Radio Days: My Lifelong Romance with Radio – Part II

by Joe Laufer

(Note: If you click on most of the photos in this blog, they will enlarge for better viewing)

I related the early roots of my fascination with and addiction to radio in Part I, and how I came to fulfill my dream of becoming a Radio Announcer at WMMN in Fairmont, West Virginia between October 1967 and May, 1969 – a period of only 605 days.  In this second Part of the story, I will share some of my other experiences at WMMN, the decision to move on to a career in Higher Education, and other opportunities I had in Radio beyond WMMN.

From DJ to Program Manager to Sales Rep

I started my job at WMMN on Monday, October 9, 1967.  Despite my inexperience, I had the good fortune of moving up the food chain rapidly because of several incidents connected with being in the right place at the right time.  Steve Mazure, the WMMN Program Director, was hired by WWVA within a month of my arrival at WMMN, and Frank Lee appointed me Program Director on November 27, 1967.  And then, with the sudden death of the station’s head sales rep, Bob Frazier,  at the end of March in 1968, I became his replacement.  However, I always wanted to remain on the air as a DJ and Newscaster.  Being single, I was able to fill in at the odd times when the “regulars” were off.  I also had a Saturday morning show, which allowed me to do some unusual programming.  I liked to play music from Broadway shows and non-mainstream music when possible.  I also took on certain news assignments, and conducted an interview show on topics of general community interest.

When I first published this blog, I indicated under the fuzzy newspaper image of the WMMN All Stars of October, 1968 posted below that it was the only staff picture I had. Well, since then, I accidentally came across this one from October 19, 1967 --only 10 days after I started at WMMN. Seated are Josephine Muto, Forgot-her-name, Josephine Trotta, Fran Lauzau; Standing: Jack Bernardo, Wayne the Sation Engineer, Bill Cristy, Frank Lee, Me, Jim Potanko, Bob Frazier.

Another thing I enjoyed was to create station promos.  Two of my most popular productions were the “Think Spring” campaign during the terrible winter we had at the beginning of 1968 and a  leap year promotion in February, 1968.  These were completely original ideas.  As winter dragged on, I got the idea of creating a novelty station promo using Hawaiian music, birds chirping and a “boing” sound effect of a spring along with this message:  “Have you had enough of winter? Are you tired of the snow, the ice and the frosty cold days? Well let’s do something about it!  If everybody in the Monongahela Valley would stop what they are doing right now and THINK SPRING, we can bring it on.  So stop what you’re doing, and everybody: THINK SPRING!” (this is where the Hawaiian music came in, and the chirping birds).  After a few seconds I said: “This pause for Springtime has been brought to you courtesy of WMMN Radio” (then came the “boing”).  I got many accolades for this and much to my surprise, the Greentown 4-H Club of Rivesville, held a “Welcome Spring” festival on March 20, 1968, and invited me as the guest of honor, presenting me with a certificate of award for helping the community dispel the winter blues.  The idea really caught on!

Here's the only photo I have of the WMMN All Stars of 1968. It appeared in the Fairmont Times in support of the United Way Campaign. Left to right: Jack Bernardo, Joe Laufer, Chuck Warner, Frank Lee, Fran Lauzau and Bill Cristy.

The leap year promotion obviously came in February,  the same year.  The copy went this way: “Are you one of those unfortunate people who were born on February 29th who only gets to celebrate your birthday once every four years? Well WMMN wants to help make this year’s celebration special.   You are among the great people born in February: Abe Lincoln, George Washington, and Joe Laufer – So send in your name and on February 29th you’ll be honored by the All Stars of WMMN” — (then a novelty polka version of “Happy Birthday to you” played the promo out).  Dozens of people sent in their names, which were read on February 29th throughout the day along with a birthday wish and jingle.

I became involved in the Fairmont community very quickly.  I was asked to serve on the Board of Directors of the Newman Center at Fairmont State College.  The Newman Center was the place where Catholic students gathered for spiritual guidance and socialization, including religious services.  I would help lead the singing at the student “folk Masses.”  A Methodist friend recommended that I also serve on the board of the Wesley Foundation on campus, which I did.  At St. Peter’s Church in Fairmont, I began teaching CCD classes.  Invitations to speak at civic and social clubs started coming in, and I gave a well-received talk on “Community Relations” to the Fairmont Merchants Club.  I judged High School forensic competitions and the local Voice of Democracy Contest.  I was really integrating into my Mountaineer community.

One of the more aggressive projects I took on was acting in the Fairmont Summer Tent Theater. It was a town and gown event held on the campus of Fairmont State College in June, 1968.  The summer musical was “Oliver,” one of my favorites.  I tried out for a role, and ended up cast as the infamous Bill Sikes.  I was surprised, because I’m basically a gentle, mild-mannered guy.  Playing a bully would be a big stretch for me.  But I deferred to the show’s director. Rehearsing became a juggling act because of my schedule, but things worked out.

The review in the Fairmont Times read: "Also received enthusiastically by the first-night audience was the performance of another newcomer to local tent theater, Joe Laufer, who was lusty, gusty, mean and villainous as the murderous Bill Sikes.

I got to meet a lot of interesting people, chief among them, Bill Miller, the Fairmont State College student who was cast as the Artful Dodger.  We became good friends and he confided in me that he wanted out of a housing arrangement he had with a couple of “animal house” fellow students, and was wondering if he could move into my apartment as a tenant.  While I liked my privacy, I agreed.  He was dating a girl he planned to marry in the summer of 1969. As we got to know one another, as only “roomies” can, he asked me if I would be his best man at his wedding.  This was my second opportunity to be a best man in less than five months, and I gladly accepted. As fate would have it, the wedding took place after I had moved to New Jersey.  It gave me an opportunity to return for the wedding — and to visit Penny for a weekend.

As sales rep, I became creative in selling air time to local merchants.  One part of the job was maintaining the advertising of regular sponsors.  It meant visiting them weekly or at least monthly for “copy” and trying to get them to advertise even more.  For potential new sponsors, I found that approaching them with a clever commercial already prepared was an easy way to get them to advertise.  I’d bring a tape of the commercial I prepared for them, and often, just hearing a catchy ad containing their name or product caused them to take the leap of faith and try radio advertising. Both Fran Lauzau and I were selling.  Major accounts in Fairmont were divided between us.  I was also given some of the outlying towns in our coverage area.  Among them were the towns of Grafton, Rivesville, and Mannington.

The Big Story – November 20, 1968

The Farmington Mine Disaster took place on my watch as a WMMN reporter on November 20, 1968.

It is unfortunate that tragedy and journalism seem to feed off of each other.  Some of the best journalists are defined by the tragedies they covered.  I can’t say that I was good at covering tragedy.  While at WMMN, in addition to the normal newscasts and events,  I covered two really big news stories as a reporter.  One was a tragic fire at the Manchin Furniture and Carpet Store in Farmington, WV on November 11, 1968.  That property was owned by John Manchin, the father of Joe Manchin, the former governor of West Virginia and current Senator who succeeded Robert Byrd.  The other was 9 days later, just two miles away from the first, at the Consol No. 9 mine, known as the Farmington Mine Disaster.  In the Manchin fire, the store was destroyed and two people, a mother and son, lost their lives.  The mine disaster took 78 lives. I was one of the first reporters at both scenes.  Farmington is only about 12 miles from Fairmont and 5 miles from Mannington, the home town of my wife, Penny.  It is just off Route 250, the very route I took from Wheeling a little over a year earlier to seek employment at WMMN.

Joe Manchin, later the Governor of West Virginia, and now their Senator in Washington, took a year off from WVU to help rebuild the family business which burned on November 11, 1968. As a sales rep for WMMN, I would meet with Joe for the commercials they ran on our station.

As WMMN sales rep, I had occasion to deal with John Manchin, and often met with his son, young Joe Manchin, for their radio ads.  Joe would help out at the store while attending West Virginia University.  After the fire he interrupted his education to help rebuild the family business. When I arrived at Farmington mid afternoon on November 11, the fire had already destroyed the building and I couldn’t drive my car into the town.  I parked it on Route 250, and walked about a mile to the scene of the fire.  I called my story in to the station for the on-air newscaster to deliver to the public.

The Farmington Mine disaster was a completely different story.  It had many of the aspects of the 2008 Sego mine disaster that cast Governor Joe Manchin into the national limelight.  I was home in bed early Wednesday morning, November 20th, when Jack Bernardo called me and told me there was an explosion at the Farmington mine.  I hopped in my car and drove the 12 miles from my home to Farmington.  There weren’t many people at the scene when I arrived and those I encountered looked very depressed.  I arrived just as one of the mine officials came out to talk to those gathered.  He had very little information.  (I still have my hand-written notes taken at the press conference on a discolored yellow pad).  The man speaking was Bill Poundstone, Executive Vice President of Consol Coal Company.  He indicated that at 5:30 a.m. there was an explosion at the Llewellyn portal.  He related how 21 men had escaped, 4 from one area, 7 from another, 2 came up an elevator at the Athas portal and 8 got out of the new Mahan shaft on an emergency elevator.  At that time he couldn’t tell us exactly how many miners were still down there, because they couldn’t get at the records due to the fire.  Again, at that point in time they had no knowledge of the cause of the explosions.  They were sealing the return shaft at Mauds Run to arrest the fire, and were centering rescue efforts at the Mahan portal.  This information is from my scribbled notes used to make my first report by phone back to the WMMN studios in Fairmont.  It should be noted that there were no cell phones then.  I had to wait in line in the Company Store to access the phone to get the word out.

Several explosions took place at 5:30 a.m. at the Consol # 9 mine in Farmington. I arrived on the scene at around 6:30 or 7:00 a.m.

Eventually, other reporters came on the scene from neighboring towns. The mine officials and police set us up in the Company Store, which was across the street from the complex of mine buildings. None of us could get any closer to the disaster scene and we were to rely on regular reports from Jim McCartney, Director of Public Relations and Personnel for Consol #9.  Several additional phone lines were installed in the Company Store for us.

Family members of the trapped miners started gathering in the Company Store, in a section away from the growing group of reporters.  I still considered myself a rookie, and really didn’t know any of the other guys. Soon the “suits” started arriving — the reporters from network radio and television — CBS, NBC, and ABC — and they somewhat looked down on us local guys.  My colleagues at the studio kept in touch with me, and I was asked to call in reports to some other stations around the state who had a relationship with Frank Lee.  I called a live feed into Wheeling’s WWVA.  I decided, just out of courtesy and without being asked,  to call in a feed to Station WARM in the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre area.  I guess I’m guilty of trying to impress my family at the cost of this tragedy.  I got Terry McNulty on the phone and told him I had an update on the tragedy.  He asked me why I selected WARM and I indicated that it was because of my roots in the Wyoming Valley, and the common bond that existed between our two communities through coal mining.  He was grateful.  I still have the script of the feed I gave him and which aired live in my home town:

“Here in Farmington, West Virginia, snow is flurrying; its cold: thirty degrees! The sky is cloudy, but every so often the sun shines through, symbolic of the brief rays of hope that flash through the minds of the mothers, wives, sons and daughters of the some 70 miners still trapped six-hundred feet beneath the surface.  To get here you snake along a narrow secondary road through the hills of West Virginia, past a row of company houses, and suddenly confront the tipple or cleaning plant and center of operations of Consolidation Coal Company.  Along the highway above the mine operation is a Company Store — now the center of communications for major Television and Radio networks.  Groups of miners huddle around bonfires outside.  Mothers and wives fill the aisles of the Company Store and gather along the highway – some crying, some expressionless – wondering what is happening below the surface.  The snow falls, the sun peeks through – its cold!

Mine officials are preparing to begin rescue operations.  They have held out some hope, but will not comment on the chances of survival for any of the men.  Ninety to ninety-five were in the mine when the explosions occurred at 5:40 this morning.  Twenty-one walked away.  The fate of the 70 may not be learned for days.  Still, mothers, wives, and children hope, and Farmington remembers back 14 years – the same mine, the same thing.  At that time, 16 men lost their lives. And here in the Company Store, there’s a sign hanging over the door which reads: “Through these portals pass the finest miners in the world.”   Joe Laufer reporting from Farmington, West Virginia for WARM news.”

Two of the lucky miners who were rescued minutes after the first explosions.

In addition to news feeds to WWVA and WARM, my notes show that I called Dick Cooper at WERE Cleveland, CHNS, a Canadian Station, and KDKA Pittsburgh (their News Director, Ron Cash).  Finally, my colleagues at the studio in Fairmont told me to call CBS news headquarters in New York with a news feed for the National News, which would go out all over the country.  Needless to say, this made me a bit nervous.  I did so, and immediately called my mother in Wilkes-Barre to tell her I’d be on the national news and to tune in to WGBI in Scranton. That was Saturday, November 23rd, four days after the explosion.

My vigil in Farmington lasted 9 days.  After about 5 days, the big city reporters left, relying on reports from the locals. As the underground fires continued to burn, the hope for survivors faded every day.  There was an unwritten protocol among the local reporters not to interview the families of the miners still missing.  Besides, I would have been very uncomfortable doing that — and there was no pressure from WMMN management to get those kinds of stories.  I know that some of the network reporters tried to do this and I think a few succeeded.  WMMN just wanted to get the basic story out.  On November 29th, the rescue attempts ended because it was determined from drill holes that it would be impossible for anyone to stay alive under the conditions monitored from the mine.  78 miners were still down there.  On November 30 the mine was sealed with concrete to prevent oxygen from feeding the fire.

The tragedy struck the WMMN family directly.  Josephine Muto, Frank Lee’s personal secretary and the station Office Manager lost her husband Joe in the mine disaster.  The mine remains a tomb for 19 of the 78 whose bodies were never recovered.  Joe Muto’s body, however, was eventually found and buried.

As a rookie reporter, I learned a great deal from this experience.  I don’t claim to have done a great job, but I hung in there throughout the period and learned a lot from my radio colleagues and from the people who suffered the tragedy.  When I arrived in West Virginia a year earlier for my “dream job,” this kind of event wasn’t a part of the landscape.  Twenty-five years earlier as a kid in Wilkes-Barre  playing a DJ, coal mine tragedies weren’t in the script.

Difficult and Life Changing Decisions on the Horizon

As 1968 was gearing down, I had to confront the future.  I had migrated from priesthood to broadcasting so fast and so seamlessly, I had never been forced to decide whether radio would be a transitional job for me or a lifelong career.  I had already learned that I wasn’t a poster boy for keeping commitments.  After all, I had made a vow to be poor, obedient and chaste for my entire life, and in the theology of the Catholic Church, I was a “priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek” according to the Bible. That all went out the window when I drove from Pittsburgh to Wheeling in October, 1967.   Could I commit to marriage?  Was I prepared to be in radio for the rest of my life?  Wasn’t one of my childhood dreams to be a teacher?  Although I had taught high school for six years, college teaching was always an option I thought I’d like. As much as I liked West Virginia, was that where I wanted to buy a home and settle in?

Over the next couple of months, things would happen to help me decide.  Earlier in 1968, I had an opportunity to go back to Wheeling to talk to Ross Felton and his Program Director, Bob Finneran. They asked me if I might want to consider working for them. At the time, I indicated that I didn’t think I was ready for a move.  In April I learned that there was an opening at WARM in the Scranton – Wilkes-Barre market.  DJ Tommy Woods, my Wilkes-Barre neighbor and fellow St. Nicks alum had sent me the job description, and I went to my home town for an interview.  Again, I didn’t think I was ready for that job — and the admonition that “you can’t go home again”  kept running through my mind.

This ad appeared in the Sunday New York Times under "Teaching Positions" on October 27, 1968. Responding to it was the first step in a nine month transition from a budding career in Radio to a 35-year career in Higher Education.

Then on October 27 I saw an ad in the New York Times Education section for a Director of Student Activities position, one of dozens of jobs listed for a new Community College being constructed in southern New Jersey near Philadelphia.  I had never heard of Gloucester County, but I thought, why not at least send in a resume.  The jobs were scheduled to be filled in September, 1969, about a year from the time the ad appeared.  It was such a jab in the dark that I never expected to get an interview.  But In mid-November an invitation came to interview for the job on November 29th.  I drove to Philly and stayed overnight with my brother Bill and his family in Roslyn, a Bucks County suburb of Philly.  I was interviewed by Bill Stevenson, Director of Student Personnel Services of the new college, operating out of a restored barn in Sewell, NJ.  It was a good interview, but I thought the journey would end there.  Then I was called back for a second interview on December 14th. On February 2nd, 1969 I was offered a contract and signed it on March 22nd.  The job was to begin on June 2nd.

This is Market St., Mannington. We are looking towards the main business district of the town. These are the merchants I would visit every Thursday as a part of my WMMN sales job. Behind us is Route 250, the road leading from Wheeling to Fairmont. Over the right shoulder of the photographer would be the Raad Building where Penny's dad had his bar, over which the Raad family lived when Penny was growing up.

While all that was going on, I was falling in love.  Life was now getting very complicated. The love story starts with my weekly sales visits to Mannington.   I particularly liked Mannington.  Every Thursday I would spend the day in Mannington visiting Hermosilla’s Men’s shop, Steve and Juanita’s Dress Shop, Maheba Francis (the Mannington Theater Manager), The Bon Ton Shop, Murphy’s Dime Store, the local Pharmacy, James Chevrolet, Snyder’s’ Florists and Shenal’s Florists, the Mannington Bank and several other establishments gathering copy for their commercials.  Soon we all became friends and we mutually looked forward to my Thursday trek to Mannington.  As time went on, I noticed that every Thursday as I paid my calls, a very pleasant and attractive young girl who looked to be about 18 or 19 would be making her rounds to the same establishments just to chat with the proprietors. I later learned that her name was Penny and she worked for the town Dentist, Dr. Modi, and Thursday happened to be her day off.  At one point I asked Frank Hermosilla, the operator of the men’s store, if she had a boy friend – perhaps off in Viet Nam. He indicated that not only didn’t she have a boy friend, but she was pretty much off-limits because of her very strict mother.

This is the first ever picture of Penny and me together, taken on February 8, 1969. Her brother, Nader, is on the right checking me out. Frank and Rosa Hermosilla hosted the party to bring Penny and me together at the same event. They owned and operated Hermosilla's Men's Shop and were the matchmakers in the budding romance between the two of us.

Nobody knew I was closing in on a job in New Jersey just as things were warming up for me in West Virginia.  Frank Hermosilla arranged a party at his house that would bring Penny and me together in the same room socially for the first time, and which would introduce me to her older brother and Mother, to set the stage for me to establish a possible relationship.  The party was held on February 8, 1969.  It appeared to go well.  I got up the nerve to ask Penny out on a first date on February 19.  I had 2 tickets for “Carnival on Ice” at the Nathan Goff Auditorium in nearby Clarksburg.  We seemed to hit it off.  Her mother appeared to be accepting the fact that her 20-year old daughter was dating a 34-year old man.  The unfortunate thing was that as our romance was blooming, ten days after our first date, my offer of employment in New Jersey arrived.

Penny and I announced our engagement on Easter Sunday, 1969 in my home town of Wilkes-Barre. This is Penny's engagement picture at age 21. I had just turned 34.

All kinds of things went through my mind.  Should I cut this off in the bud? — but how could that happen, I was in love?  Decline the college job opportunity and stay in West Virginia?  An opportunity like this – to be on the ground floor  as a staff member of a brand new College – may never come my way again.  Penny and I discussed it, and decided that we could manage a long distance relationship until things settled down.  We’d get engaged, I’d go to New Jersey and she would remain in West Virginia, and we would set a date for a June wedding in 1970.  We announced our engagement on Easter Sunday, April 6, 1969 in my parents home in Wilkes-Barre, PA.

I’m going to save this story for a separate blog about how our long-distance relationship worked out, and about our marriage at the end of 1969.  The topic at hand is still “Radio Days,” so I will conclude it with the rest of my radio story.

Wonderful WOND Radio, Atlantic City

Gloucester County College is located in Sewell, New Jersey, only about 20 miles from Philadelphia in rural Southern New Jersey.

WMMN lost two of its “All Stars” on the same day.  I moved to New Jersey on May 30, 1969.  Bill Cristy and I drove to our new jobs together.  He graduated from Fairmont State College on the morning of May 30th.  He had been employed by the Federal Government in Philadelphia, and since I had rented an apartment in Westille, NJ, and Penny was staying in West Virginia, he would leave his new wife, Corky, behind and live with me until he found a place to live and then bring her to Jersey.  They eventually got a house in Pitman.

