It may seem odd to some that an inanimate piece of mechanical equipment could spark fond memories. But replace “coal furnace” with “first car” and you’ll gain a sense of what I mean. In its day, our old coal furnace kept us warm, but to my grandfather, it was his Cadillac.
Hazleton is my hometown, a city built on a corrugated mountain plateau in Northeastern Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region. While growing up in the late 1950s and the 1960s it was a city of about 30,000; a city defined by coal and a city overcoming the decline of the coal industry. By 1830, the stage had been set for what would eventually become large-scale mining enabled by a workforce from the many surrounding small villages and towns that make up the Greater Hazleton area. The coal industry had progressed from dangerous, labor-intensive underground deep mining to surface strip mining where heavy equipment could do in a day what a miner could do in a week. The area was a mosaic of nationalities represented by the descendants of those who exchanged old world poverty for work in the mines. In my youth, Hazleton’s identity was largely Italian or so it seemed given my neighborhood friends, my classmates, our priests, and our local newspaper coverage. When I’m asked what it was like to grow up there, I reply, “It was like Mayberry but with meatballs.”
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