Category Archive 'Nostalgia'

18 Nov 2017

The Lost World

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“These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.”

–John Cheever

HT: The Man in the Green Shirt

27 Apr 2017

I Want To…

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South Main, corner of Oak, Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, 1940s, a little before my time.

Sippi remembers and yearns for the old and vanished America of yore.

I want to say hello to my neighbors. I want to send my children to school on a bus with their brethren to read of George Washington and Abe Lincoln. I want them to eat peanut butter sandwiches from a paper sack with waxy boxes of whole milk to wash it down.

I want to watch the news and not think it’s an assault on my worldview. I want to watch the news and not think it’s an assault on the worldview of people with whom I disagree.

I want to read a newspaper. I want to listen to the radio. …

I want to sit on naugahyde. I want someone to smoke. ../ I want people to make music right there in front of me. I want everybody to know the words.

I want everyone to dress as well as they can for a social occasion and still be dressed badly. I want to see dress shoes and white socks. …

I want the ballgame to be on TV. I want the TV to be on a shelf over a bar.

I want to go to church on Sunday. I want to go to a bar on Friday night. I want to go dancing with my wife of many years on Saturday. I want to be buried in the same suit I was married in.

I want to see a movie again at the Strand (burned down in the mid-1960s). I want to go to a wedding at St. George’s Lithuanian Roman Catholic Church (torn down by the Diocese of Allentown, 2010). I want to feel the dance floor in St. Stephen’s Hall bouncing from the people dancing. I want to walk up Center Street and see our town’s only skyscraper, the ten-story Steif’s Drugstore Building.

I want to step into the lobby of the Hotel Shenandoah, get a shoeshine, and purchase a carnation for a boutonniere. I want to buy a bag of peanuts and feed the parrot at Dominic Fersulo’s newstand along the north side of the Burke Building. I want to buy bagels Sunday morning at Harris’ Bakery on West Coal Street.

I want to go in and shoot a game of 8-ball in the Modern or the Majestic. I want to buy a beer at Matt Supreme’s.I want to drive deer on Opening Day with the gang from the Brandonville Fire House. I want to feed the trout in the hatchery at the Pumping Station.

I want to listen to my grandfather and the other old greenhorns argue politics, switching back and forth from Lithuanian to Polish to Russian, while playing pinochle up in Girard Park. I want to argue with my uncle Red. I want to help Adam Schadt make moonshine over in Locust Valley. I want to take long drives in my father’s Chevrolet through the Ringtown Valley and Zion’s Grove with 1950s Rock playing on the radio.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

16 Mar 2010

Billboard in Minnesota

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Ed Morrissey posted a picture of a Minnesota billboard which makes a telling political contrast. A lot of people, I expect, wish Ronald Reagan was still around and available as a candidate, now that we are living through the second, and even worse, Jimmy Carter presidency.


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