I began my job at Gloucester County College on June 2nd.  That story, too, will be saved for another blog.  But my radio life soon picked up again as I joined the staff of WOND, Atlantic City in November, 1969.  In my early days at Gloucester County College, I had met someone who was involved with training programs for the Federal Government at the Custom House in Philadelphia.  They needed someone to teach a course on Interpersonal Communication, and I jumped at the opportunity to make some extra money.  In the class was a guy who worked for WOND behind the scenes, and who, when he heard I had worked in radio, told me they needed a weekend DJ quickly — and asked if I would consider filling in until they could hire someone permanently (This time I already had my 3rd class broadcasting permit!). I said OK, and before I knew it, I was on the air at WOND, broadcasting to Atlantic City and the surrounding Jersey shore communities.

The studios of WOND ("Wonderful WOND Radio") were located in Pleasantville, a small suburb of Atlantic City. This was before casino's were introduced into Atlantic City, and it was affectionately known at "The Nation's Playground."

WOND had an interesting reputation at the shore, boasting, as WMMN did, of some celebrity announcers over the years.  Among them was the famous Jessica Savitch, one of the first women broadcasters to move to a major network as a prime-time anchor.  Unfortunately, she died in a car accident in New Hope, Pennsylvania in 1983 a short time into her national NBC career as the weekend news anchor.  After leaving WOND she gained fame as a news anchor in Philadelphia. Also, while I was at WOND, Tom Lemaine, who went on to be a major weathercaster on Philadelphia TV, was WOND’s Music Director.  I only worked on Saturdays and Sundays, so didn’t get to interact with the regular staff.  One of the peculiarities of my brief stint at WOND was that very few people knew I was there because I didn’t go by my own name.

Jessica Savich got her start in radio at WOND. Tom Lemaine, popular Philly weatherman, also worked there early in his career.

The company had invested in professional introduction tapes for their on-air personalities.  Because they had a lot of turnover in their weekend DJ staff, rather than create a new tape for each new DJ, they created a generic or anonymous tape and jingle to introduce the mythical “Jeff Jeffries”.  During my tenure there, I became “Jeff Jeffries!”   One or two times during my short stint there I slipped and referred to myself as Joe Laufer — but I don’t think anybody caught it!

I worked at WOND through the winter of 1969-70. I would drive to work from Westville — about 50 miles west of Pleasantville –  and then I’d drive home again after I signed off at midnight, returning in the morning at 6:30.  Many times I would stay overnight in a motel in Pleasantville, especially when the fog was bad or the snow was falling.  The studio was located in a cottage at the transmitter tower, which was located in marshland and accessed by a boardwalk walkway.  In the distance you could see the last exit of the Atlantic City Expressway. I was always alone in the studio – and it got really eerie out there late at night in the marshes. One of the things I remember about my tenure at WOND was a lonely female fan who called me late every weekend while I was on the air. It was a bit scary, because of the isolation of the studio.  When I saw the Clint Eastwood movie,  “Play Misty for Me” which came out in 1971, I immediately flashed back to those weird calls I got while working late nights, alone in that isolated studio at WOND.

By the end of February, 1970, Penny had joined me in Westville (we had been married on New Years’ Eve, 1969 — another story; another blog!)  and she was now pregnant with Kurt.  Things were getting busy at GCC, (my job included chaperoning Ski Trips on weekends, etc.) so I had to give up my moonlighting at WOND.  But “Jeff Jeffries” lived on in the next short-term weekend DJ who followed in my footsteps!

Within a year I was recruited by Burlington County College (June, 1970) as Student Activities Director, and moved to the town of New Lisbon and eventually to Vincentown.  At BCC I started a Radio Club, which eventually led to the creation of a bona fide Radio Station, WBZC, which was named the Number 1 college radio station in America in 1995 and 1996 and continues to broadcast from the college to this day as “Z-88.”  I was a member of the selection committee for the first Station Manager.  At BCC, the staff of the Communications Technology Department tapped me for numerous voice-overs for educational tapes and videos. That childhood dream of being an announcer followed me through life, no matter what my career.  To this day, through my Lectures as County Historian, I continue to use those skills honed as a ten-year old boy with my “Mike Jr.,” reading commercials and introducing records on my Dad’s console radio in our dining room at 13 Grove St. in Wilkes-Barre. For me, Radio Days have never ended.  Stay tuned!

Epilogue

The Laufer association with CBS continues!

I spoke earlier of the radio gene or DNA inherited from my Dad.  Not everyone in my family received it.  My sister Mary Lou would question why I always had music playing inside and outside my house — I had speakers installed everywhere.  When I travel with my brother Bill in his car, he never plays the radio, while on the other hand,  I can’t drive without my radio on.  It is as important to me as the steering wheel and the brakes. The first thing I do in the morning, before brushing my teeth and other morning things is turn on the radio.  I’ve always had a radio in my bathroom.  When I travel, I have Bose earphones that hook into a small pocket transistor radio.  I listen to it while sitting in airports, and in foreign countries on a bus, train or in bed at night.  Only recently I started bringing along a companion I-pod to listen to the songs I treasured as a kid growing up.   The question is, has anyone else in my family inherited this gene?

My son, Kurt,  will testify that when he was younger, I nicknamed him “media man” because of the fact the he, too, always had to have a radio on.  He would carry radios around with him wherever he went.  A radio was a necessary piece of furniture in his bedroom and in any bathroom he was using. It isn’t a surprise, then, that he has ended up on the sales end of the Radio and TV broadcasting industry, as I did.  He was recently employed by CBS Philly, Radio and Television as their Digital Sales Manager.  The coincidences in our lives surrounding the non-traditional paths we took to arrive at our careers in the Radio industry and the fact that CBS played a role in both our lives is somewhat amusing – some might say eerie!

And while my son Kris isn’t as addicted to radio as Kurt is, he married into the CBS family.  His wife Sara holds a position with CBS Radio in their corporate offices in New York City.  It’s all in the family!

When I decided to start blogging, I indicated that my motive and objective was to share my memoirs with my children and grandchildren.  Hopefully there may be some inspiration here for the next generation — my grandchildren — if and when they read this — to perhaps give the radio business a try along the way to their ultimate career.  Stay tuned for this, too.

Afterthoughts

Here are two photos I couldn’t integrate into the text without interrupting the flow of the story.

This was the promotional photo used in the press releases for "Oliver" during the summer of 1968. The musical was offered in a tent on the campus of Fairmont State College. It was a "town and gown" event, including college drama students and members of the community.

My second performance as "best man" came in June, 1969 when I returned to Fairmont for Bill Miller's wedding. Bill was the "Artful Dodger" in Oliver and my roommate for several months while he attended Fairmont State College.

Radio Days: My Lifelong Romance with Radio – Part I

by Joe Laufer

(Note: If you click on most of the photos in this blog, they will enlarge for better viewing)

Radio played a big part in my life.  It was one of the three careers I always dreamed of pursuing as I was growing up: becoming a priest, becoming a teacher and becoming a radio announcer.  Not many kids get to “become” all the things they dreamed of becoming as a kid.  I was one of the privileged who did.

Growing up in WBRE, WBAX and WILK land

As with many things in my life, I credit my Dad for having planted the radio seed in my DNA.  He liked to listen to the radio.  He also liked to fix old radios that people would throw out — and ultimately, I would get one for my room.  I was probably the only kid in my neighborhood who had his own radio in his room at the age of 9 or 10.  It was a fabulous table model with a big round multi-colored illuminated dial.  Each band gave me access to another world of listening — reaching countries across oceans and continents.  There was no FM at the time, but there was Short Wave, Armed Forces Radio, Canadian Radio — all different radio bands that could be accessed, and each having its own color on that big bright dial.  Stations would fade in and out depending on what was happening in the atmosphere.  I would pick up Morse Code messages, people speaking in strange languages, and exotic music being played on strange instruments.  I would hear Hawaiian music on “Hawaii Calls” from a place I imagined was on the other side of the world – it was broadcast by short wave to California, then picked up by state-side stations — always having the scratchy, distant short wave sound to it.  During World War II I would hear reports from overseas.  Then there were those far away stations like KDKA, Pittsburgh (considered America’s first Radio Station), KYW, Philadelphia, and a special favorite: WWVA, Wheeling West Virginia, a station with a powerful signal that would play a role in my life many years later.  I’d listen to the Grand Ole Opry from Nashville, Tennessee on WSM.  There was WOR and WJZ in New York — I got all of them on my used, refurbished vacuum tube radio in my room at 13 Grove St., Wilkes-Barre, PA.

My dad also introduced me to the very simply made “crystal set” which required only a toilet paper tube wrapped in wire, a set of earphones and a small metal lever to get some of the local stations. – without any electricity!  I was definitely becoming addicted to radio.

WBRE was an NBC Red Network affiliate. The NBC Blue Network eventually became ABC.

Locally, in Wilkes-Barre, there were two basic Radio Stations: WBRE, an affiliate of NBC, and WBAX, affiliated with the Mutual Broadcasting System, which no longer exists.  In those days, radio stations were associated with local families.  The Baltimore Family owned WBRE and the Stenger Family owned WBAX.  The most famous and eloquent announcer on WBRE was Franklin D. Coslett.  Another popular announcer, mainly for sports, was Jim McCarthy.  Coslett was held in awe in Wilkes-Barre as much as Walter Cronkite would be in more modern times.  I emulated Coslett, the man with the golden radio voice.  He was a dapper man who wore a bow tie — and I remember feeling as though I had encountered a major celebrity when I saw him once in person at an event in Wilkes-Barre.  In 1946, when I was 11 years old, a third station came on the scene, emanating from the neighboring town of Nanticoke – a small independent station called WHWL – on the air only during the day.  They’d sign off at sundown. Even as a kid, I recognized that the announcers were rookies — lacking the quality of the pros I’d been listening to on WBRE and WBAX.  WILK, the ABC affiliate, didn’t come on the air until 1947, when I was 12 years old.  It became the most popular station with teens because of a record program hosted by a DJ named Hal Berg. Later, he and his wife, Nancy, would make the transition to local Television in its primitive beginnings in 1950 and 51. Hal would read your requests over the air — and once I sent one in, telling him I thought his program was “keen” — only to be ridiculed the next day in school by some macho classmates who heard the dedication on the air.

Unidentified WBAX Announcer(s) in the 1940s. Microphone identifies the network on the left side: The Mutual Radio Network was a major network during my youth and no longer exists.

There was no CBS station in Wilkes-Barre.  In order to listen to CBS shows, we’d have to tune in to a faint Scranton station, WGBI.  I would listen to Arthur Godfrey on that station.  The Jack Benny Show moved from NBC to CBS in 1948, which upset me, because it didn’t come in as clear from Scranton.  Most shows came from studios in Hollywood or New York, but there was one from Chicago that I really liked, called “Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club” which was on NBC mid-day.  Radio was my daily “escape” and my introduction to geography and entertainment.

Enticed by Radio Premiums

During the early 1940′s, I would rush home from school to hear my favorite programs: Superman, Captain Midnight and Tom Mix.  My friends Bob and Frank Andes would do the same, and after the shows were over, we would discuss them. The stories were serialized.  They were 15 minute programs and would end with a cliff-hanger situation, forcing you to listen again the next day to hear what happens.  But more than the stories, we were interested in the premiums being offered through the sponsors.  The three programs followed one after the other starting at around 4:30 p.m., ending just before supper.

Captain Midnight Codeograph which I sent away for in 1941

Kellogg’s Pep (cereal) sponsored Superman; Ovaltine (the healthy chocolate drink) sponsored Captain Midnight, and Ralston Purina cereal sponsored Tom Mix.  They offered the greatest premiums, usually related to the story-line of the program.  There were ring and badge decoders used to decode secret messages given in code to members of the “Secret Squadron”.  The Tom Mix show also had its special premiums related to club membership and mystery codes.  When I would send away for my Kellogg’s Pep premiums offered by the Superman show, I always fantasized visiting “Battle Creek, Michigan” someday.  That’s where I sent my carefully wrapped dime or quarter and the PEP box top,  and from where I received that welcome mail containing my new treasure.  I’ll have to add that location to my travel bucket list!  The Andes brothers and I vied with one another in the purchasing of the latest offerings.

Advertisement for daily 15 minute Superman program sponsored by Kellogg's PEP. The program offered numerous premiums to young listeners in return for a boxtop and small charge.

As I grew older, I liked listening to the night time comedy and variety programs like Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor and the like.  Dad bought a nice console radio for the dining room.  Not only was it a radio, but it had a phonograph player that sat on top. Thus began my fantasies of being a disc jockey.  I would imitate Franklin D. Coslett or Hal Berg and play records.  My dad liked Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, so we had albums by these and other artists.   I even entered a contest and won a record containing the commercial jingle for Stegmaier’s Beer: “Now if you want a beer that’s mellow, a beer that is really grand, just say make mine Stegmaier’s, the Gold medal beer of the land!” . I would read the news, introduce and play a record, and give a commercial — just like the radio announcers.  And then I discovered the best toy of all — an actual microphone that could be connected to a tube inside your radio to allow your voice to be amplified through the radio.

I found this picture of the exact model of "Mike, Jr." that I had as a kid. It probably sold for only a buck or two. It connected simply to the prongs of a specific radio tube in the back of the radio.

It was call the “Mike, Jr.” and I ordered it through the Johnson Smith Catalog that offered all kinds of great items that boys liked.  They often posted dozens of novelty items on a full-page ad in a comic book.  But I sent away for the actual catalog.  It was there that I found the “Mike, Jr” and sent away for it.  You had to find the “director tube” in your radio — which could be discovered easily by tapping on it, because it was the only one that caused a sound to go through the radio speaker as you tapped on it.  Once you found it, you wrapped each of the two wires around two prongs at the base of the tube and re-inserted the tube in the radio.  Viola, you became an instant announcer using this inexpensive amplification system.  With my “Mike, Jr.” I started creating radio programs through my own radio for my sister and younger brother.  I had my own radio studio in our dining room.  It is a wonder that I didn’t get electrocuted playing around with the wires in the back of our radio.

Somehow I felt that someday I would become a Radio Announcer. As I entered high school, I continued to be a radio fan.  I attended studio broadcasts of the Hal Berg radio show at WILK.  During High School, my “radio voice” was recruited by my teachers as I was called upon to MC school concerts and to “DJ” for the Friday night dances.  WHWL would hold live country jamborees at San Souci Park (the local amusement park) which I attended mainly to see the station radio announcers live.  I am convinced I saw Hank Williams perform at one of these concerts early in his career, before I became aware of what an icon he was in country music.

Through the 40′s I became hooked on radio, listening faithfully to my favorite programs, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, The Aldrich Family, Fibber McGee and Molly, Truth or Consequences, Red Skelton, Abbot and Costello, Edgar Bergen, Burns and Allen, The Great Gildersleve and Your Hit Parade.  Radio encouraged you to use your imagination, and it sure fertilized mine!

TV Enters the Scene

I really don’t want to go into my relationship to TV in this blog, but for historical reasons would like to at least interject some factoids about Wilkes-Barre TV.  My first introduction to TV was during high school when local electronic and department stores would place a TV in their store window to broadcast programs like Milton Berle, Lucille Ball, and Jackie Gleason.  People would gather in front of the store window to watch TV, which wouldn’t begin programming until the afternoon and which would go off the air at either 11 p.m. or midnight.  Because Wilkes-Barre was in a valley, we had a hard time getting a TV signal.  A clever store owner in nearby Mahonoy City came up with the idea of putting a tower on a mountain and transmitting the signal from WNBF-TV, (CBS) Binghamton, NY via coaxial cable to his department store to help sell TV sets.  Neighboring Wilkes-Barre then became one of the pioneer cities in the world using cable TV.  If you wanted good TV reception, instead of using “rabbit-ear” antennas, you hooked up to cable. Milton Schapp, who later became governor of Pennsylvania, made his millions in cable TV long before the world knew about it.  Wilkes-Barre had the first Pay TV (Home Box Office) in the country.  I missed out on this phase of broadcast history because I went away to pursue my first career as a Franciscan.  Only when I came home at Christmas and the summers of 1952 through 1954 did I dabble in TV. The industry progressed without me for the 15 years I was associated with the Franciscan Order.

Back to Radio in 1967!

Having pursued that other career I dreamed of as a child — becoming a priest – from 1952 through 1967 (another blog at another time!) I left that vocation precipitously on the night of October 3, 1967.  In the middle of the night, I decided to up and leave my association with the Franciscans without pre-meditation, without money, and without a clue of what I was going to do with my life.

The Rogers Hotel in downtown Wheeling. This is a recent picture, but it may have been demolished by now. It turned out to be the transitional stop between two major career phases in my life. My two nights there cost less than $10. I still have the receipt.

I went to the nearest place with a “distant” and anonymous feel, Wheeling, West Virginia – that magical home of Radio Station WWVA, the 50,000 watt country radio station that I would listen to as a child on my multi-colored vacuum tube radio in the isolation of my bedroom in Wilkes-Barre.  I registered in the Rogers Hotel in the middle of the night of October 4 – ironically, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, patron of the Franciscan Order I had just left – and the next morning took a walk down Wheeling’s Main street and happened to pass the Hawley Building, which housed the offices and studios of WWVA on the tenth floor.  What the heck, why don’t I go in there to see if they have any job openings for an ex-priest.  How I got an interview with the station manager without an appointment, I’ll never know.  But the secretary checked to see if he could see me, and he said yes.

The Hawley Building in downtown Wheeling. The headquarters and studios of WWVA were on the tenth floor.

His name was Ross Felton.  I have since learned that he was recently elected to the Radio Broadcasters Hall of Fame of West Virginia, at Huntington.  I was honest with Ross — telling him I had just left the priesthood.  While I didn’t have any credentials as a radio announcer, I did teach public speaking and was the moderator of the Debate Club, requiring that I teach the kids the intricacies of public communication.  As a priest, I gave a lot of sermons, so I knew how to speak in public, etc. etc.  It didn’t hurt that Ross was a Catholic.  He was curious about my past, and I frankly told him that I was a good priest, but had made a mistake as an immature high school student committing to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience, and sort of got trapped once I started the process and just kept going till I was ordained, 9 years later, and then found I had too independent a nature to handle total obedience in the Franciscan Order.  It just wasn’t the right fit for me.  I was now 32 years old, the Church was in turmoil after Vatican II, and it was time for me to move on.  Incidentally, I later learned that 1967 was the peak year of the exodus from the priesthood.  I left on the cusp of the crest!

Ross was fascinated with my story and admitted that he didn’t have any openings at WWVA, but he knew of a station in Fairmont, a small mining town about 70 miles south of Wheeling, that had an opening.  His good friend, Frank Lee was the manager there.  He’d put in a call to Frank for me and I should head down there for an interview. By the way, Frank was a good Catholic, and he had a daughter who was a nun!

Before I met with Ross Fenton at WWVA, I purchased a brown blazer (up to that point, all my clothes were clerical black!). After the interview, to kill time, I went to a nearby theater where the Beetles "Magical Mystery Tour" movie was playing.

I thanked Ross, went back to my hotel after going to a Beetles movie, stayed another night at the Rogers Hotel, and then took off on the 70-mile trip down route 250 to Fairmont.  Prior to this, the only place I had visited in West Virginia was Wheeling.  While teaching in Pittsburgh, I had gone to the Wheeling Jamboree to see Johnny Cash in concert, along with June Carter, the Carter Family and the Statler Brothers.  That was in 1966. Now I was driving through towns with names I had never heard before: Moundsville, Littleton, Hundred, Metz and as I got pretty close to Fairmont,  a small place called Mannington.  Little did I know that on the corner of Main St., Mannington, I drove right by the apartment of my future wife, Penny Raad!

Arriving in Fairmont, I took a room at the Fairmont Hotel.  It just so happened that the studios of the radio station I was to visit for the interview were located in the basement of the hotel.  WMMN (try saying that 3 times fast!) was a powerful easy-listening music and sports station with a long and varied history in West Virginia radio broadcasting. It was affiliated with the CBS Radio network — another coincidence that will play out as I tell my story.

