Main Street, Shenandoah, Pennsylvania in the old days.
Daryl Ponicsan 1938-, screenwriter and novelist best known for The Last Detail (1970), wrote a hilarious, only slightly exaggerated, portrait of his, and my, hometown, titled Andoshen (1973). He changed the name to “Andoshen” to protect the guilty.
The anecdote below is a true story (well known in Shendo) and Shakey the cop is, like many of his characters, based on a real local character.
A place was reserved for the squad car on the corner of Main and Center. The slot was across the street from the Majestic [a pool hall on the west side of South Main] and up a few doors, hidden from the vision of approaching cars because the squad car was parked parallel to the sidewalk while all the other cars behind it were parked diagonally. Likewise, a car headed north on Center Street could not see it until it was too late.
There were three men on the force in addition to Red Sweeney, who sat in police headquarters above the Good Friends and Neighbors Volunteer Fire Company and manned the new two-way radio the boys were crazy about using, or played pinochle with a prisoner, if they had one. Red never left headquarters unless a bona fide crime involving the loss of a large sum of money, a valuable piece of property, or a life had been committed, regardless of whether or not detective investigation was necessary. The last time that happened was the winter before, when Eggshell Oechsle took a shotgun to his father and his uncle. When Red was not at the headquarters he left one of his three teen-age sons in charge.
Shakey the Cop worked the four-to-midnight shift. At least two generations of Andoshen children grew up terrified of him, and countless children gave up a life of malicious mischief and went straight after ringing a doorbell and running away right into the knobby backhand of Shakey the Cop. Whenever a child thought of Shakey the Cop he thought of the billy he was reputed to have broken over Matt Weston’s head for beating his wife and of the thirty-six stitches it took to pinch together the two halves of Matt’s scalp. Later, when “police brutality” became a rallying cry, these same children remembered Shakey as their first example of it, and the memory was oddly one of love for the direct, simple, and almost kindly application of Shakey’s violence. It was never planned, enjoyed, or denied, and thus was not brutality at all.
But even those citizens of Andoshen who had reputations as dumb Polacks called Shakey the Cop a dumb Polack.
One night, just before dusk, Shakey was sitting in his squad car, finishing a take-out coffee from Ella’s Lunch. A few boys were loafing and snapping their fingers in front of the Majestic, and traffic was light, and the air was calm and warm. He made up a little song and sang it softly, “Oh, I’m goin’ to the Lakie, for the Polish Picnic, cookin’ up halupkes …”
A fancy Packard passed beside him and went through the amber light. Shakey was sure that part of the Packard did not make it through the intersection before the light turned red. He started up the Nash and called to headquarters on the new two-way radio.
“Chief Red, Chief Red, this here’s Shakey the Cop, come in, Chief Red.”
“Okay, Shakey, what’s on your mind?” replied Red Sweeney. “Over.”
“Roger. A big Packard from outa town just went through the light. Pennsylvania license, number Edward, Stanley, Two …”
“Okay, okay, Shakey, give ’im the ticket and collect the fine if he’s from outa town and cut the crap.” “Well, can I be puttin’ on the flasher? Over.”
“Jesus, don’t make a three-reeler outa this, will you, Shakey?” Red Sweeney waited for an answer, then said the forgotten “Over.”
“Roger, I be’s pullin’ the bugger over. Roger Wilco, over and out.”
Shakey put the squad car into gear and caught the Packard as it was about to climb Peddler’s Hill out of town. Shakey hit his horn three times and the Packard pulled over to the side.
Shakey picked up his citation book and then threw it back on the seat in disgust. “Woi Yesus, I’m outa tickets!” He considered issuing a ticket on plain note paper, but doubted the legality of this. Besides, he did not have any plain note paper. He would have to let the Packard go, but “Not before I chew him up a little, the sneaky wise guy.”
Shakey strode up to the driver, who was with his wife and two children, and lowered his head to the window to say, “You know, youse went tru a light there on Center.”
“I thought it was on caution, officer,” said the driver. Clearly from out of town. No one in town would call him “officer.” “Well, that’s when you’re suppose’ to use caution.”
“But you can go through,” said the driver. “You only have to stop on the red.” “Say, are you tellin’ me me business?”
“No, sir, I just …”
“Say, where are youse from?” “From Pittsburgh, we’re …”
“Oh, yeah?” said Shakey, indicating he had caught them in a lie, and flashing what locals called his shit-eating grin.
