By Suzanne Sherkel Nagle
In the 40’s and 50’s Hyde City was the perfect place to be a kid. There were three general stores: Rafferty’s (which was also the Post Office), Paul Bailey’s and Schrot’s; two gas stations, a factory - American Mono-nickel, or the A & M, that I always thought stood for Airplane & Marine (?), a furniture store – Henry J. Brown’s (which is still there!), the Hyde Hotel, the Laurel Garden dance hall, the Pilgrim Holiness Church, two or three barber shops, a ball field, the “hill” (for sledding or tobogganing – NOT skiing!- usually on HJB’s cardboard), the village-dividing Montgomery “Crick” (which we dammed up in several places to make swimming holes), several vacant lots, some of them boggy or swampy (great for picking teaberries or catching tadpoles and salamanders) or woodsy (for “camp”-building using –you guessed it – HJB’s discarded cardboard appliance boxes). There was even a nearby Country Club with a nine-hole golf course! And, of course, there was “Hyde City Tech”, our much-loved four- (later, five-) room elementary school, with the super, l-o-n-g cement sidewalks for hopscotch and roller-skating, and a “football-field”- sized patch of real grass on either side.
But Hyde City was really its families, with names like Ammerman, Armstrong, Bell, Brown, Collins, Crawford, Duckett, Duttry, Faulkner, Gearhart, Guelich, Haag, Harper, Haversack, Heitsenrether, Hoover, Hummel, Hurley, Jay, Johnson, Lanager, Lanich, Lawhead, Little, Mabie, Magnuson, Michaels, Moyer, Poole, Quinn, Raybold, Reed, Reitmyer, Shimmel, Teats, Tornatore, Triponey, Viehdeffer, Vokes, White, Yatta – many of whom spawned dynasties of athletes who excelled, especially, in football, wrestling and golf.
From 1948 to 1951 I lived in one of the “suburbs” of Hyde City: the Montgomery Run, Fletcherville, Coal Hill, Riverview Road “loop”; and I got to ride the bus with kids named Barr, Carns, Fiscus, Fletcher, McBride, Powell, Ogden, Rauch, Rose, and Rumfola. Lest we forget, that’s where the airport and armory were. The Sherkels lived in the lower half of the old, then “duplexed”, McPherson farmhouse during the great ice-storm of the winter of ’50-’51. And to a nine-year-old kid, it really was “great”!
By the time I moved back to the “city”, some of the streets had been paved and given names (We never knew our “address”, except for a P.O. Box number.), fewer and fewer outhouses were in regular use, and most homes had indoor plumbing, including pure, sparkling water piped in from the Montgomery Dam. A few TV antennas were beginning to sprout up; but we kids still played outdoors until dark. (The Sherkels never did get a TV set until my mother’s beloved Pittsburgh Pirates played the Yankees in the ’60 World Series, after I was long-gone.)
Some may ask how we came to be known as “Hyde Hoodlums”. I honestly don’t know, except for the fact that we were all pretty “rough and tough”, due to our physically active, relatively unsupervised, “left- to do-as-we-pleased” childhood. As a result, some of us got hurt, and some even got arrested. (We started “halloweening” in late September: corning, soaping or, worse, waxing windows, tipping over outhouses, stretching ropes and/or chains across the streets, as well as dressing up in old clothes, with nylon stockings disguising our faces, and going begging from door to door.) As far as I can recall, we Hyde kids were not into Girl and Boy Scouting, which might have redeemed some of us – although I was in 4-H, but only because my grandmother was the leader.
Leaving Hyde City Tech for the Junior High was pretty traumatic; but that’s another chapter….
All in all, I wouldn’t trade my childhood in Hyde for anything – it was a gift for which I am eternally grateful.
