Life was comparatively simple, pleasures few. There were Saturday night band concerts in the park, and lectures at the library. Sundays half the town put on its best and went walking. Families would pick one of the neighboring boroughs and walk out and back, seeing much and, naturally, being seen all along the way.
There was a new show at the Washington Street Opera House every other night or so. Thus far in 1889 it had been an especially good season, with such favorites as Zozo the Magic Queen (which brought its “splendid production” in “OUR OWN SPECIAL SCENERY CAR”) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin appearing in a single week. (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s little drama had also changed considerably since the years before the war. The Johnstown performance, for example, featured “a pack of genuine bloodhounds; two Topsies; Two Marks, Eva and her Pony ‘Prince’; African Mandolin Players; ‘Tinker’ the famous Trick Donkey.”)
There was also the Unique Rink for roller skating, a fad which seemed to be tapering off some that spring. There was superb fishing along the Conemaugh and the Stony Creek in spring and summer. Downstream from town the river was stained by waste dumped from the mills, but above town the water still ran clear between sun-bleached boulders and was full of catfish, sunfish, mullet, walleyed pike that everyone mistakenly called salmon, trout, eels, and speedy, mud-colored crawfish.
In spring, too, there was nearly always a good brawl when the circus came to town. In the fall, when the sour gums turned blood-red against the pines, there was wonderful hunting on the mountains, and fresh deer hanging from butcher shop meathooks was one of the signs of the season. In winter there were sleigh rides to Ebensburg, tobogganing parties, and ice skating at the Von Lunen pond across from the new Johnson Street Rail works up the Stony Creek at Moxham.
And year round there was a grand total of 123 saloons to choose from in the greater Johnstown area, ranging from California Tom’s on Market Street to the foul-smelling holes along the back alleys of Cambria City. California Tom Davis had been a forty-niner. He was one of the colorful characters of Johnstown and the back room of his saloon was the favorite gathering place for those professional men and Cambria Iron officials who liked to take a sociable drink now and then.
But the average saloon was simply a place where a working-man could stop off at the end of the day to settle the fierce thirst the heat of the furnaces left him with, or to clear the coal dust from his throat. He was always welcome there, without a shave or a change of clothes. It was his club. He had a schooner of beer or a shot; most of the time he spent talking.
Like any steel town Johnstown had a better than average number of hard-line drinking men. On payday Saturdays the bartenders were the busiest people in town. And week after week Monday’s paper carried an item or two about a “disturbance” Saturday night on Washington Street or in Cambria City, and published the names of two or three citizens who had spent the night in the lockup for behaving in “frontier fashion.”
For those of still earthier appetite there was Lizzie Thompson’s place on Frankstown Hill, at the end of Locust Street. It was the best-known of the sporting houses, but there were others too, close by, and on Prospect Hill. And one spring a similar enterprise had flourished for weeks in the woods outside of town, when several itinerant “soiled doves,” as the Tribune called them, set up business in an abandoned coal mine.
But primarily, life in Johnstown meant a great deal of hard work for just about everybody. Not only because that was how life was then, but because people had the feeling they were getting somewhere. The country seemed hell-bent for a glorious new age, and Johnstown, clearly, was right up there booming along with the best of them. Pittsburgh and Chicago were a whole lot bigger, to be sure, and taking a far bigger part of the business. But that was all right. For Johnstown these were the best years ever.
Progress was being made, and it was not just something people were reading about. It was happening all around them, touching their lives.
Streets were bright at night now with sputtering white arc lights. There was a new railroad station with bright-colored awnings. The hospital was new; two new business blocks had been finished on Main. A telephone exchange had begun service that very year, in January, and already there were more than seventy phones in town. Quite a few houses had new bathrooms. The Hulbert House, the new hotel on Clinton Street, had an elevator and steam heat.
There was a street railway out to Woodvale and another up to Moxham. Almost everyone had electricity or natural gas in his home. There were typewriters in most offices, and several people had already bought one of the new Kodak “detective” cameras. “Anybody can use the Kodak,” the advertisements said.
Inventions and changes were coming along so fast that it was hard to keep up with them all. The town had no debts, taxes were low, and the cost of things was coming down little by little.
Of course, there were some who looked askance at so much change and liked to talk about the old days when they said there had never been so much drinking, no prostitution, and men could still do a day’s work without complaining. There was also strong resentment against the company, and quiet talk of trouble to come, though it would have been very hard for most men among those Memorial Day crowds to have imagined there ever being an actual strike in the mills. The miners had tried it, twice, and both times the company had clamped down with such speed and decisiveness that the strikes had been broken in no time.
And there were floods and fires and, worst of all, epidemics that hit so swiftly and unexpectedly, terrifying everyone, and killing so many children. The last bad time had been in 1879, when diphtheria killed 132 children within a few months. Death was always near, and there was never any telling when it would strike again.
Year in, year out men were killed in the mills, or maimed for life. Small boys playing around the railroad tracks that cut in and out of the town would jump too late or too soon and lose a leg or an arm, or lie in a coma for weeks with the whole town talking about them until they stopped breathing forever.
