Jon Kennedy, Nanty Glo Home Page webmaster and owner, is a former teen and campus minister. He began his journalism career as teen columnist for the Nanty Glo Journal and its sister weekly newspapers from 1957 to '62 and became the Journal's third editor in 1962 at age 20. He has edited other newspapers and magazines, and more recently, webzines, ever since. His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Christianity Today, and many other publications. His Jonals appear here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

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Jon Kennedy's latest book is The Everything Guide to C.S. Lewis and Narnia, now in stores, from Adams Media, F&W Publications. From May 9, 2007 through July 2, 2008 his blog entries or "Jonals" were articles inspired by readings in Lewis's work that didn't fit into the book. Click here for a list of all articles in the C.S. Lewis Overflow series. The book is available for purchase in support of the Liberty Museum in Nanty Glo and is also available on Amazon.

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Fifth grade at Blacklick Township High School

Jonal entry 1103 | July 1 2009

Some memories of growing up in Blacklick Township - 1952.

Belsano School was one of three elementary schools in Blacklick township, the other two being in Cardiff and Twin Rocks. The school in Twin Rocks, formally named Big Bend School, was actually a first- through eighth-grade school. (Big Bend had been an alternate early name of the town, or of a section of it; it seemed a common practice to have multiple names for coal towns and often the U.S. Post Office made the final decision on the name.) Twin Rocks was the largest town in the township, seemingly close to Vintondale in population, with two rooms at Big Bend School allotted to each of the sixth through eighth grades and one room for grades one through five.

The single-room grades served only Twin Rocks and nearby school children. The double-room grades had one room for the “town kids” and another room for the “bus kids” of that grade. Since both Belsano and Cardiff had first- through fourth-grade schools, the fifth graders, once they got through either of those schools, had no school to go to. So the school district administrators, noticing that one of only two second-floor classrooms in the high school building was not needed for any high school class, designated it the fifth grade classroom for Belsano and Cardiff school graduates.

Thus I came to go to high school at age 10. And this was a good thing because the high school was only a mile from our farm, at the point where Red Mill Road begins, little more than a half mile from Belsano to the north and about the same distance to the first houses in Twin Rocks to the south. There was probably a rule against riding bikes to school (doing so would have been very dangerous for any pupils coming from the Cardiff area and allowing some but not others was probably considered bad policy). So even though it was only a mile from home and my bicycle was my main mode of local transportation then, I had to ride the bus to school, making the distance almost twice as long and including a route transfer at Belsano school. And of course some months every winter there high in the Allegheny Mountains have no days on which riding a bike would be possible.

Though we were in classrooms in the same building, the fifth graders and high school students had very little contact. We still had morning and afternoon short recesses on the schoolground but high school students did not, of course, and during the lunch hour we were confined to a small area of the grounds, which was specified out of bounds for the high schoolers.

Interestingly, however, my brother Gary was now a high school freshman, so this was the only year that we attended the same school. And understandably Gary, who was loathe to speak to me when we were at home, was even less so thus inclined if he saw me at school. But some of his friends—I especially remember Johnny Hertzog—came to know I was Gary's brother—they had given him the nickname “Scott” by this time so I was “Scott's brother”—and seemed to take a liking to me. Johnny, something of an artist, used to draw war comics that he would have Gary bring to me at home, even after I was past fifth grade.

—Webmaster Jon Kennedy

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