My Home Town

John J. Green Jr.

It's a shame such a nice little town taken over by Crooked,greedy dishonest people, I used to really love this town
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                                              That's the Shit Creek! There in the foreground of the baseball field where I played, not well, but I played, is the famous Shit Creek.

Snow, 1978. There always was a lot of snow.

Well, there's something to do.

It was murder, pun intended, driving up and down those hilly streets in the winter.

This is where I went to school first through third grade.

I remember that post office. Walked by it many times.  Formally "Marstellar" but everybody called it "Moss Creek."

Where the hell is that? Nowhere near Barnesboro, I'll tell you that! The colors look like from one of those Elvis on velvet paintings. Or the Hughes Bore Hole.

Born there. Got the fishing lure cut out of my finger there (on a different occasion). Got the bullet fragment cut out of my palm there (on the same occasion as the fishing lure).

Swimming Pool. Also Meat Refrigeration Unit. Retro-fitted to a leading center of methamphetamine manufacturing and distribution. Over 1,000 people attended the opening (of the swimming pool) in 1956.

Built on top of a hill, the highest point around--What? do you think they were going to put it down by the Shit Creek?--the air was always noticeably cooler up there than in town. You'd get all hot from playing baseball down by the Shit Creek and want a cool dip. You couldn't take a dip in the Shit Creek (We are not an insensible people.) so you'd walk up the hill to your house, grab your trunks and get more hot and sweaty trudging up the steepest hill you ever saw to the pool. But when you got up there it weren't so hot no more. By the time you stripped down to your trunks in the communal locker room and walked across the lawn to the edge of the pool, you were fine! You weren't hot anymore. And you would have stayed fine except that you'd gone to all of that effort to take a dip and you were going to take a dip. On most days that would be a decision you would regret but once, and that is continuously. On most days, honest to God, on most days in the summer the water was so cold it was almost painful. Frigid. Your peepy shrunk and retracted into your body and you had to have it surgically extracted like the fishing lure and bullet fragment. If you hit it just right, say August 21 after two weeks of a heat wave, it was great. Go swimming up there in June, you die.

Several years ago the pool needed a lot of work to stay open. It was 50-60 years old. It was going to cost a whole lot of borough money. The mayor tried to enlist public support for the project. Not enough people were interested in having a community swimming pool, he said. And so this was the end of the Barnesboro Swimming Pool.

See! He's even got a jacket on. It was 95 degrees in town and 58 up there.

At its best, Barnesboro was a great place to grow up. That is what it was for me. I had a great childhood and have some good memories. For generations Barnesboro provided a child with safety, security, and community. You could not stay, however. If you resisted the siren call of union wages in the coal mines right out of high school you had then to resist the temptation to go back, for the wider world was a splash of icy cold water like jumping into the swimming pool on Memorial Day. You were not prepared by Northern Cambria High School for college. You were behind and had to catch up. You were not prepared for life with and among people whose skin color was other than white. Senor Rey did not really make you literate or conversant in Spanish. Senor Rey was not really literate or conversant in English. That's a lot. Accepting those caveats it was a great place to live until age 18. There is a lot to be said for that. But Barnesboro (Northern Cambria) does not do that anymore.  It's all played out, the coal mines, the land, the town, the people.

The photos in this post and the comment at top are from BARNESBOROandSPANGLER, a nostalgia site as far as I can tell. I recognize the surnames of the site host(s) and of many of those who comment. They are the same surnames that I have seen on tombstones in cemeteries all around Barnesboro all of my life. And that's the point, the people who run BARNESBOROandSPANGLER and who made Barnesboro an age 1-18 daycare center are mostly dead or moved away. I do not recognize the surnames of those who got rounded up in the drug sweeps or of those who otherwise made the Johnstown paper with accompanying mugshot. There's not enough interest in making Barnesboro a great place to grow up anymore.