Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Pennsylvania

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  What it’s about: The song was, according to John, “one of the only times I tried to deliberately write a hit single,” but it presented some problems for radio DJs: “Philadelphia Freedom” was 5 minutes and 41 seconds long. Many DJs had already vowed not to play any songs longer than four minutes because it complicated their playlists. (Accounting for commercials, the popular “14 hits in a row” hour-long format didn’t work if songs were longer than four minutes.) John’s song was so successful, though, that listeners demanded DJs play it anyway.

  Did you know? In the end, the song’s lyrics (by John’s longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin) ended up not having any direct references to Billie Jean King, tennis, or sports at all. Instead, and in spite of being written by two English songwriters, “Philadelphia Freedom” had a patriotic quality with lines like “’Cause I live and breathe this Philadelphia freedom/From the day that I was born I’ve waved the flag.” The lyrics resonated strongly with Americans—so much so that the song was used as an anthem for the U.S. bicentennial celebration a year later.

  Did You Know?

  In 1919, the Pennsylvania Railroad built the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. The luxurious 22-floor, columned structure was one of the most elaborate of its day. It originally contained more than 2,000 bathrooms and had tunnels underground that connected it to Penn Station across the street. Everyone from Duke Ellington to the Glenn Miller Orchestra played in its lounge, and the television shows Maury and The People’s Court were filmed inside its ballroom. It also had a prestigious phone number: the PEnnsylvania 6-5000, as mentioned in the song by the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

  The hotel was assigned the phone number back in 1919, and it’s still being used today, making it the oldest phone number in the United States. The “PE” in Pennsylvania stand for the numbers 7 and 3—which correspond to the letters on a telephone’s dial. This means that, including the New York City area code, the phone number for the Hotel Pennsylvania was (and still is) 212-736-5000.

  An Oil-American City

  It’s a tiny town today, but Titusville in northwestern Pennsylvania was the birthplace of one of history’s most important economic developments.

  Town: Titusville

  Location: Crawford County

  Founding: 1796

  Population (2008): 6,200

  Size: 7.5 square miles

  County seat: No

  What’s in a Name?

  In 1796, the town began as a single plot of land claimed by a settler named Jonathan Titus.

  Claim to Fame:

  •Before the 1850s, procuring oil was a much simpler process than it is today. Men simply gathered the oil at seeps (where it seeped out of the ground) and dug narrow holes into the ground near the seeps to find more. But on August 22, 1859, Titusville local Edwin Drake demonstrated that there was a way to get to all the oil in the ground: he drilled through the rock to find the source and reinforced the holes with piping, to prevent them from collapsing. Drake was the first person to drill for oil in the United States, and today, the Drake Well Museum sits at the site of that first drilling.

  The Birth of “Clean Air”

  In October 1948, in a Rust Belt town about 20 miles south of Pittsburgh, a heavy, choking smog settled over the streets and houses. For four days, it suffocated the people living there, but it also led to the first clean-air regulations in the United States.

  Donora, Pennsylvania, got its start as a factory town. In 1899, the Union Steel Company (founded by William H. Donner, Andrew and Richard Mellon, and Henry Clay Frick, who also teamed up with Andrew Carnegie) laid out the town and set up shop. The group even named the place after themselves: Donora was a combination of Donner and Nora, Andrew Mellon’s wife.

  Pollution: A Way of Life

  By the late 1940s, Donora had grown to about 14,000 people. The steel company still employed many of them (though it had since changed its name to the American Steel and Wire Plant), and the Donora Zinc Works had opened in 1915. Those two factories, both owned by U.S. Steel, pumped smoke into the air constantly, so smog was a common problem. Some residents tried to do something about it: In 1918, residents sued the Zinc Works, claiming pollution from the factory had made them sick. (They won and the owner had to pay damages.) And in the 1920s, a group of farmers across the river in Webster also complained, saying pollution from the factories was killing their crops. The city started taking samples of the air around town to test the pollution levels, but no one ever did anything about it. The factories were too important to the town’s livelihood. According to one resident, “It was a normal way of life.”

  A Killer Smog

  But on October 27, 1948, a weather system moved into the Monongahela Valley and dropped a heavy fog over Donora. The fog trapped the sulfur and other chemicals pumping out of the factories. With nowhere to go, the pollution started filling up the air in town.

  Most of the people in Donora weren’t worried initially. They figured it was just very bad smog that would pass eventually. Joann Crow, who was 12 years old at the time, said, “Dad couldn’t drive us to school because it was so hard to see. He had to walk us . . . with a flashlight, which we thought was fun.” As the days wore on, the smog grew thicker. At a high school football game on October 29, people in the crowd couldn’t see the players on the field, and the ball kept getting lost in the haze.