This is the cover of a book that features a comprehensive history of the early days of WMMN when it broadcast live country western programming from its studios in Fairmont. The cover photo was taken in the WMMN studios, and the microphone in the center features the station's call letters. The powerful signal attracted performers from far and wide who received extensive exposure on the premiere country station that it was in the 1930s and 40s. The cover photo was taken around 1940 and features Blaine Smith and his gang: Marty McCoy (the Ol' Sheriff), Blaine Smith, Billy Steed and Brother Carl Smith.

I later learned that WMMN was famous as the home of the Mountaineer Jamboree – a station much like WWVA that hosted live country music singers and groups.  It was heard all over the country in the early 1930′s, when there weren’t a lot of stations cluttering up the airways.  It boasted of at least two on air personalities known far and wide: Herb Morrison, the WLS Chicago newsman who is famous for covering the explosion of the Hindenburg at Lakehurst, NJ in May of 1937,  who uttered the memorable words “Oh the humanity” as the bodies fell from the burning aircraft.  Morrison is honored in the West Virginia Broadcasters Hall of Fame representing WMMN – so what are the chances that I’d end up working at the radio station where he got his start? As a kid I had heard recordings of his description of the Hindenburg disaster.  The other star (of country music) who performed regularly live on WMMN was Grandpa Jones, also in the WV Broadcasters Hall of Fame.  He was memorable for his humor on the Television show “Hee Haw” in the 1970s.  This pioneer radio station opened  in 1928 at only 500 watts, increasing to 1000 watts the year I was born (1935) and then became a very powerful (for the time) 5000 watt station in 1938 which led to it becoming a haven for “hillbilly singers” seeking wide exposure.  Because of its power and coverage area, the station claimed that the call letters “WMMN” meant “Where Miles Mean Nothing.” In actuality, the station was named after U.S. Senator Matthew M. Neely.

Of course, as I prepared to go for my interview with Frank Lee, I knew none of this — nor did I have a demo tape that almost every candidate for a radio job had professionally prepared.  I went to the interview with nothing but my personality and life story.  No references, no resume, no actual radio experience (except for my shows in my dining room when I was 11 and 12 years old!), and even more critical, no “Radio Telephone Third Class Operator Permit” – a requirement of the FCC for radio personalities.  Frank said I could study for that and go to Washington, DC to get it  after I go on the air!

Frank Lee was a big man.  Very professional looking with a deep radio voice.  He was actually the “Voice of the Falcons” — the Fairmont State College athletic teams.  Frank was known as the best play-by-play announcer in the area.  His signature sign off statement was “Frankly speaking, this is Frank Lee.” Everybody knew Frank — and everybody revered him.  I was happy to learn that Frank was inducted into the West Virginia Broadcasters Hall of Fame in October, 2008.  His experience with sports at first scared me — as I was sports-ignorant.  If he expected me to help with any of the sports initiatives of the station, I was dead in the water.  Thank goodness that never came up in the interview. Frank greeted me cordially, and already knew all about me, thanks to his friend Ross Felton.  He said I came highly recommended.  I think he offered me the job before I left the interview, even before I had cut a demo tape, which he said I could record in their studio after the interview.  He wanted  me to meet his Program Director, Steve Mazure and it was protocol to provide him with a demo tape.  For my demo, I read a news report and a commercial. Steve was a great guy, and welcomed me to the team. Within a week from leaving my teaching job as a Franciscan in Pittsburgh, I was on the air in Fairmont, playing music, reading the news and doing commercials!

The All Stars of Radio at WMMN

My colleagues at the station were great guys.  We were known as the “WMMN All-Stars” (note the sports emphasis!).  Over the door leading to the studio there was a sign that read “Home of the All Stars.” The senior and most popular member of the staff was Fran Lauzau.  He had a great reputation in Fairmont for his morning show.  The town awakened every morning to his cheerful, light-hearted Pollyanna chatter and on air gimmicks.  Because he  was phasing out some of his on-air time, I was selected to open the station early in the morning and go on the air for an hour, sort of as Fran’s  warm-up act.  He would follow me during morning drive time.  We liked to party together. One of our favorite hangouts was a sing-along bar called the ” J.D. Inn” on Pennsylvania Avenue, on the East Side of Fairmont.  They had a young entertainer there named “Rich” and everybody would get song sheets to “Sing Along With Rich.”  Fran, Jean and I became very friendly with Rich. I would always get to sing my “signature” song, “Jambalaya.”   Within a few months I was dating Fran’s daughter, Pam.

On the air in June, 1968 at the main broadcast console of WMMN.

As a part of my  morning air duties I had to read the Coal Mine openings and closings (Fairmont was a mining town) and I’d deliver the news from the teletype machine – a noisy automatic typewriter located in a closet near the studio, somewhat isolated so as to not be heard on the air (a predecessor of the fax machine).  This is where the news flashes would appear, letter after letter, word after word.  While a record was playing, we would rush over to the teletype and rip off the accumulated pages, and separate each story by cutting the continuous flow of paper.  If you neglected this chore for a while, you could end up with a roll of news stories accumulated on the floor of the teletype room. As the ink grew fainter, you had to change the ribbon; and as the red line appeared on the side of the paper, you had to change the paper roll.  Neglect either of these duties, and there was no news to read!  I was learning on the job.  As a DJ, my biggest fear was “dead air” – when a record ended and I wasn’t cued up for a commercial or another record.  In the beginning my ad libs were pretty sloppy. One of my favorite jobs was making commercials in the tape room.  We would record the commercial with appropriate musical background.  This is where my “radio voice” came in handy.  It also was an opportunity to be creative.  Early on Frank Lee called me into his office to advise me to keep the tone of the commercials in sync with the musical format of the station.  I was getting a little too creative (imitating some of those big city Pittsburgh DJs!).

This map indicates the coverage area of the WMMN signal at the time I worked there. Note that it extends into south-western Pennsylvania. Some of my former students at Canevin High School in Pittsburgh happened to catch my broadcasts and contacted me. Needless to say, they were surprised that their former teacher had become a DJ! Several traveled to Fairmont to visit me.

Bill Cristy was another member of the staff, a young DJ who was attending Fairmont State College while he worked full-time at the station. He befriended me from the start.   He was dating a girl named Coralie Berdine (we called her Corkie), and they were planning to marry in March of 1968.  I was deeply honored when after just getting to know me (5 months!), he asked me to be the best man at his wedding.  Jack Bernardo was another young DJ who went by the nickname of “The Big Kahuna”.  He was a lot of fun, and was the guy who helped Frank Lee with the Sports.  All of us socialized quite a bit.  We were one big happy family. The weekend part-time guy was Jim Potanko, a friendly guy also attending Fairmont State College.  The evening DJ for a show called  “Night Beat” was Chuck Warner.  After I was there a few months, the station hired a hot-shot DJ for night-time programming who went by the radio pseudonym he created for himself: “Todd Raven.”  His style was transitional for the station.  He had a lot of great ideas, a great voice, was a fast talker and attracted a young audience.  He would make great promo tapes for each of the announcers, with upbeat music, echo chambers and all kinds of jazzy sound effects. Todd dubbed me “Surfer Joe” — which became my DJ nickname for the rest of my tenure there. “The Raven” ended his show each night by playing Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.”

Best Man at Bill & Corky Cristy's Wedding, March, 1968

Mid-morning, I had a popular show that had been on WMMN for many years, called “The Swap Shop.”  It was exactly what the title suggested – a call-in show on which people would offer items for sale or swap – from cars to pigs, horses to old sinks and kitchen stoves.  I guess you could call it an early West-Virginia version of “e-bay” or “Craigs List.” Some of the callers were regulars, and many of them straight from the hills and “hollers” of stereotypical West Virginia – whose culture I admire and respect and the proud home of my wife, Penny.  However, I shouldn’t be too critical of the callers or the things they were selling, because I embarrassed myself more than once by my lack of knowledge of rural country living.  On one occasion a caller offered a gelding for sale. Ignorant city boy that I was, I asked, “what’s a gelding?”  The half hour show was one of my favorite assignments at the station.  The phones would start ringing ten minutes before we went on the air, and kept ringing for a half-hour after we signed off.  We did not put the show on “delay” as most live talk shows are on radio, so every now and then, especially when the kids were off from school, I’d get an obscene expletive or inappropriate prank caller.  I always had my finger on the mute button!

My final WMMN Business Card

Since the story of my connection with WMMN was an unbelievable convergence of unusual circumstances, the next phase of my employment there was precipitated by the untimely death of our chief commercial salesman, another West Virginia radio pioneer, Bob Frasier.  When he died at the end of March, 1968, Frank Lee called me into his office and asked if I wanted to advance my salary substantially by becoming a salesman of radio time.  It was a tough decision for me, because I didn’t see myself as a salesman.  I really relished the limelight of an on-air personality.  Frank sweetened the package by saying I could do both.  I could continue a reduced on-air schedule, but go out on the road and earn a lucrative commission selling commercials.  Reluctantly, I said yes, and were it not for that decision, I would never have met my wife, Penny.  It was while selling commercial time to the merchants in her hometown of Mannington that I met her.

Early in 1968, Jack Bernardo and I traveled to Washington, DC to take our FCC Third Class Radio Operator's License, a requirement for radio broadcasters at the time. It had to be renewed every 5 years. I maintained my license long after I left WMMN, just in case I might want to get back in the business. This is my third and final license, which expired in 1983. These documents are no longer required for broadcast personalities.

More to come…

I’ve exceeded 5,000 words in this blog, and there’s much more to my radio story, including my national radio coverage of the Farmington Mine disaster on November 20th, 1968 and radio  opportunities that came after I left West Virgina and came to New Jersey for the next phase of my career journey — Community College Teaching.  That will include my stint at WOND, Atlantic City, and some radio connections with WBZC at Burlington County College, and ends with the uncanny radio connection of the next generation of Laufers, as my oldest son Kurt joins the CBS family in Philadelphia, the same radio network that employs my daughter-in-law Sara. That will come in Radio Days – Part II.

Afterthoughts…

As I write my blog, certain ancillary thoughts (“sub plots”) come to mind that would interrupt the flow of ideas and disrupt my basic story line.  I like to add them at the end “just for the record”.  One such side bar deals with Hank Williams, whom I mentioned I had seen live in concert early in his career at a WHWL live jamboree.

I was a great fan of his during high school.  His “Jambalaya” became my signature Karaoke song.  I remember his tragic death, freezing while being chauffeured to a concert in his car (some say the real cause of death was the combination of excessive alcohol and a morphine shot given by a doctor) on New Year’s day, 1953 near Bluefield, West Virginia during a major ice storm.  I identified with him, because on the same night, while I was home for the holidays during my first year of college at St. Francis Seminary, I was driving my Dad’s car through the same ice storm. I also find it ironic that he died in West Virginia, a state with which I would identify 15 years later.

Fan Mail

I saved two letters from my tenure at WMMN that I feel are classics.  One is a humiliating put down because of my stupid ad lib before playing a record.  The other tells something about the changing music scene of the late 1960s and how radio stations struggled to find their musical niche in a community.

This first one came from Morgantown, postmarked October 14, 1968.  I assumed it came from a student at West Virginia University, as they listened regularly to our station.  It was addressed this way: Dumdum of the Day Award, Radio Station WMMN, Fairmont West Virginia.   Inside was written: DUMDUM OF THE DAY AWARD:  To the DJ, just before eight p.m. Sunday night who said (more or less): “Anyone who doesn’t think beautiful music is being written these days had better listen to… the theme from ‘Elvira Madigan’.”

This your DD of the Day then played, blissfully unaware of the fact that this modern piece was written by a feller named Mozart who died — if I’m not mistaken — some 300 years ago.     Jack Belck, Morgantown.

This incident made me realize that I wasn’t just sitting in an isolated glass booth as a DJ — but that there were smart people out there listening, and I had better think before speaking.  Also good advice today for sending off e-mails and writing blogs!  Joe

This second letter may seem a bit racist, but since it reflects a widespread mentality at the time, I think that its OK to print it here.  I’ll leave off the name of the other DJ, and not print the name of the writer.  It was sent from Grafton, West Virginia, a town near Fairmont,  dated 12/18/68.

WMMN – Dear Sirs:  Oh what a difference a disc jockey makes. Music played by Joe Laufer on the Night Beat tonight was wonderful – something good for everybody and not a constant menu of crazy Negro tin pans and so-called “singing” by a bunch of dopesters, and “nuts” as constantly poured out by your regular man, xxxx  xxxxxx, who, if he is supposed to have an ear for music — better get to the doctor right away.  Why not put Laufer on the Night Beat regularly and put xxxxxx on in the daytime when I can’t listen.  I am one of your regular listeners but also spent 25 years in show business as a manager, agent and band leader.  I am not talking through my hat.  Lets get rid of the Negro nut house noise and play some good Laufer selections.    Ralph C………

I’m not sure I want this guy in my fan base, but it does present a snapshot of the times (1968) and the place!  Joe

Website for West Virginia Broadcasters Hall of Fame

This site also includes the West Virginia Broadcasters Hall of Fame page

In preparing this blog, I found a great website for Radio nostalgia — especially the equipment side.  But it also is the home of the webpage for the West Virginia Broadcasters Hall of fame. The museum is located in Huntington, West Virginia, near the Kentucky and Ohio borders of West Virginia.

The URL for the site is: http://www.ohio.edu/people/postr/MRT/index.htm.

Part II coming soon…

Apologies for the length of this entry, but please watch for Part II in the near future.

Joe

Nix Besser* – Part II

Mom and Dad with me in the summer of 1935 at Grandma Laufer's on William Street. Mom is pregnant with Etta. I had been born on February 4, 1935, and Etta was born on February 26, 1936.

Memories of My Father – continued.

By Joe Laufer, Jr.

I had written most of this story over two months ago, but didn’t feel it captured the full flavor of my Dad’s life.  Yesterday, being Father’s Day, I decided that whether it was perfect or not, I would post it, and maybe do some edits sometime in the future.  So here it is, with a few tune-ups, but still, with many gaps that will hopefully be filled in the future.  The more I would write, the more I would remember an incident or story that I felt had to be included.  There are some things that may seem out of sequence, but it was because they came to me in connection with what I was writing at the time.  Hopefully I have painted a picture of my Dad that is accurate and a reflection of the many qualities that endeared him to me and the many people touched by his life and personality.

* For those who may not have read Part I, “Nix Besser” is the German phrase for “None Better.”  My Dad used the phrase in his advertisements for his Coal business.

Follow-up on Part I

I recently visited my wife’s hometown of Mannington, West Virginia and was reminded of something related to my Dad’s work-life that should have been included in the previous posting and which I will integrate into it later.   While in Mannington, I visited Hough Park and observed two engravings in a wall and a fountain indicating that they were built in 1939  by the WPA.

Identification of 1939 WPA project in Hough Park, Mannington, WV, Penny's home town, that reminded me of Dad's connection to Wilkes-Barre's WPA workforce.

Earlier, I had made reference to the fact that my Dad entered the work-force during the Great Depression.  One of the remedial programs for joblessness inaugurated by President Roosevelt in 1935, the year I was born, was the WPA – the Works Progress Administration.  Many parks, public buildings and schools were built between 1935 and 1943 through the WPA. Because Dad had a well-maintained 3-ton truck, he was contracted by the WPA to haul dirt and stone for some WPA projects throughout the Wyoming Valley.   I was 8 year’s old when the WPA ended in June of 1943.  But I definitely remember that he had numerous jobs related to this government program.  Also, for the record, in addition to the WPA, the year of my birth, 1935, saw the beginning of Social Security, and the completion of the Hoover Dam.

Family Fun in the Early Years

Trylon and Perisphere - symbol of the 1939 NY World's Fair

I’m amazed at how vivid my earliest memories are dating back to 1940 when I was only 5 years old.  The big event that stands out in my mind is the New York World’s Fair (1939 and 1940).  I guess you can say that this was our version of going to Disney World.  I don’t have any family pictures from that period, but I sure have the images in my head.  I specifically remember the General Motors “Futurama” exhibit.  I want to emphasize that I remember it — I haven’t just re-constructed it from reading about it.  It was a diorama of the future vision of roadside and urban America that started out in miniature and ended up in actual size that you viewed from moving theater seats.

It was like viewing a giant Christmas yard of miniature highways, towns, homes, and

A vintage photo of folks viewing Futurama - exactly as I remember it.

mountains, that grew into life-size versions by the time the ride ended.  Related to this was a second exhibit viewed from a grand circular balcony overlooking a city with sky scrapers and lights and roads on pillars — in those days, something we had never seen before and today, 70 years later, it is a reality.

I remember the excitement of the midway, the enormity of the exhibit halls, and the symbol of the fair, a big white ball — called a Perisphere– with a connected steeple-like “Trylon.”

This is the small filmstrip viewer I got at the Worlds Fair. It came with 4 small films of about 8 or 10 scenes each of World's Fair sites

Firestone tire World's Fair ashtray which has survived for 71 years in the Laufer family.

Most of all, I remember one particular souvenir my Dad bought me.  It was a film strip viewer with several filmstrips of scenes from the fair.  As I was preparing this blog, I googled “World’s Fair Collectibles,” and there it was!  Exactly as I remember it — as a five- year old.  While I don’t have that anymore, I do have one thing we had in the house as I was growing up, namely, a miniature rubber Firestone Tire with a cigarette ashtray in the center, embossed with the Trylon and Perisphere symbol of the Fair.

The fact that my Mom and Dad took me to this fair says something about them and their interests.  Remember, they had two other kids at the time — Etta was four, and I never really asked her if she remembered anything about the Fair, and Billy was only 2 — and most likely at home with a baby sitter — although, for all I know, he was with us in his carriage.   The fair was held in Flushing Meadows, Long Island.  Twenty-five years later I attended the 1964-65 World’s Fair at the age of 30 in the same location. That’s the one that exhibited Michelangelo’s “Pieta” on loan from the Vatican.

Sunday Drives and Family Excursions – 1939 to 1945

Me, Billy and Etta at one of the roadside parks we would visit on our Sunday afternoon auto excursions with Mom and Dad.

Despite the fact that there was gas rationing during World War II, I have vivid memories of plenty of Sunday drives during my childhood.

Locally, we loved to go to a small roadside park in a place near Wilkes-Barre called Nuangola.  There was hardly ever a Sunday we didn’t go on a family drive for a picnic and recreation.  Sometimes as we headed to a further destination, we would pass the park, and we would beg Dad to stop for a minute for the swings, teeter-totter and merry-go-round that were there.  There were no seat belts then, and no car seats.  I always stood directly behind my Dad.  Etta had the spot right behind my Mom.  And Billy, because he was just a little kid, got to stand on the mound that went down the middle of the back floor.  We always stood up in the car.

This was always a favorite picture of me and Etta with Mom at a mountain location where we stopped on one of our Sunday drives.

Dad was always pointing out things for us to observe.  He had a couple of stock “jokes” for the drive in the car — whenever we’d pass a field of hay or a hay wagon, he would shout out “Hay” — as though he were greeting someone.  Whenever we approached a small highway tunnel under a road or bridge, he’d warn us to “pull in your ears.”  And we loved it when we passed a series of Burma Shave signs.  Dad always read them aloud for us.  There were always 5 signs — like this: “Don’t Lose Your Head – To Gain a Minute – You Need Your Head – Your Brains Are in it – Burma Shave!” Aunt Lizzie Brader (with whom we lived) was usually with us on the Sunday rides.  I have a vague recollection that our first car was not really ours, it was hers — and that’s why she always came along.  I remember clearly being in the car during thunder storms and downpours when she told my Dad to pull over until the storm passed.

Two other fun destinations were in New York state:  Watkins Glen, where they had a beautiful waterfall, and Bear Mountain, up near West Point.  After we parked our car, my Dad would imitate the tour bus announcer who drummed up business over the P.A. system by sing-songing over and over the same phrase:  “Why walk up that long, steep hill when you can ride for only five cents.”  On the drive home Dad would annoy us by repeating over and over, “Why walk up that long, steep hill, when you can ride for only five cents!”  We never came home from these events without some kind of souvenir.  I remember my bedroom wall being decorated with felt triangular pennants from these destinations.

