were going up for the immigrant workers flooding in, the Irish, Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Slavs, Greeks.
For fifty years Hoadley experienced unparalleled prosperity and appalling poverty. There were twelve tailors in what had once been the place where the road crossed the creek, and twenty barbers, and doctors and lawyers building great gingerbreaded houses on the hillsides only a little below the mansions of mine owners. In the row houses down below the tracks, down by the sulfurous stream, where the black bony piles shut out the air, lived the coal minersâ women, the dun-skinned women the ânativesâ called âforeigners,â barefoot women who sometimes out of desperation ended or hid their pregnancies, strangled their newborns, entombed tiny tan bodies in the walls.
Then the many-branched deep mines reached the end of the coal. And the mine barons moved out of the mansions on the hilltops, leaving behind miles of rusting railroad, acres of slag, row on row of sparrow-brown mine town houses beneath hills scrubby with second-growth woods. Trout Creek, orange and lifeless with acid mine runoff. The waterfall and the gorge, junked with discarded machinery. The air, polluted enough to turn even new-fallen snow black with the smoke from the steel mills roaring farther down the valley.
Then the steel mills closed also, and the air, sullied only by house coal, was somewhat cleaner again (though not the earth or the creek), and half the row houses in Hoadley were boarded up and empty, and the people who remained supped deep of the mysteries of Unemployment Compensation and Welfare and Food Stamps and Government Surplus Cheese. There was a flood like the wrath of God, coming to wash the refuse out of Trout Creek gorge. A dead baby floated down the bloated stream. The people who remained in Hoadley learned the ways of the Red Cross and Federal Disaster Aid. Rebuilding, they went about their business with cautious eyes and no poetry in their souls, not daring to hope in anything. These were the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of the Irish and Italian and Polish and Lithuanian and Slavic miners. Some few were the Pennsylvania German descendants of the the original settlers, and went to the Lutheran and Brethren churches instead of the many Roman Catholic ones, and gave themselves airs. But they all remembered a time when men had worked twelve hours a day in the dark and couldnât ever get ahead of the Godawful gouging rent, the constant debt at the overpriced company store. They remembered men dying under the guns and clubs of strikebreakers. They remembered men going berserk and killing their wives, each other, their babies. They remembered all the babies dead, the stillborn and those who lived a few days or years, all the little ones for whom there was seldom milk and sometimes no bread.
Much evil had been done in Hoadley.
A council of such cautious-eyed citizens met the fourth Thursday of May: the borough council sat at its regular monthly meeting. Seven men, mostly substantial and oviform, and two high-coiffed women in rhinestoned glasses sat around the long table. One of the women took notes. All church councils, school boards, library boards and such governing bodies in Hoadley had to include at least one woman to be secretary. Men, apparently, did not know how to write minutes, though they sometimes made coffee.
A motion had been proposed that an ordinance should be formulated to ban pit bull terriers from the borough. No one in the area owned such an animal, nor to any council memberâs knowledge did anyone in Hoadley plan to own a pit bull terrier, but a council has to have something to do at its monthly meetings. The motion had opened a far-ranging discussion on dogs and dog ownership, and the council was discussing the banning of chronically barking dogs, and how many woofs over what period of time defined the term ânuisance barking,â when council president
For fifty years Hoadley experienced unparalleled prosperity and appalling poverty. There were twelve tailors in what had once been the place where the road crossed the creek, and twenty barbers, and doctors and lawyers building great gingerbreaded houses on the hillsides only a little below the mansions of mine owners. In the row houses down below the tracks, down by the sulfurous stream, where the black bony piles shut out the air, lived the coal minersâ women, the dun-skinned women the ânativesâ called âforeigners,â barefoot women who sometimes out of desperation ended or hid their pregnancies, strangled their newborns, entombed tiny tan bodies in the walls.
Then the many-branched deep mines reached the end of the coal. And the mine barons moved out of the mansions on the hilltops, leaving behind miles of rusting railroad, acres of slag, row on row of sparrow-brown mine town houses beneath hills scrubby with second-growth woods. Trout Creek, orange and lifeless with acid mine runoff. The waterfall and the gorge, junked with discarded machinery. The air, polluted enough to turn even new-fallen snow black with the smoke from the steel mills roaring farther down the valley.
Then the steel mills closed also, and the air, sullied only by house coal, was somewhat cleaner again (though not the earth or the creek), and half the row houses in Hoadley were boarded up and empty, and the people who remained supped deep of the mysteries of Unemployment Compensation and Welfare and Food Stamps and Government Surplus Cheese. There was a flood like the wrath of God, coming to wash the refuse out of Trout Creek gorge. A dead baby floated down the bloated stream. The people who remained in Hoadley learned the ways of the Red Cross and Federal Disaster Aid. Rebuilding, they went about their business with cautious eyes and no poetry in their souls, not daring to hope in anything. These were the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of the Irish and Italian and Polish and Lithuanian and Slavic miners. Some few were the Pennsylvania German descendants of the the original settlers, and went to the Lutheran and Brethren churches instead of the many Roman Catholic ones, and gave themselves airs. But they all remembered a time when men had worked twelve hours a day in the dark and couldnât ever get ahead of the Godawful gouging rent, the constant debt at the overpriced company store. They remembered men dying under the guns and clubs of strikebreakers. They remembered men going berserk and killing their wives, each other, their babies. They remembered all the babies dead, the stillborn and those who lived a few days or years, all the little ones for whom there was seldom milk and sometimes no bread.
Much evil had been done in Hoadley.
A council of such cautious-eyed citizens met the fourth Thursday of May: the borough council sat at its regular monthly meeting. Seven men, mostly substantial and oviform, and two high-coiffed women in rhinestoned glasses sat around the long table. One of the women took notes. All church councils, school boards, library boards and such governing bodies in Hoadley had to include at least one woman to be secretary. Men, apparently, did not know how to write minutes, though they sometimes made coffee.
A motion had been proposed that an ordinance should be formulated to ban pit bull terriers from the borough. No one in the area owned such an animal, nor to any council memberâs knowledge did anyone in Hoadley plan to own a pit bull terrier, but a council has to have something to do at its monthly meetings. The motion had opened a far-ranging discussion on dogs and dog ownership, and the council was discussing the banning of chronically barking dogs, and how many woofs over what period of time defined the term ânuisance barking,â when council president
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