ROCKIN' AT ROCK SPRINGS PARK

 The folks who really knew me early on said that I took after the McCloskey side of family, especially 

in the looks, that I took after my grandfather, William McCloskey.  This clan originally hailed from the 

Johnstown, Pa area.  We had relatives who died in the Johnstown Flood and who fought for the Union at 

Gettysburg.  My grandfather and his wife Mary Pearl Angus McCloskey had two daughters: my mother 

Elmina and her older sister Evelyn.  Together the two McCloskey girls would go on to bear 12 girls and 

two boys.  I suspect the reason everyone in this clan said I resembled my grandpa was because I was a 

male.

            

From left to right: Auntie Evelyn Lawrence, Sharon Lawrence, Grandma McCloskey, Elmina Petras

        Anyhow, every summer my Uncle Ray and Aunt Evelyn loaded up their bus (they had ten of the 14 

kids) and met us up at Rock Springs Amusement Park in Chester, West Virginia for rides and a picnic.  

Auntie Evelyn made the best potato salad ever, Pennsylvania Dutch style. The kiddie rides at Rock 

Springs were pretty memorable, too.

        

Safely landed, with sister Elaine as navigator.

    During my kiddy ride days, my Aunt Evelyn was still a few kids shy of having a full battalion.  

Cousin Richard was six years older than I, and I had always hoped mom and Auntie would someday 

pop out a boy whom I could beat up.  I was five when my parents brought home my third and youngest sister, 

Elaine, whose introduction to me was pretty much summed up by my house-welcoming to her: “Oh, no, not 

another dumb girl!”

            “Auntie,” by the way, is a term of endearment of the mountain folk of Pennsylvania Dutch.  On the Petras—Slovak—side we always said “Aunt.”

           

Judy and I sharing a boat at Rock Springs

 The kiddie rides at Rock Springs were especially memorable, thanks to my family’s passing down tales through the generations of the horrors that had befallen them at Johnstown.  And it all started because of an earthen dam upstream constructed by rich people,  like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. Because of this catastrophe, my mom never trusted anything put together by man.  When we rode the tethered airplanes at Rock Springs, Mom expressed her concerns that their cables would snap and fling us back to Johnstown.  Mom equally voiced her fears that the kiddie boats would sink and we would drown like Great Aunt Auntie Suzanne Buck, the kiddie cars would crash and give you seven kinds of whiplash.  As far as the mammoth wooden wonder, the Cyclone Roller Coaster went, you could get stampeded to the size of an Amish throw rug just by standing in line.

            Probably the kiddy ride I remember the most in my kiddy days was the Ferris wheel. Rock Springs smelled like buttered popcorn and cotton candy.  And I could smell these sweet aromas as I wheeled around and around, listening to the calliope of the merry-go-round and the laughter and screams on the big boy rides. Suddenly I stopped wheeling around and my carriage, with me still inside it, stopped at the tip top.  And I started thinking about Great Auntie Suzanne, how she clung on to that tree branch until her Pennsylvania Dutch grip let go and she was swept away with the raging Little Conemaugh River, and I started trembling and my trembling started rocking the carriage, and I let out a scream, but returned to earth safely, more mature from the firsthand experience,  bearing my park souvenir of electrified white hair.

            

At the top left is our tethered airplane right before its cable snapped and flung us to Johnstown.

The tethered planes platform. sometimes known as the launch pad

       A few years later, I did not think girls were so dumb, just those I was related to.  Near the end of the 

school year, 7^thand 8^thgrade at SC Dennis Junior High would load up the buses and take us to Rock 

Springs Park for the day. I was in Seventh Grade and rode the Cyclone, bumper cars, tilt-a-whirl with a 

pretty blonde eighth-grader Debbie Westlake, and we went on the tunnel of love quite a few times.  I 

even worked up the courage to put my arm around her shoulders. Debbie was my girlfriend that 

summer.

