BLAIRSVILLE--Today's Baby Boomers and Gen-X'ers may worry about the security of their jobs and their mutual funds during the current economic downturn.
But, for local residents who came of age during World War II and the years preceding it, nothing can match the meager existence most endured as children and young adults during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Not always aware at the time of how limited their means truly were, Blairsville's Depression survivors now can put their experiences in perspective.
Many things changed during the Depression. Even the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), which had sustained many jobs in Blairsville, faltered during the lean '30s.
"A lot of our fathers worked for the railroad in town, and our dads always seemed to get laid off," Ed Marcozzi recalled of the period.
Just five years old in 1929, when the stock market crashed, Marcozzi grew up east of the railroad tracks in an area of Blairsville which used to be known as Brownstown. The neighborhood was populated mostly by working class families of European extraction--chiefly Italian.
Marcozzi's father, Anthony, was a freight car inspector who worked at PRR's now-vanished Blairsville car shop, not far from today's borough building.
When his father was laid off, "It was like a cloud hanging over the household," Marcozzi recalled. "All railroaders lived with that way of life for a while."
For many families, sudden job displacement by the major bread-winner required swallowing one's pride and accepting public assistance while every member who was able scrambled to bring in extra pocket change.
Marcozzi remembers helping his father pull a wheelbarrow or wagon down to the old Opera House on Stewart Street. Now filled with apartments, during the Depression years the building was a distribution point serving those in need.
"We went at night because we were embarrassed" about receiving a handout, Marcozzi noted.
"You got a lot of canned goods and bread and some cereal. Every once in a while, the children would get a pair of shoes."
To help support himself and a brother, Marcozzi noted, "My mother took in ironing for the people who had some sort of an income."
In addition, Marcozzi and hischildhood chums scoured a local dump site off upper Brown Street for potentially valuable articles.
He said, "We kids would wait Saturday morning for the junk man to come around and we'd sell our findings for a nickel or a dime. You could get maybe 20 to 25 cents for old aluminum kettles and pans. That helped a little bit."
Sam Nease of Blairsville was one of four children growing up in a single-parent home during the Depression.
With Nease's mother, Angeline, having died during an earlier influenza epidemic, the household was put in a financial bind when his father, Vincent, lost his job on a PRR "patty gang" assigned to track maintenance along the Conemaugh Division west of town.
"They laid off the whole crew," Nease recalled, noting his father had been earning 50 cents an hour."That was a lot of money back then."
"Those were really hard times, until my dad got a steady job at the Conemaugh Iron Works in the early 1930s," he added.
Located where today's Dlubak glass plant operates, at Dixon and Chestnut street, the Iron Works specialized in producing bathtubs.
But, while the elder Nease remained between jobs, his older children had to pitch in to help put food on the table.
In 1931, at age 16, Sam Nease quit school to work in a slaughterhouse across the Conemaugh River in Bairdstown. Over time, his weekly earnings there increased from $3 to $5, but he also gained valuable experience in meat-cutting from proprietor William Palmer.
And, "I learned to drive. We had a little Model A Ford pickup truck with an ice box on it. We cut the meat and peddled it through town with a scales.
"We would sell a lot of chuck roast because it was only 18 cents a pound."
"Even my older sister, Christine, earned some money helping people with housekeeping," Nease said. But, "How we paid the rent, I don't know. You took any job you could get."
After the Bradenville slaughterhouse was washed away in the 1936 St. Patrick's Day flood, Nease put his meat-cutting skills to use at the Charles Johnston market on Blairsville's South Stewart Street, earning a raise to $8 a week.
He eventually retired as a meat-cutter in the food service department at Torrance State Hospital.
In an article published in the most recent Heritage and History newsletter of the Historical Society of the Blairsville Area, Bill Cornell notes his late father Hall Cornell was among those furloughed by the railroad, in 1934.
Afterwards, Hall Cornell worked for the owner of the family's temporary quarters, E.H. Bergman's Garage and Moving Co. His wage of one dollar per day paid for the rent and coal for heating.
Their home, which had neither central heating nor an indoor toilet, was located in the "Enterprise" suburb of Blairsville, in Burrell Township.
