I
grew up a mile south of Belsano near the intersection of South
Street and Red Mill Road. My first school, for grades one through
four, was the two-room Belsano School, a two-story building with
a classroom and a restroom on each floor; first and second grades
and the boys' room were on the first floor; third and fourth grades
and girls' room were on the second. Mrs. Margaret Drolet taught
the first two grades when I was there. She was a white-haired
kindly lady nearing retirement. Mrs. Helen Brown, stricter, taller,
and younger by a decade or two, taught the upper grades. The school
had a large playground and on freezing days our joy was turning
icy patches into skating trails which we could run to and skate
down in our clodhopper leather shoes, or if it was snowing, our
rubber boots.
Belsano
had two churches, the Methodist attended by the “upper crust”
(as we thought at the time) on the east side and the Evangelical
United Brethren attended by the working class and German-descended
residents, including my mother, brother Gary and me, on the west
side. Once a week we got out of school to attend “released
time religious studies” at the Methodist Church, which was
the only time I attended it (except for a brief stint in the Boy
Scouts which met there and for Janice Williams' funeral when I was
in high school). I won the essay contest on “What
the Bible Means to Me” conducted through the released-time
class. I wasn't fazed by it at the time, but it was the first recognition
that I might have some writing aptitude. The prize was three wonderful
books—the “Bee”
series—which I still fondly remember reading.
One of my Belsano memories, which
I've often looked back upon as kind of an epiphany—a first
glimmer of self-awareness, though I've never known why—was
walking home from school in third or fourth grade on the Wednesday
afternoon before Thanksgiving. I usually rode the bus home from
the Belsano school but walked that day because we were let out early
but would have a longer wait for the bus. I don't remember what
I thought about on the walk, but I remember that for one of the
first times in my life I was thinking rather than just letting myself
daydream.
I
also remember one year many of us, maybe the whole third and fourth-grade
class room, went out into the woods to get a Christmas tree. It
must have been both classes, because it was Lynn Woodling who carried
the tree back to the school. Lynn was older than I was so he wouldn't
have been at the school when I was in fourth grade. I remember him
because he, being the biggest boy in the school, had carried me
home from school with a sprained ankle once. And he was somehow
a relative of my sister-in-law, the former Sally White. But I digress.
One
of the most indelible memories of Belsano School is the day one
of my classmates, Clair Crawford, was running near a school bus,
skidded on shale and slid under a back wheel of the bus, and got
run over. His thigh was crushed and he was hospitalized for what
seems in retrospect like many weeks. Though his mother and he were
also regulars at the EUB Church and I knew who he was from that
connection, it wasn't until after he came back to school that we
became close friends and were pals for the next three or four years.
It was ironic that he got run over by a bus because, as I recall,
his father had earlier been killed by being hit by a train in Nanty
Glo.
Belsano
is also remembered for wonderful, colorful parades on Memorial Day
and the Fourth of July. I never thought about it at the time, but
the reason surely was that it was the site of both still-in-current-use
Protestant cemeteries for the township. The part the neighborhood
boys and I played at the holidays was decorating our bikes in crepe
paper and riding them up and down the street, a federal highway
closed to traffic for Belsano's parade! Imagine! Later, in junior
high and high school, I would have to play in the band for the parades,
and I never liked that much. It was too much confinement for a holiday.
I
remember Mert Edwards and his general store. There were two stores
at the time. Ward Adams' store was fairly up to date and included
the village post office. It was the “normal”
store. Mert's store was by comparison old-fashioned, with a genuine
pot-belly stove, a spittoon or two, and cracker barrels...well,
they were probably nail barrels, I don't remember ever really seeing
crackers in a barrel. It smelled like Pepsi Cola and a boy couldn't
go in there without wanting to buy a seven-cent bottle of Pepsi.
Mert was an old man when I first knew him, constantly humming if
I remember correctly, and after he died his son, Jesse Edwards,
who was about the same age as my parents, kept the store open in
the evenings, I think just for nostalgia's sake and for some place
to socialize with the community. Jesse Edwards was Belsano's most
successful denison, as the teller (and eventually its vice president)
of the Nanty Glo bank, and when I was writing for the Ebensburg
paper, he and I got acquainted. But this reminiscence is already
longer than I'd planned, so I'll have to do another
on my later memories of Belsano, on Edwardses' store and the
Philbricks' Pinehurst Restaurant.
