Basement

I grew up in the late fifties in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, a small town on the Ohio River outside Pittsburgh. Ambridge was part of the steel making boom. My home was one of the many thousands of row houses that lined the banks of the Monongahela and Ohio rivers. From my bedroom window I could see where my grandfather worked for forty eight years at the American Bridge Company.

My parents and grandparents and I lived in a house that was the same as all the other houses on our block; a three story home of simple design. Every one of those houses had a front and back porch and a garden in the backyard. And everyone of those houses had a basement. Some basements still had a coal furnace. I remember coal being delivered and dumped onto the sidewalk. From there it was carted by wheelbarrow to a small steel door on the side of the home that opened to the cellar coal bin. Shovel after shovel was fed through this door into the coal bin by a sinewy young man. Our home’s coal furnace was replaced with the old coal furnace converted to a gas furnace. The coal bin was used as a wine cellar for storing my grandfather’s homemade wine. The rest of the cellar was devoted to my grandmother’s canning , freezing vegetables, hanging clothes to dry…. (outside the air from the mills just soiled the clothes.) Dryers were nearly nonexistent.

The basement was an important part of the household. Contrary to the image of the basement being a dark scary place, it was a bright, spotless warm environment. It frequently smelled like Pine Sol due to my grandmother’s constant cleaning.

For me it served as a place to play with my friends. We would listen to records, play board games, set up toy soldiers and just hang out. Before Christmas me and my dad would go to the attic to bring down my American Flier train set. For two weeks and only two weeks it stayed set up. That once a year event kept me in that basement the whole season playing with that train. All my friends had cellars and they were all used in the similar manner. Trains were big back then.

One summer day we went up to the corner of our block where there was the neighborhood grocer. We would buy penny candy, take pop bottles to him for 2 cents but best of all, retrieve his discarded Playboy magazines. He dumped them into the woods across from his store. These gems gave us hours if not days of going from one to another’s basements where they were stashed. It was like an underground railroad for Playboy. We created our lending library.

When my buddies and I were going into our junior years, we would all meet in my basement to lift weights and listen to the Beatles White Album.

It was in Junior High when I first got drunk. My grandfather’s wine was an easy target sitting there in the former coal bin. One Friday night I orchestrated sneaking two bottles and my buddies went to our place in the woods and consumed a lot. We looked forward to the weekends getting drunk and talking to girls. The wine helped boost our courage.

The period of my youth back then took a turn for the worse with the steel mills closing. My father and grandfather were laid off. The security of good wages, pensions, health insurance were part of a bygone era. My grandparents passed, my parents moved and I went off to my freshman year of college.

In spite of losing that special time, I feel lucky to have the memories associated with that era. Sometimes I will take a ride past my old home and wonder who lives there and how it looks from the inside. And just to reminisce about how simple but precious those times were.