The Way it Was/The Way We Were

Growing Up in Mid-Twentieth Century America
Chapter Seven: The Way It Was/The Way We Were

(At time of posting I was unable to include exterior photo of the First EUB Church)

Today my wife and I live in an organized California retirement community where folks mostly live in attached duplex ranch homes with garages and small front porches facing streets often devoid of sidewalks. Every house has central air conditioning so that occupants rarely go outside but stay in to communicate with others electronically. Garages in our neighborhood are attached so you drive right into your house. Outside maintenance is performed by contractors and staff paid by the HOA. The atmosphere this creates is not really conducive to becoming acquainted with your neighbors. Any social interaction with neighbors is generally more formal and seems to be planned ahead.

In the cozy neighborhoods of my youth most folks lived in fairly large two story homes with large front porches facing the street and sidewalks were the norm. Since our Tremont Street and the intersecting Seneca Street were built inside the borders of a much larger city block bordered by major streets, our enclave and neighbors were much more intimate. Also our two streets were very narrow, unpaved at the time and the houses were separate but fairly close together. So the overall feeling of community spirit seemed much more prevalent during this time period closely following the end of World War II. The mood of the country was upbeat, jobs were readily available, families were reunited when soldiers returned, the economy was growing, and people were quite happy.

The point is that during the spring, summer, and fall seasons people sat on their front porches and visited with their neighbors. There was no television to keep people in the house, no computers, iPads, or cell phones to keep people preoccupied. Little kids went to bed early and I vividly recall listening to parents visiting on front porches while I was forced to lay in bed upstairs missing all the fun. Nobody had air conditioning so windows were wide open to permit conversations and breezes to penetrate the houses. Sometimes neighbors would actually sit on other neighbors porches with them but the houses were close so you could talk to close neighbors without even leaving your porch. After work the men would sit on the porch with the daily newspaper while the wife was inside preparing dinner. After dinner all would be on the front porch.

Warren, PA had churches of many denominations and it seemed that most families were affiliated with a church. Our father was of a nature I have always thought of as being a “victorian gentleman.” He was strictly biblical in his thinking though not at all inclined to be a religious leader. He loved to laugh but would tolerate no off color stories in any situation. He did not smoke nor partake of alcohol in any form and I have to say he seemed strangely intolerant of any religion not protestant and also certain ethnic groups though he was very quiet about such things. Our mother, on the other hand, tended to be accepting of everyone and especially those who were needy or downtrodden. At the same time, she had a volatile German temperament and ruled our home with an iron hand as well as a steel pancake turner with holes in it that was frequently used on my backside. Our father had a laid back personality in contrast to her temperament and tended to be thinking of either scientific endeavors involving his work as an engineer at Struthers Wells or one of his many personal inventions. He also spent much time with music as he played the piano and prepared plans for the weekly music at the First EUB Church where he directed the choir and played the organ for Sunday services.

Our church building had been built in 1875 as a Methodist Episcopal Church and was purchased by the EUB congregation after the construction of a new Methodist Church on Market Street in the early 20th century. Our church had the look of a majestic gothic cathedral. Only the front part of the building is dated from 1875. The rear three story addition was added at a later date and included a gym in the basement and a two story Sunday School area dominated by a grand hall two stories in height with little rooms surrounding the grand hall on three sides and two floors with a balcony running on three sides of the second floor. Each room had an overhead door that retracted into the ceiling so that classes could all participate in the preliminary gathering with singing and then pull the door down to have private lessons.

The original church had a grand cathedral that occupied the central part of the second and third floors of the original building with theater style seating for close to 500 people including the U shaped balcony. A parsonage for the pastor and his family was built attached to the very rear of the educational building. Our family’s social life was centered around this church and it’s members. During the tenure of the First EUB Church here the rear portion of the building was never used for Sunday School because the limited membership could not afford the heat for that area. Several of the small meeting rooms were used for classes using small gas space heaters to ward off the winter chill but the grand hall was only used for rummage sales in spring and fall. In the late forties the church leased the basement gym to Mrs. Conway who ran a private kindergarten in that space. In the 1949/50 season I attended that kindergarten as did quite a number of my current Facebook friends!

Our parents had moved to Warren in 1941 upon our father’s (hereon known as Ted) transfer from Struthers Titusville to Struthers Warren shortly after the birth of my sister Cynthia Suzanne. Our mom (Margaret) had been partners in a beauty shop known as “The Personality Shop” back in Titusville. She gave up her business affiliation in Titusville when they made the move to Warren. They lived in several rental properties in Warren but sometime within the first couple of years they had an opportunity to purchase the house at 3 Tremont St. from a plumbing contractor who helped them by offering the property on a land contract arrangement as they had no cash for a down payment. It was an attractive property with a very modern built-in kitchen.

I cannot say exactly how they came to join the First EUB Church but it seems that the minister, The Rev. Weigand, may have been from Ted’s hometown of Franklin, PA and that his family knew Rev. Weigand. In any event I believe they joined that church quite soon after arriving in Warren and that Ted immediately became the volunteer choir director and organist. The church had a nice pipe organ in the upstairs cathedral and piano downstairs for Sunday School and winter services. The EUB congregation consisted of only 200 members during my childhood so that heating that massive upstairs cathedral was out of the question during the cold winters. Actually it was kept at about 50 degrees to avoid damage to the structure and the musical instruments because there was a beautiful grand piano up there in addition to the pipe organ. Ted Prichard also performed all maintenance and tuning of the pipe organ. Either my sister or I spent volunteer time sitting on the organ bench sounding the notes he asked for as he labored inside the pipe chamber. My only regret now is that he did not allow me inside the pipe chamber to see how he was doing the tuning. He always said it was too filthy in there for kids.

