Childhood memories

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — 10 Things We No Longer Do

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An old Youngstown bicycle license from the 1970’s

My wife and I were talking about things we don’t do that were a part of our lives growing up in Youngstown. Here were ten things we came up with on this stroll down memory lane.

Buy bike licenses. We remember buying licenses for our bikes. You’d go down to the nearest fire station, fill out a form with your name, address and bike description and serial number, It was supposed to help in recovering stolen bikes. The old ones were metal and there were holes on bike fenders that you could use a nut and bolt to attach the license. Eventually they went to reflective stickers like the one pictured above that were harder to remove. No one I know ever recovered a lost bike. Better to buy a good lock.

“Vintage Children’s Flying Ace Outdoor Roller Skates” by Joe Haupt is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Skate on sidewalks with roller skates that clipped to your shoes. This allowed for a quick switch without pulling off shoes and pulling on skates and the metal wheels held up to concrete sidewalks. Looking online, it does appear there are some modern versions of clip on roller skates.

Buy the latest hits on 45 rpm “singles.” Remember getting the latest Beatles or Human Beinz single. There was a “B” side with a song not nearly as good, usually. The top hits lists came from sales of these. You had to play them with an adapter or insert. Now you download or stream the songs digitally. But vinyl has experienced a comeback. Will 45’s?

Use an old cigar box for your school pencil case. We loaded pencils, erasers, pens, rulers, and protractors into one of these after grandpa emptied one of all his stogies.

Go to sock hops. Yes, we wore socks to protect the gym floor. Girls on one side, boys on the other. Eventually the bolder ones paired up and somehow most of the rest followed while teachers and parents chaperoned.

Climbing Rope, Public Domain

Climb the rope (or not) in gym class. At least for guys, this was a mark that you were fit. It was a moment of triumph when I could finally do this in eighth grade as baby fat finally got replaced with adolescent muscle. For a long time, it was just a dreaded ordeal of failure.

Using carbon paper. Remember when if you wanted to have a copy of a document, you would insert a piece of carbon paper between two sheets of paper or printed forms, including credit card receipts?

Image by Ralph from Pixabay

Returning pop bottles for deposits. When we bought a bottle or crate of pop, there was a bottle deposit that was part of the price. We’d get a few cents back when we returned the bottle, which we often used to buy penny candy. Recycling was built into the system.

Shopping at mom and pop stores. They were more expensive but they often would go out of their way to serve their neighborhood customers. They’d set aside a favorite cut of meat. Or deliver a grocery order. “Pop’s” was the store I’d buy baseball cards at or pick up a bag of sugar when mom ran out.

“Chrome Reflection” by Jenn Durfey is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Polishing the chrome on dad’s car. Bumpers. Grills. Trim. Wheels. At one time, cars were loaded with chrome. It would get pitted and you used a special chrome cleaner to make it shine like new.

I suspect you could come up with a lot more. It’s funny all the things that were a part of our lives that we (or our kids) no longer do. One more that readily comes to mind: we dial phone numbers on phones that have electronic keypads but no dials. Hope you have a fun trip down memory lane!

To read other posts in the Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown series, just click “On Youngstown.” Enjoy!

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Mementos

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My Grandfather’s Mantle Clock © Robert C. Trube, 2024.

I bet you have objects around your home that connect you with your Youngstown past. The clock above was inherited from my Grandfather Scott who passed away in the late 1970’s. He lived on the Southside. Not only does it work, but if you get close enough, you can still smell the cigars he smoked. It sat on the mantle behind his favorite recliner. It reminds me of Sunday afternoon visits and the stories with which he regaled us.

This is a commemorative plate from the Tabernacle United Presbyterian Church from its centennial celebration in 1959. That’s the church in which I was baptized. I remember the building as being a great place for hide and seek with a winding stairway up to the belltower. It had organ pipes in the front of the sanctuary that I thought looked like giant pencils. The building was at the corner of Wood and Walnut near downtown and no longer standing (a search on Google Streetview shows it still standing in March 2021, but now a vacant lot). The church moved to Austintown in the late 1960’s and continues to minister under the name Tabernacle Evangelical Presbyterian Church.

Stored in a box in my garage is my old baseball glove. I loved baseball even though I played it badly! That glove bears countless hours of pitch and catch with my brother in our backyard, pickup games on the playground behind Washington School and Borts Field. It was the glove I was wearing on our church league team when a runner ran into me and broke my thumb. I thought it was dislocated and played out the game. I last used it in games of catch with my son. It’s stiff, needing a treatment of Neatsfoot, and small by today’s standards.

My old Schwinn Collegiate 5-Speed © Robert C. Trube, 2024.

Hanging in the rafters of my garage is my old Schwinn Collegiate. If you look closely, you can still see the Boardman Cycle Shop sticker, where it was purchased from, as well as the bike license sticker Youngstown used to sell. I bought that bike secondhand from a buddy who had graduated to cars, over 50 years ago. I rode that bike all over Youngstown, all through Mill Creek Park, and even to visit some friends over in New Wilmington (my first experience of getting chased by farm dogs!). It has survived trips on bike carriers to northern Michigan where my son and I went on many rides.

My wife’s childhood watering can. © Robert C. Trube, 2024.

My wife said, “you don’t have any of my mementos from my childhood.” So I threw in this antique watering can that she used to water flowers around her home as a child. We still use it for that purpose and it has held up better than the succession of plastic watering cans we’ve bought over the years!

Why do we keep these objects that our kids may think of as junk for a garage sale? Very simply, they remind us of our childhood in Youngstown–and are sometimes still useful. They are laden with memories, mostly of how good it was to grow up in Youngstown.

