Like math, you usually hate or love history. I’m a lover!  Yesterday I got to spend time learning about the history of the slate barons, the founding fathers, of my home town, Slatington.  It was fascinating and I would love to share it with you. But, I also don’t want to put you to sleep. I know many of my readers have never even been to Slatington! So I am going to avoid facts and figures (except this one…Slatington once had over a dozen millionaires) and focus on a few universal concepts that I learned.  Then I would like to quickly share two fascinating stories, of the barons, that could be made into movies!

The first universal concept is that people tend to stick with people that are like themselves.  The Slatington area was a farming community until slate was discovered. When the slate industry moved in, there was a division between the slate people and the farmers. The slate people were Presbyterians and were from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The farmers were Lutherans or other German denominations. There are two major cemeteries in town. Guess what! Fairview was for slate people and Union was for farmers!

The second universal concept is that money talks!  The slate industry had much more money than the farming community did. At one point, they wanted to build a quarry at the site of a small farming community cemetery. Guess who had to dig up and move their loved ones. Whatever the wealthy slate barons wanted, they got.

Here’s an interesting story. Two good friends decided to try their luck in slate. One bought a quarry. The other bought a factory to make roofing slate. The one with the factory made a lot more money than his friend the quarry owner. The quarry owner was jealous, though still wealthy himself. The quarry owner built a thirty room hotel next to the factory owner’s house, blocking the factory owner’s beautiful view and access to the river. The hotel stood vacant for its first thirty years. It was the ultimate spite fence!

Finally a mystery! James Foote was a marketing genius, the Don Draper of his time. He had Slatington slate respected and sold all over the world.  He was responsible for much of the growth of the town.  He was beloved in the community. When he died in 1914, he had what the Slatington News called “the largest funeral ever held in Lehigh County”. But here is the mystery. There is no record of where he is buried, though it almost had to be in the Fairview Cemetery. There is no tombstone to mark his grave.  His wife’s tombstone stands alone. Where is the body of James Foote?

I hope I didn’t bore you with the history stuff.  But you have to admit it is much more interesting than the Pythagorean Theorem. And who cares what x is! I want to know where James Foote is!

Enjoy your day!

Here are some slate barons:

Emma started tenth grade last week and she has been doing a lot of thinking about careers.  She has been, lately, settling on Elementary School Teacher. I think that is a fine choice and she would join the ranks of other elementary school teachers in my family.  I have two nieces, one nephew, and a daughter-in-law, all teaching grade school. They teach in the Northwestern, Panther Valley, Palmerton, and Mahanoy Area school districts.

If you have been reading my blog post for a while you know that I always welcome the chance to get nostalgic. All this recent teacher talk got me thinking of memorable teachers I have had in my past. When I say memorable, I don’t mean good or bad. I just mean that when someone says name some K-12 teachers from your childhood, these are the ones that come to mind.  I am going to mention a few, only from my K-12 days, and try to explain what made them memorable.

Sara Miller, my favorite teacher, is at the top of my list. She was a language teacher at Slatington High School. She was an older woman, never married. She had a cleft palate which made her voice distinctive (language teacher was an interesting choice for her).  I had her for three years of German and two years of Latin. She was also my homeroom teacher for most of the high school years.  I saw her a lot.  To me, she makes the memorable list because she challenged you but also knew when it was time to have fun.  Also, she liked to find, and promote, those with talent, and potential, who weren’t jocks or cheerleaders.

Walter Dorward, my sixth grade teacher, is memorable and was quite a hoot!  Sixth grade was part of elementary school back then so he was our teacher all day long. It was, inarguably, the most fun year of school I ever had! Mr. Dorward probably should have retired  a year or two before he taught our class.  He would sometimes come to school with shaving cream around his ears or on his neck. He didn’t understand the SRA, color coded reading program we were using that year, and we often had to explain it to him.  He didn’t have a lot of class control. But we were basically good kids and didn’t take too much advantage of that. We were able to sneak transistor radios into his class for the arrival of the Beatles to America!

The last one I would like to mention today is Mr. Stettler, Trigonometry teacher. I hated math, I despised Algebra, I abhorred Geometry and I loathed Trigonometry. You would think this class would have faded from my memory for that reason alone.  But Mr. Stettler was distinctive, both in appearance and intelligence. He was a large man, with an extreme PA Dutch accent. He had distinctive phrases he would use to encourage us. He would bet us a blueberry pie or a blueberry sundae that we could get the answer to a particular problem. When he was frustrated with us he used to call us members of the IWW (a union at that time), but he called us the I Won’t Works.  But he cared about all of us, even those of us who didn’t care that X=7.  I can honestly say I know no trigonometry to this day, nor have I ever had the need to use it.  But, as a teacher who cared, Mr. Stettler remains memorable. We dedicated our high school yearbook to him.