But had not life always been so? Was not hard work the will of the Lord? (“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground…”) And yes, death too? (“…for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”)
And besides, was it not a fine thing to be where there was so much going on, so much to keep a man busy and his family eating regularly?
So far it had been a good year. Except for measles the town seemed pretty healthy. Talk was that it would be a good summer for steel. Prices might well improve, and perhaps wages with them, and there would be no labor trouble to complicate things, as there would probably be in Pittsburgh.
The Quicksteps, Johnstown’s beloved baseball team, had made a rather poor showing so far, losing to Braddock, Greensburg, and McKeesport in a row; but they had beaten Altoona once, and most people felt that about made up for it. The newspapers were full of stories about the World’s Fair opening in Paris, and its Eiffel Tower, and about the Oklahoma Territory opening up out west. Towers of structural steel could reach nearly to the heavens, and Americans could turn a dusty prairie into farms and whole new cities overnight. It was some time to be alive.
But perhaps best of all there seemed such a strong spirit of national unity everywhere. The Constitutional government those Grand Army veterans had fought for had just celebrated its one hundredth birthday that spring and there had been quite a to-do about it in the newspapers and picture magazines. “A nation in its high hour of imperial power and prosperity looks back a hundred years to its obscure and doubtful beginning…” one article began. That the next one hundred years would be better still, bringing wondrous advantages and rewards to millions of people who had also come from “obscure and doubtful” beginnings, seemed about as certain as anything could be; and especially in a place like Johnstown, on a day when flags were flying from one end of town to the other, and the “Boys in Blue” were marching again.
When the rain started coming down about four o’clock, it was
very fine and gentle, little more than a cold mist. Even so, no one welcomed it. There had already been more than a hundred days of rain that year, and the rivers were running high as it was. The first signs of trouble had been a heavy snow in April, which had melted almost as soon as it came down. Then in May there had been eleven days of rain.
The rivers ran high every spring. That was to be expected. Some springs they ran so high they filled the lower half of town to the top doorstep. A few times the water had been level with first-floor windows along several streets. Floods had become part of the season, like the dogwood blooming on the mountain. Yet, each year, there was the hope that perhaps this time the rivers might behave themselves.
It had already been such a curious year for weather. A tornado in February had killed seventeen people in Pittsburgh. Not much had happened in Johnstown, but the wind carried off a tin church roof at Loretto. The April snow had been the heaviest of the whole year, with fourteen inches or more in the mountains. And all through May, temperatures had been bouncing every which way, up in the eighties one day, down below freezing two nights later, then back to the eighties again. Now it felt more like March than May.
About five the rain stopped and left everything freshly rinsed looking. The Reverend Chapman, back on his front porch after participating at the graveside ceremonies, sat gazing at the park with its big elms and draped chain fence, and thought to himself that he had seldom looked upon a lovelier scene. Or at least so he wrote later on.
The Reverend had been in Johnstown only a few years, and it had been just the month before that he and his wife, Agnes, had moved into the new parsonage. He had grown up along the canal to the west of Johnstown, at Blairsville, where his father had eked out a living painting decorative scenes and designs on packet boats. His first church had been in Ligonier, on the other side of Laurel Hill. Later there had been churches in New Florence and Bolivar, down the Conemaugh, and half a dozen other places between Johnstown and Pittsburgh. He liked every one of them, he said, but Johnstown was something special. His stone church next door was the largest in town, a landmark, and except for St. Joseph’s, the German Catholic church over in Conemaugh borough, no church had a larger membership. His neighbors across the park, Dr. Lowman and John Fulton, were the finest sort of Christian gentlemen, and their homes were as elegantly furnished as any in town. The Dibert bank, Griffith’s drugstore, the post office and the Tribune offices on the floor above it, were all but a few steps from the Reverend’s front door. The parsonage faced on to Franklin Street, at almost the exact dead center of Johnstown.
Night settled in and the lights came on along Franklin and Main. A few blocks away William Kuhn and Daisy Horner were being married in a small ceremony at the bride’s home. At the Opera House Mr. Augustin Daly’s New York production of A Night Off, “The comedy success of two continents,” was playing to a small house. Daly was the foremost theatrical producer of the day, and A Night Off had been his biggest hit for several years. Like some of his other productions, it was an adaptation from a German comedy, a fact which the Johnstown audience undoubtedly appreciated.
Other than that not much else was going on. Because of the holiday there had been no paper that morning, but according to Wednesday’s Tribune, rainstorms were expected late that Thursday; tomorrow, Friday, was to be slightly warmer. The barometric pressure was reported at thirty, temperature from forty-six to sixty-five, humidity at sixty-nine per cent.
About nine the rain began again, gentle and quiet as earlier. But an hour or so later it started pouring and there seemed no end to it. “Sometime in the night,” according to Chapman, “my wife asked if it were not raining very hard, and I being very sleepy, barely conscious of the extraordinary downpour simply answered, ‘Yes,’ and went to sleep, thinking no more of it until morning.”
