In 1950s Ligonier, a mainstay of pop culture was just beginning to take hold.
“There was a whole change in lifestyle that was happening,” said resident and historian Ralph Kinney Bennett. “Television was just coming into vogue.”
The tube was altering people's habits: instead of an evening on the porch, folks would spend a summer night tuning into their favorite show, Bennett said.
Outside, Ligonier was more a commercial center than a tourist destination, where families came to buy a suit, groceries or linens to sew new curtains, Bennett said.
“It was just a town where you did what you had to do — where you ran a drug store or a plumbing supply shop,” he said.
An upcoming photography exhibit aims to showcase the Ligonier that existed before it transformed into the Ligonier of today.
The Ligonier Valley Library is seeking items to include in “The Way We Were: Ligonier Valley in the 1950s,” its free, historic photography show that will depict life in 1950s Ligonier. The show inside the Pennsylvania Room will run Sept. 8 through Nov. 10 and feature a talk from Bennett Sept. 29.
“That's the time when Ligonier was a small commercial center for the outlying district, whereas now it is, in a way, it's an attraction,” said Bennett, author of “Ligonier 250: The Fort, The Town, The Valley.”
“It's a destination,” he said.
Approximately 150 photographs of local businesses in the summer of 1956 are the focal point of the show, said librarian Shirley Iscrupe.
Iscrupe said resident Mark Sliwa, who has helped in the past in the Pennsylvania Room, came to the library with the photographs, saying another local, Bob Shamey, had shared them with the him. Iscrupe said the pictures were taken by a family member of Shamey, and they capture a period of time “right before Ligonier really started to change.”
“Every year we do a different theme for Ligonier,” Iscrupe said of the historic photography shows. “It's basically to find something that's interesting and maybe hasn't really been represented before and is educational.”
“Sometimes this stuff just, three o'clock in the morning when I can't sleep, it just slides into my head,” she said. “That's what this one did. I said, ‘Oh look: all these great pictures. Let's do the fifties.'”
Bennett, a 1959 graduate of Ligonier High School, believes people who view the exhibit will be surprised at how many businesses there were, like the number of gas stations in town, or how many recreational spots there were where teenagers spent their free time.
“It was just our town where people lived and did their business,” he said. “Now Ligonier is an attraction.”
Iscrupe said in the fifties, Ligonier was “just a country town.”
“The greatest proportion of the people in it on Saturday afternoon and evening were local people,” Iscrupe said. “They weren't people from out of town. They were the local people coming into to town to, as Ralph Bennett says in his book, get their haircut, visit, do some shopping, trade goods for goods — bring in your eggs and go home with a bag of sugar.”
“The bottom line I think really is that not only was the country changing but little Ligonier Valley was changing, too, and it was just heralding in the big changes that happened in the sixties, and some of those big changes, you can see their genesis in the fifties, like the Vietnam War, the space race, heightened Cold War, and those are national and international things, but the end of World War II and the fifties is what got all that going.”
Eric Greisinger, an adjunct history professor at Westmoreland County Community College, said small town USA was basically transformed by World War II. Young people who had fought in the war were returning with an advanced maturity, he said, and coming back to, in a sense, take the place of the older generation that dominated aspects of communities, like church and school leaders. The generations had “two different world experiences,” he said.
Two outlooks of America emerged during this time, Greisinger said. The mainstream, exterior image of America was defined by the Eisenhower administration, television, suburban life and pop culture like “I Love Lucy” and “The Lawrence Welk Show.” Beneath it was the emergence of a counter culture reacting to the status quo, defined by such things as the Beat Generation and the creation of Hell's Angels in California. Additionally the female identity outside of the home began to surface, which would change the perspective in small communities, he said.
The photography exhibit will allow people to see a “freeze frame” of history, Greisinger said.
“It gives us a framework to identify our own place in history,” he said.
Anyone with toys, games, advertising materials, clothing, magazines, business souvenirs, furnishings, scrapbooks, letters or household items from the 1950s are welcome to submit them for inclusion in the exhibit. Iscrupe said the library often makes copies or photographs of items with the owners' permission to keep them on file for future programs.
“This is not about us showing what we already have here,” she said. That's part of it, but it's about adding to the collection.”
“How we always do these shows is we take whatever people bring in if it fits because it shows how life was in that time period, that era or that neighborhood,” Iscrupe said. “Hopefully we'll get some documents. It would nice to have some high school graduation diplomas or advertising stuff from all the businesses in town.”
“What I'm hoping for is that people will walk in with (photos of) class reunions, family reunions, weddings, kids playing out in the yard in 1954, the flax scutching festival in 1956,” she said.
“The Way We Were” is the library's 14th Historic Photography Show. For more information, contact the library at 724-238-6451.
Nicole Chynoweth is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. She can be reached at 724-850-2862 or nchynoweth@tribweb.com.