I could go on and on about teachers I have had. I guess that just shows how important teachers are in our lives.  I hope that this post makes you think of teachers from your past. If it does, I hope you can look back and smile.

Have a wonderful week! If you are in the path of Florence I hope you are safe. Florence is supposed to bring lots of rain and flooding to the Lehigh Valley on Monday. After that, maybe we will see the sun. Remember what that looks like?

 

Does it sound like a political rant is coming? Not really, because I promised to keep politics out of my blog.  This is more about the importance of being active in the issues and events that affect our lives.  There is no left and right in that. It’s just, be aware and do something with your awareness.

Doesn’t this look like a beautiful town? It’s Slatington, of course, back in the day. It’s a picture of the “uptown” taken from the “downtown”.  It was posted on Facebook by the Slatington History Preservation Committee. There were many comments, mostly asking for identification of the buildings or the location of the camera. But one comment stood out to me. Someone said something like “looks like a nice town to live in, not the garbage dump the town is today”. WTH!! I couldn’t let that comment pass with out a reply. I told the commenter “to be a part of the solution. Run for Borough Council”.  I heard nothing in reply. I didn’t expect to. It’s too easy just to complain.

I get it. I served some time on borough council a few decades ago. It’s a pain in the ass, part-time job, with minimal dollars and no respect! But you know what? A borough council is necessary. If not for a few dedicated individuals, the town would collapse into disrepair and anarchy.  But you don’t have to even be a council member to help.  There are many other ways to continue to improve the town.   Calling it a garbage dump and then doing nothing is not a way to help.

I am guessing that other small towns face this same dilemma.  But here is a rather sad story to illustrate that Slatington may have the worst case of an apathetic citizenry. A few years back, in an attempt to be funny, a group of citizens strongly pushed a write-in campaign for mayor. Unfortunately, the person they chose to promote was a well-known mentally challenged man.  You could argue that they were taking an active part, but no, not really.

Apathy is a problem nationally as well. We have a dismal percentage of people who vote. There is a famous quote “people get the government they deserve”.

A bit of a downer of a post today so let me end with a report on a really fun part of yesterday’s George reunion:  Bumper cars…with almost every attendee participating!

Today is the George Family Reunion at Knoebbels’s Grove Amusement Park.  It is more of an impromptu affair rather  than the formal George reunions of my childhood. In other words, I am not sure who will be there because it is more of a word of mouth and Facebook invite.  I hope there is a good turnout and that I get to see a lot of family that I haven’t seen for many years.  My family is very large.

The reunions of my childhood were rather somber affairs. My dad and I would attend so my dad could see his cousins and aunts and uncles once a year, on Fathers Day.  My dad’s family was Mennonite. He was raised Mennonite as a child. Not the beard and suspender Mennonite, but Mennonites just the same.  My dad was not religious in any way at the time of these reunions. But we participated anyway. It usually started out with a prayer breakfast, which led into a hymn sing. There were  old fashioned games played like three legged races and beanbags and horseshoes. I remember my mom never attended.

Any Lyle Lovett fans out there? No, he won’t be at our reunion today. But he has a song about reunions called “Family Reserve”.  Here is the chorus: “And we’re all gonna be here forever, So Mama don’t you make such a stir, Just put down that camera, And come on and join up, the last of the family reserve.”  A call to be in the present moment. But family reunions are as much about the past as they are about the present.

I hope the reunion goes there. To the past I mean.  I hope we talk about the wonderful memories of our collective past. I hope we talk about all of the family members who have passed away and the legacies they left. I hope we talk about how simpler things used to be. I hope we talk about the kindness and manners that were once commonplace.  I hope we don’t talk about politics!

Back to Lyle Lovett, and his song Family Reserve. Despite his plea to stay in the moment, and not think about the past, he starts to talk about family deaths. It starts small but builds to this verse: “And there was Great Uncle Julius, And there was Aunt Annie Miller. And Mary, and Granddaddy Po, And there was Hannah, And Ella, And Alvin, And Alec, and he owned his own funeral home. ”

The importance of family. The importance of our past. What have we learned from these people? What can we still learn?  What kind of legacy will we leave for attendees of future reunions to remember?

I hope that doesn’t sound like I am hoping for a somber affair. Not at all. I hope I laugh until Dr. Pepper comes out my nose! I almost wrote until I pee my pants, but that would be embarrassing!