Annually Dad packed up the family and took us to the Bloomsburg Fair.  Bloomsburg was

Here's Dad and Mom with Aunt Mary and Uncle Mike. I'm guessing that the picture dates back to somewhere around 1933 or 1934.

about 50 miles south of Wilkes-Barre.  One year, just before we were to leave I got a tremendous bloody nose that just wouldn’t stop, and as a result, we had to delay the trip. I was really upset.  One of my favorite events there was a huge wooden bowl-shaped arena where motorcycles would race, crisscrossing in front of each other at high speeds, and every once in a while one would crash or tumble over.

We often went to the local amusement park, San Souci.  I remember one incident that upset me because of my Dad’s reaction to my behavior.  I was riding “The Whip” — and exaggerating its effects by an excessive display of head and body movements that appeared to my Dad as being sissified.  He used the occasion to correct me, in effect telling me to “man up,” thus spoiling the rest of the day for me.  I was just having fun!  I was reminded many years later by one of my son’s that I was insensitive to his feelings when I corrected him in public for something entirely different.  Parenting isn’t easy!

Visiting Family

As is evident, my parents provided us with plenty of opportunities for fun and togetherness.  Some of the family togetherness wasn’t fun, though, like the forced holiday visits to relatives.  On Christmas and Easter afternoon, just when kids like to stay home and play with their toys or eat their candy, we would be packed into the car to go door-to-door in Ashley visiting our Aunts and Uncles and cousins.  Sometimes that expanded into visiting friends of my parents.  There were some occasions, however when we would go on longer trips to visit family.  That was a little more fun.  Like trips to Brooklyn, New York to visit my Aunt Betty and our Langan Aunts and Uncles or our cousin Nancy (Nealon) Minicker.

Uncle Bud and Dad growing up.

When we were very young, we would drive to Scranton to visit my dad’s younger brother, my Uncle Bud (who was my Godfather) and Aunt Marge.  I liked going there not only to see him, but because he had a friend who was a cartoonist — and he would draw real cartoons and let me take them home.  Later Uncle Bud moved to Harrisburg and my Grandmother Laufer and Aunt Biss joined him and his family.  I liked the trips to Harrisburg.  My Uncle Bud was a retail businessman.  My earliest memory of his work was when he was employed at a major Department Store on Public Square in Wilkes-Barre called Pomeroys.  He gained a reputation as an excellent department manager and advanced his career in Scranton, then Harrisburg and then Sharon, Pennsylvania near the Ohio border.  Uncle Bud and Aunt Marge had three children, David, Judith and Diane. They returned to Ocean City, New Jersey where he established his own millinery business, then to Westfield, New Jersey where he operated a retail drapery store and began a mail order country curtain business.  I always maintained contact with him right up until his sudden death on my Dad’s 70th birthday in 1980.  He was 68.  My Dad took the death of his younger brother hard.   Penny and I and our young children enjoyed visiting Uncle Bud, Aunt Marge and David regularly in  Westfield and Ocean City.  Their daughter Diane died tragically in the San Francisco earthquake in 1989.  My Aunt Marge spent her last years in Texas with her daughter Judith and son David.  She died in 1996 at the age of 84.

Dad and Mom had a circle of about a dozen really close friends with whom they played cards and attended parties.  Often they would drag us to all-day clambakes and picnics where there was lots of beer, singing and dancing.  I think I had more fun watching the adults make fools of themselves than  hanging out with kids my own age.  As I grew older, I came to appreciate why they took advantage of these opportunities for weekend fun with their friends.  The rest of the week was spent working hard to put food on the table and clothes on our bodies.

This picture of Dad and his Mom caught my eye. I feel you can see his self confidence and a bit of the "kibitzer" in him - also his affectionate side - unabashedly shown towards his mother in this photo, but not often experienced by the author in his lifetime.

Dad liked his beer.  I already mentioned that his almost daily routine was to end the work day at one of his favorite bars.  There was always a case of Stegmaier beer at our house.  No matter what little project he was working on around the house, he would have an open bottle of beer at hand.  He like to have a radio on, too, when he worked.  Dad could handle his beer better than anyone I knew.  However, for some reason, once a year he broke his routine.  I could never figure out why, and it really upset me.  He would get drunk every Christmas Eve.  One year he came home late on Christmas Eve and fell into the Christmas yard I so carefully constructed.  I felt helpless and very upset.  I always felt bad for Mom when this happened.  I came to expect — and resent– it every year.

He had one other hobby that puzzled me.  He loved Detective stories.  Next to his bed there was always a pile of Detective Magazines.  Out of curiosity I would go through them to look at the pictures.  Some were pretty grizzly and graphic pictures of brutal murders.  Dad would often send me to Vick’s (a nearby cigar store) to buy the latest “Official Detective” or similar magazines.  Even as a kid, we were able to buy cigarettes without an ID — so he would send me to buy his Lucky Strikes — and for a while “Wings.”   Dad was a pretty heavy smoker.

One of his favorite times of the year was the World Series.  During the World Series he took off from work and settled in on a project — often at Falls — which involved listening to the game with a beer in his hand. Dad liked going to New York to see the Yankees play — sometimes with the Knights of St. George on a group bus trip, or in a car with a few friends like Father Kraemer from St. Nick’s and Uncle Mike Nealon.

Albert’s Corners – Mountaintop

This a rare picture taken at our property at Mountain Top. It is my Aunt Lizzie sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs. The chair and the white Pepsi can that Dad used there for trash verify the location. It's one of the few pictures I have of Aunt Lizzie Brader before her accident. I'm guessing that the picture was taken around 1944 or 1945.

The Sunday drives I mentioned earlier were a popular form of family entertainment from about 1940 through 1944 when Dad made an interesting property purchase. For all I know, Dad may have won it in a card game.  However, I think I recall that it was a combination purchase and barter deal.  Dad paid for a parcel of land by doing some work for the owner and throwing in some cash over and above the work.  He was pretty good at making deals like this. Thus, he took ownership of a corner plot on Yeager Road, Mountaintop, PA.  It was near a place called “Albert’s Corners” in an undeveloped area.  There were scary snakes on the property — they hung out in the stone wall we built along the border of the neighboring property from the stones we cleared off the center of the lot.  Lots of wild huckleberry plants and red tea berries grew throughout the area. We had to get water from a hand pump across the dirt road that ran along the property.  Yeager Road was unpaved, too.

The first thing Dad did, with the help of Uncle Mike and Aunt Mary, my Mom and us kids, was to create a little park area on the grounds consisting of a stone fireplace, a merry-go-round like the one we liked in Nuangola — placing a large hay wagon wheel on an axle and building it out with a pipe railing and seats.  It was a professional job and we loved it.  He hung playground swings on boards nailed between two sets of closely aligned trees, and placed  some Adirondack chairs around, built several picnic tables and benches between trees — and, of course, an outhouse!   Dad placed ten-gallon Pepsi Cola cans around for trash.  We worked there every weekend, and I remember my Aunt Mary and Uncle Mike joking with my Dad and Mom about the future location of the swimming pool.  We had our very own picnic grove!  One of my favorite things was roasting hot dogs and marshmallows in the fireplace. Every weekend we partied there.

This became a place for annual Nealon Family reunions bringing dozens of relatives from my Mom’s side of the family to the place.  Dad would transport those without cars in the back of his truck.  When I got to High School, I remember having at least two or three class wiener roasts at this great isolated country spot.

Falls, PA

Soon, however, this family treasure would be upstaged by another recreational property Dad purchased in the opposite direction from our home, 22 miles up the Susquehanna from Wilkes-Barre at a place called Falls.  In the spring of 1947, just after the Susquehanna river had receded after another of its regular March floods, Dad and Mom were attending a party at the Walter’s Cottage on River Road in Falls.   The date had to be very close to the time Karen was born — most likely a short time after she was born.  We kids weren’t with them when this “handshake transaction” took place.

The owners of the cottage next door to the one where the party was held were busy cleaning up after the flood. Dad, in his usual semi-serious, half-kidding way threw out a challenge: “I’ll give you $500 and a carton of cigarettes for it.”  “Sold,” said the disgusted

We had a dock, boat and a small Evenrude Motor. That's me at the controls coming into port with Dad and our Wilkes-Barre neighbor, Frank Kaporch after a ride on the Susquehanna.

owner of the mud-filled cottage. And the rest is history. It may have been the Stegmaiers speaking when he made the offer, but Dad was fully sober when he finalized the deal — and yes, he threw in the cigarettes. They were probably his brand, Lucky Strikes!

Several weeks later, after the papers had been signed, Dad packed Mom and their four kids, me, Etta, Billy, and Karen (she was about 5 weeks old) — Mary Lou wasn’t born yet — in the Ford, and drove the 22 miles to Falls to show us our new “summer home.”  Our first glimpse was not as exciting as anticipated. We were greeted from River Road by what looked like a crumbling bungalow. However, as soon as we walked around to the front of the cottage, a much more impressive image emerged.

This is the front of the cottage facing the Susquehanna River. We would play ball in the large front yard between the house and the river. The front room above the porch belonged to me and my brother Bill. We had the riverfront view! Dad installed a tire swing on a wire-rope cable on the riverbank, one of our most popular "fun" things to do at Falls.

From the front porch, beyond a wide expanse of “gully” there it was: the mighty Susquehanna River, still flowing “high” after the spring thaw.  I’ve lived on a small lake for 40 years, but I have to admit that there’s something special about living on a River.  During our years at Falls I did a lot of exploring along the banks of the Susquehanna.

Within months, Mom was pregnant again, this time, with Mary Lou, as this new phase in the life of the Laufer family began. This period would last only 25 years — because on June 24, 1972, Hurricane Agnes would rip the cottage off its foundation and send it down River Road, ending a quarter century of special memories for the Laufer family.

One of the numerous floods at Falls. Incidentally, that "outhouse" to the right of the house was our neighbor's. Ours was on the other side of the house.

What started out as a handyman’s special would eventually be fitted with electricity, running water, indoor plumbing, finished walls, and all sorts of amenities, and evolve into a truly special “summer home”. Handyman Joe did most of the work by himself — with a little help from his sons, daughters, nephews, brother-in-law, and “helpers” (the array of guys he hired in conducting his coal business).

One of my favorite casual family pictures taken at Falls in the "gully" between the river and the cottage. It was taken in the summer of 1951 when I was 16, between my Junior and Senior years of High School. Dad was 40 and Mom was 41 at that time. Bill was about to turn 13, Etta was 15, Mary Lou was going on 2 and Karen was 4.

I personally liked the entire Falls experience.  I made some new friends in Jack and Frankie Fuller, our next door neighbors.  It was Frankie who taught me about the birds and the bees – at least he filled in some of my missing information. I liked going to the Roller Skating Rink at Falls, and there was something special about Sunday Mass in St. Margret Mary’s Chapel.  I mentioned in an earlier blog that back home we had to attend a children’s Mass at 9 a.m. every Sunday with our schoolmates.  Here at Falls for the first time we attended Mass as a family.  It was nice being in the family pew –with Dad and Mom and my brother and sisters.  We walked to Mass as a family, and most of our neighbors were Catholic, too, so Sunday mornings were always special there. When we got home, we had a nice family breakfast together, too.

Falls was the location of many a weekend party for friends and relatives. Hardly a weekend passed without a keg of beer being tapped. Dad created a complete beer dispensing system that he’d set up almost every Sunday.  Sometimes there would be big parties, and at other times, just a couple of families.  Depending on who was there, there would be singalongs, card playing, softball games, and lots of food.  Because Joe, Etta and Bill were in their High School years during the heyday of Falls, there were class “wiener roasts”, parties and outings during the 1950′s. During the latter years of the cottage, Karen and Mary Lou entertained there, also.

When the Susquehanna overflowed after Hurricane Agnes, it picked up the cottage, floated it a few doors down River Road till it hit a tree and crumbled.

Once Hurricane Agnes took the cottage, there was no going back. The laws would not permit rebuilding in the flood plain, and Dad received “market value” for the property. It was a great loss to the family, and the end of an era. Dad took the loss very hard.  He had spent 25 years of sweat and blood (literally) to transform the property and the cottage into a really valuable asset — and one he could be proud of.  But beyond that, it was a place filled with memories of really happy family times. It was most unfortunate that the next generation of Laufers were not able to benefit from the family “summer home” the way their Moms and Dads did.

My brother Bill and I each have souvenirs in our homes from Falls that come from the remnants of  the

Post-flood wreckage includes the fireplace with the marble engraving "Laufer's Rock" now a permanent part of my brother Bill's family room fireplace in Richboro, PA. I have the pair of decorative andirons for my fireplace.

fireplace Dad built there.  Bill has the stone with the family name engraved on it imbedded into his fireplace and I have the two decorative andirons in front of my fireplace.

My siblings and I seem to have carried on the family tradition of enjoying life through friends and parties and events.  We had a couple of good teachers!

Chickens and Rabbits

I’d like to go  back to a couple of other things which show what a versatile and talented man my Dad was.  One of my very early memories was having chickens in our back yard.  At one time Dad must have had at least a hundred chickens in coops in the back yard.  I remember the little yellow peeps coming in containers like big pizza boxes with holes cut in the top.  I was amazed how fast these little yellow chicks would grow into full-grown white chickens.   I used to be afraid to go in the coops to get the eggs because the roosters would jump up and attack with the spurs on the back of the feet.

The time would come when the chickens had to be butchered.  That wouldn’t be hard for my Dad, having gained experience in that field at Wideman’s Meat Market.  I think he wanted to make a man out of me by having me witness the butchering process.  He would kill the chicken by sticking a sharp knife down its throat and twisting it — I can still hear the eerie sound — and then cutting its head off.  Sometimes the headless chicken would run around the cellar — propelled by reflexes, my Dad would say.  I still remember the stench from the feathers when he dipped the dead chicken in a tub of hot water to remove its feathers.  I think the chicken raising period was during World War II when there was food rationing. All I know is that I was pretty young.

A few years later, when I raised rabbits, Dad demonstrated the art of killing them by breaking their necks with a quick jerk.  I hated to watch him strip the pelt off the Rabbit flesh.  He was certainly a talented butcher.

Dad could do just about everything.  He was a great woodworker.  He used to make wooden garden decorations.  I remember the patterns he would buy and was always impressed by the fact that the finished product looked exactly like the blueprint.  I specifically remember the little Dutch Boy and Little Dutch Girl he made for Mom’s garden.

Dad created a three- or four-foot high wooden replica of a page boy modeled after this Phillip Morris advertisement, with "Johnny" holding an ashtray. It was a fixture in our home throughout my childhood.

One of my all time favorites was the ashtray holder he made and which stood next to his “Archie Bunker” chair which was located next to the large radio console we had in the dining room.  It was a Bell Boy in a red suit and a little black hat.  In his white-gloved hands he held out the ash tray that my Dad would fill with cigarette buts every night as he read the Times Leader Evening News and listened to the radio.  The bell-boy ash tray stand reminded me of “Johnny” of the “Call For Phillip Morris” cigarette ads.

Jack of All Trades

Dad’s manual skills included carpentry and masonry.  He almost single-handedly rehabilitated the Falls bungalow into a bona fide summer home – albeit over about a fifteen year period.  He built the massive outdoor brick fireplace at Falls (and broke his leg when it fell on him when he was trying to straighten it out); he built a concrete block garage next door to our Wilkes-Barre home for the Kaporch’s,  and constructed his own 3-truck concrete-block garage at 13 Grove St., laid concrete sidewalks, re-fitted the attic into a bedroom for me and Billy, painted the house more than once, and was a pretty decent truck, auto and lawn mower mechanic.  When we bought the cottage at Falls, there was no electricity in it.  He wired the house completely.  However, this was one of his “learn from your mistakes” projects — after he had the house all wired, when he turned on the power for the first time, all the light bulbs in the house blew out because of a higher voltage surge than required from an improperly installed power source.

I always found his workbench in the cellar a challenge to navigate.  Every once in a while he would re-organize it and put all his tools into their designated place.  It wouldn’t take long for things to be all over the place.  He was definitely a pack rat, which led him to purchase the property behind the house on Bell Lane that once belonged to my childhood playmate, Bobby Zenjohn.  He filled that house with antiques and junk.  The fifth and final piece of property he purchased was the home of my Grandmother Nealon in Ashley after she died. He used to say that he had a piece of property for each of his five children.  I was written out of his will when I became a Franciscan and took the vow of Poverty (not “because” I became a Franciscan — but because of the “poverty” part).  However, it ended up that only Karen was lucky enough to be the beneficiary of Dad’s promise – getting the Mountain Top “Laufer Grove” on which to build her home when she married John Gayewski.  The rest of the properties were sold off at different times.

This Laufer Family portrait was taken in our living room in 1952 when I was a Senior in High School. Dad and Mom were 42 at the time.

In the earlier blog about Dad’s Coal and General Hauling businesses, I spoke about my love of the Circus and the role Dad played in bringing sawdust to be Big Top.  Among my fond memories of Dad was his enchantment with the Circus.  He loved that I loved the circus.  I know he took me there at least a half-dozen times in my childhood.  He would point out the action in the different rings and in the aerial performances so I wouldn’t miss anything.  He always bought me Cracker Jacks — which I have always associated with the Circus — when Cracker Jacks had lots of nuts in them and REAL prizes — not the chintzy cardboard junk they pass off as “prizes” today.  And he inevitably made sure we got there early enough to spend time in the menagerie to see all the animals before the show.  One of my joys before Dad died was that he came to visit me in Vincentown in the late 1970s and we went with my kids to see Ringling Brother’s Circus together at the Spectrum in Philadelphia.  I couldn’t help but reflect that Dad and I enjoyed it much more than the kids for reasons that only he and I could understand and not explain.

Clowning Around

I guess he was supposed to be a shirtless motorcycle cop in this getup. Notice the Stegmaier's beer bottle on the table.

A lot of people remember my Dad as a real character.  This

Dad's favorite character was Carol Burnett as the studio cleaning lady. That's me, hand on hip, drink in left hand!

characteristic especially came out at our weekend parties at Falls.  Dad had a fondness of dressing up in various costumes and making everybody laugh.  He would often sneak away from the group, put on a costume and then appear out of nowhere causing an uproar in the group.  I found a couple of pictures of him “in character” as the hippy dippy weatherman before George Carlin invented him and as Carol Burnett at the end of her show as the studio cleaning lady.  I wish we had taken more pictures, because they show that he was definitely one of a kind.

Civic Responsibility

There was also a serious side to Dad.  He took on some political responsibilities as a

Dad remained active in the Credit Union until his death. This article with his picture (second from left, front row) appeared in 1980, two years before he died.

Republican Ward leader.  Our garage was used for elections, and he would support local candidates in their political campaigns.  He was also very active in the St. Nicholas-St. Boniface Credit Union.  He played a leadership role on the Board of Trustees of the Credit Union and till this day, thanks to his excellent fiscal responsibility, the Laufer name is as good as gold when it comes to obtaining Loans from the St. Nick’s Credit Union.

All his hard work took a toll on my Dad.  As I write this, I am four years older than he was when he died.  During his final ten years he suffered a lot from emphysema, caused by his exposure to coal dust for so much of his life.  When he visited me once in the early 1970′s he apologized for not being able to help me out with any odd jobs around the house — because while he always liked to keep occupied — he could no longer do it.

As I recalled these many memories of my Dad, I feel I got to understand him better.  I wanted to make sure that his memory would not be lost when his children left this world.  So now they are written and hopefully, future generations of Laufers will be able to appreciate their roots a little better.  I also discovered how very many Laufer traditions are being perpetuated in the current generation, and that makes me happy.  In recalling the past, I discovered the wisdom behind some of the things my parents did that I had never credited them for. It may be a little late, but I’ll use this forum to say “thanks Dad”.

Here’s to Joseph Francis Laufer: Nix Besser!

Nix Besser – Part I

Memories of my Father

Par I – Joe The Entrepreneur

By Joe Laufer, Jr.

Joe Laufer, Sr. having a beer on August 8, 1959 on the river bank at his cottage at Falls. The occasion was the wedding reception of his daughter, Etta. Despite the poor quality of the photograph, the setting, image and smile reflect his joy at a peak moment in his life. He was 49 years old at the time of this picture. It is my favorite picture of him.

