OLD DAYS: A column in a North Carolina newspaper is sure to
bring memories of a place in McKean County that no longer
exists.[neWLine]

Mary E. Fleckenstein penned a piece, “”My Life, My Words,””
about growing up in the town of Kinzua which was inundated by water
when the Allegheny Reservoir was created.[neWLine]

The newspaper identified her this way: Mary E. Fleckenstein
lives in Webster from April to October and in Tavares, Fla., the
remainder of the year. She raised five children with her husband,
who died in 1989.[neWLine]

She writes, “”In the Depression year of 1932, my family moved
from upstate New York to a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania.
This was a very unhappy time for a homesick 7-year-old. When we
moved again in a few years to another small town, some miles
farther north, this 7-year-old was now 10 years old and a little
happier.[neWLine]

“”To enter this town, you had to drive up a steep hill on the
one end, slowly negotiate a sharp curve known as Devil’s Elbow, go
down and around another hair turn, back up the other side and then
down a long hill and glide into town. You had to stay alert here or
you would find yourself going out of town on the other end and on
the way to Corydon or Sugar Run or Bradford.[neWLine]

“”This little town had no library, no theater, no bank (hah –
who needed a bank? These were the Depression years). However, it
did have its own 12-year school, a post office of sorts, a lumber
mill, several watering places called ‘beer gardens,’ the Allegheny
River running through it and a railroad station where my father
worked as a station agent for the Pennsylvania
Railroad.[neWLine]

“”Orders for the trains were dispatched by telegraph to the
station. My father would decode these orders, transfer them to
paper and fasten this paper to a clasp on a long-handled loop. As a
train approached, he would stand by the tracks and hold the loop up
by the long handle. The engineer would lean out of the cab, snatch
the hoop with his arm, remove the orders and toss the hoop out. We
kids were then dispatched down the tracks to retrieve the
hoops.””[neWLine]

More tomorrow.