“Yeah,” said the driver, “Pittsburgh.” “Then how come youse got a Pennsylvania license plate?” said Shakey the Cop, straightening up triumphantly and putting his fists on his hips.
Vittore Carpaccio, St. George and the Dragon, 1502, Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice.
From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:
Butler, the historian of the Romish calendar, repudiates George of Cappadocia, and will have it that the famous saint was born of noble Christian parents, that he entered the army, and rose to a high grade in its ranks, until the persecution of his co-religionists by Diocletian compelled him to throw up his commission, and upbraid the emperor for his cruelty, by which bold conduct he lost his head and won his saintship. Whatever the real character of St. George might have been, he was held in great honour in England from a very early period. While in the calendars of the Greek and Latin churches he shared the twenty-third of April with other saints, a Saxon Martyrology declares the day dedicated to him alone; and after the Conquest his festival was celebrated after the approved fashion of Englishmen.
In 1344, this feast was made memorable by the creation of the noble Order of St. George, or the Blue Garter, the institution being inaugurated by a grand joust, in which forty of England’s best and bravest knights held the lists against the foreign chivalry attracted by the proclamation of the challenge through France, Burgundy, Hainault, Brabant, Flanders, and Germany. In the first year of the reign of Henry V, a council held at London decreed, at the instance of the king himself, that henceforth the feast of St. George should be observed by a double service; and for many years the festival was kept with great splendour at Windsor and other towns. Shakspeare, in Henry VI, makes the Regent Bedford say, on receiving the news of disasters in France:
Bonfires in France I am forthwith to make
To keep our great St. George’s feast withal!’
Edward VI promulgated certain statutes severing the connection between the ‘noble order’ and the saint; but on his death, Mary at once abrogated them as ‘impertinent, and tending to novelty.’ The festival continued to be observed until 1567, when, the ceremonies being thought incompatible with the reformed religion, Elizabeth ordered its discontinuance. James I, however, kept the 23rd of April to some extent, and the revival of the feast in all its glories was only prevented by the Civil War. So late as 1614, it was the custom for fashionable gentlemen to wear blue coats on St. George’s day, probably in imitation of the blue mantle worn by the Knights of the Garter.
In olden times, the standard of St. George was borne before our English kings in battle, and his name was the rallying cry of English warriors. According to Shakspeare, Henry V led the attack on Harfleur to the battle-cry of ‘God for Harry! England! and St. George!’ and ‘God and St. George’ was Talbot’s slogan on the fatal field of Patay. Edward of Wales exhorts his peace-loving parents to
‘Cheer these noble lords,
And hearten those that fight in your defence;
Unsheath your sword, good father, cry St. George!’
The fiery Richard invokes the same saint, and his rival can think of no better name to excite the ardour of his adherents:
‘Advance our standards, set upon our foes,
Our ancient word of courage, fair St. George,
Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons.’
England was not the only nation that fought under the banner of St. George, nor was the Order of the Garter the only chivalric institution in his honour. Sicily, Arragon, Valencia, Genoa, Malta, Barcelona, looked up to him as their guardian saint; and as to knightly orders bearing his name, a Venetian Order of St. George was created in 1200, a Spanish in 1317, an Austrian in 1470, a Genoese in 1472, and a Roman in 1492, to say nothing of the more modern ones of Bavaria (1729), Russia (1767), and Hanover (1839).
Legendarily the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George was founded by the Emperor Constantine (312-337 A.D.). On the factual level, the Constantinian Order is known to have functioned militarily in the Balkans in the 15th century against the Turk under the authority of descendants of the twelfth-century Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelus Comnenus.
We Lithuanians liked St. George as well. When I was a boy I attended St. George Lithuanian Parish Elementary School, and served mass at St. George Lithuanian Roman Catholic Church in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania.
St. George Church, Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, Christmas, 1979. This church, built by immigrant coal miners in 1891, was torn down by the Diocese of Allentown in 2010.
In my high school, the better students, in the two Academic class sections, received instruction in Latin in 9th and 10th grade. Our Latin teacher had a curious personal custom. He sacrificed annually in honor of Great Caesar, on the Ides of March, the male student in each class who had offended him by doing the least work and/or being the most disruptive. He sacrificed additionally one female student from each class whose selection, I fear, was based only upon his own capricious whim and covert sexual attraction.