This is about Joseph Francis Laufer, my Dad.  He was born on October 15, 1910 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.  He was the first of two children of Joseph John Laufer and Mary Elizabeth Spindler.  He lived a good 72 years, passing suddenly in June, 1982 after returning to Wilkes-Barre from New Jersey and Bucks County, Pa., where he had his last visit with his two sons, Joe and Bill.  His visit to my house included a day at Great Adventure Park with my children – a rather fitting last memory of their grandfather.  He and my Mom were just about 8 months away from their Golden Wedding Anniversary when he died quietly in his sleep on a Sunday night.

To know my father was to know a hard-working, happy-go-lucky, fun-loving guy.  He had a lot a friends.  He was often the life of the party.  One of the great things I remember about my dad was the relationship he had with my Uncle Mike Nealon, my mom’s youngest brother.  They were a great pair when they were together.  You could always tell that my Uncle Mike loved being around my Dad — and my Dad enjoyed his company as well.  I chose this relational quality in my Dad to begin his story because it happened to be the first thing to jump into my mind.  That says a lot about my memories of my Dad, considering all that he was and did in life.  Despite a very rough outer shell, Dad was a very emotional, sensitive individual.

Wedding picture of my Grandparents, Mary Elizabeth Spindler and Joseph John Laufer on January 4, 1910. Mary was 26, 5 years older than Joseph, who was 21. He died suddenly and unexpectedly only 8 years later at the age of 29.

Several things about his childhood will give some insight into the way he would later meet the challenges of life.  A major challenge was the fact that he grew up without a father.  His Mom and Dad were married on January 4, 1910 when they were 26 and 21 respectively.  In those days it was rare for the husband to be younger than the wife — but in this case, my grandfather was 5 years younger than my grandmother.  In 1918, when my dad was only 7 years old, his mother became a widow.  My grandfather died suddenly and unexpectedly on March 8, 1918 at the age of 29 in his sleep after returning with my grandmother from visiting friends.  His obituary even stated that he returned home “in the best of health.”  He and my grandmother had been married for only 8 years!

This is a photo of my Dad around the time of the death of his father. He was about seven years old here. He never mentioned a dog to me, but it looks like he really appreciates this puppy.

Another thing that contributed to the uniqueness of my Dad’s childhood is that he contracted Scarlet Fever in his youth,  which left him hard of hearing — not deaf — but very seriously hearing-impaired.  Throughout his life that disability would be faced daily.  It is reflected in most of his pictures – always showing him wearing a hearing aid, and in the fact that he was exempt from military service during World War II.  Because of the nature of his work, wearing a hearing aid was more than an inconvenience — it was a royal pain, yet he dealt with it both through humor and creativity.  He was never ashamed to wear the hearing aid, and I never heard him complain about his disability.

Easter Sunday, 1940 at 28 William St., my Grandmother's house (and my Father's boyhood home). That's my Grandmom in the middle -- with the black hair. She is 56 years old here. Next to her is my Mom (30). In front are Billy (2), me (5), Etta (4). On the top row are Aunt Biss (ZuZu); Aunt Marge, Aunt Lizzie (ZaZa) and Uncle Bud, my Dad's younger brother. Dad took the picture. William St. no longer exists - a victim of re-development in Wilkes-Barre. It was located a few blocks from my home on Grove St., half way to St. Nick's, my parish and school. Today, Pennsylvania Boulevard goes through the former location of William St.

Although I don’t recall his ever discussing this with me, as an armchair psychologist, I would suggest another thing that had to impact his life growing up.  His Mom, my Grandmother, never really got over her husband’s death.  She never seems to have worked through her grief.  The sudden death of her young, apparently healthy, husband had a traumatic effect on her that she never accepted.  I felt that my Grandmother never appeared to be happy.  I remember as a little boy going to her house at 28 William Street and reflecting on how dark and gloomy it was.  The shades were always drawn.  It was very depressing — and that was about 25 years after her husband had died!  I didn’t connect her gloom (she called it “nerves”) to her sudden and early widowhood until I was older, but I think its an accurate assessment.

My Dad’s entrepreneurial bent has its roots, I am certain, in his survival instinct under these handicaps — and in the responsibility thrust upon him through his becoming the male “head of the household” at such an early age.  On top of all this, the country was experiencing the Great Depression.  I marvel at how my Dad maintained his great sense of humor in the midst of these many challenges.  He was able to start a business for himself in this dire economic atmosphere, while at the same time supporting his Mother and younger brother, and starting his own family in the process.

Historians calculate that you can put book-ends on the Great Depression starting with Black Tuesday (October 29, 1929 — two weeks after my Dad’s 19th birthday) and ending at the inception of World War II, (December 7, 1941) — the twelve-year period during which my Dad married, had 3 children and started his own business!

This is Coughlin High School, located on North Main St., Wilkes-Barre. My dad quit high school in his Sophomore year. St. Nicks High School was not established at the time he left 8th grade.

My Dad had once told me that he never graduated High School,  but left after tenth grade. My brother Bill and I had some discussion about it, but I checked Dad’s obituary and learned that he attended both St. Nicholas Grade School and Coughlin High School.  I was curious as to why he didn’t attend St. Nicholas High School or GAR, the High School nearest the family home.  Research showed me that St. Nicholas didn’t open the High School until 1928 and GAR began in 1930, while Coughlin, on North Main St., was established in 1909. Dad would have been in High School from 1925 through 1927, just before St. Nick’s High School opened.

A 1948 picture of Aunt Biss and Grandma Laufer -- they were sisters. Aunt Biss never married. She was known as Zu Zu. Grandma Laufer was known as Mae to her friends. They moved to Harrisburg to live with my Uncle Budd and Aunt Marge, eventually returning to Wilkes-Barre to live near us. During my childhood we would take trips to Harrisburg to visit them. A favorite memory was writing letters to them and receiving their letters in return -- often with a dollar tucked inside. After Aunt Biss died, my Grandmother lived with my Dad and Mom for a while, and then with a cousin, Mamie Schmidt. She died in November, 1959 at the age of 74.

Growing up, Dad definitely had a strong support group.  My Aunt Biss (“Bee” to my cousins), “ZuZu” to us as kids, moved in with my Grandmother, her older sister by 4 years.  Her full name was Elizabeth Spindler.  Aunt Biss never married and was a favorite aunt when I was a little kid.  We always referred to them together as “Grandma  and Zu Zu” — and Zu Zu had the jovial personality that contrasted dramatically with my Grandmother’s dour demeanor.  Zu Zu would prepare scrap books with images she would cut out of magazines,  like the Saturday Evening Post – pictures of jungle animals, and beautiful birds — I specifically remember the Toucans she seemed to favor in her collection.  It was she who introduced me to Norman Rockwell paintings, which I came to love.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  She was one of my Dad’s support group, along with her brother, George J. Spindler.   George was a plumber, but he died at age 34 when my Dad was 19, leaving my Dad as the oldest male in my Grandmother’s support circle.

This is Aunt Lizzie Brader exactly as I remember her. When I was researching my family tree, one of my Dad's cousins told me that she threw herself an elaborate 60th Birthday Party in 1920.

Another very important person in my Dad’s life was his Aunt Lizzie Brader.  Elizabeth Spindler Brader was the sister of his Grandfather,  George Spindler – thus his Great Aunt, and my Great, great Aunt.  My Dad never knew his Grandfather George, because he died in 1910, the year my Dad was born.  George was an iron worker who built bridges.  His sister Elizabeth married Harry Brader and lived in a house on 13 Grove Street that would eventually become our family home. Harry died in 1933 , the year my parents were married.  As a widow, Aunt Lizzie (we called her “Za Za”) invited my Dad and Mom to live with her as soon as they got married.  I was born in her house.  That gesture made it easy for my Dad and Mom to start out in life without too much worry about lodging.

Our family home at 13 Grove St., Wilkes-Barre. Originally built by Uncle Harry Brader, my parents moved in after their marriage to live with Dad's widowed Aunt Lizzie Brader, who sold it to him around 1945. I was born in the front room of the second floor. We have Aunt Lizzie's antique wooden bedroom suit in our home in Vincentown.

Eventually, my Dad bought the house from Aunt Lizzie.  I remember finding the blueprints to the house in the attic as a kid.  It was fascinating to see how every little detail in these architectural drawings became the reality of the door and window frames, porch banister and pillars, walls and roof of the house I lived in. One of the unique features of our house was a stained glass window in the front attic peak.   Tragically, my Aunt Lizzie fell down the cellar stairs at 13 Grove St. when I was about 11 or 12 years old.  She never recovered from a head injury and I remember Dad struggling with the decision to place her in a nursing home.  I recall going with him to check out one of the more “institutional” facilities and on the way home in the car telling me he could never leave her in a place like that.  Eventually he found a residential facility operated by a private individual for about a dozen or so elderly people.  The urgency to make this decision came about because of the birth of my sister, Karen, in 1947.  My Mom was now preoccupied with the care of a newborn.  Also, The baby was not safe with Aunt Lizzie’s behavior being so unpredictable. We visited her often, but she never knew who we were.  Aunt Lizzie died at the age of 92 in 1952, the year I graduated from High School.

This was my Dad at about age 20, probably around the time he was courting my Mother and while he was a butcher at Wideman's Meat Market.

When he was about 17 or 18 my Dad was working as an apprentice butcher at Wideman’s Butcher Shop on the corner of Hazel St. and South Washington Street.  The Wideman’s were cousins on the Spindler side.  As a boy, I recall a regular Saturday morning chore, as my Mom would send me to Wideman’s Meat Market to pick up the weekly meat order.  My Dad taught me the intricacies of the butcher business — how no part of the cow was wasted, and how the intestines were used as sheathes for the baloney, and that the liverwurst I loved was nothing but fat,  stuffed, of course, in a re-cycled intestine and reconfigured into the more appealing ring, tied at each end with a cord.   I would imagine my Dad in the white apron, working behind the counter at Wideman’s.

Soon, however, his entrepreneurial spirit inspired him to move out of this environment into his own grocery store.  As I understand it, this happened just about at the same time he and Mom married in 1933 — when he was around 23 years old.  During that first year of marriage, I suppose as I was growing in my Mom’s womb, they were operating their very own grocery store in the vicinity of Wideman’s Butcher Shop.  Here again, the dates are a bit uncertain, but this enterprise must have gone on for a few years.  My dad told me that his hauling business began when he was asked by a customer if he could move something from his home.  He said “yes,” forcing him to modify his car into a mini-truck of sorts,  so as not to loose the business. This is how his “General Hauling” business began, while he was

This is my Mom and Dad around the end of the 1930's when they each were 30 years old.

still operating the grocery store.  I have never fully reconciled how my Mom maintained her job as a Telephone Operator while helping with the grocery store and having kids. Mom must have had to increasingly take on the grocery store duties as she cared for me, when my year-younger sister, Etta, came along.  I’m pretty sure that by the time Billy was born in 1938, Dad had transitioned completely into the General Hauling business, with an expansion into home coal delivery,  and he abandoned the grocery store. In fact, in the newspaper account of their 25th Wedding Anniversary in 1958, Dad indicated that he’d been in the coal business for 21 years, meaning he started it in 1936. On one of his promotional pieces he printed: Est. 1936.

The only business I remember my Dad being in was the Coal and General Hauling business.  He had his own 3-ton dump truck with his name painted on the doors.  His primary service was the home delivery of coal, with the related specialties of taking out the ashes and other hauling.  He alternately referred to his business as a “Coal Dealership” and “General Hauling”.

This fuzzy image is the only existing picture of one of Dad's trucks. It was taken at a Nealon family reunion somewhere. I put out a call to all my relatives to see if anyone had a picture of any of Dad's trucks, and my cousin Judy Bromfield Buff came up with this one.

Eventually he would have two 3-ton trucks and “helpers” to work with him.  Some of his helpers were my Nealon and Clarke cousins from Ashley.  My recollection is also that his trucks were always Fords, purchased at Motor Twins on South Main Street, Wilkes-Barre.

Dad’s customers were located all over the city of Wilkes-Barre and in the suburbs.  He would bring his truck to the breaker early in the morning and have it loaded for the first customers of the day.  He would then return to the breaker, have the truck loaded again, repeating the process throughout the day.

This is the Dorrance Colliery, one of the "breakers" frequented by my father for coal. He also used the Huber Colliery in Ashley, my Mom's home town. These giant buildings were used by the Glen Alden Coal Company to crush and size the coal brought to the surface from three nearby mines. The coal was sorted, washed, and put into train gondolas and trucks, like my Dad's, for delivery to nearby homes.

The faster you could do this, the more coal you sold and the more profitable the business. His trucks were 3 ton – with one-ton dividers in them.  So if somebody wanted only one ton, the dividers stayed in.  Remove the second divider, and you’d get two ton, and if he had a three-ton order, he wouldn’t put any dividers in the truck.

My Dad was a really hard worker.  If he were around today operating the same kind of business, I would try to get Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” to do a show about him.  I have to admit, as a kid, I hated to work for him.  Just take the coal business for example.  Try to get 3 tons of coal into a 3 ton coal bin!  My job was to go down to the cellar into the coal bin, as my Dad poured the coal from the truck down the coal chute into the bin.  As the coal piled up at the window, my job was to pull the accumulating coal over to the open part of the bin so it wouldn’t stop the flow down the chute.  As more coal came into the bin, the less room I had to maneuver.  At a certain point there were only about three feet between the top of the coal pile and the ceiling, with 5-foot-4 me trying to keep from being yelled at by my Dad for not moving the coal fast enough.  Add to this that the black coal was wet (to keep the dust down).  My pants and feet were all wet, I was filthy dirty, and I was breathing in the dust from the dry coal previously in the bin.

Every coal bin was different — and outside at the truck, the angle of the chute varied depending on the topography of the road and the customer’s property.  In the winter, the wet coal would freeze in the chute; in the summer, the basement coal bin was extremely hot, with very little ventilation.  This was my Dad’s job!  And I had little or no voice in whether or not I worked for him.  Many a time I feigned having to stay after school in order to avoid helping my Dad on the truck.

For a teenage boy trying to impress female classmates, being caught on the job was generally humiliating for me.  I hated to be seen with my hands and face pretty much in minstrel black face and my pants soaking wet with black coal water.

I don’t want to say that I had the worst job, either.  Outside in the freezing cold or in the oppressive heat, my Dad often had to shovel the coal — it wasn’t just the simple mater of hooking up the chutes and raising the high-lift truck hydraulically to trust gravity to unload the coal.  Sometimes the coal bin window was at the same level or higher than the chute outlet — so gravity didn’t work. Manual shoveling was the only solution to getting the coal in the bin.

Sign my Dad placed at the curb of customers expecting coal on a particular day.

Since there were often coal shortages or the miners would go on strike, my Dad knew enough to diversify.  As long as people were burning coal, there would be ashes to haul out of the home.  If you got the impression that I disliked working the coal bin job, consider my attitude towards hauling out ashes.  Most furnaces had pits that accumulated the ashes underground.  My job was to fill the ash cans with the ashes, as my Dad carried them out to the truck.  I still wonder how my lungs are still operational after all these years.  Try shoveling ashes out of a pit while standing on the floor above the pit — while there was a fire in the furnace and hot embers were still a part of the payload.  Some customers already had their ashes “above ground” or in metal cans already.  I didn’t mind those, unless I was forced to carry them to the truck myself.

Somewhere along the way Dad got a contract with the Hazard Wireworks, a factory that I passed every day on the way to school.  This was a place something like Roebling Wireworks here in New Jersey.  They made the wire cable used in elevators and on bridges.  But they also made the wooden spools on which the wire rope was wound for shipment.  Dad had the contract to remove the wooden scraps from the woodworking department that made the spools.   We had to load the wood scraps onto the truck by hand.  Imagine three tons of wood scraps.  The wood was in various odd shapes, about a foot or two in length.  There was  double value in this work for my Dad, the ultimate entrepreneur.  Not only did he get paid to remove the wood.  He would turn around and sell it for firewood.  That meant that after uploading it and unloading it, you had to re-load it for the customer to purchase it, generally packaging it in bags or other containers, although some people would buy it by ton or truckload. Dad had no qualms using his kids for the jobs at the Hazard Wireworks — at least me and my brother Bill.  One of the occupational hazards (no pun intended) was slivers if you forgot your gloves — or if you had holes in your gloves.

While talking about the Hazard Wireworks, I want to relate one of the fun parts of working

I found this picture of my Dad (shirtless in the center) and my Uncle Mike Nealon (arms upraised) to verify my claim that they enjoyed each other's company. They are at the family cottage at Falls in the summer of 1966. My Dad is 56 years old here. The two ladies in the background are my Aunt Kay (my Mom's sister) and my Aunt Mary Nealon, Uncle Mike's wife, who taught me how to drive because my Dad couldn't maintain his cool when I goofed up at the controls. That's my sister, Etta, in the foreground.

for my Dad (there weren’t many!).  I was a great lover of the Circus.  Whenever the Circus came to town, I was totally absorbed.  I had no qualms about taking off from school to watch them put up the tent in the morning and take it down at night and go to the show in between.  In fact, I think I liked the drama of the set up and take down more than the show itself.  A part of my Dad’s contract with the Hazard was also the removal of the sawdust and shavings from the spool making facility.  Because my Dad hauled the sawdust and shavings from the Hazard, he got the proverbial “sawdust contract” when the Circus came to town.  He would take loads of the wood shavings for the hippodrome in the Big Top.  I felt proud that my Dad was a part of the overall drama of the Circus and when I attended the show I reveled in the fact that my Dad was responsible for that sawdust around the arena that the clowns, horses, elephants and acrobats were using in their performances — and that I was personally involved in delivering it for the “Greatest Show on Earth.”.

As I relate the story of my Dad’s business, I have to keep telling myself that most people — especially my kids –  have no clue about the way homes were heated back “in the day”.  My kids grew up in a total electric home.  We don’t even have a furnace.  So when I speak of home delivery of coal, and “coal bins” — these are foreign concepts to the present generation.  So the following explanation is essential to understand my Dad’s business.  Coal was not just coal.  There were “brands” of coal, based on the company that mined it and processed it.  My dad sold “Glen Alden Coal.”  A part of the “branding” of this coal was a unique “trade mark” called “Blue Coal.”  At least my kids got to see a “Blue Coal” sign that I salvaged from my Dad’s estate.  “Blue Coal” was just plain old Anthracite Coal, but as it came out of the breaker into the train they sprayed it with a blue dye.  It was supposed to be a better grade of Anthracite — not because of the blue dye, but because of its inherent quality.  However, in Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, you couldn’t buy “blue coal” — that is, coal tinted blue.  That was for the folks in the rest of the country.  The blue dye was sprayed on the coal in the trains, not in the trucks used for local delivery.

A page from one of Dad's billing pads.

Dad was pretty good at marketing on a shoestring budget.  Even though we lived in a residential area, there was a sign on the front porch banister advertising the business.  He had his name in big letters on his trucks.  He used the traditional calendars and notepads to promote his business.  He came up with stickers to paste everywhere (before “self-stick”), and he had his business cards.  Being proud of his German heritage, he came up with a slogan that soon appeared on all his promotional material.  He got the idea from some product that used  a slogan something like “We’re Number 1″ or “We’re the Best” — I can’t exactly remember which product he got the idea from, but he decided to do it in German — choosing a Pennsylvania Dutch term: “Nix Besser” which means “None Better.”  As I labored over what catch phrase to use in naming this blog that might capture my feeling about my Dad, I decided to tap into his creativity and call it “Nix Besser” since there was “None Better” than my Dad!

One of the down sides of having your name plastered in big letters on your truck was that

These were Dad's promotional stickers.

everyone knew where you were at a given time.  Dad rarely came straight home from a day’s work.  He would end a long, hard day at one of the nearby taverns on Hazel St.  It could be Casty’s (short for Castriganos), Anstett’s, or Layden’s (Wilkes-Barre is known as a town with a tavern on every corner).  Now and then he’d be at Warnick’s on South Main St., or Grieshabbers (a more “upscale” joint).  During his gambling days, the truck would be parked at Gonda’s.  It was never ever good to tell my Mom that Dad’s truck was parked at Gonda’s.  The name alone gives you a feeling of what it was — a place with a smoky back room with guys gathered around a table playing cards.  And can you say “Mafia”?

