Gold, Black, and Blue

We had a wonderful day trip to Pittsburgh. We drove from Grove City, Pennsylvania, home of my Alma Mater, Grove City College, to my childhood home in Forest Hills.

Three weeks after graduating from Grove City College in May of 1979, I moved to Florida. I set out on a life adventure that summer, moving from Pittsburgh where I lived all my life, all the way to Florida, where I knew not a single soul. I thought I would only be in Florida for six months before moving on. Three years later I was still in Florida.

Life never turns out the way you plan it.

After three years, I had a house, a girlfriend, and a black cat name Onyx.

When Sperry Rand wanted me to move on as per the original plan, I found a new job instead, and stayed in my new Florida home with Onyx. I changed jobs two more times until I ended up at E-systems were I worked for 26 years. Privileged to work with many talented, smart, hardworking and dedicated employees over those 34 years, I just tried my best to keep up with them. The teamwork, camaraderie and the friendships over those years is what I remember the most from my career as an electrical engineer. I was very fortunate. Eight years have now quickly passed since I retired.

I visited with my sister and brother in Forest Hills. Forest Hills is just eight miles east of downtown Pittsburgh. My sister Nancy still lives in the house we all grew up in. My brother David lives five minutes away, and spends a lot of time in that house too. Nancy and David are doing great. Both are retired, relaxed, and living a good life in our home town.

We drove south from Grove City in the morning, taking I-79 and then getting on the Parkway East. I must have driven on the Parkway East thousands of times during the 22 years I lived in Pittsburgh. We got off at Ardmore Blvd and memories came flooding back as we drove into Forest Hills to my childhood home. I had Chris drive around on some of the roads in my childhood neighborhood to show him and Erica how steep the roads are. Many of the roads are 15 degrees to over 20 degrees in grade. These are the kinds of roads where you get off your bike and push. Riding downhill you can reach speeds of 40 mph in a few seconds.

I’m so very fortunate being able to visit my childhood home. Not many people can return to the home they grew up in. While walking up the front steps to the house, and into the living room, and seeing my bedroom, the kitchen, and the back yard, I felt nostalgic. I’ve been gone 42 years and the home still feels very familiar to me. The experience was surreal to share with Erica and Chris, as two different worlds converged. I am so very grateful I could travel back in time to see my childhood home again.

Then we drove back out the Parkway East to downtown Pittsburgh to Station Square to meet a childhood friend of mine named Freddie Pozzuto. Fred is the person I have known the longest besides my brother and sister. Fred is my best childhood friend. We’ve known each other from the 2nd grade when we were eight years old, from 56 years ago,

Freddie and I grew up in Forest Hills together. We rode bikes all summer long, and playing softball, football, and basketball. There we no organized leagues back then with uniforms and parents supervising. We found places to play and organized our own games. We would sneak into the high school football stadium through a secret hole cut in the fence in a remote part of the stadium. We would play football using the endzone as our field. Our football field was marked side to side by the goal line and the back of the endzone. Our touchdowns were scored when we crossed one of the sidelines of the field.

We went to the same grade school, Woodside Elementary. All six grades and kindergarten where in the same two story building. We played basketball and football where the tennis courts were. I never saw anyone play tennis there. That fenced area next to Woodside Elementary was called the Pigpen. We spent countless ours in the Pigpen playing basketball and three on three touch football. Now the entire school has been leveled for homes, including the classic softball field behind the school where we played softball all summer long.

Freddie and I hung out at each others house most days. We used to play golf with plastic golf balls in his yard. One day his dad came home and became furious after seeing all the divots I took out of his immaculate lawn. The divots were mine, not Fred’s. Fred is a good golfer, I was a duffer. The ban on golfing in the yard last only a day or two.

I could write 20 more posts about our childhood adventures. Perhaps some of those are best left for another day. Especially the one about Fred crashing his Dad’s Chrysler New Yorker into the back of another friend’s car while chasing him at night with the lights off. The crash wasn’t really our fault. The guy turned on his right blinker, and then trying to deceive us, turned left, as Fred tried to pass him on the left. Yes, we still played cops and robbers back then in huge steel and chrome cars. Fred’s Dad was not happy, to put it mildly. I didn’t go over to Fred’s house for awhile after that. Suffice it to say, life was better when our toys were bicycles, not huge metal and chrome behemoth cars with 440hp, 4 barrel carbuerated motors. Oppsie, I guess I just told that story. There are 50 more.

Summer’s were also spent hanging out at the Forest Hills community pool. Summer traditionally began on Memorial Day Weekend, and ended on Labor Day Weekend. We had all of June, July, and August to run around free around in steep hills of Forest Hills. We had a wonderful childhood growing up in an idyllic safe town back in the 60s and 70s. I’m glad Fred and I are still in touch after all these years.