            I really can’t remember any more memorable experiences at Rock Springs after my tunnel-of-love summer.   I remember becoming self-conscious about pimples and nose hair and tattle tell sisters.  But the wildest amusement ride of all is life itself, and my wife Debbie (Minor) and I had our first born, a girl, of course,  in 1976.  Most everyone says Severine looks like me; so she must take after the McCloskey side of the family in the looks department, but not the Johnstown fears.  She, together with our son and their spouses-- Felipe and Brandie --have four girls and two boys.  I believe it’s a good time to endear these beautiful women in the family by calling them Auntie.  

We have enough in the family now to participate in a good go at bumper cars.

            Rock Springs Park closed in 1970, the year before I graduated from Toronto High School.  But every once in a while every summer I go back to Rock Springs for a spin or two in the front car of my memories.

 

Moments before derailment

            

My last time on a Ferris wheel--ever

Auntie Evelyn on stampede look-out in front of the Cyclone

A BABY BOOMER'S SUMMER DAY

            When I was growing up, my dad worked at Sears and Roebuck.  He didn’t have any stock, but he had a lot of stock sayings.  He especially liked to blurt “money doesn’t grow on trees.”  He blurted “money doesn’t grow on trees” so much I suspected he was hiding something.

            I like to attribute my father’s frugalness to being a child of the Great Depression, as were most of the parents of my generation—the Baby Boomers.  By the way we lived it up back then, you would have thought the Great Depression ended with the landing on the moon. 

            Only rich people had color television sets back in our day.  The average family had one console tv, a monstrous rectangle of wood and plastic that could have been a recycled coffin.  These black-and-white monsters squatted upon the living room floor and received black-and-white transmissions from the lightning -rod antennas snugged to the chimneys, the tines on the antennas with spans as long as the Market Street Bridge.  On a good day, they could pick up fuzzy transmissions clear to western Pittsburgh, depending, of course, upon on how high your house stood on a T-town hill.

            Often, when some neighbor was operating a power tool, the broadcast emitted on your coffin emitted enough static and white squiggly thingies to make your standard RCA casket look like a snow globe.  Other times, the vertical control went bonkers, resulting with a never-ending black-and-white image steadily dripping from top to bottom, a visual torment as excruciating as the infamous Chinese water torture.

            Whenever the vertical took the eternal horizontal, you brought into the living room the little shoe box portable your mom watched game shows and soap operas on and mounted it upon the lifeless snow globe.  Every night, you participated in the family squint fest watching the only channel the rabbit ears would pick up—good, old Channel 9.  The television remote back then consisted of the youngest son, who had to physically hike from the couch to the microscopic tv to turn by hand the volume and blasted vertical control.  Often, he had to hold one of the aerials so that the reception improved.

          

  No one had private swimming pools or jacuzzies in our day, if they did their name was Clampett.  The closet thing that came to a private swimming pool was if you lived within the proximity of a creek and it was dammed and had lazy spills and pools.  We swung into the cool flowing waters of the creeks from monkey vines and had chicken fights and other challenges with our friends while our pop chilled within the shallows of the creek.

            None of us lived in air-conditioned homes back then.  In the Petras manor, we had one condition—“Either stay inside or out,” another stock saying of my dad.  We had screen windows on the house and one fan that was about the size of the box that package the television, the one the size of box the Keds came in.  Whenever a hole developed in one of the window screens, my mom would darn it with a needle and thread.

            Our family cars provided little relief from the summer sun.  On the hottest days, we rolled the windows completely down manually with hand cranks as stubborn as tow truck winches.  For extra BTUs, you would accelerate the MPHs.  Additional climate control could be maintained by moving these little triangle panels of glass in front of the passenger and driver’s windows.  It was only when I was taking Driver’s Ed that I learned these little glass jibs were called “vents,” not “cigarette disposal ports.”

            In a Baby Boomer’s booming day, self-propelled and self-motivated usually resulted from a gentle nudge toward the lawn from a father’s steel-toed work boot.  Steel rule usually awarded lawn care duties to the designated television remote, or so titled at 1017 Biltmore Avenue the “aerial- holding specialist.”

