[PRCo] [Fwd: Wild and Wonderful West Virginia]

[Fred W. Schneider III]

Forwarded because I screwed up the address the first time.  fws

"Fred W. Schneider III" wrote:
> 
> I'll eventually tie this into a trolley line that you know and love (a
> West Penn subsidiary) but for the most part it is a travelogue
> interspersed with personal memories.  Feel free to delete now if you
> have no desire to go any farther.
> 
> It all starts with the death of my father's sister in San Diego last
> winter.  To quote Roger's and Hammerstein, its "summer and we're running
> out of ice."  So we all gathered in Greenfield, Ohio on Saturday to
> plant a cardboard box of ashes.  It was a wonderful celebration.  First
> time I'd seen my cousin in a decade.  He did a great job of celebrating
> his mother's life instead of mourning her death.
> 
> But the ride through rural America was even nicer for me, as I live in
> the road rage capital of the east.  We drove west on Friday, stopping to
> have lunch with EHL at Angelo's in Washington, PA, and to add my name to
> the crew schedule at PTM for July 19 and 20, and then screamed "On
> Dancer, On Prancer."  Marie and I stopped for the night in a Red Roof
> about six miles east of Zanesville, Ohio.  The Red Roof was OK ... one
> year old and clean ... in the lobby was a list of very familiar hotel
> names all run by Accor (a French company) ... Red Roof, Motel 6, Mercur,
> Formula 1, IBIS ... the latter three are European (mostly French but
> expanding across the continent like an avalanche). Diagonally across the
> intersection was a brand new stainless-steel diner.  I didn't want to
> get back in the car, so we walked across the street.  Once I got closer,
> the sign read Denny's Diner,  brought to you by the same California
> concern that gives you Denny's restaurants.  Food was what one expects
> of the chain ... mostly meats ground up and pasted back together in
> precisely weighed patties served up with canned vegetables all at a
> price far higher than the quality deserves.  They had fried chicken on
> the menu but they could not serve me any dark meat ... Marie ordered it
> and found it was a reconstituted chicken patty covered with glued on
> crumbs that was fried to death along with the french fries.
> 
> Next morning I asked the hotel clerk if there was anything left of the
> amusement park at Buckeye Lake and got a very dead stare, almost like
> I'd asked if the trolley still went there. ("Daddy, what's a trolley?")
> I'm reminded of my late father describing driving along US 40 in the
> 1925 Chevrolet and seeing the Ohio Electric car overtake him a breakneck
> speed, rocking and swaying on uncertain rail and causing, in turn, the
> slack trolley wire to swing from side to side like a jump rope.  Well,
> the town named after Col. Zane looked like a once important place ...
> many business streets with empty spaces between the buildings.  (I
> actually remember Sunday bus service in Zanesville in 1954, which I
> photographed). But best of all was the beautiful ride over US route 22
> through Lancaster (Scioto Valley Traction), Circleville (same), and then
> 138 into Greenfield ... farms as far as the eye can see ... no
> congestion ... no ugly suburbs ... what rural America used to be like in
> the 1950s.
> 
> After the service we drove east to Marietta, Ohio for the night.  (My
> cousin said wanted to show his son where the family came from but he
> really wanted to try to bring back his own youth.)  It doesn't get more
> rural than US 50 to Athens and the former Alternate 50 (now Ohio 550)
> from Athens to Marietta.  The best kept homes seemed to be manufactured
> housing.  There was strong evidence that the farmers once made a lot of
> money selling oil and gas rights but the pumps probably only work a few
> minutes a day now.
> 
> Well, Marietta is still a nice place ... reminds one of a New England or
> upstate New York town.  My grandfather's house sold recently for
> $100,000, probably due to the proximity to the college and the
> hospital.  The owner (a McDonald's supervisor) took one last family
> picture of the Schneiders and Hisers on his front porch.  Weird??? Even
> crazier was the framed picture on his family room wall ... the house ca
> 1898 with my grandmother, her sister, and their mother standing in front
> ... American Gothic at its best.  My dad had given it to the prior owner
> and it was passed down with the deed.  The elm trees were all killed off
> by the Dutch Elm blight in the 1950s, but the town is green again with