So many childhood memories came streaming back while we were in my childhood home. I remember walking to grade school and coming home for lunch. My mother would read books to my brother and I while we had a hot home cooked lunch. I remember my mother reading my favorite childhood book called Rascal, by Sterling North. The book is about a boy and his pet raccoon he rescued as baby raccoon. The big mystery at the end of the book was whether the raccoon would stay with the boy, or return to the wild. When my mother read the end of the book, the raccoon left to go into the woods, and my mother knew I would cry. I am crying right now writing this.

A year before my mother’s passing, she found that book, Rascal, and wrapped it up as a Christmas present. That book is the best gift I ever received. The book was probably 50 years old. During my euolgy for my mother’s funeral, I told the story of the Rascal book, how my mother read to us, and how she gave it to me as a gift 40 years later. This was the part of the eulogy that I lost my composure and broke down and cried.

Junior high was much farther away, over two miles. This is the classic tale that I walked two miles to school in the rain and snow, up, down, over dale, and over some very steep hills. This was true, over half an hour walk at each way in sometimes rough conditions. Walking all those hills was good as the walking kept us fit. High school was much closer, about 1/2 mile away my my home.

We had a wonderful youth, with grade school, junior high, and high school all within walking distance. We had many of the same friends for 12 years. I was blessed. My last year of high school I didn’t miss a single day. I didn’t want the high school to end. I loved my time there. We were innocent and not jaded by the real world. Youth is a wonderful time of life. I look back on my childhood with very fond memories.

Seeing the old neighborhood in summer was wonderful. I went back every year for 32 years, but always in winter for Christmas. I enjoyed seeing the place in summer. Pittsburgh was a great place in summer and autumn, up until Christmas. Then January through May was often cold, snowy, wet and brutal.

Erica, Chris, Fred and I had a nice lunch at Station Square. I severely hurt my leg fooling around while trying to dance along with the fountains that were synchronized to music. My achilles tendon hurt so much I could hardly walk for several weeks. The pain was so bad I thought I might have ruptured my achilles tendon. The part of my leg that hurts the worst is where the achilles tendon attaches to the calf muscle. This is the worst injury I have ever experienced. Make sure to turn the sound up for the video.

 

Seven weeks later I am still walking with a noticeable limp. Each day my leg feets a little bit better. Finally while in Maine, I ended up getting a cane. I was brought to my knees from excruciating pain while trying to jump around on some big rocks along the Maine coastline. I ended up prone on the rocks, wrenching in pain. The cane helped a lot. Each day since using the cane, the leg feels a little bit better. The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be. Being on a long RV trip is not a good time to have a leg injury.

We rode the Monongahela Incline to the top of Mt. Washington. Bandit was allowed to come with us on the funicular railway. Bandit is Erica’s and Chris’s wonderfully smart, agile, fast, and very happy dog.

Funicular railway means that there are two counterbalanced cars permanently attached to opposite ends of the haulage cable, which is looped over a pulley at the upper end of a track. The two cars move in concert: as one ascends, the other descends. The rope pulls one car upwards while the other car descends the slope at the other end of the rope. Except for the weight of passengers, the weight of the two cars is counterbalanced, so the engine only has to lift the excess passengers and supply the energy lost to friction.

Perhaps the best view of Pittsburgh is from Mt Washington. The entire town and landscape comes into the view. The Monongahela River joins the Allegheny River to form the Ohio River. Downtown Pittsburgh sits at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers. John Madden used to love to say the word “confluence” on Monday Night Football. He got a kick out of using that word. The ariel views of Pittsburgh lit up at night on MNF are iconic. Heinz Field, the home of the Steelers is visible on the left middle of the photo below. The Steelers are known as the Black and Gold, I changed the order to Gold and Black, and Blue, for purposes of highlighting my wretched tendon injury.

We rode back down the incline to the banks of the Monongahela River. I lived in Pittsburgh for 22 years, and I still have to look up the spelling of that river on the internet. I lived just three miles from the Mon river. We simply called the river the Mon.

We said goodbye to Freddie Pozzuto. Seeing Fred again was really great. As Harry Chapin sang in the song, “I Let Time Go Lightly”, “Old friends, they mean much more to me than the new friends, Cause they can see where you are, and they know where you’ve been.” Then we drove back up north to Grove City. Today had been a very good day.

The next day we drove to Niagara falls. The drive was one of our shorter drives. We stayed only a few miles from Niagara Falls. And then the rain began.

Back to my Roots – Imagine Dragons