            We indeed had one of those push mowers you sometimes see in a museum.  Our so-called push mower was more like a mush mower because it required to budge it a smidgen the lean and the leg power of an Iditarod sled dog.  The mower paddlewheeled glass clippings, dandelions and dust while chirruping like a Bill Mazeroski baseball card in the spokes of a bicycle.

            After zigzagging swathes of lawn that resembled a cornfield maze, you rewarded yourself with a cool drink from your outside drinking fountain, more commonly known as the garden hose.

            There must have been something rejuvenating about the taste of rubber-flavored water.  We always had plenty of energy remaining for a game of sandlot baseball.  In our day, we didn’t have composite-alloy bats.  “Graphite” we called “lead,” and it was inside our standard number 2 Ticonderoga pencils, and the wood of the pencil was probably the same wood our bats were made from.  If you swung the 28-ounce Ticonderoga bat and connected the hardball smack dab on the trademark, the bat handle would crack and need some repair because we didn’t have extra bats.  We would mummify the bat handle with black electrical tape that we would borrow from some father’s toolbox and use the bat over and over until it was reduced to a mere tent peg.

            The leather from the hardballs would also peel off as would the compressed yarn comprising the ball’s guts.  Again, we would repair it with a generous raveling of borrowed electrical tape.

            On the Baby Boomer sandlot, we did not have batting gloves to reduce the sting of contact with the hardball.  Believe me, hitting a taped-up Spalding with a tape-reinforced 15-inch Louisville Slugger emitted an aftershock you felt clear up to your ears.  To reduce the sting to a mere 5.5 on the Richter scale, we would spit into our palms and rub a generous helping of dirt into them.  Come to think of it, we didn’t do much handshaking after games.

            I like to think I have come a long way from those booming Boomer days.  Now, after a few hours of mowing grass on my John Deere X330, I like to hang out at my pool with a glass of Cabernet.  My wife Debbie says that my wine would best pair with a brown paper bag.  My taste buds have progressed, as well.  I can detect traces of black cherry, chocolate, tobacco, with a very big finish of garden hose.

DOUGHNUTS

DOUGHNUTS

            What I am attempting to write is urban legend, what I remember of Doughnuts.  Not too much to tell, really; not so urban when you consider a town as small as Toronto-- Toronto, Ohio, that is, if I may be so bold to borrow the tease on words from a local cookbook.

            Doughnuts walked in a perpetual stoop, hands folded upon the small of his back, his oversized overcoat swaying from side to side.  You could not see one feature of scenery where he trod, not so much as a flower, a mailbox, a lawn ornament, when you saw Doughnuts walking, you saw only his gait.  Whether he liked it or not, whether he wanted it or not, he commanded attention.

            They said he walked this way because he had spent so much of his life down in the local mines.  Doughnuts had a pair of paws like sledges, forearms and wrists like steel cables, no doubt from picking veins of coal.  His bewhiskered face was as angular and chiseled as the coal veins he hacked daily.

            Or had he been a miner at all?

            There were other rumors about his origins.  The one I heard most and the one making the most sense to this then teenager was Doughnuts held a patented invention for Titanium (Timet today) that made him a millionaire eccentric, our little town version of Howard Hughes.

            The locals said that Doughnuts lived along the riverbank in the company of dogs in the south end.  They also said he walked stooped over because he was always searching for money, a strange habit I thought for a millionaire, but befitting of an eccentric one.

            I encountered Doughnuts only a few times.   I was inside Melhorn’s, sitting upon a red vinyl bar stool sipping on Cokes and puffing on cigarettes with friends.  Doughnuts came in and skulked to the corner booth near the jukebox. Whether music played, I cannot remember, if it did I wouldn’t have heard anyway, his presence commanded that much attention.  The waitress came to him.  He ordered coffee and powered doughnuts.  A couple of minutes later, Lou Melhorn himself brought the man two doughnuts and the coffee pot.  Doughnuts carefully tilted the pot and trickled the steamy coffee into a saucer, not a cup.  He then dipped a powdered doughnut into his coffee, nibbled on it, and then tilted the saucer to his mouth.