I have included a historic photo of the cathedral chancel and pipe organ taken in its earlier days as a Methodist Episcopal Church. A large orchestra is shown with the conductor and music director, Dr. Leroy Campbell. Dr. Campbell was a prominent pianist and author, also Director of the Warren Conservatory of Music. Dr. Campbell is seen in front of piano on right side of photo in a casual pose. I believe this photo is from the late 19th century and so fascinating to me to realize that my family provided the music in the same place decades later. When I was a child of 10 in 1954 Dr. Campbell was still Director of the Conservatory and we had annual auditions with him. I played for him in 1954 at which time he was surely in his eighties. He was very cordial and wrote a personal note on a biographical brochure of himself saying “Dennis is a very talented boy doing fine work.” My father also organized the older kids of the church into a Sunday School Orchestra during his time as music director from 1941-1960.

The first floor parlors of the church were used year around for Sunday School gatherings on Sunday mornings and during the winter months also for the church services. There was a full kitchen just behind the first floor parlors and the long hall to the front doors was a perfect place for long tables to be set up for special tea parties, childrens’ parties and and receptions. Until 1948 the only musical instrument here was a piano but in 1948 a committee for purchase of a downstairs organ was formed. Though I was only four years old I recall that I went with the committee because my father was part of it to inspect a new Minshall-Estey Amplified Reed Organ as a possibility. We drove to a music store in Jamestown, NY just twenty miles north of Warren. The organ only had one keyboard (manual) and no pedals and just a few stops (voice selection) The best thing about it was the inexpensive price and it did sound like an organ so the church bought it.

Ted, being an engineer as well as a musician, had some big plans for this little organ. Under my parents bed on Tremont St. there was a full scale organ pedal board with regulation 32 pedals. Ted built or had someone build a box to set the organ up higher in order to accommodate the pedals additional height and he ran heavy duty string down to the pedals in order to let them play the bass notes from the keyboard. The organ still was a bit limited for heavy organ literature that would require more than one manual but was much improved with pedals. Unfortunately the voices of the stop selections all sounded very much alike so the organ was not exciting to play.

An additional improvement was made when Ted decided a set of chimes would improve things. There was no budget to purchase commercial chimes so Ted drew up plans and persuaded his friend, church member and machinist Karl Peterson, to cut stainless steel pipes to spec to fabricate chimes. Ted then engineered sets of doorbell ringers and a small keyboard to sound the chimes and it worked flawlessly for twenty years until the church was demolished. He also placed the organ and piano perpendicular to each other so he could play both at the same time. In later years they were more separated as either my sister or I would play duets with him both in the downstairs church and upstairs with the pipe organ and grand piano.

In those long ago days there were many children at the church. For small children there was a group called “The Little Heralds.” I loved going to the special parties because there were always frosted sugar cookies usually made by one of our neighbors, Mrs. Grey. She looked about 100 years old and had trouble getting around but wow she was a terrific baker. The cookies would be in various shapes depending on the season, trees, bells, angels etc. She lived around the corner from us and we often transported her to church programs.

The children’s Sunday School department was run by Mrs. Wilda Custer and her daughter Maxine. The Custer family lived around the corner from my family on Seneca St. Maxine was in her twenties and had been a baby sitter for both my sister and I early on. Maxine graduated from Warren High School in 1937 and went to work at Bell Telephone as a switchboard operator, living at home with her parents. My mother’s brother John Ebbert returned from the Army at the end of World War II and began rooming at our house after obtaining employment at Penn Furnace and Iron.

In 1948 John and Maxine were married at the First EUB Church and purchased a stone duplex on Seneca St. diagonally opposite our house on Tremont. Wilda’s husband Stuart Custer had worked as a telephone lineman for Bell Telephone for his entire career, retiring in 1952. Also in that family was Granddad Gates who was Wilda’s father. Thus we were surrounded by neighbors as well as family. I was good friends with Stuart and Granddad Gates and spent a good bit of time with both of them in those early years. Stuart was an avid hunter and fisherman who always kept a hound dog in a pen in the backyard. The dog was always named Buster (Buster Custer you know) and there were a number of Busters over the years. Sometimes we would put Buster in the trunk of the Custer’s car and take him to “The Old Brewery Lot” to let him run loose and chase rabbits for a while. He always came back when called. The trunk of the Custer’s 1941 Plymouth and later 1950 Ford always smelled like wet hound dog.

Stuart liked to hunt rabbits and squirrels and in my bicycling years he provided me with squirrel tails for my handlebars. We also did a little fishing but I found sitting still long enough to catch a fish a bit tedious. I spent a good bit of time at the Custer house during evenings when my parents had church meetings or had to be out and about. I remember listening to radio programs like “Charley McCarthy” and “The Jack Benny Program”, in their living room. Uncle John and Aunt Maxine never had children of their own so my sister and I sort of had another set of parents and grandparents right around the corner during our childhood. We moved to other neighborhoods twice as we grew up but always maintained our ties to the Custers and the Ebberts with frequent visits and picnics in the numerous parks surrounding our community in the Allegheney National Forest.