Legacies

My father told me of camping out with other boys and shooting chickens with umbrella staves with a string on them so they could retrieve them. They also fished in the Saucon Creek near the area where the sewage plant is now. At that time it was farmland with only a few houses. Because he started work when he was twelve years old, there could not have been too much of this activity. This area is where the B.O.F. is located now.

The First World War had the Bethlehem Steel expanding beyond this area. The Heights, as it was known, became a slum and was later torn down after W.W.2.

We had no bathroom so all baths were taken in the kitchen. Water was heated on the stove and a large tin tub was the bathtub. Wood and coal were kept outside. The Corn Crib was the coal bin. Water was pumped from a well outside near the back porch and hauled in bucket by bucket. This was usually my job as my father worked swing shift and was gone most evenings. He worked down on The Heights and took the bus, a five-cent trip. He smoked Bull Durham tobacco and rolled his own cigarettes. I know one time he walked home to save the five cents for a sack of tobacco.

We had a large back yard with buildings along the alley, one of which was an outhouse. My brother Neal threw a kitten down the hole one summer day and cousin Earl had the job of fishing it out, but I don't know who cleaned it up. I do remember the honey dipper coming to clean the outhouse as they were called. Now there is a job that disappeared and no one regrets its demise.

My mothers father, Franklin Zettlemoyer, was found dead in the Monacacy Creek, behind the paint mill. It was not understandable how he got there.

We were led to believe he was in the state hospital at Rittersville, Pennsylvania. That is what the nut house was called. When I started doing genealogy, I uncovered the truth. He had been injured at the iron works, this was before the Bethlehem Steel Co., and he was in Saint Luke's for a time for a head injury. He was the first patient admitted at Rittersville, Pennsylvania. He was transferred to the poor farm, or the county home for the elderly, as it was known. This was located near Schoenersville, Pennsylvania.

Thelma Wenzel recalls a tornado hitting St. Louis in 1896. "It was on Dolman Street," she said. "Mama knew that the tornado was upon us. She had a lamp in one arm and me, an infant at the time, in the other.

Each room we entered, the way through would be blown away as soon as we left it. We would just barely get through a room before it was gone. Mama was trying to keep me against her chest because of the vacuum being created by the tornado. She was afraid that I would smother.

I was learning long division in school. One day I was trying to reason out the way to do a particular problem. I finally got the answer, but my teacher came over and said, "Thelma Wenzel! You cheated! You must have turned to the back of the book and gotten the answer."

"Well, I had not cheated! It would never have occurred to me to do such a thing. My mother brought me up to be honorable," she said. "You weren't anything unless you were truthful and honest. That was one thing that I had to be," she concluded.

There were many stories about great-grandmother Amanda (born 1846); that she had been a slave and that the slave owner had been her father; that she had a white half-sister who visited her and finally, that she received a government pension that made her affluent for her time and community.

I had recently been given a photograph of great-grandmother Amanda and remarked to my Aunts Ernestine and Hallie that they resembled her a great deal. I asked if they remembered their grandparents.

Neither had any memories of their grandfathers, but recalled when their mother's father died in Dayton, Ohio in 1919. It was their first train ride and first time away from Kentucky.

When questioned as to why he was in Ohio, they replied that he was in the Old Soldiers Home! My brain was racing, Spanish-American War, World War I? The answer floored me! They said that both of their grandfathers had fought in the Blue and Gray War!