–3–
George Heiser’s day did not end until after ten. It was his practice to keep the store open until then. With the saloons along Washington Street doing business on into the night, there were generally people about and he could pick up a little more trade. Either he or his wife Mathilde would be looking after things behind the counter, in among the queen’s ware and the barrels of sugar and crackers, the cases of Ewarts tobacco and yellow laundry soap, needles, spools, pins, and Clark’s “O-N-T” (Our New Thread).
George and Mathilde Heiser, and their sixteen-year-old son, Victor, lived upstairs over the store. They had been at the same location, 224 Washington, for several years now and, at long last, business was looking up. At fifty-two, for the first time in his life, George Heiser was getting on in the world.
Washington Street ran parallel to Main, two blocks to the north. From the Stony Creek over to the Little Conemaugh, the east-west streets—the “up” streets they were called—ran Vine, Lincoln, Main, Locust, Washington. Then came the B & O tracks and the B & O depot which was directly across the street from the Heiser store. Beyond the tracks were two more streets, Broad and Pearl, then the Little Conemaugh, and on the other side of that rose Prospect Hill, steep as a roof. With the town growing the way it had been, the Baltimore & Ohio had brought in a spur from Somerset eight years before to try to take away some of the freight business from the Pennsylvania. An old schoolhouse had been converted into a depot, and the steady night and day racket of the trains right by their window had made quite a difference to the Heisers. But with the store doing as well as it was, George Heiser had few complaints.
George had been troubled by bad luck much of his life. During the war, at Fredericksburg, when his unit had been making a rapid withdrawal, his companion in the ranks, a fellow named Pike, got hit and went down grabbing on to George’s leg and pleading for George not to leave him. As a result they were both captured and George spent the rest of the war in Libby Prison. Then, years later, at a time when he seemed to be getting nowhere in Johnstown, George had gone off north to Oil City hoping to strike it rich. He wound up running a butcher shop instead and in no time was back in Johnstown, flat broke, wiped out by fire and his own lack of business sense.
George had not marched in the parade that afternoon. His blue uniform seldom ever came out of the big wardrobe upstairs. He was not much for parades and the like. He seldom mixed in politics, never became an enthusiastic church man. He neither smoked nor chewed, though he would take a beer every so often and once a year he liked to make wine down in the cellar. He did enjoy the Grand Army meetings, but that was largely because he enjoyed being with his friends. People liked him. He was a good storyteller, easygoing. He was also about as physically powerful as any man in town, and he was a very soft touch. He could lift a barrel full of sugar, which was considered quite a feat; but turning away a friend whose credit might not be the best seemed more than he was up to.
Twice in his life he had let friends have money when they came to him; twice he had suffered heavily from the loss. Fortunately for the Heisers, Mathilde was a determined and sensible wife. She was the manager of the two, and after George came back from Oil City she took charge. She kept the books, saw that he did not let much go on credit. Nor would she allow him to set any chairs out on the bare wooden floor. Otherwise, she said, his cronies would be sitting about half the day giving the place the wrong sort of appearance. They had at last been able to add a new window to the store front and appearances would be maintained so long as Mathilde had her say.
Mathilde’s appearance was straightforward and intelligent. She had a fine head of dark-brown hair, a high forehead, and a set to her mouth that suggested she knew where she was going and that chances were good she would get there. She had had a considerable amount of education for a woman of that time and continued to keep up with her reading. Education was the thing, a proper education and hard work. It had been her way of life since childhood in Germany, and she intended to pass it on to the pride of her life, her son.
Victor was her second child. The first, a girl, had died of diphtheria. Victor had been struck down with it too, but he had been stronger. H
e looked much like his father now, only a ganglier, rawboned version. He was a serious, pink-faced boy, with big feet and blond hair, taller already than most men and far better educated. At sixteen he knew several languages, was well along in advanced mathematics, and had read about as widely as any boy in Johnstown. At his mother’s insistence, his life was a steady round of school, homework, and being tutored in one extra course or another. If George Heiser had had his troubles making his way, that was one thing; Victor, Mathilde Heiser was determined, would not just get on, he would excel. There would be no going off to the Cambria works or coal mines for this young man, and no clerking behind a store counter either.
Now and again Victor had his moments away from all that. His father would step in and see that he got some time off. George Heiser had a wonderful way with children. He was forever telling them stories and listening to theirs. He took a great interest in his son and his schemes, one of which was to build a raft and float down the Conemaugh to the Allegheny, then on to the Ohio and Mississippi. Victor had taken some night classes in mechanical drawing at the library and had worked up plans on how the raft should be built. His idea was to catch the Conemaugh when it was high, otherwise he knew he would run aground.
In summer he would bring home accounts of his long rides out of town to the open country above the valley. Once he and one of his friends had gone all the way to the South Fork dam to take a look at the lake and the summer colony, but they had been sent on their way by the grounds keeper and never got to see much.
Other nights Victor talked about walking to the edge of town to watch the big summer revival meeting. He loved the powerful singing and the whooping and hollering of people “getting religion.” On the way home he and his friends would try to imitate what they had seen, laughing and pounding each other on the back as they came along the streets. This was the kind of education George Heiser understood. He had grown up in Johnstown himself. His people had been among the Pennsylvania Germans who first settled the valley.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 242