But getting back to the bars – as a really young kid, I would sometimes sit at the bar with Dad, enjoying the adulation from the fellow drinkers.  More often I was put in the back room at a table with a bag of pretzels and a Coke.  As I got older, I didn’t particularly like hanging out at the bar.  I would “punish” my Dad by staying in the truck alone, trying to lay some guilt on him.  It really didn’t work.  Eventually, I would be able to walk home from most of those places, as he continued to hang out there.  I think I got my payback as a Father, particularly from my daughter, Kerry, when she would give me the same treatment when I conned her into doing something she really didn’t want to do.

Dad was a very efficient business man.  The orders came to the house by phone.  Coal had

One of Dad's Business Cards.

its different sizes — “rice” for stokers, “pea” coal was the most common size and “stove” coal was in larger chunks.  There was also “buckwheat” – I can’t remember whether that was bigger or smaller than pea coal.  As kids we were expected to know how to write-up the orders that were called in just as Mom and Dad would.  There was a ledger at the phone for writing down the name and address of the customer.  Dad was good at keeping records.  He kept track of everything.  Later on in life it was fun to see how he even listed little home expenditures — including hearing aid batteries, sweeper bags, shoe shine polish and all kinds of stuff.  I would joke that if he bought a single clothes pin, it was entered in his ledger.

Having a nice 3-ton dump truck gave him lots of business opportunities.  He would “move” people — that is, if someone were moving from one house to another in the vicinity, he would be their mover. I remember one case where a family was breaking up over domestic strife — and I was Dad’s “helper” in the emergency move of the father who was being kicked out.   The husband and wife were still fighting as we moved his stuff out — she was throwing dishes and vases at the husband and he was calling her all kinds of un-repeatable names and breaking her nick knacks to spite her, as I ducked to avoid the projectiles swirling around my head.  I recall feeling sorry for the kids who were crying in the other room.  I learned a lot about life working for my Dad.

May, 1954 at St. Francis Seminary, Staten Island. The carnation means its Mother's Day. Not sure why the 3 of us seem so angry. Dad and I are smoking! Bill would probably rather be home. Ages l. to r.: 43, 19, 15.

His trucks were great for transporting my classmates to parties at our summer home at Falls and our relatives to family reunions at our place in Albert’s Corners – and for taking us and the whole neighborhood on VJ Day to Public Square to celebrate the end of World War II.

As I grew older, in high school, I remember suspecting that one of Dad’s coal customers was a brothel madam.  All I know is that her name was “Annie” and I had to go up to her apartment to collect the payment for her 3-tons of coal.  She reminded me of “Belle” from “Gone With The Wind.”  Nervously I would climb a dark set of stairs to her second floor apartment on Hazel Street to collect. I was impressed by how really nice she was to me.  And I thought it was cool that I was in her place of business! How did I know she was a prostitute?  Call it instinct (and hearing my Dad’s employees talking about her when I wasn’t supposed to be listening).

This is Mom and Dad at their 25th wedding anniversary in February, 1958. They were each 48 years old. They renewed their vows at St. Nick's Church and had a party in the Church Hall.

These are just some of my memories of my Dad’s coal business.  There are so many more, but these give some insight into the atmosphere in which I grew up.  I haven’t touched on most of the individual personal characteristics that made my Dad so unique and so special  That’s next.  I have lots  more to say about Joe the Family Man, Joe the Jokester, and Joe the Real Estate mogul (he accumulated 5 different properties, each with a unique story) — and more.  There’s definitely a Part II and possibly a Part III.  That’s the way it is when there’s “Nix Besser.”

Click twice on the picture to enlarge it for more detail.

 

It takes a Village – Part III – The High School Years

by Joseph M. Laufer

I have learned that trying to share a lifetime of memories in an organized fashion is a lot harder than anticipated.  Having written about my early years at St. Nicholas School in Parts I and II of “It takes a Village,” I would like to conclude this topic by focusing on a few more elementary school recollections, and wrap it up with some High School memories, leaving some stories for individual future in-depth topics.

Recalling and Helping the Greatest Generation

During World War II, I was very conscious of the war as I attended St. Nicholas School and Church.  From 1941 through 1945, the period of the war, I was in second through fifth grades, from age six through ten.

This is the closest I could come to a replica of St. Nick's service flag. The stars on our flag were a bit smaller. I don't recall a red one on ours, but had there been one, it would represent a female member of the armed services.

Half way down the aisle on the left hand side of my church was a large banner — a service flag –  consisting of a white field surrounded by a wide red border.  One inch blue stars were sown in rows on the central white section.  There were 150 St. Nick’s parishioners in uniform on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941.  The number of stars would increase as the years went by.  Eventually, gold stars began to replace some of the blue stars on the flag, as sons of St. Nicholas were killed in battle.  Later I would learn that by the end of the war the flag contained almost 700 stars.  Fourteen of them were gold stars in the summer of 1945 — all sons of St. Nicholas parish.  After the war the parishioners erected an Honor Roll at the base of the flagpole in the churchyard containing the names of these 14 men.

I also remember the scrap drives and the big piles of metal between the church and the school.  I  contributed some of my metal model cars and other metal toys for the war effort, and we collected tin cans and  metal tooth paste tubes for the scrap pile.

We were encouraged to buy War Savings Stamps at rallies held at school. I had my own stamp book, and when it was full, my Mom would cash it in for a War Bond. As I recall, the stamps sold for ten cents.

A  small booth was constructed in the same church yard at which we purchased war stamps that would eventually translate into a war bond when we pasted enough stamps in the small booklets we were given to collect them in.  My Uncle Bud, my Godfather, was in the Army, and fighting in Germany.  I recall my dad saying that he might be fighting against his own cousins!  A couple of my Dad’s helpers enlisted in the army and one of them married a British “war bride.”  He sent my Dad a piece of the wedding cake in a small container the army issued specifically for that purpose, since there were so many such weddings during the war.  I remember the piece of cake was hard and stale by the time it arrived.

My son, Kris, wanted to see what an Air Raid Warden helmet looked like, so he Googled "WW II head gear" and came up with this photo, which is as I remember my Dad's.

My Dad had a hearing problem and was classified 4-F, thus exempt from Military Service.  He volunteered as the Air Raid Warden for our neighborhood. I was proud of him as he donned his white helmet and patrolled the streets during a blackout.

My non-structured Music Appreciation Class

I attribute my love of music to some of my early experiences at St. Nicholas.  I have already mentioned the magnificent pipe organ that we had in the church.  If one of our daily Masses was a High Mass, we would be “entertained” by various musical versions of the Mass.  For Requiem Masses, the priest would wear black vestments and the music would be mournful.  We learned early, simply by osmosis, the power of music to affect the emotions.  This was particularly true of the “Dies Irae,” one of the more melancholy dirges of the Requiem Mass.

My favorite times for music at St. Nicks were the Advent and Christmas season, and Mary’s month of May.  The May hymns were the best.  My all time favorite was “Bring Flowers of the Rarest” with its refrain:

O Mary we crown thee with blossoms today!
Queen of the Angels and Queen of the May.

A popular May hymn took on a double meaning, depending on the event. “Mother at your Feet is Kneeling” was originally written as a hymn to Mary, but at a funeral of a mother, it would often be sung at the end of the service, just before the casket was taken out of the church.  As an altar boy, I would get all choked up as this hymn was sung and members of the family would be sobbing audibly throughout the singing of the hymn.  After  Vatican II it was banned from most Catholic services, I suppose, because it was too saccharine.

Definitely dressed up for something. Picture taken in front of my house on 13 Grove St. while I was in High School.

One of the most joyful and powerful hymns sung in German at St. Nicholas once a year was “Ein Priester Herz” (A Priestly Heart), sung on the anniversary of Father Staib’s Ordination to the Priesthood.  It was an ideal hymn for the pipe organ — and Mrs. Rogers, our organist, knew how to get the most out of the organ.  Years later I requested that the fabulous St. Nicholas Choir sing this hymn at my First Mass on May 28th, 1961.

I mentioned that we went to Novena every Monday, and most of the hymns sung at novena were in honor of Mary, but at the Benediction we also sang the “Tantum Ergo” which became very familiar to all of us, as the smell of the burning incense filled the church.  The Easter hymns were particularly joyful, and again, I found that my favorite hymns were the ones that took the greatest advantage of the magnificent pipe organ.

Picture taken on my birthday, February 4, 1949 when I was a Freshman at St. Nicks.

There was another musical tradition at St. Nicks that I should mention — and that was the annual parish Minstrel.  Yes, we had the traditional minstrel, with a “Mr. Interlocutor”, and “End Men” in black face.  As students in the school, some of us were somehow selected to be in the chorus.  I recall being in the chorus for at least two or three minstrels.  The chorus was made up of the men of the church  choir, and high school and grade school boys selected by the nuns. I remember one song in particular which impacted my life:  “Beyond the Blue Horizon.”  Its melody has stuck with me throughout my life and the words have always had a special meaning for me:

Beyond the blue horizon Waits a beautiful day;  Goodbye to things that bore me, Joy is waiting for me;   I see a new horizon, My life has only begun; Beyond the blue horizon Lies a rising sun.

The song dates back to 1930 when it was written for the movie “Monte Carlo,” and was sung by Jeanette MacDonald.  It was obviously still popular in the mid-1940s, to be included as a main choral song in our St. Nick’s Minstrel.  It was revived in 1974 by pop singer, Lou Christie (a Pittsburgh boy whom I met when he appeared at one of our dances at Canevin High School when I was Student Activities Director there in the 1960s – a Pittsburgh disk jockey brought him to the school to promote one of his new records).  Christie’s version of “Beyond the Blue Horizon” was on the sound track of  the movie “Rain Man.”  I have it on my I-pod and listen to it often both for entertainment and inspiration.

Years after I first learned the song at St. Nick’s,  whenever I portrayed Christopher Columbus during the early 1990s and gave school assemblies to young fifth and sixth graders, I would challenge them to follow Columbus’ example of adventure by looking and venturing “beyond the horizon.”

Whenever my sister Mary Lou would visit us in Vincentown, she would remark that she couldn’t understand why I always had music playing.  I had my house wired for sound, with speakers outside, in the bathroom — everywhere — and music always playing.  I think it all goes back to St. Nicks.  I plan to write more about my love affair with music.  And besides St. Nicks, my Dad had a lot to do with it.  I’ll save that for my future music blog.

Friends and Pals

During my early grade school years my closest friends were Bob and Frank Andes.  Frank was a year younger and was in my sister, Etta’s class and Bob was my brother Bill’s age.  They lived on High Street, a few doors from my house.  We used to hang out together on Abbot Street, which was just across Grove St. from our driveway.  There we played stick ball, kick-the-can, roller skated and did all kinds of things kids do outdoors.  The Andes

Here I am in 1949 going for my clarinet lesson on a Saturday morning. I took my lessons at Charles and Mary Music store on Northampton St. This picture was taken in front of Dresden Caterers, across the street from St. Nicholas Church, seen to the right of the picture.

home was adjacent to the Salvation Army.  I spent more time at the Andes home than at my house.  Frank and Bob’s older brother, Joe, was a model circus fan.  He had constructed a huge model circus layout in his basement.  I idolized Joe and I think that my love of the circus can be traced to that period in my life when I associated with the Andes boys. Joe was a Senior when I was a Freshman, and he went on to college and became a teacher.  He died suddenly at a very young age while I was in the Seminary.

Bob and Frank and I had mutual interests in after school radio programs like Captain Midnight and Tom Mix.  We would send for Captain Midnight decoders and all kinds of Ralston cereal premiums associated with the Tom Mix radio program.  We carved several images of the decoder badges in the Abbot Street pavement.  We collected all kinds of premiums from cereal boxes.  Recently, while watching “Pawn Stars” on The History Channel I saw a duplicate of my complete collection of Kellogg’s Pep cartoon buttons sell for over two-thousand dollars!

Shortly  after World War II we turned our attention towards the new model cars that were being manufactured and we collected the new car catalogs from the dealerships.  My favorite breakaway model was the 1949 Ford.  The Studebaker also fascinated us for its sleek lines and bullet-shaped front grille.  The car’s unique design had a matching hood and trunk area, so you didn’t know whether it was coming or going. In later blogs I will focus on some of these childhood interests and hobbies in more detail.

At the beginning of seventh grade, on September 22nd, 1946, I received the Sacrament of

Bill, Etta, Ruth Walter and me. We had just been climbing the Falls at Falls, PA where we had a cottage. The Laufers are wearing our St. Nick's T-shirts.

Confirmation.  This was our “coming of age” ritual in the Catholic Church.  I was confirmed by Bishop Hafey, the Bishop of Scranton.  I remember being disappointed because my parents did not attend this event.  It seems to have been a period in our family when relationships were strained.  That would change a year later when on April 29, 1947, my sister Karen was born, soon followed in November, 1949 when Mary Lou was born, giving my parents a new lease on life, with a total of 5 children – creating, so to speak, a second family: the first 3 being separated from the last 2 by almost 9 years.  During my high school years I had two baby sisters and my mom had three live-in baby sitters: me, Etta and Billy.  Meanwhile, in Mannington, West Virginia, a baby girl was born on July 10, 1948, the summer between my 8th grade graduation and my entry into High School  to Nader and Ann Raad.   They called her “Alice,” but her nickname was “Penny” and 21 years later she would become my wife.

Before “Bullying” was discussed in Teacher “In-Service” Workshops

Before relating my High School experiences, I’ll close out my memories of grade school with an 8th grade incident which was a bit traumatic for me, and stayed with me for a long time.  It was a bullying incident at the hands of a classmate who left St. Nick’s after 8th grade.  His name was Jimmy Lynch.

This is my 9th grade picture in the St. Nick's 1949 yearbook. I was 13 years old when the picture was taken, but looked about 8!

I guess the best way to describe me during my middle school and high school days would be as a baby-faced, skinny, immature  kid.  Most of the guys were bigger and older looking than I was.  I wasn’t into sports — although I was a big fan of our St. Nick’s basketball team throughout High School, attending most of the games.  I always felt I was treated as the “little kid” in my class.  Jimmy Lynch, on the other hand, was big for his age — and something of a bully when it came to me.  He tended to push me around.  One day, in the playground over lunch period, he was pushing me around, and pushed me against the brick wall of the school.  My face went slamming against the wall head on, chipping my front tooth.

In the St. Nick's school yard in 8th grade. Left to right: Eddie Anstett, Victor Lugosky, Paul Schwab, Jimmy Lynch (the tall guy) and me. I don't know who that guy is walking on the right. Not sure, but it looks like I'm wearing knickers.

A whole corner of my upper right  front tooth broke off.  In a split second, my desire to smile would be curtailed for all of my high school days.  It was the beginning of all kinds of cosmetic dental procedures to fix that tooth and until this day I have a cap on what remains of that tooth after all the work that has been done on it over the years.  Initially I was told nothing could be done , because the tooth was still growing. Missing half a front tooth was no fun for a kid who was already self-conscious about his size and his baby face. After high school, a gold pin was implanted and a partial artificial tooth-piece was added, and a few years later, a cap, once the tooth matured.  You can imagine how I felt about the infamous Jimmy Lynch after that.  I was happy when he didn’t show up as a Freshman at St. Nicks the following year.

As I transitioned from 8th grade into high school, I drifted away from the Andes brothers and my new circle of friends became my classmates, in particular Jerry Klug, Bernie Balz and Ralph Lauer.  We did a lot of hanging out together — and a lot of walking, usually up to Blackman St. to visit Louise Murray, a girl Bernie Balz thought was cool and we all hung out on her front porch.

Freshman orientation, September, 1948. That's me to the right of Dan Sabol, the guy using an eye dropper to empty one bucket of water into the other. I'm the guy sitting on the step with the smirk on his face. The Seniors excelled at humiliating Freshmen during St. Nick's classic initiation ceremonies.

When we became Freshmen, our class size doubled, as students from other Catholic elementary schools in the area which did not have High Schools attended St. Nick’s or St. Marys.  There were now two classes for each high school grade.  Sister Francine had one Freshman Class and Sister Arline, whom I had in fifth grade, was my home room teacher. The Seniors made it clear to us that we were entering a new world as they administered the dreaded Frshman Orientation.   I started smoking when I was a Sophomore in High School – secretly, at first (although I’m sure my parents knew).  Bernie, Ralph and I smoked, but I don’t think Jerry did. Jerry liked to play pin ball machines — I usually watched and tilted the machine now and then.

Buttermilk Falls

This is the notice for the wiener roast posted on both Senior home room bulletin boards in May, 1952. That particular event was attended by most of the class. Notice, I spelled "wiener" incorrectly.

Standing in front of the Falls that gave the community its name.

Our family summer home at Falls, a resort 22 miles north of Wilkes-Barre on the Susquehanna River, played a role in my high school days.   I plan to do a special blog on Falls later.  It is sufficient to say here that my dad bought it as a “fixer upper” in the spring of 1947 when I was in 7th grade.  When Jerry Klug and I were in 9th grade we decided that we would take the 44-mile bike ride of a lifetime — and rode our bikes the 22 miles to and from Falls in one day.

This was our cottage on the Susquehanna River at Falls, PA. The access road was to the rear of this picture. From the porch you would look out at a large yard that handled all kinds of recreational activities like softball, volleyball, and badminton At the end of the yard was the Susquehanna River. We would light our bonfires on the river bank .

During my Junior and Senior years, I hosted a couple of wiener roasts at Falls for my classmates.  My dad drove us up there in the back of his 3-ton coal truck!  On one of the trips, the coal truck broke down on the way home and we were stranded on the highway until after midnight.  Many of us did not go to school the next day, and the Nuns pretty much held me accountable.  My classmates, boys and girls, had many great times at Falls — nicknamed by the locals, “Buttermilk Falls.”

One classic story that has come down through the years, and one my Dad would often tell, was about a couple of my friends going down to Chromey’s, the bar at Falls, and attempting to buy a case of beer, telling Chromey that it was for Joe Laufer (my Dad).  Trouble was, Chromey knew that my Dad only drank Stegmaier’s Beer.  They asked for a case of Gibbons!  They came back to the party empty-handed.

I mentioned that while in High School, I attended most of the St. Nick’s basketball games.  Going to the games was a social event.  St. Nicks had its own snack bar in the downstairs bowling alley for half-time treats and after the games we would go up to one of the hangouts on South Main St. for a BLT and a milk shake.  Our favorite place was “The Palace” between the Orpheum and Penn Theaters on South Main Street, not too far from the school. We also liked “The Boston” near Public Square.  Wherever we went, we walked.

Previously I mentioned the Friday Night Dances at St. Nick’s.  I attended most of them — the typical kind where the boys lined up along one wall and the girls along the other — and then near the end of the evening you began dancing.  In my Junior Year I began playing the music at the dances, until I got my job as an usher at the Paramount Theater on Public Square.  That was my second job, because I also had a paper route, delivering Wilkes-Barre’s Times Leader Evening News.

The Incident

There is one major incident that took place while I was in High School that baffles me to this day.  Since I loved the school so much, I can’t understand how the situation escalated to the point where I actually withdrew from St. Nick’s and transferred to G.A.R., the public high school.  The other part of the mystery is that my parents actually allowed me to do it.  I was a Junior, it was after Christmas break, and I was 16 years old — and my teacher was Sister Joseph Marie.  She and I never hit it off, from day one.  She was relatively young, and a bit stiff. What started as a correction for chewing gum in class escalated into an act of insubordination on my part, and a stand-off between the two of when I refused to stay after school to make up the punishment she levied on me for the infraction.  As further penalties accumulated for the act of insubordination , and I continued to fail to comply, I was ultimately refused entry into her classroom when we reached an impasse. During her classes in which I was enrolled, I was forced to remain outside the door in the hallway for the entire period.  Each of us was bull-headed about it, and there was no resolution.

This is G.A.R. High School on South Grant Street in Wilkes-Barre. Several of my friends attended GAR -- this was the public school I would have attended had I not been enrolled at St. Nicholas -- and the place I temporarily escaped to during my tiff with Sister Joseph Marie. It was within walking distance of my childhood home.

Rather than attempt to reach a compromise, I told my dad I wanted to leave St. Nicks.  Without really giving me any argument, he let me sign up for G.A.R. in the middle of my Junior Year.  After my first classes there I realized I had made a mistake.  Not only was I unable to comprehend what they were talking about in any of the classes, especially Math and Physics, but I was like a fish out of water — I was out of my “German Ghetto”– my comfort zone, and definitely did not fit in.  But I was determined that I wasn’t going to go back to Sister Joseph Marie’s Class. I continued to struggle at G.A.R. for about two weeks.