So whatever your plans are today I hope you will think about family and your place in it. And I hope you will think about preserving legacies. Lastly, I hope you laugh so much that you pee in your pants! It’s only embarrassing if I do it!  It’s funny if you do!

 

 

I just stole the title of this blogpost!  It’s also the title of a really good John Mayer song called “In The Blood”. The song is about the old nature vs. nurture argument. In it John is wondering if he is stuck with some of the painful attributes of his parents.  He wants to know if it will wash out in the water or if it’s always in the blood.

That is a really good question. I’ve wondered, often, how much of who I am is because of who my parents were and how much is because of all the life experiences I have had.  I guess it is both.

Being a counselor I see first hand, every single day, how much our childhoods affect our daily lives. How much love and attention did we receive? How were we  treated in comparison to our siblings? How were our parents’ marriages?  Have we seen or been part of any traumas? Were we given a spiritual life? The list goes on and on and on.

But we have to remember that our parents had parents too. The way your parents were toward you was often a by-product of how their parents were to them.  For example, my mom quit school in ninth grade to work in a cigar factory in Mahanoy City, PA.  She was adamant that I go to college.  Unfortunately, she never lived long enough to see it happen. My dad was born into a Mennonite family that was pretty strict. What I got from him is that life should be fun and you should enjoy yourself!

I know I got my stubbornness from my mom. Stubbornness and the tendency to go quiet when things aren’t going well.  But was that learned behavior or is stubbornness part of the Becker Family DNA? From my dad I got the “stick up for the little guy” trait.  To this day I can remember him saying, when some rich guy got house arrest for some illegal activity,  “if he didn’t have money, they’d slap his poor ass in jail!”.  So is my trait learned behavior or does the George Family DNA include an empathic gene?  Who knows?

I guess I will never know the answer to these questions. My kids, Andy and Emma, may be asking themselves the same question years from now. Maybe they do now.

I know that some of my siblings and cousins read this blog. I would love to hear their opinions on this! Actually, I would love to hear anyone’s thoughts on this and read examples from their families.

My readership is up and I would love if it could become more interactive. There is a place to comment at the end of each post.  Enjoy the short week!  Next blogpost on Friday.

 

 

When you first walk into the factory area you are blinded by all of the gleaming stainless steel and spotless white tile. I’m talking about the cottage cheese department of Lehigh Valley Dairy. You also notice the chill in the air and the sweet mist of the various stages of cottage cheese production. It was a magical place in many ways. Even the building itself, on MacArthur Road where Whitehall turns into Allentown, was an architectural masterpiece. That building is in the process of being torn down. Sad. Though it hasn’t been a dairy for decades.

I worked there in the summer of ’70. It was my first factory job. It was an interesting place to work. I was put in the cottage cheese department. Cottage cheese was huge at the time. We had three packaging lines going two shifts a day. Yogurt hadn’t hit the big time yet, as they had one packaging line that ran sporadically.  You don’t really hear much about cottage cheese anymore.  Maybe that’s just me.

The dairy had milk and chocolate milk on tap for its employees.  Anytime you wanted, you could get a cold glass of milk in the lunch room. You would always see employees from the ice cream department in there with their winter clothing. They worked a half hour in the freezers and a half hour out, so basically they worked half a day and got paid for a full day. But they always looked miserable, and cold.

My job was to help out wherever it was needed. Some days I would be cleaning. Other days I would be on the packaging line, putting just sealed containers into cardboard boxes.  Boring! Other days I got to help the Cheesemaker. He, other than management, was the king of the department.  I liked helping him. He was an older man who had been there for thirty some years. I learned a lot from him. About life in the working world, as well as about cheesemaking.

It’s Labor Day Weekend so let me add a little labor story. We were all union employees. I was a Teamster! Yes, me and Jimmy Hoffa! The cheesemaker was going on vacation. Because I knew how to make cheese, and the cheesemaker extolled my cheese making abilities, I was scheduled to be the cheesemaker for a week. But they didn’t want to pay me cheesemaker pay (the top rate in the department) because I had only been there a couple months.  The union steward stepped in and filed a grievance. I not only got cheesemaker pay for the week but I also made some mighty fine cottage cheese! Look for the union label!

Here’s an  interesting fact that you probably already knew.  The cottage cheese we made was for many different companies. There was Lehigh Valley, Penn Maid, Sealtest, and many grocery store generic brands.  All the same cheese just in a different package. Brand loyalty be damned!