In addition to food, Bill Cornell recalled a government relief program provided the family with seed and fertilizer to plant large gardens near the house.
His mother and sister would can much of the garden's yield, to see the family through winter. In addition, the younger Cornell noted, "When there was a train wreck nearby, bushels of oranges would turn up."
Instead of buying soda, the family made its own root beer using a Hire's brand concentrate.
Bill Cornell recalls the homemade concoction as "better tasting than commercially made." But, as the root beer aged, "sometimes the mixture created too much gas and would cause the glass bottles to explode."
Public assistance was a must for the family of Tom Rovison of South Spring Street. He also grew up during the Depression with three siblings and a single parent--his mother, Ann.
Unlike Nease, Rovison was able to stay in high school, graduating in 1934. He recalled, "I had one pair of blue sailor pants I wore to school. My mother would wash them on Sunday and on Monday they'd be ready to wear for another week."
To heat their home, Rovison and his siblings would gather limbs from the nearby woods or scavenge coal from a mine site near the glass plant: "When they would load the coal into railroad cars, if any would fall off, we'd take it home."
Rovison considered himself lucky to earn some extra money by working after school at neighbor Ed Johnston's dairy farm.
Especially after South Blairsville's large glass plant closed, "Everybody was on relief," Rovison said. "You couldn't get a job any place."
Even though the "glass works" was shuttered, many former employees and their families stayed on in 30 duplex homes arranged in five rows nearby.
Once covering a wide expanse on Blairsville's southern border, some of the Johnston farm acreage has since become residential lots on South Walnut Street while an adjacent section is now part of a federal flood zone controlled by the Army Corps of Engineers.
"I used to help bring the hay in and cut the corn down for $3 a week," Rovison said of his farm job.
In addition, for husking and shelling the corn, "I got a penny or two per bushel."
In 1937, Rovison finally hopped a freight train and found a job as a construction laborer in the Pittsburgh area. He worked for a contractor, Arthur G. McKee and Co., which was installing a new mill at the U.S. Steel works in Homestead.
"I used a pick and a shovel or a jackhammer to do odds and ends," he said, noting the job lasted a few months. Then he shifted among similar work assignments in East Chicago and Clair ton--seeing his hourly wages rise from 25 cents to 75 cents as he joined a union.
Back in Blairsville, Rovison noted, his mother cashed her relief check at a neighborhood store operated by Mike Nakles.
He said, "It was about $19 every two weeks. That wasn't very much money." But, luckily, "Everything was priced cheap."
Bread was 10 cents a loaf, he recalled.
"Mike Nakles would grind poppyseed for you if you wanted to make a cake," Rovison added. "To get your vinegar, you'd take a gallon jar up there and he'd pump it from a big drum."
Like the Cornells and most other families of the era, the Rovisons grew as much of their diet as possible in a backyard garden. "Everybody had gardens then," he said.
Also, "We used to go across the (Conemaugh) river on a swinging bridge and up over the hill to pick blackberries by Jim Dunlap's farm."
On summer days, Rovison still finds a few raspberries growing wild in the fields around Blairsville, but he noted the blackberry crop has disappeared.
When money allowed, Rovison's mother would buy her family some pork chops. He noted, "We used to have pigs and chickens of our own, but during the Depression, we couldn't afford to keep them."
In most cases, meat dishes were an exception for Blairsville families struggling through the Depression.
In addition to rabbits ("a nice-eating dish"), the Marcozzis raised chickens. So, "We had chicken and pasta on holidays, or when somebody's birthday fell on a Sunday."
Working at the slaughterhouse meant Nease could on occasion beef up his family's menus. "A piece of roast beef would be a real treat, even a chicken," he recalled.
Watermelon was another relatively exotic treat. But, "My dad always made sure we got one on the Fourth of July," Nease's birthday.
A staple dish that was common among many of Blairsville's Depression-stricken households was "coffee soup"--coffee garnished with morsels of stale bread.
"The bread added a little substance to it," Marcozzi noted.
In Italian kitchens, polenta--or corn mush--was "very inexpensive and filling," Marcozzi said.
