Family LIfe at 3 Tremont Street

Growing Up in Mid-20th Century America
Chapter - Six: Family Life at 3 Tremont Street

Please bear in mind that the narrative is built around photos that appear either at the beginning or end of this posting instead of interspersed throughout which would be my intention if I could figure out how to do it on Facebook but so far that has been unsuccessful.

My local world was as is shown on the neighborhood map. The Allegheny River made a horseshoe shape right around the area known as “The South Side” of Warren, Pennsylvania. During mid-century America the town had more than 15,000 residents in a rural northwest Pennsylvania county that had only 40,000 inhabitants. We were surrounded by the Allegheny National Forest and the area had been developed in the 19th century on the basis of oil and lumber. Tremont Street where we lived was only two blocks back from the river. We lived at the west end of Tremont in a large size block bordered by Onondaga Avenue on the east, St. Clair Avenue to the north, Main Street to the west, and Wayne Street to the south.

Most of the homes in this part of town were built between 1900 and 1930. There were only two houses on our block of Tremont St., #1 and #3. Ours was #3. There was also the Howard Tree Expert Company occupying an industrial complex of office and garages directly across the street from our house. There was a vacant lot next to our house that was owned by a neighbor and used as a vegetable garden most summers. The Tremont St. on the east side of Onondaga was purely an alley with garages for homes facing Wayne St. and St. Clair St. as best I can recall. Our little section of Tremont dead ended into Seneca Avenue making a T with a very wide Top. There were several houses on Seneca Avenue. So basically my territory was the big square block surrounding the west end of Tremont and the part of Seneca Avenue north of Wayne Street. Once I was mobile (with tricycle or my red jeep pedal car) I had free reign of the whole area as long as I did not cross the major streets by myself.. On our side of the river there was Crescent Park that was (and is) a great place for picnic lunches. It wraps around the whole north end of the south side, a lovely park. One of the photos included shows
Crescent Park and the Hickory St. Bridge leading to downtown from the south side where we lived. I walked across the bridge with my mother or Aunt Myrtle many times.

One day when I was between three and four years old my mother took me next door to visit Mrs. Dentler at #1 Tremont. The house was just like ours only a mirror image as builders seem to like to do. The Dentlers were an older couple with grandchildren around my sister’s age. The house was nicely furnished and even had a coffee table in front of the couch. This was likely the first coffee table I had ever seen. On the coffee table rested a beautiful glass dish with a lid. Mrs. Dentler took the lid off and said “Would you like some peanuts Denny?” I had never liked nuts of any kind and frankly couldn’t stand to have such nuts as walnuts or coconut in my mouth. (In later years I would find out I am allergic to every nut known to man) For whatever reason, I thanked her and took some peanuts which I proceeded to chew up. Then every few minutes she would offer me more peanuts and I would accept them. After some additional time went by my mother and I got up to leave. As we walked along the sidewalk to our house I said to my mother, “whaaaad dooo I dooo wi alllll theeeese peanuds?” Seems I chewed up all the peanuts, had a mouthful but no way did I want to swallow. That is a story that was never forgotten! She laughed and laughed and told me to go ahead and spit them out.

Living so close to the river was somewhat risky as we lived in a flood zone and we had floods about every Spring. Our house was built fairly high on a bit of a mound and the cellar walls were about half above ground. This meant we never had water on the first floor as some houses did but the cellar would get flooded. There was an outside door
from the driveway directly onto the landing halfway down the cellar stairs so that door was at outside ground level. Dad had a workbench in the cellar just for his electronic puttering but nothing else was kept in the basement. The more serious concern was that my mother always had respiratory problems and the dampness of the nearby river caused her quite a lot of trouble. A few years later we would move to higher ground. When dad worked in the basement I would often accompany him and make pirate ships from a collection of window screens kept down there. There was also a pot belly stove for burning paper trash and wood scraps that was pleasant on a cold winter’s morning.