The sacrifice consisted of the victim being bent over a desk and receiving three strokes of a paddle, delivered by a six foot+, 250 lb.+ Latin teacher laying on the strokes with a will and putting his weight behind them. (I won’t name him.) Mr. X’s paddle was a four foot long piece of 1 1/2″ thick pine, produced in our high school’s wood shop by General Curriculum students, who did not take Latin, but admired Mr. X. The paddle was roughly in the form of a Roman gladius, and its surface was scored by a series of regular lines, because it was generally believed that a blow from an uneven surface was more painful.
Mr. X had a fixed policy of assigning the duty of construing the day’s Latin assignment on the blackboard in strict and completely predictable order, going up and down the aisles of desks. Two or three of the smart kids would always actually do the Latin, (I was one of them) and it was our recognized duty to supply the translations in advance to the person who would be going to the blackboard.
Readiness to translate correctly was really vital, because Mr. X would apply his dreaded paddle to anyone who failed to write out the day’s assignment correctly on the blackboard. It was rare, but every once in a while some truly feckless idiot would neglect to seek out Kenny Hollenbach, Jack Rigrotsky, or yours truly, and would arrive at the blackboard, chalk in hand, unprepared.
Mr. X typically broke the current paddle over the defaulter’s posterior, and the mental defectives in shop class would gleefully commence the fabrication of a new, yet more elaborate, edition of the famous paddle.
Every March 15th, two 9th and 10th grade Academic Curriculum sections would look on with the same sadistic interest of Roman spectators at the gladitorial games, as Mr. X conducted his sacrifices. I can recall that he struck the pretty strawberry blonde with the well-developed embonpoint so hard that he raised dust from her skirt. We were a bit puzzled that girls actually submitted to being beaten with a paddle for no reason, but all this went on undoubtedly because the legend of Mr. X the fierce disciplinarian had enormous appeal in our local community. The whole thing was fascinating, and it all made such a good story that everyone, student and adult, in his heart of hearts, enthusiastically approved.
Mr. X would never be allowed to get away with that kind of thing today. Alas! In Hades, poor Caesar must do without his sacrifice. And it is my impression that Latin instruction has rather overwhelmingly also become a thing of the past. Kids today learn Spanish. Modern languages are easier and are thought more relevant.
My high school Latin teacher is the large chap wearing glasses. He also coached one of our sports teams.
In my high school, the better students, in the two Academic class sections, received instruction in Latin in 9th and 10th grade. Our Latin teacher had a curious personal custom. He sacrificed annually in honor of Great Caesar, on the Ides of March, the male student in each class who had offended him by doing the least work and/or being the most disruptive. He sacrificed additionally one female student from each class whose selection, I fear, was based only upon his own capricious whim and covert sexual attraction.
The sacrifice consisted of the victim being bent over a desk and receiving three strokes of a paddle, delivered by a six foot+, 250 lb.+ Latin teacher laying on the strokes with a will and putting his weight behind them. (I won’t name him.) Mr. X’s paddle was a four foot long piece of 1 1/2″ thick pine, produced in our high school’s wood shop by General Curriculum students, who did not take Latin, but admired Mr. X. The paddle was roughly in the form of a Roman gladius, and its surface was scored by a series of regular lines, because it was generally believed that a blow from an uneven surface was more painful.
Mr. X had a fixed policy of assigning the duty of construing the day’s Latin assignment on the blackboard in strict and completely predictable order, going up and down the aisles of desks. Two or three of the smart kids would always actually do the Latin, (I was one of them) and it was our recognized duty to supply the translations in advance to the person who would be going to the blackboard.
Readiness to translate correctly was really vital, because Mr. X would apply his dreaded paddle to anyone who failed to write out the day’s assignment correctly on the blackboard. It was rare, but every once in a while some truly feckless idiot would neglect to seek out Kenny Hollenbach, Jack Rigrotsky, or yours truly, and would arrive at the blackboard, chalk in hand, unprepared.
Mr. X typically broke the current paddle over the defaulter’s posterior, and the mental defectives in shop class would gleefully commence the fabrication of a new, yet more elaborate, edition of the famous paddle.
Every March 15th, two 9th and 10th grade Academic Curriculum sections would look on with the same sadistic interest of Roman spectators at the gladitorial games, as Mr. X conducted his sacrifices. I can recall that he struck the pretty strawberry blonde with the well-developed embonpoint so hard that he raised dust from her skirt. We were a bit puzzled that girls actually submitted to being beaten with a paddle for no reason, but all this went on undoubtedly because the legend of Mr. X the fierce disciplinarian had enormous appeal in our local community. The whole thing was fascinating, and it all made such a good story that everyone, student and adult, in his heart of hearts, enthusiastically approved.
