beautiful place to live and play.  And with warmer air and higher light, what better place to take a late winter's hike, as I did today.  (Check out my YouTube video from opposing mountain...Mount Pisgah plane is quite visible http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJGSv-d947M .)

 
When you reflect on the importance of this area in fueling America’s industrial revolution, on the backs and ingenuity of Josiah White, Erskine Hazard and later, Asa Packer, you learn to appreciate this place we live even more. To take in some of the same views they did, you can perhaps have a little inspiration of your own.

One amazing piece of our history is The Switchback Railroad. It was one of a kind. Not only was it key in delivering coal, but it also became our nation’s second biggest tourist attraction behind Niagara Falls.  It is also said to be the first man-made contrivance to excede 55 miles per hour and has been cited as the inspiration for the rollercoaster.
President Uylsses S Grant and Thomas Edison were said to have traveled here to ride it. Today, expert mountain bikers ride it for some of the same thrills as years ago.

Empty coal cars were pulled up the Mt Pisgah plane. Cresting the top, they would traverse this trestle as they began their descent down the other side to reach the base of Mt. Jefferson at Summit Hill. Again the cars are pulled atop another plane, that of Mt Jefferson, then filled with their cargo and sent down the eight mile gravity journey to Mauch Chunk. There, coal was sent down chutes over what is today Route 209, and filled the awaiting Canal Boats on the Lehigh Canal. Later, Packer’s Lehigh Valley Railroad took over the bulk of the coal transport.

(Pictures: Above, Mt Pisgah trestle long ago, Below: the same site today)


Mt Pisgah is one of the key vistas of Carbon County.  A must for anyone visiting our county.  You gotta love this place! 

Check out these sites for more of a flavor of the history and character of Carbon County:





Saturday, March 6, 2010

Tonight Your Hell is Broken - by Ronald Rabenold

Tonight your Hell is broken
from the shards of glass you made
In the space you placed
Between you and your life
Your self-made comfort
could be predicted
Farther you dig
sharper it gets urges taking you deep
swimming through shards
See light along edges
through possible angles
Strokes become short
see how you’ll die
Sidestep
Go forth
Live alluded certainty
fate still certain
this weight your burden
Without digging you’re drowning
Enjoy the folly
Stack up stack glass
stack up against it
stack it pitch on
against the light.

Sometimes I gather and
Sometimes I stand in starkness.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Early Hydroelectric Power 1890s

Before the Auto became the desired and more affordable form of transportation, the Inter-Urban Trolleys rolled from town to town, to areas not serviceable by train lines.  And because the modern-day Powergrid was yet to be invented, the Trolley companies had to provide their own electric.  Lehighton was connected by Trolley from 10th St & Mahoning Sts, at the Main Gate of the Fair, and up over the Ukrainian Homestead, winding up the side of the mountain to Flagstaff, and connecting to the otherside with the Swicthback Railroad.  The Lehighton Tracks also went down to First Street to service passengers to and from the Lehigh Valley Train Station.  This hydroelectirc turbine was recovered from the Lehigh River near Jim Thorpe by John Drury, President of the Mauch Chunk Museum and Cultural Center.  You can stop there and ask Mr. Drury more of this interesting age.  

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Greed and Zealousy - The Recluse of Gnaden Hutten










Greed and Zealousy by Ronald Rabenold

A small patch of land was the center of it. A society was formed on it and out of it, a recluse found her life in it and her death away from it. James Fenimore Cooper came to the Moravian Library to study it. The profiteers then captured it, to set their monuments to the sky upon it.
The spiritually connected Leni-Lenape, lived here first, followed by the Iroquois who claimed tribute from it. Thomas Penn in turn, coveted and squeezed it, creating the “Walking Purchase” to steal it. His hoax of a deed in 1737, called for a ‘walk for a day and a half’ to measure the land, that he said the Leni-Lenape leaders agreed to cede many years before.
The greed turned the walk into a run, with Edward Marshall’s hike ironically ending just north of Jim Thorpe’s present-day grave. The character in Cooper’s novel “Deerslayer,” who seeks asylum from Native retribution in a tomb-like stone home in the middle of a lake, is based on Marshall’s life.
Thus this land was already tainted when Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf led his Moravians here in 1746 to cleanse the ‘dirty souls’ he sought. Eight years of peaceful missionary zeal, ended with Native retribution, eleven Moravians dying amid flames they hoped to eternally avoid.
This is a copy of the lithograph
Frederica Misca was said
to have been selling.  She is pictured
in the foreground, with the church she
envisioned and the smoldering
wreckage of Zinzendorf's
settlement.  High above, all concerned
in Heaven look on favorably of
her pursuit.
That was just the sort of martyrdom to inspire the pioneer woman, some say recluse, Lady Frederica Misca to seek her solace, some say her con, on this ground in 1830. She subscribed $500 from the Moravians to build a church, and another $500 selling lithographs that depicted her above the burning ruins of the massacre site, then disappeared, some say murdered and robbed near Harrisburg, some say she lived to enjoy the fruits of deceit elsewhere.
But she did make provisions.  Her efforts weren't in vain.  A deal was struck for the land.  It was deeded to the “Society of the United Brethren for Propagating the Gospel among the Heathen,” then to a Mr. George Douglas, who deeded it to the First Presbyterian Church of Mauch Chunk, helping to build that congregation's first church as well as a later one in Lehighton.  In 1872 these “Gnadenhutten Lands,” the old “Moravian Cemetery” became the property of the “Lehighton Cemetery” next door, which was formerly the first site of the Lehighton Fair Grounds, a horse track for the laying of bets.
The first Board of Directors of the Lehighton Cemetery was composed of men of means and self-made wealth. Among them, General Charles Albright served here after his Civil War campaigns but before his war against the Molly Maguires. Thomas Kemerer was President, Frederick Brinkman served as Treasurer, and A.S. Christine was secretary.  And among this mounmental field they created,   among the high obelisks, sets there today, pointing high, the finger of the Lady of Eternal Peace herself. She stands alone, above board member and the disciplined meat-packer, Joseph Obert’s grave, pointing with hope, for final redemption.

Monday, March 1, 2010

A Human Floor?

http://www.jimthorpeburlesque.com/
Don't miss the Burlesque Festival at the Mauch Chunk Museum and Cultural Center
March 27th-28th
See a Man buried in 3000lbs and Dirt and Walk all Over!
Broadway, Jim Thorpe