I only worked at Lehigh Valley Dairy for a few months. I left there to go to LCCC. It was an eye opening adventure for me. I learned to respect the people that work in factories. They work hard and probably deserve more than what they make in pay.    I also learned to appreciate what unions can do for employees.  Perhaps the start of my Democratic Socialist ways?

Now I’m a little hungry for cottage cheese. They do still make that stuff, right?

 

I’ve been divorced now for almost eight years. As I have mentioned before in this blog, I am very content with my life. People often ask me, though, “but aren’t you lonely?”.  I can emphatically say no, with some qualifications.  I like being alone. I find myself pleasant company! The only times I feel lonely are around the holidays and whenever I am in a social situation that is mostly couples.  That explains why I usually avoid the Bethlehem Counseling Holiday Party and why I am a little leery about attending a family wedding in September.

But before I became as content as I am, I went through a period where I thought I should date. After all, isn’t that what we do when we are single?  I signed up for Match.com. I also tried Our Time (for us older folks) and Plenty of Fish.  Let me tell you…that dating scene is crazy!! I never had more than a few dates with any one woman from the internet.  That was enough!!

Here are a few of my more interesting matches. There was one woman who seemed to be able to talk about nothing but ferrets. She had four ferrets and she couldn’t wait for me to meet them! Uh, no thanks.

Another woman seemed nice enough. When I told her my ex-wife was 22 years younger than I , she literally yelled at me saying “22 years younger? That was fucking stupid!”.  The entire restaurant heard this proclamation. As soon as my delicious burger was finished, I made a hasty exit.

I met another woman for a hike in Lehigh Parkway. It was supposed to be a nice conversational walk through the woods. That woman moved like she was being chased by a bear! I could barely keep up and ended up soaking wet with sweat and anxious to never see this woman again.

So here I am. Alone, but not lonely. Content. It reminds me that we don’t always have to follow the same path as others. We don’t always have to do the expected thing.  We can each forge our own life and make it the way we want it to be.

And besides…dating is expensive!

Enjoy your Friday and then your long weekend!

 

Tomorrow is the opening day of this year’s version of the Allentown Fair.  I’m pretty sure that I have missed only a handful of Allentown Fairs in my entire life.  I’m very sure that, after this one, I will say that I am not going back next year. But I will. I know, because I said that last year.

Why do I say that? I think because the fair seems to get smaller every year. Smaller, more expensive, and less original.

But why do I go?

The food!! Fair food is amazing! My usual menu is a sausage sandwich, always very messy to eat, but oh so good.  That is followed by deep fried vegetables…no zucchini please!  Then tacos…hopefully from Hogar Crea.  Kutztown Old Fashioned Birch Beer to wash it all down! On the way to the car it’s funnel cake for dessert! Getting the powdered sugar off the car seats the next day is well worth it.

Why else do I go?

People watching!! There is no better place to people watch than the Allentown Fair. You will see all kinds of interesting sights and wonder where are these people the rest of the year. You will see all manner of dress, including some that is barely there! Oh my!  But you will often see people dressed very nicely, maybe even wearing a tie. All kinds of people attend the fair!

Another reason?

The quirky events you will see nowhere else, that’s a reason. Who doesn’t loved to see pig races? C’mon you know you do!  The Clydesdales are usually there, back there with the vendors selling wood stoves and window replacements. I don’t mean the Clydesdales are selling home improvement products! The midway with its giant rat, heaviest woman, and smallest horse. The Allentown Fair is an eclectic mix of fun!

Finally, there are the memories. Best concert I ever saw was at the Allentown Fair.  Crosby, Stills, and Nash played for three and a half hours without a break. It was the last show of their tour and the drummer was from Allentown, so they gave it something extra. Nice.  When I was in my pre-teens and early teens there was sort of a family curse involving the Allentown Fair.  Whenever it was fair week, a relative was usually in Allentown General Hospital, right next to the fair. I’m glad that curse has ended.

So one day this week I will wander to the fair, like I always do. I can already taste the sauce and onions on that sausage sandwich that awaits me!

My last blogpost was a tribute to my daughter, Amy. That took a lot out of me. Hence this totally silly, innocuous, and totally useless look at things that only happen on TV.

When someone gets a present on TV, it looks just like the wrapped gifts we get at home. However, there is no ripping of paper, no untying of ribbons, no looking for a place to throw the trash. On TV, they simply, and easily, lift the lid.  I bet, if you haven’t noticed this already, you will now.

Forests on TV are remarkably neat and pristine. They only contain trees! There are no bushes, no underbrush, no sticker bushes and not even any fallen leaves. No, just trees. Trees in perfect order, none of them fallen and none of them split.  Maybe they do their filming on tree farms.