"It was like fluffy Cream of Wheat," he explained. "My mother would spread it on a board and cover it with sauce and Romano cheese.
"If you could afford it, you could even put red kidney beans in there. That was a treat."
According to Bill Cornell, his family also relied on coffee soup and corn meal mush. But, their mush was cooled into a large loaf, cut into slices and fried in lard.
"We would smother the mush with granulated sugar," he recalled.
Like their neighbors, the Marcozzis padded their pantry with fresh produce from a backyard garden.
When in season, he noted, "We always had tomatoes and fried peppers. And there would be rhubarb to make pies or stew."
Blairsville's Leroy Forsha was just three years old at the dawn of the Depression.
In a series of penned recollections of the subsequent decade, Forsha notes it was a common practice for neighbors to borrow food from each other:
"Many families survived the Depression years by neighborhood borrowing...Probably the most borrowed items were a cup of flour, a cup of sugar, a cup of milk, some rolled oats, or anything similar to complete bread or cookie making, and especially enough to complete the evening meal."
Most who borrowed an item would return something in kind once their assistance check arrived or a relief truck made its food distribution rounds.
Forsha noted his family was lucky, as his father had a job paying $20 per week.
But, "For those who didn't have any income, the food truck drove through the neighborhood on Tuesdays and another truck with clothing...came on Fridays....
"During the week, the mother or father had gone over to the welfare office to prove their needs and get the necessary slips to give to the drivers of the trucks."
On Tuesdays, the truck delivered such items as potatoes, flour, sugar, oats, margarine, lard and canned milk. "Lima and navy beans were the most popular," according to Forsha.
"The Friday truck had shoes, socks, coats and mostly clothing on it."
Forsha noted his family and others who lived along Blairsville's railroad tracks would do what they could to help the hungry, homeless travelers who rode the rails in search of better prospects.
"My mother had an old milk bench set at the back door with a basin, towel and soap," he said. "If it was at all possible, she would give them whatever she could from our leftover supper or breakfast."
Rovison recalled, the displaced glass workers' homes were among the stops Johnston made as he delivered his milk in metal gallon containers. "Even when they couldn't pay anymore, he still gave them milk."
Once a family obtained some food, a "window refrigerator" or an icebox was used to keep it edible, Forsha said.
The earlier window refrigerator--a metal box which sat on the window sill with the top sash closed above it--could be used in the cool months of late autumn and winter.
By the early 1930s, he noted, many homes instead had a wooden ice box which could be replenished daily with ice from the Kelly Brothers in Cokeville.
Said Forsha, "Each house had an ice card, and if you needed ice, you put the card in the front window for the iceman to see. Most of the time we bought 25 pounds at a time."
He recalled the iceman would sometimes give leftover chips of ice to curious youngsters to suck on. Or the children would hold their hands under the rear of the truck to catch a cool drink from the slowly melting ice.
Frank Avalli of Josephine and Marguerite Dick George of Blairsville both grew up in Burrell Township during the Depression, and both enjoyed a more varied diet than many of their contemporaries who grew up in Blairsville.
Meals at the Avalli table were spiced up with some of the inventory from the family store which occupied the front of the homestead on Black Lick's Main Street.
Meanwhile, George enjoyed fresh produce, poultry and ham grown on her family's farm in the nearby Grafton area.
Said Avalli, "My Dad used to take orders and deliver them the next day in his old Model T truck. When people got their checks on relief days, they would cash them and get their orders."
Specializing in Italian items, "He sold olive oil and hard cheese that you could grate. He also sold a little flour because people made their own bread."
But Avalli's wasn't the only store in town.
Despite the hard times, he recalled, Black Lick boasted a clothing store, two doctors and a theater, across from today's fire hall.
Earning a dime per day, Avalli noted he and other local youths "took bread off the train when it arrived and hauled it to the A & P store"--located where the Sheetz convenience store now is, along Rt. 119 in Black Lick.
Burrell Township businesses in the which did not survive the Depression included a local bank and a blast furnace in nearby Josephine.
