The Overnightscape Underground

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4:23:03 – Welcome to Tape Land! On each episode, I’ll present the audio of a cassette tape or historic material from my personal archives.

On a rainy Monday, May 13, 2002, I took a 6 hours drive out to my grandmother’s hometown of Patton, PA, and visited her little brother Ralph, and other relatives. She had been telling me so many stories of her youth there I wanted to visit it for myself.

Notes: Monday, May 13, 2002, arrival in Patton, driving in my Jeep in the rain with Ralph, craftsmanship, talking about the old days, arrival at Louise’s house, shooting rifles, the ghost in the mine, Joe with the knife, Uncle Frank who died in a mine accident, he had a bad feeling beforehand, history of the mine, cats, leg funeral, Grandpap Pinali was a weaver, Alabama, Ellis Island, mine accidents, jobs (miner, farmer, CC camp, blacksmith), slingshots, Sears Catalog, old schoolhouse, Precious the kitty, Dry Run, the town used to be called Columbia but was renamed Reilly’s, Patton, Lumber City (previously named Goods), Uncle Bill the bootlegger, bathroom story, houses, moonshine, cockfights, poker, rambling rose and blackberry bushes, Sheetz, in the Navy in WWII, Guam, Skyline Drive, rain, back on the road, trolley, Cunningham’s Woods, school, driving around, cemetery, mules chewing tobacco, old radio shows, TV shows, geese, coal mines, giant stones, arrival at Ralph’s house, cats, broken service, portage railroad, driving up to the Anna’s, current events, 9/11, ball field, rough road, arrival at the Anna’s, Joe, Dick, the lumber business, computers, cellphones, Joan, 9/11, remembering the family reunion, disposable cameras, “we live where time has passed us by”, heading back on the road, Star Wars, Spider-Man, social hall, back to Louise’s, commuting, the cemetery, hotel for the stone workers, windmill, looking for giant stones, random encounter, stone work, another random encounter, inside a store, McCrory Stores, back to Ralph’s, motorcycles, in the house, back on the road, Joe, history of Patton, back to the house, hobo’s lunch, troublemaker girl, a lotta screwballs in Altoona, morel mushrooms, Joe’s trip tp NYC, Cranberry King, archway painting, Joe can’t place Route 80, sonar school, tobacco, the long drive home.

Released 10/11/21

License for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). Attribution: by Frank Edward Nora – more info at onsug.com