The news from Johnstown, PA
The past six weeks it has been bizarre so often seeing Johnstown, PA in the news as a major campaign stop for the Democratic primary campaigns. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and for all I know Ralph Nader, have all made several stops. Until now, Johnstown was most famous for the Johnstown floods (all three of them) and for giving us Spider-Man’s co-creator, Steve Ditko.
In my family, it’s been most famous for giving us my mother.
Whenever we would visit on family trips when I was a kid, we would take in the same two Johnstown attractions: the highwater mark on City Hall downtown, which calibrated the effects of the three floods, and the inclined plane, which to me seemed slower than a nasal drip. One thing that always impressed me was the distinct local accent. Her Johnstown heritage is the reason that my mother pronounces “tire,” “tower,” and “tar” identically — “tarrrr,” like a pirate. Johnstonians also call soda “pawp” and at some point manufactured “yins” as a contraction of “you-uns.” I am not making this up. These unfortunate locutions provided fodder for my father, who told people he’d “rescued her from the hillbillies.”
I call my mother every weekend and never tarrrrr of hearing about her “wushin’ dishes” and “arrrrn’n’ clothes.” On Saturday I was unsurprised to hear that she was cooking sauerkraut and pork, although I was surprised to hear her say that she’d burnt the fish she was cooking separately. She blamed me for distracting her. Mom is 83 and that’s probably the first fish she ever burned, and I’m sure she ate it anyway. Those Depression kids are thrifty. I should have asked her how it’s felt seeing Johnstown in the news so frequently again — at my last count, about 19 people still lived in Johnstown, so the competition for votes must be fierce indeed. This will give me something new to ask her about when I visit the first week in June. And maybe by then, the Democrats will even have chosen a presidential candidate.