In the case of the bank, Avalli said, "I lost $33 when it went broke." But, "I got a third of it back when it was all over."
According to Avalli, when the furnace was torn down, "The steel was shipped to Japan, and we got it back in bullets" during World War II.
Avalli and other Black Lick youngsters took a trolley and later a taxi service into Blairsville to attend high school. The entire trip cost 12 cents one-way.
To save a few pennies on the the way home, he noted, "We'd get off at the top of Mile Hill and walk the rest of the way.
"My father told us, 'You're crazy. You just wore out six cents worth of shoe leather.' "
"There were no jobs when I graduated from high school in 1934," Avalli noted.
His first decent-paying job was as a temporary railroad laborer, earning 40 cents an hour to rebuild a local section of track.
He explained, "In 1936, the flood took out the railroad track a quarter mile above Josephine along the Black Lick creek. There was a curve in the track and the water washed it right out.
"That job lasted about six months."
Avalli also worked for several Blairsville businesses--including a silk mill and Pittsburgh Store Fixtures, which made meat cases and coolers. He joined his brother for a time in operating the family store in Black Lick.
During the Depression, "The farmers were better off than the town kids," George said. "We had chickens, a smokehouse and a root cellar. We'd can sausage and meat."
It wasn't unusual for men who had been set adrift by hard times to find their way to her family's farm, seeking a square meal or work as a hired hand.
"My mother always helped them out," George said.
When George and her father would attend to the morning milking, they might find an unexpected guest asleep between the hay and the cattle stalls.
"You appreciated it when they came and asked first," she said, noting, "Sometimes they smoked and you were afraid of a fire."
Like others, her family lost some money when the local bank went under. George herself was out 62 cents.
But her father continued to draw a steady salary as a schoolteacher--a profession she took up as well.
"People had to work hard," she said, recalling that youngsters at the time "had a lot of hand-me-down clothes."
While local doctors "didn't charge that much," George noted, "People didn't go to the doctor every time they sneezed.
"Some people paid them with vegetables or eggs. Even a minister would be paid with food."
Providing an alternative for workers who were idle and families who had become dependent on relief were two federal employment programs: the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).
According to Ed Marcozzi, the WPA was one of the few good things to come out of the depression years: "It was good therapy" for the unemployed men. "They were able to go out and do things."
According to Forsha, most WPA laborers made $48 per month, the foreman made $52 and the lowly water boy earned $28.
The Blairsville community as a whole also benefited from the program, chiefly through construction of the then-new Legion post home at the end of North Stewart Street. Today, the building functions as Blairsville's community center, satisfying various recreational and meeting needs.
Also, WPA crews paved several of the town's less developed streets. Said Marcozzi, "We had some dirt streets, and they replaced them with a hard surface."
Avalli recalled the WPA was responsible for building a road in the village of Palmerton, on a hillside above Black Lick.
According to Forsha, WPA crews worked several years to improve a segment of North Blairsville's Sulphur Run--by excavating the bottom and sides of the stream and lining it with large stones.
According to Nease, who lives nearby on the appropriately named Quarry Street, stones for WPA projects were obtained from an old quarry in the northwest section of Blairsville, once known as Riverview.
"The WPA quarried stone out of there and used it to build a lot of the curbs in Blairsville," he said.
Said Nease, "The early '30s were really terrible."
But, he believes programs initiated soon after, during Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration--WPA, CCC and Social Security--were the "salvation" of his generation.
According to Nease, the CCC wages of an older brother, John, helped get his family through the hard times when his father was without work.
The program employed jobless men between ages 18 and 25 in reforestation, erosion control and other work in public parks. The monthly pay was $30.
Nease noted his brother traveled wide and far with the CCC, assigned first to a park in Ridgway, Elk County, and later to a site in San Jose, Calif.
Said Nease, "My friend's older brother had a Model A Ford, and we all went up for a visit" to Ridgway. "That was a vacation for us."
Forsha had a different recollection, indicating very little of CCC members' wages trickled back home: "Most just made enough to keep themselves in cigarettes and toilet articles."
But, he added, "While they were away, it was one less mouth to feed."