On television it is possible to run, gesticulate, and even get in and out of a car with a hot cup of coffee. C’mon really!?  There is not one drop of coffee in those cups! No Folgers. No Maxwell House. No Green Mountain. No Starbucks. No Dunkin.  Just Air!

An advantage of being on TV is that if you are going to the hottest club, the most popular  event, or even to the police station to report a crime, you can almost always park right in the front of the building. How is that even possible? Luck? I don’t think so. It’s just TV chicanery.

Hostages on TV have no bodily fluids, apparently. They can be locked in a truck trailer for weeks and there is no sign of any bodily functions. Lovers on TV can make out in the morning with not even a wince due to morning breath.  Women on TV always look gorgeous just getting out of bed.  I’ve seen women in the morning. I beg to differ! Haha.

Finally, if you are only making minimum wage on TV, you can still have a beautiful multi-bedroom apartment in the finest part of town.  If you have a middle class job, like an accountant, expect to live in a mansion! No wonder the world thinks all Americans are rich!

I bet you all have other TV only idiosyncrasies that you have noticed that aren’t on my list. I’d like to hear any you may think of.  Don’t stay inside, today, watching TV and looking for them though. At least in the Lehigh Valley it’s another beautiful day!!

 

 

29 years ago today, as the sun was rising on another hot and sultry Houston day, my daughter Amy lost her eleven month fight with Acute Myelogenous Leukemia.  I miss her every day.

She was in Houston receiving experimental chemotherapy at  M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. We knew the odds were against us. The odds won.  Her mom, her brother Andy,  her maternal grandmother, and I were all in Houston for her last days. I was sleeping on a sofa in her room when her grandmother, from the doorway, told me that Amy had just passed away. Just before I heard her grandmother’s voice, I felt the pointer finger of my outstretched arm being pushed down. I was alone. To this day, I believe that was Amy saying goodbye to me.

Amy was seventeen when she died. I want to try to use a few anecdotes to explain who she was. She was born in January  with a tiny hole in the chambers of her heart. Because of this she couldn’t come home from the hospital right away. When she did come home, a couple of weeks later, she used to sleep 20 hours a day. She was a good baby and cried very little.

She wasn’t the greatest student in the world.  Her lack of reading comprehension held her back in many classes. But she tried very hard and always did enough to pass.  She loved her friends. In elementary school she used to hug them so hard that we had to teach her to ease up a little bit.  She had a passion for her friends, and was well liked.  She was a bit of a couch potato. But she was our couch potato.

She was definitely not a morning person. She would sleep until noon on a weekend and you couldn’t talk to her in the first hour. That ability to sleep helped her out during her long hospital stays. Nine months of her eleven month fight were spent in either LVHN, Hahnemann, or MD Anderson.  She and I would watch the soaps together.  I think it went, All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital.

She and her younger brother, Andy, had a typical sibling relationship. They would bicker and at times be mean to each other. But their love was strong. That was made obvious when he donated his bone marrow for her bone marrow transplant.  At one point they were talking to each other, by phone, from their separate hospital rooms.

Dreams Come True Foundation sent her to California to see Guns n Roses. She spent time with them during a practice session. Remember how I said she really loved her friends? There were three tickets. She took her mom and her best friend, leaving her brother and me at home!

Her transplant was done in Philly at Hahnemann Hospital. The doctors described it as bringing a person to the brink of death and then bringing them back stronger. Amy was a fighter through the entire process. There was a chart in her room where we would track her blood chemicals. We particularly watched her bilirubin levels because if they got to a certain level, she could go home.  Eventually she did go home, but she relapsed soon after.

She was a wonderful patient and would do all that was asked of her. The nurses and the doctors took a liking to her. I remember a nurse at Hahnemann got in trouble for spending too much time in Amy’s room.  A doctor had tears in his eyes when he told us about her relapse.

She kept her sense of humor throughout, She had lost her hair from the chemo and I used to call her chowder head, a term from the old McHale’s Navy TV show.  She would get back at me and tell me I will be bald someday too. She was right!

One last memory. Hahnemann Hospital. Close to Christmas. I was in her room and a group of carolers were singing outside her door. I remarked on how nice that was. Amy said, “Oh no. It’s those Catholics again!”.  She could be pretty feisty at times.

She’s gone now, for twenty nine years. No one really knows where, or if, she exists today. We all have our different religious views. I believe she is off somewhere living another life and is happy. I just hope that she gets a little longer than seventeen years this time.