I’d love to hear of the mementos you still have in your home from younger days in Youngstown. You can leave comments here, or if you are reading on social media, leave pictures. I’ve probably brought back memories for you. Now it’s your turn!

To read other posts in the Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown series, just click “On Youngstown.” Enjoy!

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Snow Forts

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School_kids_in_a_snow_fort_(23677889675)

Provincial Archives of Alberta [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons

Staring at the snow piles around my driveway after shoveling snow yesterday, I was reminded of the snow forts we used to build as kids in Youngstown during those winters when we would get all those snows off of Lake Erie.

The best snows for snow forts were the heavier ones because the snow would pack easier. Sometimes we would just mound up and pack the snow into walls. Or we would get a sturdy box–a wooden box was best–and make snow bricks by packing the snow in the box, then turning it over and adding it to our wall. This allowed us to make curves, or even igloos. Sometimes we would create tunnels to crawl through. If it didn’t snow more than a few inches, you’d end up using all the snow in your yard for your snow fort!

Of course, the reason for a snow fort was to have epic snow ball fights. When you had a snow fort, you didn’t have to make your snow balls one at a time during the fight. You could stockpile them, even let them get hard overnight. Then the unsuspecting neighbor kid who walked by would get clobbered.

Or you could do staged battles–a capture the fort sort of thing. I suspect forts got captured fairly often, unless you had more defenders than attackers. Snow balls really aren’t that good at stopping people!

The strangest thing is that we would often be out there for hours at a time. I don’t remember all the warnings about wind chill. I’m convinced that our nerve endings didn’t fully mature until we were adults. We’d be digging and building and battling in the snow and think nothing of the cold. Sure mom bundled us up in snow pants and coat, scarves, hats, gloves and boots (remember the boots you would pull on over your shoes?). Now, I’m out there snow shoveling for a half-hour, and I’m ready to come in for a hot shower and some coffee.

In my neighborhood, there weren’t many of us who went to ski resorts in the winter. But we found plenty of things to keep us busy–ice skating, sledding, or building snow forts and having snow battles. For a good snow fort, all you needed was snow, a shovel, a sturdy box, and your hands. What could be simpler or more fun?

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Dr. James B. Birch

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James B Birch

Photo from The Vindicator, December 25, 1978, accessed from Google Newspaper Archives

A few weeks ago, I wrote about times when we were sick as children. Among the Facebook comments I received, several mentioned doctors who made house calls when they were sick and several mentioned the doctor who was my pediatrician, Dr. James B. Birch. When I was writing the post, I was trying to remember if he made house calls. When some others mentioned him coming to the house with his black physician’s bag, it all came back–laying on the living room sofa while he examined me, giving me a shot or some medicine from his bag and writing out a prescription for more. How different medical care was just 50 years ago!

My other memories of Dr. Birch had to do with visits to his office, located on the North side at the corner of Wick and Illinois. It wasn’t one of these sterile medical suites you visit today. It was a house. I remember a waiting area with these wood toys, children’s size chairs, a receptionist, and a dog. His exam room was in the back. I remember a table you would climb up on, some diagrams of the human body on the walls, and this gentle man who treated you like the most important person in the world. I never feared going to the doctor’s office, and there was even a time early in my life when I wanted to be a doctor. I think Dr. Birch had a good deal to do with that.

I wondered what became of him, and what more I could learn about his background. It was hard to find much but I did locate a Vindicator article from December 25, 1978 on Google’s newspaper archives, on his retirement when he was nearly 77 years old and had practiced medicine for 50 years. From it I learned that he was born in 1902 in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He moved to Springfield, Ohio, where his father was a college philosophy professor at Wittenberg College. He graduated from Wittenberg and studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He had a sister living in Warren and interned at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. This was followed by residencies in pediatrics in Philadelphia and at the University of Cincinnati before returning to Youngstown for good.

His first office was on Lincoln Avenue and later he was in the old Butler house on Wick Avenue before moving to the Wick and Illinois house that would serve as his office for the last thirty years of his career. The article mentions the wood toys, which came from the Swartz Toy Shop in New York City, and were still in use as he ended his practice. There was a coat rack made by a customer with wooden dogs at the base, mobiles, a facsimile of Snow White and pictures of ducks. At his retirement, he had a cockapoo. All I remember was the toys and the dogs.

The article speaks of the advances in medicine during his years of practice. In the early years, he saw many polio cases. I would have received my first polio vaccination from him. Similarly, he saw vaccines introduced for all the other childhood diseases except chicken pox (for which there is now a vaccine as well). Unfortunately, that was after my time–I had measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox.

He sounds like he was progressive in many ways, favoring breast feeding even when it wasn’t fashionable, deploring junk food and sugary drinks, and opposing some of the rigid schedules for mothers and young children that were advocated at one time. He sounds like a paragon of common sense! He was on the Child Guidance Clinic board when it hired its first child psychologist, and the boards of the Speech and Hearing Center and the Crippled Children’s Center, later the Easter Seal Center.

He apparently stayed in the Youngstown area after retirement and passed away on November 1, 1988. He is buried in Tod Homestead Cemetery. Many of us, and probably in some cases our children, were patients of Dr. Birch, and some of us probably owe him our lives. His gentle manner and his child friendly office in a home removed the fear of going to the doctor. Until a few weeks ago I hadn’t thought of him in years. He was also a part of growing up in Youngstown for many of us and represents an era of medical practice that is past, but worth remembering.