OIL TALES: Even though, ARG’s 125th anniversary has passed into
history – and what a celebration it was! – we continue to receive
memories from the oil patch.
Our Florida correspondent Mary C. Williams writes to say how
much she loved Angela Nuzzo’s poem which we printed in Round the
Square last week.
“I, too, remember Glycerin Hollow up Harrisburg Run and found it
interesting that she,ðalso,ðhad such fond memories of that place.
There are many fascinating stories about the horrible explosion and
how we took for granted the jobs that many of the oil field
roustabouts performed to make our cars run daily.”
Mary tells us the once started a fiction story about Glycerin
Hollow but abandoned it after realizing that any Internet searches
for facts about nitroglycerin and the oil fieldsðwould make her a
prime target for Homeland Security.
Mary also passes along a memory she wrote in 1987 and appeared
in “Frameworks,” the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford’s
literary magazine. It’s titled, “The Roundhouse Wheel.”
“There lays a piece of Americana out there
on the hills in Northwestern Pennsylvania,
among the caving tin of the powerhouses
that once pumped black gold from the veins of those hills.
“The roundhouse wheel, the monster wheel,
the pumper’s daily bread,
which spun each day and drove the jacks
and drained the soil’s bile.
“The monster’s throat sucked unctuous vessels
and gathered up the blood,
draining, sucking, draining, sucking,
until the wound flowed dry.
“Today the wheel stands silent
and only memories scrape its rust,
and America forgets this place;
a graveyard of tin and grease and rods and jacks
and tanks and pipes and blood and sweat.
“The roundhouse wheel, the monster wheel,
the pumper’s daily bread.
“America forgets them,
as the powerhouse rests in state,
waiting, waiting, no regret,
no shame that it drained the life
from the hills of Northwestern Pennsylvania.”
ANGELA NUZZO: We would like to blame this on our computer
spellchecker – it’s possible – but can offer no other explanation.
On that poem by Angela Nuzzo we had listed her name as Angela
“Nuzzle” and we darn well know better. Our apologies to Angela –
and hope spellchecker doesn’t do it again!
