The first week of 2023 has turned out to be much too exciting for me. On Tuesday morning I woke up to find that two massive oak trees in my back yard had uprooted and fallen, away from the house. One had demolished half of a storage shed; the other was precariously threatening the remaining half. On Wednesday it completed the damage. These were lovely, thirty-inch diameter trees, probably nearly three hundred years old.
When I reported this to the insurance adjuster, she requested that I make a list of the personal items that were destroyed in the shed and to estimate their value. The first item on the list is Fort Littleton. In 1941, when I was particularly fond of playing with toy soldiers, my father meticulously built for me a scale model of the colonial era frontier fort, Fort Littleton. During the French and Indian War the settlers built a chain of five forts between the Potomac and Susquehanna Rivers, as protection against their adversaries. George Croghan built Fort Littleton, in what is now Fulton County, in 1755. Three years later it served as a valuable link between Forts Loudon and Bedford during Forbes’ Campaign.
My model was four feet square with eight-inch high palisades on each side. The palisades were individual half inch black cherry spikes with their tops whittled into points. It had a main gate, elevated blockhouses on two opposing corners, and a rugged log cabin inside. I remember it being the centerpiece of a display in Sarasnicks’ window for Boy Scout Week one year. My father was a craftsman, seemingly capable of making anything. The fort survived eighty years; I am embarrassed that I didn’t take better care of it. I can’t bear to throw out its remnants; they will receive a Vikings’ Funeral in my fireplace. How do I place a value on it?
Another sad casualty of this event is my mother’s Noritake China set. When I returned from service in Japan in 1955, she commented that she wished I had brought back a set of dishes for her. I promptly went into Joseph Horne’s and ordered a lovely Ashby pattern Noritake set for her. For the remainder of her life it served as her “good China”, proudly used at every family gathering. I shuddered when I saw its crumpled storage box in the ruins of the shed. Fortunately there are enough unbroken dishes that each of the grand-children can have one as a souvenir.
A poignant loss was a significant part of my collection of classic 78 rpm vinyl records. The very first one I fished out of the debris was my all-time favorite, “The Wreck of the old 97”, by Vernon Dahlhart.
Beth and Mike came over on Saturday and did an outstanding job of recovering things from the wreckage. At some point Sara called and inquired “What was in the shed?” My response was “A lifetime of memories!” A lot of the things in the storage shed were salvageable, but a wee bit soggy. I had a collection of about thirty Pittsburgh Pirate score cards from the 1940s and 1950s that are currently spread out on my kitchen table and almost certainly will survive. They will be the subject of a future column.
A crumpled box entitled “JFO Memorabilia” also survived. Among other things it contained an interesting assortment of souvenir programs from Penn State football games, Steeler games, Pittsburgh Hornet hockey games, and Civic Light Opera musicals at Pitt Stadium and at the Civic Light Opera. I wonder if the Heinz History Center would be interested in any of them?
My Bridgeville High School artifacts will be a welcome addition to the already impressive collection at the Bridgeville Area Historical Society History Center. The program from the Fortieth Reunion of the Class of 1949 contains a lot of information on the adult careers of my fellow classmates; reunion artifacts can be a valuable resource. A dance card from our Junior Prom, filled out with the names of my partners for each dance, is a treasured heirloom. My copy of our Class Play, “Love is Too Much Trouble”, autographed by my fellow Thespians, brought on a wave of nostalgia — the roster of surviving fellow classmates is shrinking rapidly. I also, somehow, ended up with a copy of the high school’s application for initial membership in the National Honor Society – Don Colton and I are the only ones left from that inaugural class.
I have distinct memories of grade school projects where we put together booklets made of construction paper to report on specific subjects. Six of them have survived. “Pennsylvania”, “New York”, and “Germany” were clearly geography-related; my objective treatment of Germany at the height of World War II is particularly interesting. “The Crusades” obviously was a history project; I wonder what course produced the ones on Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and Mark Twain? I don’t recall our reading at that level when we were in grade school.
Several years later it was a different story. Our eighth grade English Composition class produced a collection entitled “Poems and Stories by Class 8-1” which includes a number of classics. I have my original copy, properly autographed by a precocious group of fourteen-year-old poets and authors. My contribution is a blank verse poem “To me this is Pittsburgh”. I don’t think it caused Walt Whitman to turn over in his grave. Bob Baldwin wrote “Death at Three”, a clever story involving a mythical island through which the International Date Line passes.
So far I have discarded about half of the stuff that survived and am making an attempt to determine the final resting place of the remainder. There is a definite limit to the amount of memorabilia my children and grandchildren could store, even if they wanted to.