            He was British, we decided.  That’s how they drank coffee over there.  We were 12 and 13 and worldly.  Worldly, we watched him dip his doughnuts and sip his coffee, until he finished.  And then he stood, hunkered over and wobbled through the haze of tobacco smoke, out  the door, into the invigorating air, seasoned with coal soot, fly ash, lead fumes and steel dust.  We watched through the big picture window his head hobble by, disappearing south on Trenton Street, then Ohio Route 7, busy with traffic.

            One other time, I encountered the man everyone called Doughnuts, perhaps that same summer of Kool Aid, Melhorn’s Popsicles and filterless cigarettes. 

            One of the Conlon twins accompanied me along the north sidewalk of the Overhead Bridge.  Hardly anyone walked the south side, still to this day.  If you wanted to take the shortcut, you sidled along the concrete base and skipped across the railroad tracks in the cool eternal shadows below, saving you something like 15 to 20 seconds.  Above at the western base of the north sidewalk, we saw Doughnuts heading toward us, a caricature of a man from where we stood, his head seeming directly stemmed to his shoes because of his pronounced stoop.

           

Usually in the Gem City, they name the streets and buildings after someone, someone deceased.  Pretty sure no one in town had bore the surname Overhead.  “Overhead” made more sense when you were taking the 15-second shortcut.

            But we were not taking the 20-second shortcut; we were striding along the side of the sidewalk everybody took, including someone walking stooped over with his hands clasped behind the small of his back.

            Our paths intersected near the top where in my insolence, I said, “How are you doing, Doughnuts?”

            He swiveled his head, his eyes steely and penetrating, “None of your God-damned business how I am doing.”  His voice was like sandpaper, number 2 grit.  It certainly wasn’t High Tea British.

            Another time I saw Doughnuts up close.  I am uncertain what year.  I certainly couldn’t pin a date by his visage.  He was one of those people like your Great Uncle Harry or your afghan-knitting baba, who always looked old, even when they were younger than you in those faded brown vignettes sitting forever with the knickknacks upon the fireplace mantle.  Doughnuts, I had to believe, was born gray on a gray day and swaddled in sandpaper.

            He was part of a crew pouring a sidewalk in a neighbor’s yard on the Federal Street side of the ally, cattycorner from my parents’ home on Biltmore.  Shielded from potential steely rebuke, I spied upon him behind shrubs.  Immediately I lost focus on the other workers and features of the house and yard.  Had a spittoon of gold glistened at the end of the rainbow, I wouldn’t have paid it a glance.  I saw only Doughnuts, his whiskers glistening with sweat.  He worked hard.  He wheeled the wheelbarrow, hoed, shoveled, troweled. He made that concrete lay down like an unruly puppy.  Occasionally, he would stand erect, all six feet of him, to point out some flaw in the concrete that needed attention, and then he would resume his robotic labors. 

            He had what we T-town Hunkies called the Hunky work ethic, although I didn’t know ethic from ethnic, but I did know Doughnuts was one hell of a worker and didn’t stoop because of some physical impairment.

            I would later learn the man I had insolently called “Doughnuts” to his face was actually named Barney and like a large number of T-townies, he was of Eastern European descent, like me.  I would also learn later somehow through the self-awareness that the slow incubation of

 maturity brings, I had stooped lower than the tail of Barney Evanosky’s overcoat and was most deserving of being called a few choice names, the one most salient starting with the letter A and ending in E, and I don’t mean Ace. 

            I did learn Mr. Evanosky wintered in Bergholz and returned every spring to Toronto. I like to think Toronto, Ohio is the center of the Universe. 

            I like to think of him as another colorful character in the history of this colorful city, another gem of the Gem City, and upon a soft windy summer evening, you can smell a trace of powdered sugar in the air and you can hear the steady clomp of invisible footsteps ascending the north sidewalk of the Overhead Bridge, and somehow the surroundings become fuzzy as though you are looking through a time telescope out-of-focus, and all so silent,  and the clomps trickle into the distance while dogs howl in recognition.