One way local residents relieved the gloom of the Depression was playing and enjoying music.
Marcozzi took lessons on the clarinet in a free music instruction program offered in the former second-floor meeting room of the Blairsville Legion-- upstairs from what is now Dr. Bruce Highberger's East Market Street dental office.
Once his father had resumed work with the PRR, Marcozzi was able to continue private lessons on the instrument. He today," performing with the Blairsville Community Band.
Playing music for audiences has provided Nease a lifetime of enjoyment and, during the Depression, it added a few much-needed dollars to his family's coffers.
Self-taught on the guitar and piano, Nease and some like-minded Blairsville youths joined forces to play at local night spots.
Nease usually earnef about $1 for a whole evening's work.
He also was in demand for accompanying square and round dances at the popular Campbells Mill resort north of town.
Later switching to big band music, Nease has played with a number of regional outfits over the years. Currently, he performs with the Blair Elton Band, earning $30 an hour through a musicians' union-- Greensburg Musical Society Local 339.
His most recent gig was a holiday date at the Westmoreland Manor senior housing complex near Greensburg.
For those who preferred visual escapism, and could afford the admission price, Blairsville offered two primary movie theaters.
According to Rovison, "The Grant was where Melissa's beauty shop is; the Richelieu was in the old Moose building," across from today's Blairsville Pharmacy.
Also, "The Regent was where the ambulance service is now. They had mostly westerns."
Marcozzi was among those who usually ate his popcorn at home.
"The movies were a nickel or a dime (for admission), but you still couldn't afford to go," he said. "If there was a good cowboy movie on at the theater, it would hurt my parents to say no because of a lack of money."
Instead, Marcozzi and his pals often turned to sports as a release.
He recalled that one of his neighbors--Mike Asper, owner of a Blairsville clothing store-- "had the only car on the street, a big Nash. We were able to play football on the street when he wasn't around."
Don Henigin, who also grew up in Brownstown, added, "We had a baseball team that played with the different neighborhoods."
But just as diverting for Henigin was accompanying his father, who drove a team of horses, delivering coal for a mine in nearby Brenizer.
When he was dating his future wife, the former Anabele Curtis, Nease "saved up a couple of nickels so we could go to the movies and then stop for an ice cream at Brizzi's or Dean's."
Avalli and his boyhood friends side-stepped the price issue at Black Lick's movie palace.
He explained, "We used to do work for the (theater) owner. We'd weed his garden and he'd give us free admission.
It also was no obstacle that his family was not among the few in Black Lick owning a radio.
"Our neighbor had one and we'd stand outside and listen through the open window," he noted.
With the church at the center of social life for rural residents, George noted her childhood pastimes were simple.
"We didn't have much to read," she noted. But, "We had the Grit newspaper that had a little section with stores that would be continued the next week. You could hardly wait to get it."
As the Campbells Mill resort was practically in her back yard, "We sat on the bank and watched the well-to-do people come out in their cars and rent canoes. That did provide a lot of entertainment."
However, George and her friends didn't partake of the facility's skating rink.
"We didn't have the money and we weren't allowed to skate on a Sunday," she noted.
On Sunday evenings, she said, "We had an old battery radio and I'd listen to a soap opera that came on, One Man's Family."
Forsha was among those who had no qualms about playing poker, even if the stakes were necessarily limited to enough coins to buy some penny candy.
While scouting through a local dump one day, Forsha said, he and some friends saw a truck unload some mysterious boxes.
Opening them, they discovered cancelled checks from a Blairsville bank that had gone out of business.
"For months after, we played poker with real checks," he said. Most other times, match sticks were used to ante up and place bets.
While some Blairsville natives, like Forsha and Cornell, have set their memories of the Depression down in writing to share with later generations, Marcozzi said: "I'm glad it's over and I hope it never comes back."
Still, he acknowledged the decade of economic hardship did not deprive Blairsville area families of their dignity, no matter the size of their income.
"There was a lot of pride that went on in those days," he said, noting, "Everyone kept a nice place."
"I wore a shirt and tie every day of school," he added. "Our trousers might have been patched, but they were never torn."