Mr. X would never be allowed to get away with that kind of thing today. Alas! In Hades, poor Caesar must do without his sacrifice. And it is my impression that Latin instruction has rather overwhelmingly also become a thing of the past. Kids today learn Spanish. Modern languages are easier and are thought more relevant.
My high school Latin teacher is the large chap wearing glasses. He also coached one of our sports teams.
When I was a boy, I walked to school every day, and the daily morning walk featured human landmarks.
On the 400 block of West Lloyd Street, a fierce old man with long white hair (at a time when no men wore long hair) and a white beard would be found standing high on a second floor porch. He stood there, as if at attention, and greeted passing schoolchildren with a grave nod and never a smile.
Turning north on Chestnut Street, at the corner house just before the alley, we would find Henry Walukewicz, the undertaker, standing on the sidewalk level porch of his house waiting for us. He subscribed to weekly humor magazines, and thus armed himself with a repertoire of corny riddles, which he would dispense daily to an appreciative audience of schoolkids. After the chilly reception we got from “the wild old man” back on Lloyd Street, Henry the comedian provided a refreshing dose of human warmth.
All this was in the late 1950s.
I lived much of my adult life in Newtown, Connecticut. Our house was built in 1712 and I had a great deal of fun researching our home’s history and the history of the town itself.
At the intersection of Church Hill Road and the Boulevard, there is a stately Victorian house (now law offices, alas!) on one side of the Boulevard and a splendid large barn right across from it. An old, old man who’d grown up in Newtown told me that, long ago, when he was a boy, as the schoolkids passed by that barn, the farmer would stop feeding his cows, come out in front of the barn and do a dance for them. This would have been back in the 1920s.
(I went to Google Earth, thinking that I’d grab an image of that impressive old barn and post it here. It and the Victorian house were both gone! Tempus fugits.)
St. George Lithuanian Roman Catholic Church, Shenandoah, PA, decorated for Christmas in 1979. I served as an altar boy at Christmas mass here many decades ago.
The Diocese of Allentown had this church, the grandest and most architecturally distinguished in its town, demolished in 2010.
An elderly woman walks past the ruins of the former high school in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania.
WNEP 16 reports that several once-thriving communities in Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, including my own boyhood hometown, all one-time mining boom towns, are discovering that, after their economic raison d’être has disappeared, the population vanishes as well.
[S]ome communities in our region are fast becoming virtual ghost towns.
The proof comes from the 2010 U.S. Census which found in three area communities more than 25 percent of the homes and businesses sit vacant.
The three communities are in the heart of the coal region. All experienced population and employment losses in recent years that left hundreds of vacant houses and storefronts.
In Mahanoy City, Schuykill County, according to the U.S. Census, 26.3 percent of its homes sit vacant.
Just a block from the main street a home is selling for less than a price of a used car.
Shamokin, Northumberland County also has a vacancy rate of 26.3 percent. Afternoon traffic rarely stops on downtown blocks that increasingly see buildings for rent or for sale.
Shenandoah has the region’s highest vacancy rate at 28.9 percent. …
Empty lots. Empty businesses that closed years ago.
“It’s a great little town, but it has an image problem,” said realtor Erica Ramus. She has a hard time selling property in Shenandoah. “I’ve brought people up here to show them downtown properties as far as commercial, and the comment I’ve heard is, ‘Why would I want to move my business to a dying old coal town?'”
A typical Shenandoah block consists of an empty building, another vacant storefront, a doctor’s office, another vacant storefront, then a bank branch. People downtown said the neighborhoods are even bleaker. …
A drive through Shenandoah’s east side finds abandoned, unlivable homes. Others sit vacant for years, with little hope of finding a buyer.
A rowhome for sale is covered with newspapers from the year 2000.
“They’re not dead, but they’re certainly ill,” said Wilkes University economics professor Tony Liuzzo. He said the communities spiraling downward where jobs and people leave and vacant homes stay vacant.
“There’s an increase in pressure on the individuals who are remaining there and, of course, you don’t want to be the last one left holding the bag, so to speak,” Liuzzo added.
John Dopkin calls his east side Shenandoah block the loneliest place imaginable.