  Then came a rash of breathing problems. The first victim was a man walking home at night. He started choking, stopped for a moment to rest, and died. Soon, people all over town were choking from the bad air. According to one resident, “The air was yellow and so full of sulfur. It burned my eyes so badly that I had tears. My eyes were burning like fire.” The local hospital was overcrowded with patients, firemen were going door-to-door with oxygen tanks, and doctors couldn’t examine people fast enough. Ultimately, about 7,000 Donora residents got sick. Twenty of them died in just five days, a horrifying number for a town in which only 30 people had died during the entire previous year. The local funeral home was so overwhelmed that it ran out of caskets.

  “Murder from the Mill”

  Finally, on October 30, the town council convinced the superintendent at the Zinc Works to close the plant in hopes of preventing more deadly gases from being pumped into the air. And the next day, the weather changed. A front moved in, pushed the fog out of town, and it began to rain. Almost as quickly as it had come, the smog disappeared.

  As the poisonous air cleared, people clamored for some kind of explanation. U.S. Steel called the deaths an “act of God” and blamed them on asthma and other ailments, but a doctor at Donora’s Board of Health, William Rongaus, thought differently. He argued that the deaths and sickness were the direct result of air pollution. He said later, “People were dying while I was treating them. I called it murder from the mill.”

  Even so, the people of Donora were initially unwilling to take on U.S. Steel in a fight for clean air. The company employed thousands of townspeople, and thousands of others ran support businesses that depended on the steelworkers. But the story had made the national news, and it wasn’t just up to Donora anymore.

  Acting for Clean Air

  The deaths in Donora were big news, especially after major newspapers in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia picked up the story and radio personality Walter Winchell discussed it on his broadcasts. Pennsylvania’s Department of Health, the U.S. Public Health Service, and Donora’s town council launched investigations . . . the first organized inquiries into the effects of air pollution.

  Their findings showed that the mills were contributing to the pollution in Donora, but authorities shied away from officially blaming U.S. Steel. Others were bolder—editors at the newspaper in Monessen, just a few miles from Donora, wrote that the damage was “something no scientific investigation is necessary to prove. All you need is a pair of reasonably good eyes.” For its part, U.S. Steel—though it admitted no liability—did eventually pay small settlements (between $1,000 and $30,000) to the people who got sick or lo
st loved ones.

  More important, though, the study was the first real recognition that air pollution was a major problem in the United States. Change came slowly, but the events at Donora inspired lawmakers (first on the local and state level, and then nationally) to enact legislation to clean up America’s air. The Air Pollution Control Act of 1955 was the first, but the most sweeping was the Clean Air Act of 1970, which put strict restrictions on emissions from automobiles and factories. During the congressional hearings debating the law, Donora came up repeatedly; the danger the town’s residents had faced in 1948 was something no one wanted to encounter again. The law was updated in 1990, and today, the air over the United States is much cleaner than it was in 1948—it’s estimated to have 98 percent less lead, 41 percent less sulfur dioxide, and 28 percent less carbon monoxide, though environmentalists stress that there’s still a long way to go before the air is truly “healthy.”

  Donora These Days

  The decline of the steel industry hit Donora hard, and today, it’s a small town of about 5,000 people. The Zinc Works closed in 1957, and the steel plant shut down in 1966. For many years, Donora’s older residents saw the 1948 smog as a stain on their town’s reputation. According to one city councilman, “The smog in Donora over the years had been looked upon as a black eye. The older folks just didn’t want to talk about it because they thought it was bad publicity.” But as people moved out (and in) and the hazards of air pollution became more widely known, Donora started to take pride in its history and its place in the environmental movement.

  In 1998, on the 50th anniversary of the tragedy, the town erected a historical marker. And in 2008, the Smog Museum opened downtown. It’s filled with photographs and artifacts from the five days when smog smothered Donora. The museum’s motto: “Clean air started here.”

  Did You Know?

  In 1905, Pittsburgh’s John Harris and Harry Davis partitioned off part of their penny arcade, set up a film screen, and charged a nickel for entrance into what Pennsylvanians claim was the first movie theater in the United States. Soon “nickelodeons,” a term coined in Pittsburgh, were popping up across the nation.

  As the motion picture business grew, storefront nickelodeons gave way to motion picture palaces. And once again Pennsylvanians were at the forefront of the change. In 1908, door-to-door salesman Samuel “Roxy” Rothapfel opened a nickelodeon in the back room of a saloon in Forest City. Thirty years later, Rothapfel owned a chain of theaters that included some of America’s largest motion picture palaces, and he managed the country’s largest theater: New York’s Radio City Music Hall.

  You Can’t Do

  That Here!

  In its history, Pennsylvania has had some pretty dumb laws. Example: Did you know there used to be one that disqualified gubernatorial candidates who had participated in a duel?

  Around the House

  •No more than 16 women may live together. If they do, their house is be considered a brothel.

  •Wives may not hide dirt or dust under a rug in their house.

  •Singing in the bathtub is prohibited.

  Travel Advisories

  •All motorists who drive at night on a country road in Pennsylvania must stop every mile and send up a rocket signal, like the kind that comes in a flare kit. Then they must wait 10 minutes for the road to be cleared of farm animals before resuming their journey.