As I grew a bit older playmates entered my world. At first it was primarily just one who shall remain nameless since we are no longer in touch. She lived around the corner and south a couple of houses on Seneca Avenue. We were pretty constant companions at least from the age of 3 to 7. Sometimes she would come to my house where we had quite a collection of toys plus a finished playroom on the third floor that was the size of the footprint of the house - probably about 25 feet by 25 feet. After Great Aunt Myrtle arrived to live at our house she would read stories to both of us as we sat in a large overstuffed chair with her in the living room. Other times I would go to her house where I remember a favorite thing was to set up a grocery store in the kitchen. This worked out nicely because she had a toy cash register and we took turns being the customer or the grocer. Her mother didn’t seem to mind us hauling the canned goods out of her cupboards.

Other kids from the neighborhood also joined in the fun especially in good weather when we were outside or in winter when there was sledding. These sometimes included Helen McClure, Michele Long, Jim Torrance, Fred Sailor, Will Trager, Larry Ekey, Marcia Brown, Grace and Jean Arp, Rick Ladner and many of my sister’s friends. In the Fall season there were leaves to rake and play in before our fathers burned them in the street. The Nameless family bought a house further south with a large yard so we had more room to play in leaves. I remember building houses using leaves for walls a few inches high but laying out rooms covering a large area for an imaginary house in which we - what else? - played house.

Our house included a console radio and 78 RPM record player that many evenings produced the sounds of skating rink organ music from my father’s collection. Neighborhood kids could be seen pretending to skate going round and round the inside of our downstairs from the front hall through the kitchen and back through the living dining area to the front hall again. Those were happy times. We didn’t even need real skates.

Another photo shows a typical Spring flood in our neighborhood. Look at the house at the right side of the photo. Typical of most of the homes you can see a door right at street level that enters the cellar stairway right at a landing so you can go up to the first floor or down to the cellar. Also made an easy way for flood water to enter the basement. Across Wayne Street and to the left you can see Seneca Street School. This was a two room school that had two teachers. Miss Grace Bell taught first and second grades and another teacher taught third and fourth. I only attended Seneca for the first two grades as we then moved across town to a different neighborhood.

One fine Sunday afternoon my father decided to take my sister and I for a hike in the nearby forest. He loved to tell us about various trees and bushes and hopefully find some “huckleberries” to pick and eat. We did find some berries that day. We also found an abandoned glass soda pop bottle. Who knows what he was thinking but my dad proceeded to show us how you could break a pop bottle without hurting yourself! You simply hold the neck of the bottle in your hand and find something hard like a tree stump to bash it against.

As a four year old boy I was suitably impressed and most anxious to share this new knowledge with my friend Nameless when I would see her the next day. As it happened, the Nameless family loved soft drinks and they had a rear enclosed porch that was filled with empty pop bottles! (you know where this is going!) My parents only purchased such drinks for special occasions like picnics so we had no such supply at our house. Luckily or perhaps unluckily as it turned out, Nameless also had a little red wagon which was something I also did not have. So, our activity the next morning was to fill the little red wagon with empty pop bottles which we then transported about one block away to the corner of Wayne St. and Main Street - far enough from both our houses to avoid detection. I then showed her how to break bottles without hurting ourselves and we took turns filling the edge of the street with broken glass by whamming the bottles on the edge of the cement curb. Then realizing what a mess of broken glass we had made, we pulled the wagon back to her house and loaded it up again.

This time I suggested we could take our load to our garage where there was a cement curb directly beneath the door that we could use for smashing the bottles. Our garage had doors that slid sideways so even a little kid could open the garage and one of the doors was usually open all the time anyway. This time we got pretty well finished smashing the second load about the time my mother looked out the back door to see what was going on. She ran out and put a stop to our morning play, sent Nameless home and called her mother. The mothers decided we should be grounded the rest of the week. We were temporarily separated a number of times during those years but those occasions shall remain sealed to protect the innocent. Suffice it to say that we did have some fun. Oh, and after I explained about my dad showing me how to smash bottles safely the day before, suddenly my mother’s anger was mostly directed toward my dad. Instead of having him paddle me, he was in big trouble when he got home from work. I was still grounded.