My upbringing was shaped by two places, both in a river valley formed by the West Branch of the Susquehanna in Northcentral Pennsylvania. During most weekdays of the school year, we lived downriver in a cramped apartment located in the local borough. The town ran along the river to the north and the Appalachian Range to the south. Heavily trafficked freight rail tracks ran parallel to the river, guarded by earthen dikes. Flooding was a periodic threat, particularly in the hardscrabble neighborhoods, like ours, lying in the flats near the train tracks.

Our apartment was on the first floor of Grandma’s old two-story brick house. She lived in a comfortable apartment with a sunroom and balcony on the second floor. We were crammed into a small railroad-style apartment without hallways where each bedroom opened to the next in single file. No privacy, even for Mom and Dad.

Plus, the old house was surrounded by Hurr’s, an expanding dairy making milk for the entire region. It’s production facilities, loading docks, offices and retail store cut us off from the rest of the residential housing on the block. The smell of rancid milk pervaded our place in the summers when all our windows were open. The stench came from what locals called the Milk Stream, a leaky drainage system for discarded milk that ran by our place, ultimately discharging into the Susquehanna River as a notorious plume.

Here’s what it was like on a most school days.

Just as I was about to brush my teeth, I saw the pale-white glass orb staring up at me. “Hey Dad, your eye is on the edge of the sink. Please come and get it!” It was my turn in the apartment’s single bathroom, and I was running late for school.

Dad didn’t respond, probably because my older brother Doug had Elvis’s new single, “That’s All Right,” blaring from our bedroom. I was sure he was combing his hair in step with the music, looking at himself in our bedroom mirror. “Turn down that damn record player … and stop trying to think you look like Elvis,” I yelled. Doug turned it down long enough to yell back, “You’re hogging the bathroom as usual. Get out; Sid’s gotta pee!” Sid, my younger brother, was whining that it was his turn.

Dad suddenly appeared at the bathroom door. “Stop the yelling, all of you. Doug, turn off the record player. You, out! Sid, go in and pee.” He grabbed his glass eye with a handkerchief. I never got used to seeing his eye gazing at me from the sink counter, but even more disturbing was looking into the oozing black hole of his left eye socket. He went over to his dresser, grabbed some solution, cleaned the glass orb, and popped it in.

Dad was a legendary high school football player in our small community. He received a full scholarship to attend nearby Wilkes College and played on the football team in his first year. Late in the season, he was cleated in his left eye. No face masks back then.

After several tries to save it, his eye was removed, and he went through a long recovery. The loss of his eye and the end of his football career were blows, but he returned to Wilkes the following school year determined to be the first in his family to get a college degree.

Only a few months into the fall term, Dad was called home to help the family. He did as he was told, got a job at the steel mill, moved back into Grandma’s house, and never returned to school.

Mom said to me, “I don’t think he’s ever gotten over it. Living in this house reminds him of the decisions he made. It’s a lesson for you; don’t give up your dreams the way Dad gave up his. It can make you very bitter.”

That’s how I remember it when I first asked Mom about Dad’s mean streak. He was a creative, hard worker who could build anything. But he was also a fearless menace to any who crossed him, particularly when he was drinking. The smallest affront could set him off. And he was a jealous husband. These traits fermented into a mean brew that would spill into our lives in the confines of our cramped apartment. Sometimes Mom could feel his meanness brewing in time to say, “Come on, let’s pack up and get out of town. We got a lot to do on the farm.”

Dad was a different man on the farm owned by Mom’s Aunt Laura and Uncle Court, a place that’s been in the family since the late 1700s. It’s where Mom had been raised through the Great Depression, after her father abandoned the family and her mother moved to New York to find work.

It was a magical place while I was growing up. I knew little about Mom’s birth parents but loved Laura and Court, who I saw as captivating characters removed from the conventions of the day, leading leisurely lives inattentive to the crumbling of their grand old house.

They were well into their 70s when I came to know them. Laura was long-retired, a former stenographer. Court was a “gentleman” farmer who leased his fields to neighbors to till while he served as a deputy sheriff in the day. He was tall; she short. Other than that, they were nearly indistinguishable in their ways of dress. Both wore flannel shirts, overalls, and rubber boots, regardless of the weather. Laura always had a bright bandana covering her hair and Court wore a stained, wide-brimmed Stetson hat.

Court was a great storyteller. With a chaw of tobacco in his mouth, a spittoon at his feet, and a listening device shaped like a miniature saxophone in his ear, he talked about the days when his dad was County Sheriff, trying to slow the lumber barons from clear-cutting every forested mountainside shaping the West Branch Valley. Even more captivating to me were Court’s stories about the relations between the Delaware Indian Tribe that hunted and fished these parts, and the white settlers, like Court’s ancestors, who farmed these lands.

No drinking (their rules) and lots of projects suitable to Dad’s many talents. Just fifteen miles upriver from town, the farm covered seventy lush acres stretching along the river with the two inland fields leased to a local farmer to till. The overgrown apple orchard was next to the mowed lawns around the farmhouse.

Dad led us in clearing a portion of the underbrush every time we visited. The orchard was the first phase of his plans to develop rental lots for city people who wanted places to park their trailers and keep their boats in the water for summer seasons.

We’d eat hardy breakfasts early in the morning and then work on Dad and Mom’s projects. In the afternoons, we were released to have fun, often with friends we brought along. Doug would grab his fishing gear and head off to nearby creeks where he’d explore and hone his fly-fishing skills. When the fields were freshly plowed, he’d teach us how to spot arrowheads and other artifacts left by Delaware hunters and fishermen.

With Sid often in tow, my friends and I would play in the run-down barn acting out scenes from war movies we’d watched. A favorite was parachuting into enemy territory, simulated by our jumping from the second floor into old mounds of hay in the barnyard. Itching and hot in the summer months, we’d head for our favorite swimming holes along the Susquehanna. Dad and Mom would sometimes join us.

We’d all come together in the evenings around a fire pit to tell and hear stories, especially Uncle Court’s tales. Exhausted, sleep would come early with Mom and Dad retiring to an old trailer Dad was fixing up. After taking our turns in the outhouse, we’d head for warm, creaky beds in the farmhouse.

Dad’s river lots took shape, providing a supplemental string of revenue for the farm and extended family. With Court and Laura’s passing, Mom inherited the farm. We moved in, and Dad led a crew in renovating the farmhouse, one room at a time.

Restoration seemed to run parallel to the reappearance of bald eagles and the disappearance of Dad’s binges through my formative years. In the summers, the couple acres of mowed lawns surrounding the farmhouse became playing fields for games ranging from tag football to croquet. Eagles Rest Farm became a gathering place of our extended family and folks in our small rural community.

Mom managed the farm’s businesses and became influential in local politics. Dad continued to build things, including the first houseboat to appear on our part of the Susquehanna. I eventually moved West; but when the heat became unbearable in Arizona, I would say to my family, “Let’s pack up, it’s time to get out of town.”

 

Michael Musheno was drawn to the significance of storytelling at an early age listening to his Great Uncle, Court spin tales about the history of the Appalachian valley where his family has lived for over 200 years. Musheno took his passion for storytelling into the field as an academic.