“I have no friends, all my friends are gone. I just lost my wife a year ago, and I’m waiting to go myself,” Dopkin added.
St. George Lithuanian Roman Catholic Church, Shenandoah, PA, decorated for Christmas in 1979. I served mass at Christmas there many decades ago. The Diocese of Allentown had this church, the grandest and most architecturally distinguished in town, torn down in 2010.
Shenandoah, Pennsylvania: South Main Street in the 1940s, a bit before my time.
My high school and elementary school classmate Norman Gregas posted on Facebook this Iris Dement nostalgic tribute to a vanished small town, particularly applicable in the case of our hometown whose treatment at the hands of time and economic change was exceptionally destructive and cruel.
Hans von Aachen, St. George Slaying the Dragon, c. 1600, Private Collection, London
From Robert Chambers, The Book of Days, 1869:
Butler, the historian of the Romish calendar, repudiates George of Cappadocia, and will have it that the famous saint was born of noble Christian parents, that he entered the army, and rose to a high grade in its ranks, until the persecution of his co-religionists by Diocletian compelled him to throw up his commission, and upbraid the emperor for his cruelty, by which bold conduct he lost his head and won his saintship. Whatever the real character of St. George might have been, he was held in great honour in England from a very early period. While in the calendars of the Greek and Latin churches he shared the twenty-third of April with other saints, a Saxon Martyrology declares the day dedicated to him alone; and after the Conquest his festival was celebrated after the approved fashion of Englishmen.
In 1344, this feast was made memorable by the creation of the noble Order of St. George, or the Blue Garter, the institution being inaugurated by a grand joust, in which forty of England’s best and bravest knights held the lists against the foreign chivalry attracted by the proclamation of the challenge through France, Burgundy, Hainault, Brabant, Flanders, and Germany. In the first year of the reign of Henry V, a council held at London decreed, at the instance of the king himself, that henceforth the feast of St. George should be observed by a double service; and for many years the festival was kept with great splendour at Windsor and other towns. Shakspeare, in Henry VI, makes the Regent Bedford say, on receiving the news of disasters in France:
Bonfires in France I am forthwith to make
To keep our great St. George’s feast withal!’
Edward VI promulgated certain statutes severing the connection between the ‘noble order’ and the saint; but on his death, Mary at once abrogated them as ‘impertinent, and tending to novelty.’ The festival continued to be observed until 1567, when, the ceremonies being thought incompatible with the reformed religion, Elizabeth ordered its discontinuance. James I, however, kept the 23rd of April to some extent, and the revival of the feast in all its glories was only prevented by the Civil War. So late as 1614, it was the custom for fashionable gentlemen to wear blue coats on St. George’s day, probably in imitation of the blue mantle worn by the Knights of the Garter.
In olden times, the standard of St. George was borne before our English kings in battle, and his name was the rallying cry of English warriors. According to Shakspeare, Henry V led the attack on Harfleur to the battle-cry of ‘God for Harry! England! and St. George!’ and ‘God and St. George’ was Talbot’s slogan on the fatal field of Patay. Edward of Wales exhorts his peace-loving parents to
‘Cheer these noble lords,
And hearten those that fight in your defence;
Unsheath your sword, good father, cry St. George!’
The fiery Richard invokes the same saint, and his rival can think of no better name to excite the ardour of his adherents:
‘Advance our standards, set upon our foes,
Our ancient word of courage, fair St. George,
Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons.’
England was not the only nation that fought under the banner of St. George, nor was the Order of the Garter the only chivalric institution in his honour. Sicily, Arragon, Valencia, Genoa, Malta, Barcelona, looked up to him as their guardian saint; and as to knightly orders bearing his name, a Venetian Order of St. George was created in 1200, a Spanish in 1317, an Austrian in 1470, a Genoese in 1472, and a Roman in 1492, to say nothing of the more modern ones of Bavaria (1729), Russia (1767), and Hanover (1839).
—————————-
St. George, being a soldier saint, was also a favorite of the Lithuanians, and the Lithuanian parish in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania where I grew up was named for him. Our church’s cornerstone was laid in 1891, and construction was completed in 1894. In 1901, the frame church was clad in brick and twin towers erected. In 1907, a poor immigrant coal mining community spent nearly $100,000 covering the church in granite and decorating its interior in the Gothic manner of Pugin.
The diocese of Allentown in its wisdom demolished St. George Church during the winter of 2009-2010.