Then as I began the third week, my Dad said that we had to go to the rectory for a conference with the pastor.   Father Staib had contacted him to find out why my parents took me out of St. Nick’s and he wanted to discuss the matter with us face to face.  Well, we met with Fr. Staib, he heard my story, and he said I belonged in St. Nicholas, and he would see that I would be reassigned to the other Junior Class (there were only two) where Sister Bernadine was the home room teacher. I withdrew from G.A.R. and went back to St. Nicks as though nothing had ever happened.  I still had Sister Joseph Marie for one or two classes, and we went through the year as though nothing had ever happened.  Sister Bernadine was very laid back and we got along very well.  I still have my 11th grade report card with Sister Joseph Marie’s typed name crossed out and Sister Bernadine’s signature written above it.  My grades for the second half of the year, especially “Deportment” were dramatically higher than the first half of the year.  I’m not proud of this phase of my high school career, and I don’t know whether I learned anything from it — except not to let things escalate to a point where they are completely out of control.

Closing out an Era

I played the clarinet in the newly formed St. Nicholas Orchestra in my Junior year, and

In my Junior year I played the Clarinet in the newly-formed St. Nick's Orchestra. We played for the Graduation of the Class of '51. That's me in the middle of the 3 guys against the back wall.

attended the “Snow Ball” Christmas Dance with a Freshman, Rita Skapura (notice how I seem to be attracted to younger women!).  I also had a role in the Junior play that year.

The cast of the Junior Play. Marion Henry, Joan Wender, Bill Weibrecht, me (the runt), Regina Palacheck, Louise Murray.

The last St. Nick's Yearbook, when I was a freshman. No more yearbooks were created while I was in High School.

I remember some of my relatives from Ashley being in the audience and cheering me on, to my embarrassment, every time I came on stage.  The following year I had a role in the Senior play, “Music in the Valley.”  And as a Senior, I was selected to be the Master of Ceremonies for the Annual Concert of the St. Nicholas Glee Club in the Auditorium on May 18, 1952.

Some members of the cast of the Senior Play, "Music in the Valley." Taken in the school library. L to R: Theresa Henry, Carl Klein, Mary Abend, Jim Williamson, Marion Rauscher and me. I had dated Mary Abend a few times during high school.

Our Class trip to Washington, DC, where we stayed at the Plaza Hotel in the shadow of the Capital, was exciting.  I still have the journal I wrote — a tradition I’ve kept alive for my entire life –  writing travel journals for all my trips.

First page of a 3-page Journal of our Washington class trip.

The tour included stops at Philadelphia, the state capital of Harrisburg and the Gettysburg Battlefield en route to Washington.  Father Staib was on the trip with us, as well as Father Ulrich.  The poor nuns never got to go.

My official graduation photo.

I didn’t go to the Senior Prom in 1952.  I had made the decision to enter the seminary to study for the priesthood the following September, so it seemed inappropriate to ask a girl to the prom.  I graduated from St. Nicks in a class of 52 seniors in 1952.  Commencement took place on June 8th.

This picture of our graduating class appeared on the cover of "The St. Nicholas Messenger," our parish's monthly newspaper.

This concludes the three-part series I call “It takes a Village” to demonstrate the unique inter-connection between nationality, family, church, school and neighborhood that my children and their children did not and will not ever experience.  It is a part of Americana that no longer exists.  I feel privileged to have been raised in those circumstances and at that time in history.  It wasn’t a perfect society, but it provided me with many positive experiences that have contributed to the way I feel and think and the way I live my life.  I am proud to call myself a son of St. Nicholas Parish and an alumnus of St. Nicholas School.

It takes a Village… Part II – St. Nick’s Grade School

by Joe Laufer

Continuing the story of my school days at St. Nicholas School in Wilkes-Barre, PA, I intend to share some specific memories that illustrate the uniqueness of my educational experience as compared to that of my children and that of my grandchildren.  In the first segment, I described the community in which I was raised as a self-contained, homogeneous community of second and third generation immigrant families, primarily German, whose identity was defined by their common Roman Catholic Faith and the Parish where they worshiped.  What I refer to as a German Ghetto served to both insulate and define us.

The early grades – 1940 – 1945

The classrooms for the first six grades were located on the first floor of the school.  Starting at the far end of the building at the ramp at the end of the hall leading to the auditorium, grades 1, 3 and 5 were on the Church side of the building and grades 2, 4 and 6 were on the school yard side.  The classrooms were relatively plain, but one of the things I remember distinctively were that in each of the lower grades, 1 through 4, there was a black sandbox on legs in the front corner of the room. The nuns would  use the sandbox for rotating “dioramas” reflecting the various holidays and seasons.  I remember especially around Christmas time when Nativity sets were placed in the sand — with sheep and other animals grazing in the white sand. I think it was in third grade that there were as many sheep in the sand box as there were kids in the class, each with our name on it.

All of the rooms had the alphabet, capital and small letters, in flawless cursive style across

I'm guessing that this picture was taken in 1941 or 42 when I was about 7 or 8 years old and in second or third grade. That's my back yard, and that building is the Vulcan Iron Works, located along the railroad tracks that ran in front of it. During World War II, we were allowed to go in the building when they had lunch hour band concerts to raise money for War Bonds from the workers there.

the front of the room above the blackboard.  There was always a crucifix on the front wall, centered above the teacher’s desk, which sat on a platform, so the nun had a view over the heads of the kids.  There was always a silver bell on the corner of the nun’s desk which she would tap to gain our attention to stand for the morning prayer and Pledge of Allegiance.   Our student desks had ink wells, and were screwed to wooden rails, so that several benches in the row could be moved at once, if necessary.

I remember clearly the lined penmanship books we used in the early grades.  My favorite school book was our reader.  Some of the stories and the illustrations are still a part of my active memory, especially the one about the little Christmas tree freezing in the field, wishing to be cut down to become someone’s Christmas tree.  And who could forget Dick and Jane and Spot.  The Baltimore Catechism, with its questions and answers and the major source of our knowledge of our faith, was one of the important texts used each day.  The math books were mazes of numbers in problem formation.  There were no illustrations in our math books.

All our classrooms had “Holy Childhood” posters on the wall, where we pasted cut-out images of the pagan babies we adopted with our donations. Some nuns were better than others at encouraging us to bring in our money for the Holy Childhood.  Every Lent we were given mite boxes in which to deposit our monetary sacrifices for the Holy Childhood.  I imagined having adopted brothers and sisters running around Africa and China.

I remember my respective first and second grade teachers, Sister Lucina and Sister Herman Joseph as being very kind nuns.  However, I never seemed not to understand the assignments they were giving us.  I remember being confused a lot in the early grades.

My First Communion Certificate dated May 3, 1942 and signed by Father Staib.

The highlight of 2nd Grade was preparing for First Communion.  We learned how to go to confession — I remember the little “Examination of Conscience” booklets which jogged our memories about the sins we may have committed, commandment by commandment.  In those early days the big one was disobeying my parents — gradually being taken over by  “impure thoughts” as I got older. We practiced receiving the sacred host at the hands of Sister Herman Joseph.  When the big day, May 3, 1942, finally came around, we gathered in our classroom, the girls in their white dresses and veils, the boys in their blue suits, each with our little first communion kit that contained a missal, rosary and scapular.  Those were the days when you had to fast from the previous midnight if you were to receive communion.  To make sure we didn’t accidentally take a drink of water before our first communion, the water fountains in the school hall were wrapped in a white cloth.  The nuns thought of everything!  And how the heck do I remember that little detail from when I was only 7 years old? We then lined up, two by two, for the procession over to the church.  It was really a major milestone in our lives.

Some of my favorite early grade school memories center around the Christmas holidays.  Our last school day before the Christmas break was always very special.  The entire student body would go to the auditorium to welcome Santa Claus.  We all received song sheets to sing a variety of Christmas songs.  When we walked into the auditorium, all across the front of the stage there were boxes of hard candy neatly piled up for distribution to each child in the school.  Father Staib and the other priests were there to greet us — it was one big party atmosphere. This annual ritual never changed in my 12 years at St. Nicks, as I recall.

Also, in the days before Christmas, as we attended morning Mass in the Church, we would witness the gradual construction of the elaborate Christmas Creche on the St. Joseph Altar.  The Germans are especially adept and creating realistic Nativity sets.  The transformation of the St. Joseph Altar was an engineering feat.  First, a large wooden framework was constructed to hold the dozens of live Christmas trees that created a typical alpine forest as the background for the stable.  The trees extended well up to the ceiling over the side altar, and there were so many of them, the odor of pine filled the church.  Each day leading up to the Christmas break we would see additional construction take place, until finally a white sheet was strung up concealing the Nativity scene until it was unveiled on Christmas Eve.  I’m convinced that this annual ritual planted the seeds of my total immersion in the spirit of Christmas and the many things I have done throughout my life at Christmas time, from elaborate interior and exterior house decorating,  to playing Santa Claus for children.

At some point around 8th grade and beyond, we began the custom of the Advent Wreath in the school.  This ceremony took place in the main hallway of the school over the 4 weeks of Advent.  The nuns reminded us that this custom began in Germany.  My children will recall that every Advent in our home we had an Advent wreath, the tradition I was first introduced to as a student in St. Nicholas school.

I have a unique story to share about one Halloween at St. Nick’s.  It was somewhat traumatic for me.  I mentioned how I sometimes was confused by the assignments and directives of the nuns.  I’m guessing that this incident took place in 3rd or 4th grade.  My parents had purchased a clown costume for me for Halloween.  Somehow, with all the talk in school about Halloween, I told my mom that we were told to dress in our costume and wear it to school on Halloween afternoon.  So on Halloween, I went home for lunch, dressed in my clown costume and walked back to school, arriving in the school yard only to discover that I was the only kid in a costume. I remember being very upset at being laughed at — and one of the Nuns consoling me.  The unfortunate part of it was that I didn’t have street clothes on under the costume.  The costume was my outfit for the rest of the afternoon.

I mentioned in Part I that as I went through the first several grades, I always dreamed of

Here I am on November 14, 1944 when I was 9 1/2 and in 5th grade.

becoming an Altar Boy like the older boys I  would see daily at Mass. The new class of Altar Boys was chosen annually from among the fifth grade boys.  No one was assured of being an altar boy, and I don’t recall that you “applied” for the honor.  It was simply bestowed on you, based on good conduct, decent grades and, (I assume) piety.  There was an “Altar Boy Sister” — one whose job it was to coordinate the whole altar boy program, from selection to training, to assignments.  I think the Altar Boy Sister in 1944 was Sister Cletus (not one of my classroom teachers).  When the names were announced, mine was not among them.  I was devastated. I know I cried.  It was probably the hardest blow I had received in my school career.  In retrospect, however, it was probably one of the best life lessons I learned at St. Nick’s.

I was determined to do whatever I could to get that decision reversed.  I can’t recall all the exact details of how I let the nuns know I wanted to be reconsidered for the next class, but I do remember one of my ploys: bribery!   Each year my Mom and Dad provided me and my sister and brother with something to give to our teachers for Christmas — usually a box of candy.  I remember asking my Mom to gift-wrap two boxes of candy for me — one for my teacher, Sister Arline,, and one for “the Altar Boy Nun”.  I’m sure Sister Cletus was surprised when she got a box of candy from this kid she didn’t even know, but I think she got the message.  It gave me the entry to let her know that I would like to be reconsidered for the next round of Altar Boy selections.  I know Sister Arlene interceded for me — and I did attempt to improve my grades .  It worked!  I became an Altar Boy in 1945.

Ad Deum qui laetificat, juventutem meum

Being selected an Altar Boy was only the first step.  Now came the training.  The first requirement was learning the responses to the prayers in Latin.  A new Altar Boy was given a 5″ x 7″  booklet with a red cover, with the Mass Server instructions, including the Latin prayers every Altar Boy must know.   The Latin words were provided phonetically to assist you in learning them.  The first assignment was the initial dialogue between the priest and the server (representing the congregation in those days before the liturgy reforms)  known as “The Prayers at the Foot of the Altar”.  The priest would say: Introibo ad altare Deo” (I will go to the Altar of God) and the server would respond “Ad Deum qui laetificat, juventutem meum” (To God, who gives joy to my youth), written phonetically in the training book as “Ahd day-yumm qwee lay-tee-fee-cott, you-ven-too-tem may-yum” (And guess what, I didn’t look this up — I still remember the Latin responses).

I found this part of the training very difficult.  Not only did you have to learn the Latin, but you had to memorize it.  One of the hardest prayers to learn was the “Sucipiat” – the response to the priest’s “Orate fratres” (Pray, brethren) at the end of the Offertory.  I had developed a knack for mumbling that response so it sounded like I was saying it correctly. You also had to learn all the “moves” — when to move the book from the Epistle side of the altar to the Gospel side (the priest had a signal — he’d put his left hand on the altar when it was time).  You had to know when to get the wine and water, when to get the communion plate, etc.  And back then, there were certain very serious restrictions:  you could never touch the sacred vessels — the chalice and the paten.  If you Carried them, you had to use a cloth between your hand and the chalice or paten – they were sacred because they had contact with the body and blood of Christ.

The more the training progressed, the more I realized how really important my job was in

Thanks to this bride and groom I have one picture of myself as an altar boy. I was either a Junior or Senior in high school (1951 or 1952) when it was taken. His last name was Gayette and she was a Helfrich, whose parents were friends with my parents.

the drama of the liturgy.  I finally passed all the tests and was ready for my first assignment.  Just the fact that I could now enter the sacristy, behind the altar, where the priest prepared for Mass was worth all the preparation and anticipation.  There were other jobs related to the actual setting up for the Mass.  One was to light the candles on the altar.  The older Altar Boys gave us special tips on how to adjust the wick of the candle-lighter, and what to do if you couldn’t get the candle to light.  Another job was to assist the priest in vesting.  There were rituals associated with holding the “cincture” (the cord that served as a belt for the “alb”) — and all kinds of other things.

This was serious business — and you couldn’t mess up.  Once you got out on the altar, you had to remember when to ring the bells associated with the consecration of the host, and its exposition to the congregation.  Heavy stuff!  Then there was learning the knack of holding the communion plate under the chin of the people sticking their tongues out for Holy Communion.  You didn’t want to get ahead of the priest, in case the “sacred host” dropped.  You were there to catch it in the communion plate.  And if your buddies were receiving communion and looked up at you as you held the communion plate under their chin, you had to be careful not to laugh.  I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but that was one of the occupational hazards of an Altar Boy.

Early on there was one practice at St. Nick’s  that eventually was discontinued, even before the liturgical reform.  All along the altar rail there was a communion cloth hanging on hinges (like a long, narrow curtain).  Just before communion, two altar boys had to go over and flip it up over the top of the wooden altar rail — like a table-cloth.  There was an art to getting in sync with your partner so you flipped it up and over at the exact same time.  There were two of them, one on each side of the altar rail where the people came and knelt to receive communion.  Each cloth was about ten feet long and about 2 feet wide.  Only an altar boy from my time period can appreciate this unique and antiquated task.  This was probably discontinued because it was a bit redundant, since the communion plate was used to keep the sacred host from falling to the floor.  However, there’s more to it than meets the eye.  These practices -  the protective covering, the reverence for handling the sacred vessels, etc. – demonstrate the deep reverence the people had  in those days for the Holy Eucharist.  Critics of the Liturgical reform of the 1960′s consider the relaxing of these practices as the cause for the casual attitudes modern-day Catholics have towards the Sacraments of the Church.

Finally, there was the cassock and surplice — the official uniform of the Altar Boy.  At St. Nick’s we had red cassocks and black cassocks.  The black ones were mainly used for funerals. Then later on, by the time I got to high school, they introduced the cool white ones with the red sash and cape, and the gold fringe.  In those days, being an Altar Boy was a great privilege.  You knew you were a part of an elite group.  We had our own “dressing room” in the basement of the priest’s sacristy.  There were large closets with all different sizes of cassocks and surplices.  There was a sink and mirror in our sacristy to make sure our hair was combed and our hands were clean.

One of the other cool things about being an Altar Boy at St. Nicks was the way you got out of class to serve a Funeral Mass or to serve a Mass for a visiting priest who slept in in the morning. You always knew when somebody died at St. Nick’s.  The church bells would ring the mournful slow cadence announcing that another member of the parish had died.  Our classrooms were right next to the bell tower, so we would always know what time it was, even if we didn’t see the clock – the bell would ring out the time on the hour, and then give a signal on the half hour.  There were actually four big bells in the tower, each with its own tone.  One of my favorite sounds was on a feast day or at a special holiday Mass where they would ring all the bells for about 5 minutes indicating that this was really a special occasion, like First Communion or Confirmation.  On the day of my First Mass in 1961, they rang out that way for my own special celebration!

The “Altar Boy Nun” was responsible for making the weekly Mass Server assignments. The Nuns were the first “recyclers” I ever encountered.  The Altar Boy assignments were written on small slips of recycled paper. They included Sunday and weekday Mass assignments, as well as assignments for special ceremonies, like Novena services which took place after school and into the early evening on Mondays (every Monday, as the last period of the school day, the entire student body attended novena in the Church.  It was in honor of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, and included Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament).

There were several things a good Altar Boy tried to avoid:  forgetting to show up for one of his assignments (I slept in on Saturday mornings more than once!); being late for one of his assignments (it was embarrassing to walk out into the sanctuary after Mass had begun); getting a laughing jag during Mass, tripping on your cassock while moving the Missal from one side of the altar to the other, and messing up the Latin prayer responses.

Being an Altar Boy was a great honor at the time of the pre-Vatican Council Church.  While I was a great champion of Vatican II, the liturgical reform of the 1960s, and the many changes that took place in the Church with the introduction of English, I lament the downgrading of the role of the Mass Server.  At my present parish in New Jersey, during the 80s and 90s, the Altar Servers did not wear vestments — they served Mass in their street clothes.  Many of their responsibilities were diluted.

I'm guessing that this picture was taken on Easter Sunday, 1946 when I was in sixth grade. Neither Karen nor Mary Lou had been born yet. That's my sister Etta and brother Bill.

As the prayer dialogue was taken up by the entire congregation, one of their unique liturgical roles was eliminated. None of my three sons ever demonstrated a desire to be a Mass Server, and I was never one to pressure them into anything like that.  And, of course, my daughter couldn’t have done it even if she wanted to, because at that time girls couldn’t be Mass servers.  I regret that none of them had the opportunity to experience that aspect of our Catholic tradition that I so eagerly desired and so dearly treasured in my youth.  But by my sharing this story, they may get insights into my behavior, my spirit and my values that they never had experientially.  And even if they had been a modern “Altar Boy,” it would never have been anything like my experience.

My Altar Boy experience was unique because it took place at St. Nicholas and at that time in the history of the Church.  There, where religion and education were so intertwined, being an Altar Boy was different from being one in any other setting.  I am grateful to the Nuns and Priests of St. Nicholas for making this such an important and memorable part of my life.

The Priests of St. Nicholas

I didn’t intend to spend practically this entire segment on my Altar Boy experience, but as I got into it, it pretty much took on a life of its own.  So rather than get into some of the specifics of school life, I will close out with a commentary on the priests who ministered to the faithful of St. Nicholas and who played a big role in my life.

In addition to Father Staib, the Pastor, about whom I wrote in Part I, there were about ten other priests who served St. Nick’s during my school years, 1940 through 1952.  The earliest ones I recall were Father Joseph Luksic and Father Joseph  Meier.  The priests garage was just off the back part of the school yard.  I think it was a three or four car garage.  Sometimes the priests  would walk over from the rectory near the end of lunch hour to get their car.  I remember whenever Father Meier came into the school yard, all the kids would gather around him.  He had a great smile and the kids had a high regard for him. We were disappointed when he was assigned to another parish, but he returned again about twenty years later, in June, 1969 as the fifth pastor of St. Nicks and oversaw the major renovations of the Church in compliance with the liturgical architecture dictated by the Second Vatican Council.  I have always been impressed by the way the church was modernized without losing its historical features.  Fr. Jacob Wideman was my second cousin, and he was assigned to St. Nick’s as a young priest.  He was very popular with the students.  Perhaps the most popular priest during my days at St. Nicks was Father Gerald Bischof.  He was the most down-to-earth priest the parish ever had.  He was loved by everyone.   He had been a chaplain in the army during World War II and I remember once seeing him in his military uniform.  I recall that after he was transferred to a church at some distance from Wilkes-Barre, my parents took us to his parish for a summer bazaar.

