Nostalgia Lane (Part 5)

Southwestern Pennsylvania is such a wonderful place. Although Pennsylvania's chief industry is agriculture, to me, it will always be COAL COUNTRY. My husband always tells me that if I did now what I did then I may not be alive to write for this column. In closing my eyes and remembering the long sunny days and just wondering all over the hillsides and along the river, it would be unthinkable to allow a small child all the freedom that I had growing up. Our house is an old mine office, probably over a hundred years old. Right outside our home was the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad tracks. I have always loved trains and would wave at the engineers and the men in the caboose. There would be little cars called "paddy cars" with workers who watched for me to wave at them, too. Across the road and along the river was an open building made of iron. Inside, a man worked having just a pot belly stove to keep him warm and as the huge buckets came across the river on the pulley around to him, he would quickly turn this bucket over and send it on it's way again across the river to be filled with coal, emptied and back again for him to do the same thing. The pulley wheel was inside about a 20 foot vat filled with black, thick oil. There was a ladder inside for a worker to go down in to the vat in case something happened to it. I spent very much time there in the old bucket house talking to that man although I never knew his name. My parents knew him and trusted him to watch over this overly rambunctios child. Daddy had horses or mules to pull the heavy coal cars out of the mine to be dumped in to the waiting truck for delivery. One brown one was called "Bud," and he let me ride him and he would shout out "gee" and "haw" to the horse for whichever way he wanted it to go. He had yellow little bull dozers which he called "doodle bugs!" His partner who worked with him could spit through his teeth really far and naturally I took to trying to spit just like him! That didn't set very well with my dad, his little girl spitting. So, I didn't spit anymore!