The world that once surrounded Warner Company's Cedar Hollow limestone mine is long gone now. The 145-foot-deep quarry has been filled in with water. A smoked-glass office building stands where the Warner offices used to be, right across from Solitario's Kennel, now deserted and set for demolition in a turnpike expansion. If you turn around and look in the opposite direction, you can see the belltower of St. Peter's Episcopal Church of the Great Valley, built in 1744, perched on the very edge of the quarry's southern rock precipice. We used to live just down the road.
Fifty years have passed, but the town is pretty much unchanged on the north side of Yellow Springs Road. Kissling's old general store with the curved glass candy cases is gone, but Pete (The Barber) Melchiore's house still looks the same, and the building where Whitey's Tavern once beckoned our blue-collared fathers hasn't changed, as well as Forcine's whitewashed home above what used to be the jiffy store of its day.
On the south side of the road, though, everything is gone. The shanties were torn down many years ago, the road that ran behind them has long since disappeared, and the union hall where our neighborhood Santa, Charlie Burris, gave us oranges and candy canes is just a memory.
The clearing where our bus stop used to be is grown over with weeds, but if I close my eyes I can still see old Sarge, our white-haired bus driver, sitting there in his army green jacket waiting for the Cauler kids to make it up the hill. We were always a little late, and he would always wait for us.
I was born in Cedar Hollow in 1955, the same year Churchill resigned and James Dean died and Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, spat out into a family of four boys and three girls. I came in at number six, the youngest girl.
Our little neighborhood was a melting pot of working people--Mexican, Polish, German, Italian, Irish and African to name but a few. We were all poor, and poor people stuck together. They had to in those post-war pre-health insurance days. Your neighbors were your baby sitters, handymen, medical consultants and auto mechanics as well as your morning coffee friends. Josephine's daughter, Susie, was our babysitter for years until my mother accused my dad of having an affair with her. Santa Claus was dad’s crony Charlie Burris. He'd don the red suit at Christmas and go around from house to house, as much for a nightcap as to scare the kids into going to bed so the parents could get busy and put together the bicycles and dream kitchens or whatever else came needing assembly.
Money was always tight, but every Christmas my father would take out a small loan to buy presents for us, each kid getting an equal amount of money spent on him, and each year my parents would go further and further into debt. My father never gave much thought to how he would pay the money back, being like a child himself at Christmas, getting as much pleasure in watching us as we did in opening our presents.
...to be continued...