Pottsville, Freemasonry and Wistful Memories

I was asked a few weeks ago about coming to speak about Freemasons For Dummies in a little Pennsylvania mining town called Pottsville. If you've ever read any of author John O'Hara's short stories about the fictional town of "Gibbsville" and its high-society neighborhood along "Lantenango Street," he was really writing about Pottsville. O'Hara was born in a house just two blocks from where I once lived on the very real Mahantongo Street, decades after that snooty class of pretentious, fancy-pantsed snobs he wrote about moved away in search of richer pastures where the coal dust would never again stain their tennis outfits and white golf sweaters.

Meh, you take your brushes with the famous wherever you can find them.

Way back in the dark ages of 1968-1970, I spent three wonderful summers with my father and step-mother who lived for a while in Pottsville, at 803 Mahantongo Street, in a long-decayed mansion that had been a deserted hulk when they bought it. The original front part of our house had been built in the 1830s by Burd Patterson, a little-known man today, but the first American to pioneer inexpensive iron smelting techniques, as well as a new, more economical way to mine anthracite coal. Patterson was instrumental in the early industrial days of the U.S., helping to wrest control of the world's iron business away from Europe. In keeping with the 18th and 19th century convention of attaching a special name to a big farm, ranch or stately home, Burd christened his new Georgian-style manse Foxhead, and over the next 40 years the house was expanded in the back, creeping farther and farther up the steep hillside behind it, until the 1870s. 

Actually, everything in Pottsville is built on a steep hillside, and it was a longstanding belief that its first citizens had actually been a sturdy strain of Norwegian mountain goats.

The Yuengling Brewery was just two blocks down the vertiginous street from us, and is the oldest operating brewery in America – the same underground spring that ran through our basement's cave-like fruit cellar still provides the water that goes into Yuengling Lager to this day. (I was ten at the time, so I couldn't sample their alcoholic wares yet, but the Yuengling family also ran a local dairy that made delicious ice cream, with which I was content to intoxicate myself). 

Elizabeth Yuengling lived in the house for a while in the late 1800s. Then, two wacky, reclusive widows who always dressed alike moved in, and the house began to crumble. After they died, Foxcroft sat empty for almost 30 years. When Dad took possession, the thick, heavy, velvet curtains the ladies had installed so long ago to keep the inside in eternal darkness quite literally disintegrated when they were touched.

The mid-1960s were the days before people rehabbed old homes with anything like loving care, but Dad somehow did it on a middle-class white-collar salary, and turned the town eyesore into the greatest house I would ever live in. 

Those were heady days for a ten-year-old kid who imagined ghosts in the attic, skeletons in the basement, and a mysterious labyrinth in the tunnels that no doubt lurked beyond the eerie passage in the foundation that an underground spring passed through. We had twenty rooms and a dozen fireplaces. One attic room was piled to the ceiling with steamer trunks. A 48-star American flag.  A 194-bottle wine cellar behind two massive wooden gates. Weighty brass chandeliers from the 1880s with intricate Steuben glass shades that had never been wired for electricity. What electric lights were still in the house had heavy, oblong Edison bulbs, with a little pointed nib on the end and great, thick orange filaments that gave off more heat than light. There was a leviathan-sized boiler in the cavernous basement that heated up just four cast-iron steam-heat radiators for the entire house – that's why we had all those fireplaces, too.

Next door on one side, at 801, there was a dark, filthy, spooky, dopey, sleepy, sneezy old mansion that closely resembled Herman Munster's house, with its tower, oval attic windows, and steep mansard roofline. It appeared to have never received a lick of paint since its original construction, and bricks would fall off of it regularly. In three summers, I never once saw anyone coming or going, or even puttering outside, but the lights would come on at night in a single room. 

On the other side, at 825, was a great rambling building, the Saint Patrick Convent. None of these places had air conditioning, so everyone's tall, Victorian-era windows all along our block were often thrown open to catch a breeze in summer, and occasionally we'd hear the nuns laughing hysterically inside – we were reliably told that one of them would climb to the top floor, lay out a long dust rag, and then slide all the way down the bannister to the ground floor to dust it, to the cheers of the other sisters – kind of like The Flying Nun in reverse. No vows of silence at Saint Pat's.

For three days and nights during the Great Pottsville Blackout in July of 1968, we cooked every meal on a tiny hibachi out in the side yard, finding new, creative methods for cooking all our rapidly thawing frozen food over hot coals. 

Two major transformers had been destroyed by the worst electrical storm in the town's history, but somehow Pottsville's citizens managed to survive a couple of days of no electricity without rioting, looting, demanding federal aid, opening crisis centers, or burning anything down. 

Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon right in our 1830 front parlor room one hot, muggy July night in 1969, and that dichotomy wasn’t lost on me even at that young age. I remember my grandmother sitting with us and watching in stunned silence as the static-filled images flickered on our Zenith TV set from 240,000 miles away — she had been born in 1884 in the hills of Kentucky, just 19 years after the end of the Civil War, and seven years after Mr. Bell invented the telephone.  My father and I walked out onto the front porch that night, and stared up at the Moon overhead — we both privately hoped that if we looked up there long and hard enough, we'd actually see Neil and Buzz wandering around the Lunar Module. We both understood just how cataclysmic this particular night was for the entire world.

When I turned twelve, I fell hard for my devastatingly cute neighbor Vici Zimmerman. We hung out in the balcony of the theatre downtown and saw "2001", "Yellow Submarine", and prophetically, an otherwise forgettable Doris Day comedy called "Where Were You When The Lights Went Out?" ("Right here in Pottsville," answered the headline in the paper when it was reviewed.)

One memorable afternoon, I even tried to impress Vici by treating her to lunch in the very dark and romantic downstairs 'Coal Mine Tap Room' of the Necho Allen Hotel, with its swanky, secluded booths made to look like individual caves, with black rock walls and ceilings of anthracite coal, lit only by electrified reproductions of miner's 'Davey lamps.' It was just the place for cozy afternoon trysts and rendezvouses (we were surrounded by bosses and their secretaries lolling over their three-martini lunches), but it was tough for me to pull off the Dean Martin act when 'Yummy-Yummy-Yummy-I-Got-Love-In-My-Tummy' was playing on the Muzak, neither one of us smoked, and we couldn't order up anything more seductive than a couple of ginger ale and maraschino cherry juice 'kiddie cocktails.' 

Just drilling a hole through a wall inside our house was an all-day project, since all the interior walls were a foot thick, made of brick, insulated with horse hair and shredded newspapers from the 1830s, covered in wood lath, and plastered over. But despite the many challenges and soaring costs, Dad and Joyce restored Foxcroft in record time. They even joined the local Schuylkill Haven Country Club, where the fancy-pantsed snobs used to hang out before fleeing town for tonier Philly. Meanwhile, I learned about plumbing and wallpaper and wiring and oil furnaces, about coal mines and railroads and preserving the past before it slips away. 

And about faltering economies. My father worked for Aetna Metal Products, and when it abruptly closed just three years after he had been hired, Foxcroft had to be sold at a huge loss, and it took three long years before they'd even had an offer. They moved eventually to Charlottesville, Virginia, losing almost every dime they'd put so lovingly into the magnificent house on Mahantongo Street. The next historic home they’d live in was rented. But that’s a different story.

In one final act of bitterness and despair, they even removed the great, heavy brass fox head door knocker from the front door, in hopes that it might once again grace the entry to another dream home, somewhere else, sometime in the not too distant future.

It took me almost thirty years before I could return to 'Gibbsville.' I was in Philadelphia with my wife at a mystery writer's convention in 1998, and we rented a car and drove up to Pottsville just to see the house again. Despite Alice's embarrassed pleading not to, I insisted on climbing the steps and knocking on the front door. By sheer luck, a family had just bought it from the doctor who had purchased it from my father all those years before. But the old doctor and his wife had told them almost nothing about the house and its history, and I had seen it at its worst. They were ecstatic to let me drag them from one end of the place to the other telling them all I could remember, and we spent two hours there. 

Curiously, the new owner, Paul Kulp, was a Freemason and his wife Jan was a member of the Eastern Star, and the topic of Masonry came up. I told him I was strongly considering joining the fraternity after an experience we had just had in Texas. Alice's father had died, and I had been especially moved by a service performed by a group of Texas Masons we had called on very short notice the night before his funeral. Paul and Jan enthusiastically encouraged me to pursue Masonic membership, and on my return to Indianapolis, I did just that. I was initiated two months later, in November of 1998.

I wouldn't be the same person I am today without spending those three special years in Pottsville during that high-wire passage between childhood and adolescence.  And I might not have ever become a Mason if I hadn't returned for those few short hours.

* Here's another coincidental link in the great chain of life where Freemasonry tapped me on the shoulder: I recently found out that three big, hand-painted coal mine scene murals that used to grace the walls of the Coal Mine Tap Room until it closed were removed and placed into storage for years. But in 2000 they were installed in the banquet hall of Schuylkill Lodge 138, in nearby Orwigsburg.