> other trees. Surprisingly, every so often, someone has bought a house in
> town, demolished it, and built another on the same site.  The one my
> grandfather bought in 1903 (It was sold outside the family for several
> years), and to which he later added indoor plumbing, has been gutted and
> modernized but the outside is still turn of the century.  It seems like
> such a nice place to live. Downtown, the four blocks of Monongahela West
> Penn Public Service track remain entombed in the bricks of Putnam
> Street.  The tongue of the switch point at 2nd and Putnam still points
> around the corner, where the last city car had gone in 1932.  Switch
> iron anyone?  The Monkey Ward's and Otto's department stores are empty
> downtown (Walmart and K-Mart are outside town and Sears and Penney's are
> in the mall in Vienna) but the downtown has a lot of antique and tourist
> related stores.  Dad's old high school buddy Graydon Bay is dead, but
> his kids still run the Workingman's clothing store downtown. Marietta
> loves its history ... what other city would have stern-wheeled boats
> tied in the Muskingum River (or any river for that matter).  There was a
> Mon West Penn car body preserved on the west side in orange and blue (I
> think No. 114 ... one of the ex West Virginia Public Service cars from
> Morgantown) but the local vandals have done the residents of the city a
> service by smashing out all the glassover the last two or three years.
> 
> Well, yesterday we came home through "Wild and Wonderful" West Virginia,
> the state the world drove off and forgot.  Most of its industries simply
> dried up and blew away like tumbleweed in Wyoming.  The steel industry
> (Wheeling - Pittsburgh Steel was dominant) is gone.  Lumbering faded out
> a century ago.  What little coal is mined today is essentially for power
> plants, its  railroad, general industry, steel, and residential use
> having evaporated between 1930 and 1980.  There are still a lot of
> chemical plants, mostly coal by-product operations, in the state but
> building a new Dupont or Exxon Chemical plant will be accepted as
> readily as piranhas in the swimming pool.  So we have all those little
> back water mining patches that are 90 percent dead today ... the
> occasional brick bank or lodge hall offers testimony to the one-time
> importance of the town.  And nobody paints their houses ... once the
> owners die, their house will have as much value as a warehouse full of
> English top hats.  They will eventually fall down or be torn down,
> leaving one more empty piece of real estate in the town (that the town
> fathers would like to sell for back taxes).
> 
> Marie and I had lunch in Ellis's Restaurant along US 19 between
> Clarksburg and Shinnston.  Priceless experience.  Behind the restaurant
> was the village drive-in theater ... straight out of the 1940s with a
> gravel parking lot.  The restaurant was slightly newer (it wasn't
> trimmed in knotty pine at any rate).  We both chose the liver and onions
> special with two vegetables.  I had this wonderful concoction of
> spinach, endive and collard greens boiled with garlic cloves and
> onions.  The strawberry pie was home made and the berries were actually
> crunchy.  The check, for two meals, was terribly expensive ($12.70).
> The teenager who waited on us was intelligent (a surprising departure to
> one accustomed to service in Lancaster where the kids have too much
> money and the unemployment rate is the lowest in the state).  I left
> behind more than 20% ... it's not her fault that she lives where you
> can't add in the fixed costs of a worthless restaurant ... and she was
> tickeled pink to get both a $2.00 bill and a gold dollar coin (she had
> never seen either before).  So we ate in a 1950s restaurant with 1975
> prices in 2001!  Who says you can't go back?
> 
> There were traces here and there of the Mon-West Penn interurban line up
> the valley but it was easily confused with the now dismantled B&O
> mainline in the same valley.  Ed has mentioned that he wants to take me
> down there but tracing trolley rights-of-way is a winter only occupation
> (when the leaves are down and preferably when the snow outlines the
> fills).  Are you with us Mr. Bruhn?  And Mr. Brashear?  Anyone else?
> 
> Well, once I got to Hagerstown there was a slight tinge of
> disappointment.  Yes, we were out of the mountains.  We were back to
> 2001.  But we were also back to road rage and where people pass on the
> shoulder because they are more important than other drivers and to an
> example of too many people on the planet.