  •If a group of horses approaches a driver on a road, the driver must pull over and cover the vehicle with a blanket or canvas that camouflages it with its surroundings until the horses pass.

  •Selling a motorized vehicle on a Sunday is against the law.

  •In the city of Tarentum, it’s illegal to tie a horse to a parking meter.

  •In Pittsburgh, donkeys and mules are banned on trolley cars.

  •There’s a block in Carlisle that requires all people who park there to pay a $50 annual fee. People must also move their cars every night for street cleaning, even if snow or ice prevents it, or else receive a parking ticket.

  No Fun

  •It’s illegal to buy more than two packages of beer at a time unless they’re being purchased from an official beer distributor. (It’s unclear whether a “package” means a 6-pack, a 12-pack, a case. . .)

  •In Ridley Park, it is against the law to walk backward while eating peanuts in front of the Barnstormers Auditorium while a performance is underway.

  Go Fish!

  •Fish may not be caught by any part of their body but their mouth.

  •The law prohibits catching a fish with your bare hands.

  •It is illegal to use dynamite to catch fish.

  •You must obtain a hunting license to hunt on your own land, but it is legal to fish on your land without a fishing license.

  Did You Know?

  The site on which Pittsburgh’s National Aviary was built was once a prison and the city’s first plant conservatory. Today, it’s one of the largest aviaries in the United States and is home to more than 500 birds.

  Pen-sylvania

  John Updike once said that he and fellow author John O’Hara “could have been nurtured only in Pennsylvania, not in Boston or Brooklyn.” Here’s how the state shaped them . . . and other famous wordsmiths.

  James A. Michener

  Hometown: Doylestown, Bucks County

  Michener was born in New York City, but he was adopted by a widow from Bucks County, Mabel Michener. He always considered himself a Pennsylvanian and credited his early years in Bucks County with fostering his storytelling abilities. Michener said later,

  My mother read to me when I was a boy. I had all the Dickens and Thackeray and Charles Read and Sinkiewicz and the rest before I was the age of seven or eight. And so I knew about books. And there was a good library in our town, and I read almost everything in there. But primarily, I had very good teachers—teachers who wanted to make kids learn.

  Michener went to Swarthmore College on a full academic scholarship and graduated with honors and a degree in English. He then taught at several schools in Pennsylvania. But when World War II broke out, he joined the navy and was sent to the South Pacific. He drew on this experience to write his first novel, Tales of the South Pacific, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. He went on to write more than 40 other books. The most famous: Hawaii, Centennial, The Source, The Bridges of Toko-Ri, Chesapeake, and Space.

  Keystone Fact: Michener dabbled in Pennsylvania politics. In 1960, he was chairman of the Bucks County Committee to Elect John F. Kennedy, and in 1962, he ran for Congress as a liberal Democrat in predominantly conservative Republican Bucks County. Not surprisingly, he lost.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Hometown: Perkasie, Bucks County

  Pearl Buck grew up in China, where her father worked as a missionary, and Chinese was her first language. She became a Pennsylvanian later in life, when she moved to Bucks County in 1934 and bought a 60-acre farm called Green Springs. Buck spent the last 38 years of her life there, writing . . . and winning awards. Some of the books she wrote at Green Springs: His Proud Heart, The Patriot, Today and Forever, and The Child Who Never Grew. But she’s best known for the now-classic novel The Good Earth, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize.

  Keystone Fact: Buck’s oldest daughter, Carol, was born with severe mental and physical disabilities, and Buck herself was unable to have additional children, though she did adopt. This experience inspired Buck to found the Welcome House Adoption Program in 1949. The organization concentrated on placing biracial children who were, at the time, considered unadoptable. Today, Welcome House is part of the larger Pearl S. Buck International foundation, a humanitarian foundation headquartered at Buck’s Green Springs farm in Perkasie.

  John Updike

  Hometowns: Reading, Shillington, and Plowville

  The man who would become one of America’s most famous novelists spent his early years in and around Reading, Pennsylvania. When he was 1
3, he and his family moved to his grandparents’ farm in Plowville, where the elders spoke Pennsylvania Dutch almost exclusively. After high school, Updike went to college at Harvard but returned home in the summers to work for the Reading Eagle, a local paper. He started out as a copy boy and went on to write features.

  Updike published his first book, The Poorhouse Fair, in 1959. That story was set in New England, but Pennsylvania played an important role in some of his other works, including The Centaur, which won the National Book Award in 1963, and the Rabbit series, five books that tell the story of 1950s Pennsylvania everyman Harry Angstrom. (Two of the “Rabbit” books won Pulitzer Prizes.)

  Keystone Fact: Updike has also published many stories in the New Yorker that are set in a fictional Pennsylvania town called Ollinger, a stand-in for Plowville.

  John O’Hara

  Hometown: Pottsville, Schuylkill County

  Like Updike, John O’Hara also created a fictional Pennsylvania landscape modeled after the town where he grew up. In 1934’s Appointment in Samarra (and in several short stories), his characters inhabit a coal-mining town he called “Gibbsville.”