Father Mikus was a very serious and scholarly priest.  He was respected, but not very popular with the students, as I recall.   During my high school years I was personally very close to two of our parish priests, Father Carl Ulrich and Father Francis Kramer.  Father Ulrich had a lot of responsibilities related to the school.  He was more or less the spiritual adviser to the Basketball team, and was at all the games.  I didn’t play basketball, but I attended most of the games.  Father Ulrich also was in charge of the Friday night dances

Father Carl Ulrich during our Senior class trip to Washington DC in 1952. He made me the DJ at the school dances, a "Bingo Boy" and introduced me and some of my classmates to winter sports in the Poconos.

held in the school auditorium.  In my Junior year he recruited me to be the disk jockey for the dances.  My job was to open up the auditorium on Friday night, and to play the records at the dances.  Little did I know that some day I’d actually be playing records over the air as a real disk jockey at WMMN in Fairmont, WV.  He became very upset with me when during the summer between my Junior and Senior year, I told him I took a job at the Paramount Theater as an usher.  It required that I work on Friday nights, so I couldn’t DJ any more.  Fr. Ulrich was also the “BINGO” priest, in charge of the very popular Tuesday night bingo at St. Nicks.  He recruited me as a “Bingo Boy”.  Several of us, boys and girls in the high school, would “work the room” every Tuesday night selling bingo cards,  verifying winners, and being touched “for good luck” by the ladies who bought a winning bingo card from us.  Fr. Ulrich would reward us with a ski trip to the Poconos in the winter and an outing at Penn Lake in the summer.  On occasion he took a couple of us to Levittown, PA to visit his married sister and her family. He was also the chaperon on our Senior trip to Washington, DC in May, 1952.  I felt honored to be a part of his “team.”

Finally, Father Francis Kraemer became a very close friend of our family.  He was a great Yankees fan, and would go to New York with my Dad to see them play. He and my Dad became great friends, and he was a frequent guest in our home.  During the summer of my Junior year he was assigned to take the parish census, requiring him to drive to the homes of each parishioner.

Father Francis Kraemer, family friend, "Drama Coach" and Religion teacher during my Junior and Senior years at St. Nicks.

He recruited me to be his driver — driving his car — because he wasn’t as familiar with the neighborhoods as I was.  He would also visit us at our summer cottage at Falls.  I was in both the Junior and Senior play at St. Nick’s, and Fr. Kraemer was the drama coach.  I thought this was a big joke, and I told him so.  He actually didn’t know anything about drama — and he agreed!  We Seniors had a nickname for Father Kramer.  He always wore a fedora — and we called him “Harry the Hat.”  He was a fun guy.  The last time I saw him was at my 25th class reunion in 1977.

While all of our teachers at St. Nick’s were Nuns, in our Junior and Senior year, the priests taught us Religion.  Father Kramer was my Religion teacher.  The integration of  education, religion and family and social life in the parochial school setting was a positive experience for me.  Again, the first steps in my multi-faceted career path were taken right here at St. Nick’s.  In Part III of “It takes a Village…” I plan to conclude this topic by relating some additional educational experiences at St. Nicks.

It takes a Village… Part I – A German-American Enclave

by Joe Laufer

In 1996, Hillary Clinton wrote a book that popularized what was considered an ancient African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.”  Commentators went scurrying to find the source of the proverb, but to no avail.  They uncovered usages attributed to medieval European authors, earlier usage of the reference by Ted Kennedy and also citations in Native American folklore. No matter what the source, the concept made a lot of sense to me because I felt that my childhood was influenced strongly not so much by the kind of village that comes to mind from Clinton’s usage, but from one I call the German-Catholic Ghetto of St. Nicholas Parish in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

An old postcard of St. Nicholas parish rectory and church (consecrated in 1905) on South Washington St, Wilkes-Barre, PA. - from the vantage point across the street from the entrance to the South Street Bridge. The new St. Nick's school had not been erected yet (1916) at the time of this picture.

Some may question my use of the term “ghetto” — but according to the basic definition, a Ghetto is a section of a city occupied by a minority group who live there especially because of social, economic, or legal pressure.  Because of recent history, the term is a bit more derogatory than it was when I was growing up during the late-30s, 40s and early 5os.  I intend to write here about my childhood experiences associated with being a member of the parish of St. Nicholas in Wilkes-Barre.   I have to write this, because my children and grandchildren have never had nor will ever have a similar experience, and in order to understand why I can speak so positively about my Roman Catholic childhood experience, they have to understand it through my recollections.

I hate to start out with some of the negatives, but I just have to get this out of the way.  I have been deeply saddened by the image so many younger people, including my children,  have of the Catholic Church because of those priests and fellow Catholics whose abusive and scandalous behavior brought shame and disgrace to the Church.  While I feel the church has been wounded deeply by these individuals, I cannot turn my back on it based on the good and positive experiences I have had over my lifetime through the kind and inspirational men and women of God I have encountered, especially at St. Nicholas and in the Franciscan Order, the two Catholic institutions I know best.  I have always acknowledged that the church is run by mere human beings who have faults like anyone else.  But while I deplore the sin, I have been taught to forgive the sinner.  I can honestly say that despite my many years of close contact with the priests of St. Nicholas as a student, an altar boy, and a teen parish volunteer, I never witnessed, experienced or even heard of an abusive priest at St. Nicholas.   On the contrary, they were kind and dedicated men who inspired me to higher things — even to the point of imitation, leading me to become a priest, albeit for a relatively brief period.  My leaving the Franciscan Order was in no way precipitated by any moral issues, but simply because of philosophical and theological questions that motivated me to seek the more traveled road as a Catholic lay person rather than as a clergyman.  That being said, let me share the wonderful story of growing up Catholic at St. Nick’s between the years 1940 and 1952!

The origins of St. Nick’s

When I was growing up, Protestants went to public school, Irish Catholics went to St. Mary’s, Polish Catholics went to Marymount, and German Catholics went to St. Nicks or St. Boniface.  Why two schools for the Germans?  I heard that the Germans on the hill had a fight with the Germans in the valley, and the St. Boniface group took their bat, ball and the bases and started their own church.  By the time I was at St. Nick’s, since it was the only German High School, the St. Boniface kids had to “eat crow” after 8th grade and join us at St. Nick’s.  But we had lots of kids from other Catholic churches come to St. Nick’s for high school, even some from across the Susquehanna river in Swoyersville and Edwardsville.  But I’ve already gotten ahead of myself by talking about high school.

St. Nicholas Parish was organized in 1856 by German immigrants.  It was only natural that during the height of European emigration, immigrants settled down in communities with fellow countrymen.  There were language issues and cultural concerns, and a sense of security was achieved by living around people who came from the same town in Germany that you came from.  Years later (1984) when I visited Weilersbach, Germany, the town in Baden-Wurtemburg from which my Great Grandfather David Laufer emigrated, I was surprised to see, in addition to the many “Laufer” tombstones in the parish cemetery, familiar names that I knew from my church and school.  I found monuments for Baumanns, Greishabers, Kammerers, Zellers, Eigeldingers, and Schulers, and lots of other familiar names.   My Aunt Lizzie Spindler, who married Harry Brader, a second generation German, and who lived with our family in Wilkes-Barre, could only say the Lord’s Prayer in German and couldn’t go to confession unless the priest could speak German (I could never use that excuse!)  She learned her prayers by rote (as all of us did), but she, in German, and we, in English.

This was the St. Nicholas "compound" as it was in the 1940s and early 1950s when I attended school there. On the left of the church were the priests' rectory in the front and the nuns' convent in the rear. The school is on the right, with the auditorium/gymnasium attached to it in the rear. In the basement of the auditorium there were some recreational facilities, including a two or three lane bowling alley.

Monsignor Peter Conrad Nagel - 1825-1911. Became first pastor of St. Nicholas in 1858,

Eventually, the Germans in Wilkes-Barre had enough people living in the same neighborhood to raise money for a Church. (Parishioners were asked to contribute $1.50 a month for fifty months to build a new church).  Over time,  the St. Nicholas Germans had a whole complex — I call it a “compound”: a church, a rectory, a school, a convent and an auditorium.  Across the street from the Church, in 1890, they even created their own social club in the German tradition — a bar, a hangout for playing cards and a sportsman club called initially “St. Konrad’s Verein” and later, “St. Conrad’s Young Men’s Society” so named in honor of St. Conrad of Bavaria,  and prompted by the middle name of St. Nick’s founding pastor, Father (eventually Monsignor) Peter Conrad Nagel.  Monsignor Nagel came from the town of Grevenstein, Westphalia, Germany.  He arrived in  the USA in 1857, was ordained by Bishop (now Saint) John Newmann in 1858, at which time he was sent to Wilkes-Barre to minister to the growing number of German Catholics there.  With the St. Conrad’s Society, they completed the central components of the German Ghetto – places for worship, education and recreation.

I was fortunate enough to have been born after all these great buildings were completed.  My dad went to St. Nick’s as a kid, but had to quit after eighth grade in order to work.   My mom was a St. Leo’s girl from nearby Ashley.  All my cousins went to St. Leo’s.

Father Staib was the third pastor of St. Nicholas Parish. He was named pastor on September 10 in the year I was born, 1935. He was pastor throughout my years at St. Nick's. He was still pastor in 1961 when I offered my First Mass at St. Nick's. He died two years later, in 1963.

By the time I was ready for first grade in 1940, St. Nick’s had installed its third pastor, Father Cyriac Staib.  He’s the only “Cyriac” I ever heard of — and eventually the parishioners erected a statue of St. Cyriac, Father Staib’s patron saint,  in front of the school.  Fr. Staib must have been a pretty powerful guy — because I don’t think anybody ever heard of St. Cyriac before — anywhere — and there are probably no other statues of him in the world, except in front of St. Nick’s school.  There’s something else I should share about Fr. Staib, whom I always respected, by the way.  He was bald – not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But he never revealed his baldness until near the end of his life.  Not that we didn’t all know it.  He had a really bad toupee.  And there’s a great story about his toupee.  Long before Vatican II, when they were still saying the Mass in Latin, and when priests used to wear their 3 pointed Beretta (hat) during Mass, somehow during a high mass, somebody gave Fr. Staib the wrong Beretta, a smaller size than his.  When he ceremonially removed his Beretta at the name of “Jesus”, his toupee got stuck in it and he feverishly tried to shake it loose.  That day, all the altar boys saw Father Staib’s bald head — and so did the whole congregation.

While I’m talking about Father Staib, I should mention one of his duties — one which he took very seriously.  He distributed the report cards to every kid in St. Nicholas School every report card period. He would go from classroom to classroom, carefully examine each report card as he handed it to each student, and if you had any “red marks” on it, he’d say something about doing better next marking period.  I used to dread it when he gave out the cards.  I never was a good student, and often there was a “red mark”, (as I got older, usually in math or science).  So there you have another unique characteristic of a the St. Nicholas ghetto — your Pastor gave you your report card.  Talk about lack of separation of church and state!!!

Twelve years in the South Washington Street Compound!

One of the neat things about where I lived in relation to the St. Nicholas compound was that I could walk to school each day.  It also meant I could walk home for lunch.  We only lived about 7 or 8 long blocks from school.  Some kids were even luckier.  My classmate Carl Klein lived directly across the street from the school.  When we were in sixth grade and I think also 11th, from our classroom windows bordering on South Washington Street, we used to watch his little brothers climb out of the second floor window and run around the flat roof of the family Funeral establishment. We were convinced that some day, one of them was going to fall off the roof.  Theresa Henry and Paul Schwab lived a couple of houses down South Washington Street from the school, and Tom Dooley lived around the corner on a South St. (how did a Dooley get into St. Nicks?).

To reach home, I had to walk all the way down South Washington Street, turn left on Hazel Street and walk all along the Hazard Wire Rope Factory, then through the Bowery (there were often a few drunks hung over in front of a bar or two along the way), then, at Vick’s Cigar and Candy Shop, cross over onto High Street and walk the length of the Salvation Army Building (had to be careful of the “bums” who lived there) and then turn the corner to Grove Street, which was the foot of “Mill Hill.”  Ours was the third house on the right – # 13.  I’d say it took about 20 minutes to walk it — giving us 20 minutes for lunch — then 20 minutes to just make it back to school in time for the first afternoon period.  There went our lunch hour!  One of the problems was we had to cross two sets of railroad tracks to and from school.  If a long train came along on our way to or from school as we were taking our lunch hour, we could end up being late for the afternoon class.  I guess you could say that I lived “on the wrong side of the tracks.”

During my time at St. Nick’s, there was no cafeteria as such.  If you brought your lunch,

This is the school and school yard on South Washington Street. The entrance to the right rear took you to the Auditorium or, down the stairs to the bowling alley.

you ate in the classroom and spent the rest of the time in the school yard.  For as long as I can remember, they sold milk for recess and lunch.  99% of it was chocolate milk.  I can’t recall, but I think you could order white milk if you wanted.  I never did.  I also remember the distinctive sour “chocolate milk” smell the school cloakroom always had, where they stacked the cases of milk.  And yes, each room had a cloak room, with hooks on each side of the wall.  At some point — I guess it was when we got to high school — we had access to tables in the basement of the auditorium for lunch.  It wasn’t actually a cafeteria, but you could eat there.  In my day, half of the auditorium basement was a bowling alley — it had at least two lanes , or perhaps four.  I remember the pin boys who would re-set the pins.  It was never automated.  My brother Bill, after reading an earlier version of this blog informed me that he was one of the pin boys — something I was totally unaware of (as I was away in the seminary at the time).  He said he got paid twenty-five cents a game.  The St. Nick’s bowling alleys were busy every night.

I still remember the names, images, and personalities of each of my teachers at St. Nick’s.    In contrast to kids who go to Catholic School these days, all of my teachers were nuns — and they all wore the traditional habit of the Sisters of Christian Charity, a Religious Order from Paderborn, Germany brought to the United States in 1873 because of an invitation from St. Nicholas pastor, Monsignor Peter Conrad Nagel, himself a native of Germany.

Mother Pauline von Mallinckrodt, foundress of the Sisters of Christian Charity in Paderborn, Germany in 1849. The order was expelled from Germany during the Kulturkamph initiated by Bismark in 1873. Monsignor Nagel of St.Nicholas invited them to come to America to teach at St. Nicholas school.

The foundress of the order was Pauline von Mallinckrodt, whom my teachers taught us to honor and respect.  Their first US Motherhouse was at what was St. Ann’s Academy in my time, an elite girl’s school in Wilkes-Barre.  My brother, Bill, attended kindergarten there (the only grade that allowed boys).

My great-aunt was a Sister of Christian Charity.  Her name was Sister Isabella, and I remember meeting her only once or twice at St. Ann’s.  She was the sister of my Aunt Lizzie Brader, who lived with us.  The nuns wore a unique headpiece.  It was very stiff because the white fabric was starched and shaped into a heart around their face, with a bow on their chin.  I used to feel sorry for the nuns who had scars on their chin from the abrasion caused by the starched bow.  And on hot summer days, it must have been really painful to wear.

Some of the nuns were really cool, usually the younger ones.  I had my favorites, like Sister Arline (she came across as very organized and professional) and I was lucky enough to have her in both fifth and ninth grades.  Sister Marie Bernarde was fun, she smiled a lot and had a way of pursing up her lips when she was upset.  I had her twice, too, in fourth and tenth grades.  In Part II of this segment I’ll talk about an incident I had with my 11th grade teacher, Sister Joseph Marie.  I feel that all my teachers at St. Nick’s were really dedicated to our education and I owe a lot to each of them.  I’m not especially proud, however, of how I and my fellow 8th graders treated Sister Adelrica.  She was a bit eccentric and perhaps a little absent-minded, and we tended to come up with pranks to bedevil her.

At one of our All Class reunions a few years ago, several alumni put on a skit about life at St. Nicks.  They focused on one of the mysteries of our school: where did the Nuns go to the bathroom?  No one had a clue where in the entire school building there was a bathroom for the Nuns.  Finally, in 1995 when I returned to St. Nicks for a reunion and toured the school the mystery was solved when the tour guide pointed out the secret hideaway with the lavatory we never knew existed.

Here’s my list of teachers at St. Nicks:

This is a Sister of Christian Charity from the 1950s exactly as I remember them. She looks very much like Sister Francine, a nun I had in 9th grade. Present day members of the order no longer wear this habit, but a much more modern and simpler one.

First Grade – Sister Lucina; Second Grade – Sister Herman Joseph; Third Grade – Sister Arbrogosta and Sister Johanna; Fourth Grade – Sister Marie Bernarde; Fifth Grade – Sister Arline; Sixth Grade – Sister Alberica; Seventh Grade – Sister Naomi; Eighth Grade – Sister Adelrica ; Ninth Grade – Sister Arline (and Sister Francine); Tenth Grade – Sister Marie Bernarde; Eleventh Grade, Sister Joseph Marie / Sister Bernadine; Twelfth Grade – Sister Claretta.

These nuns had a really tough life.  They had to teach just about every subject and they had a very limited social life outside the convent.  As an educator myself, I have an awful lot of respect and admiration for what they were able to do for us and the quality of the education we received.  Every morning we would report to school in time to line up and march over to the church two-by-two to begin the school day with Mass. Each class had its appointed place in the church.  Each Nun had a clicker — and when the class arrived at their appointed pews in church, she would click the clicker and we would all genuflect in unison, and at the next click, rise, and enter the pew.   As we progressed from grade to grade, we would move to the next section of the church for our respective class.  One year on the “Epistle side” of the church, the next year on the “Gospel side,” then the following year back to the Epistle side, behind the younger class in front of us, until we worked our way towards the rear quarter of the church where the high schoolers sat.  Seniors brought up the rear, and regular churchgoers sat at the very back of the church.

The interior of St.Nicholas Church. Imagine being present here every single morning for 12 years. I got to analyze every stained glass window, every statue, every religious painting and to be awed daily by the elaborate ritual of the pre-Vatican Council church. I loved to listen to the magnificent pipe organ, sing the hymns, especially during May, the month of Mary, and during my early years, longed to become an altar boy when I reached 5th grade, which was the magic year successful candidates were selected.

St. Nicholas was a beautiful Gothic church.  It had a magnificent wood-carved Germanic reredos or altar piece and a large marble altar.  In 1985 when I visited the hometown of my ancestors in Germany, I discovered a small meditation chapel on a hill overlooking the town.  In it was an altar with a similarly carved altar piece. The link between my roots and my parish church was very obvious.

The Meditation Chapel on the hill overlooking the village of Weilersbach, Baden-Wurtemburg, Germany, the home of my great grandfather, David Laufer, who emigrated to the US in 1883.

Each morning we were ushered into this amazing “other world” surrounded by beautiful art work, stained glass windows, statues of saints. burning candles, ornate vestments, and the sounds of a magnificent pipe organ.  It wasn’t until I was in my 50s and 60s and visited the classic Gothic cathedrals throughout Europe that I came to the realization  and appreciation of my privileged youth when I was exposed to the same grandeur daily in my parish church in Wilkes-Barre.

I once calculated the approximate number of daily Masses I attended throughout my 12 years at St. Nicks.  Figuring that there were 180 mandated school days per year, times 12 years, I would have attended 2,160 Masses during my elementary and high school years.  Add to this the fact that on Sundays, we had to attend the 9 a.m. children s’ Mass with our respective class.  In later life, I considered this a downside of Catholic life as a child.  In my opinion, it would have been spiritually healthier to attend Mass on Sunday as a family.  My mom and dad would go to a later Mass on Sunday on their own.  At St. Nick’s the “quick” Mass was at 10:15 and the “High Mass” was at 11:00.  I should mention here that this was all before the Second Vatican Council in the 1960′s, which means that all these Masses were completely in Latin – as English wasn’t introduced into the liturgy until the first Sunday of Advent, November 29, 1964.  (Trivia footnote: I was Mass celebrant on that Sunday in St. Pamphilius Church, Pittsburgh, PA).

Having reached about 3,500 words at this point, its a good place to close out Part I.  I have a lot more St. Nick’s memories to share, so I hope you’ll come back for Part II.