The other night while in one of those bored, introspective moods (there was nothing good on tv) I was looking at photo collections of southwestern Pa posted online, and stumbled across this picture. I didn’t think “Hmm, that looks familiar” or “where have I seen this street before”, I knew immediately—rhis is East High Street (also known as Main Street) from the small town I grew up in, Waynesburg PA.
The only information attached to the few photos was “Greene County Archives” but I guessed them to be circa 1915-1930. It was almost disconcerting, seeing how little things have changed since then.
When I showed this to my sister Shawn, and said I wished I could step into that old photo, she replied “Yes, until you found a penny in your pocket with the current year on it” (you know, like Christopher Reeve did in ‘Somewhere in Time’). Well, I haven’t fallen in love with a sepia photograph of Jane Seymour from 80 years ago, I just want to put on a brown derby hat and see how things really were back then.
But I’m guessing things on Main Street weren’t too different from how I remember it.
That same view of East High (Main Street) in Waynesburg, & how it looks today
As a kid in the late 1960s-70s, I can remember when ‘downtown Waynesburg’ was still a major source of activity. And on Saturday afternoons, before malls and strangers (masquerading as human beings) became part of the social consciousness, my parents thought nothing of dropping me and my sister Shawn off on a bustling Main Street for a few hours, free to do whatever we wanted.
We usually spent our hours chatting up Peg & Mabel (a pair of spectacled, middle-aged clerks at Sun Drugstore), browsing comic books at “Good News” or the candy & toy departments of the local five & dime stores. (I can still remember Shawn once asking me why McCrorys had creaky wooden floors; I explained it was where poor people had to shop!)
Saturday matinees at the local theater usually had a line of 8-12 year olds in front, without a parent in sight.
Another old photo shows the original Opera House marquee; Wallace Beery & Marie Dressler are a big hit in ‘Min & Bill’ (1930)
I suppose I’ve been giving my hometown a little more thought than usual lately, as recently a friend from back home told me they were tearing part of Main Street down; it was alarming to see the photos of the rubble.
The Colonial! Hudsons Jewlers, the Chinese Garden—gone!
(Okay, I’m not feeling any real loss for these places, but they’ve been around forever, it seems.) Coincidentally, one of the old photos I found were of those same three buildings being renovated 80 years ago.
The recent demolition; those same buildings being renovated in 1930
When I posted one of these found pictures on Facebook, an old friend sadly commented on how much things had changed since we were kids. While I agree with Jon, I can’t help but remember how my mom would often tell us kids how different things were in her time.
She’d point at the old Ullom & Baily’s Drugstore and say “When I was your age, my girlfriends & I would sit at the counter in there after school and drink cherry colas, there was a jukebox in the corner and we even danced. Oh you kids have no idea how much fun we had back then…”
I’m sure that thirty years from now, some kid in Waynesburg today is going to be telling his own children the same thing.
