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The Greatest Fun Was Watching People Work

I shouldn’t say nobody had money in Monongahela, but it’s accurate to say nothing was expensive. Beer was the town passion, more a religion with the men, and a big glass cost only a nickel, the same price as twelve ounces of buttermilk or a candy bar three times heavier than the modern sort. Bones to make soup were free. Beyond movies—twelve cents for kids—commercial entertainment hardly existed. There were a few bowling alleys at a nickel a frame, Redd’s Beach (a pool at least ten miles away where swimming was a dime), and a roller-skating rink I never went to.

Where society thrived was in hundreds of ethnic social clubs and fraternal organizations up and down the Valley: the Moose, the Elks, the Oddfellows, Mystic Knights, Sons of Slovenia, the Polish-American Society, the Russian-American Club. These were places for men to drink and talk cheaply except on Saturday night when ladies could drink and talk, too, alongside their men and have a dance. Sometimes with even a live band to give snap to the joint.

No kid in Mon City reached for the "Events and Activities" page of the papers because there wasn’t one, nor were there any special kid places that people of all ages didn’t frequent. When the men weren’t playing bocce at the Italian Club, kids were allowed, passing first through a barroom reeking of unpasteurized stale beer. No special life was arranged for kids. Yet there was always a full menu. Just spying on the adult world, watching people work, and setting out on expeditions to explore filled whatever time you wanted to spare. Until I got to Cornell, I can’t recall anyone I ever knew saying "I’m bored." And yet in New York City, when I moved there, hardly a day passed without someone crying loud and long about ennui. Perhaps this indicates some important marker we’ve missed in our modern search to make private worlds for children—the constituents of meaning have been stripped away from these overspecialized places. Why a child would want to associate exclusively with children in a narrow age or social class range defies understanding, that adults would impose such a fate on kids strikes me as an act of madness.

The greatest fun was watching work at construction sites, watching freight trains unload or coal up, studying lumberyards at work, seeing gas pumped, hoods lifted, metal welded, tires vulcanized, watching Johnny Nami cut hair, watching Vito fill chocolates. Best of all was trailing Charlie Bigerton, the cop, on his rounds without his catching on. When kids around town pooled data about Charlie, we could recreate the police patrol schedule accurately enough that violating wartime curfew was like taking candy from a baby.

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