2004 Europe

Colonial Fieldstone House



July 2 – Today is Friday and after a breakfast of ham and cheese omelet with a side of scrapple we started calling relatives. Darrell, no answer, Dustin, got Betty Ann and they’re tied up the whole weekend, Bobby, he’s involved with Rose’s surprise birthday party and has relatives of hers coming in from out of town. Fred, he’s sick and can’t have visitors. Aunt Irma, my mom’s youngest sister, is home and ready to see us so we headed over to see her. On the way we did some shopping and visited my old grade school, my old house on Crestline Ave, the Laible farm and my cousin Richard and his wife Violet. His father, my Uncle Warren is still alive and will be 97 this week. He lived in his own home until just a year or so ago. Now he’s in a retirement home and is not very well. It’s odd that out of the nine children in my mother’s family only the oldest, Warren, the youngest, Irma and my Aunt Mildred are still alive. Mildred is the middle child. So the book ends and the average are still with us.



We stopped my by Great-grandfather George Moyer’s house on Emmaus Ave (above). It’s a Colonial era fieldstone house which means it was built by the farmer with stone he collected while clearing his land for cultivation. This accounts for the variety of colors in the stone you see in the house on the left. There are some structures in his yard that I have always fascinated me. They are sculptures and small buildings constructed from mortar and small river rocks. There are several houses, a church (which can be seen between the two bushes in the lower right of the picture above and the picture below) a moon with a star suspended from it and a large heart. During the depression an itinerant artist came through the area and George paid him to build these structures to allow him to earn some cash. Apparently the artist knew a good thing when he saw it because he made several visits building one of the structures each trip. They have been standing in the yard since the early 1930s with very little care. As a youngster I used to love to play around them.



We got to Irma’s and after visiting for a while we convinced her to go out to dinner with us at the Bethlehem Diner. It was a lot of fun and she had crab cakes which she loves. Then we went back to her home and played Flinch and Racko until Diana was turning into a pumpkin and we headed back to our hotel.



July 3 – Got up this morning and went back to the Bethlehem Diner for more scrapple, this time with SOS, which for the non-military among you is creamed chipped beef on toast (actually made with hamburger by most military kitchens, which, by some perversity of nature, is actually better than the version made with the much more expensive chipped beef). If you want to know what the anagram SOS stands for in the culinary milieu, find a veteran and ask. Any veteran from Vietnam or before will know exactly what it stands for, he may not tell you, but he will know. After breakfast we went back to the hotel with the intention of calling our folks using my cell phone because there are no long distance charges on the weekend. I was just getting ready to call when I had to go to the bathroom. Sorry if this is all too graphic for some of you. I had just flushed the toilet and was getting my phone out to check the battery charge when it slipped out of my hand like a bar of wet soap and flew up, over and directly into the swirling toilet. I was so stunned that I was frozen for a moment and that was all it took for the phone to take one lap of the toilet bowl and go directly down the drain. I immediately went to the desk to ask the maintenance man to come see if he could get it out.



When I arrived back at the room the phone had floated part way up and the antenna was sticking a little out of the drain so I reached in and pulled the phone out. It was completely shorted out and dead for sure. Diana insisted that I dry it out with her hair dryer but I knew it was no use. I went through the motions anyway and sure enough it was dead. In fact the LCD screen inside the phone looked a little like an aquarium with water bubbles on the face.



We wanted to do some laundry so I dropped Diana off at the Laundromat and went down to the Verizon store. After some negotiation I wound up with an updated phone at a good price. They couldn’t recover the phone book from the drowned phone so I’ll have to enter all those numbers again. Oh well, what else have I got to do for three days on the train.



Just when I got back to the Laundromat I heard this weird ringing. After a moment or two I realized that it was my new phone. It was Darrell asking if we could come visit as they would be home all day. That’s exactly what we did. Visiting with Darrell and Connie after spending yesterday with Aunt Irma makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have returned to Pennsylvania after leaving the Air Force. Back in 1972 when I graduated from California State University, Long Beach, the problem was jobs. Eastern Pennsylvania was in the early stages of a two-decade long period of decline. All the major employers (ex. Bethlehem Steel and Mack Truck) were shrinking rapidly or moving out of state. Stable employment was very hard to find, especially for those just entering the job market. Since I found a good job in California it was just too easy to stay there. I often wonder how things would have worked out if I had gone back.



Historical Note: Most of you don’t know that Darrell and I are ‘double cousins’. That is, his mother was my mother’s sister and his father was my father’s brother. Darrell and I are cousins on both sides of the family. He has always been my favorite cousin and I really enjoy spending time with him. We grew up next door neighbors, both of our fathers left home before we were 6, both of our mothers worked for pennies in a garment industry sweat shop to support us and when my mom died while I was in high school I lived with Irma and Darrell until I graduated. In short, I have a special affection for both of them that I have probably not adequately expressed to either; a shortcoming and oversight that I must correct as soon as possible. Writing this has made that very clear to me.



We went to Hellertown to have steak sandwiches at Matey’s. They were great! Philly’s Best, a chain of steak shops in SoCal has allowed me to satisfy my yen for steak sandwiches in California. Something I couldn’t do for the first 20 years I lived there. They’ve invited us back over tomorrow for dinner and fireworks.



July 4 – Up early and to breakfast, scrapple with ham and cheese again. Then over to pick up Irma for church. Central Assembly of God is the successor church to the Gospel Tabernacle that I attended as a child on 4th street in Bethlehem. It’s a good church with nice people but the emphasis on feeling instead of growing puts me off a bit. I do enjoy the services when I go there though. After church we went home to change and call our parents for the first time in 3 months. Everyone seemed to be doing pretty well but as they are all over 80 some issues do arise from time to time.



We went back to Irma’s; picked her up and headed for Darrell’s to visit. We had lunch and then played some games and headed over to Bethlehem to see the Sand Island fireworks. They were very nice and lasted about 20 minutes. We had a good view point on top of a hill over behind the Bethlehem Steel headquarters. After that we headed to ‘The Cup’, an ice cream parlor that has been in Bethlehem for over 70 years, for some après fireworks treats. (Now that I’ve been to Europe, I’ve got to sprinkle my writing with foreign words.) Then it was back to Irma’s to take her home and off to our hotel.



July 5 – Up and to breakfast at about 10AM then to the local shopping center to see if I can find some razor parts I need for my electric. No luck. Then over to Darrell’s to visit for the day. This is great!! Matt and Anna, their eldest son and daughter-in-law came by to show us the plans Matt has made for the house they want to build. Matt is a landscape architect by training and has designed and drawn the plans for a beautiful home. He had a licensed architect go over them to make sure he wouldn’t have any problems with the authorities. It’s a nice design and is very big. He’s going to act as his own general contractor and has already put the plans out for bids and calculated the approximate cost of construction. They are having a meeting with a mortgage specialist today to arrange financing for construction. My Cousin Freddy and Jean came by and Uncle Bobby, Darrell’s dad, too. All in all it was a good day of visiting.



Now we are packing for the train ride home. Yikes, what a pain. Diana acquires pictorial guide books of the places and things we visit. They are always printed on slick paper that is very heavy. I’m sure we have at least 50 pounds of books in the suitcases. I’ve tried several times to get her to let me ship some of them home but she won’t do it. I’m glad she buys them because they are a wonderful reference and reminder of all the things we’ve seen. I just wish there was some way to get them home besides carrying them in our luggage.

(c) 2004 Rod Longenberger