My Shenandoah, 1966
Recollections of a 9-Year Old along with the Ramblings of a 59-Year Old. A Nostalgic Look Back to the 60’s in a Small Coal Region Town.
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As a nine year old in 1966 you find me attending fourth grade at St. Stephen’s; the Slovak parish’s parochial elementary school. We were taught by a team of three Sisters of the Order of St. Francis. We had three nuns and three classrooms for the eight grades.
In our parochial schools we did learn to abide by the Golden Rules of our Good Sisters. We were… if not literally… at least metaphorically… taught to the tune of the aforementioned hickory stick in the lyrics of the song. Sometimes it was a ruler, or a paddle... or a stern glance or a threatening voice, but it was a stricter education with an emphasis on discipline and recognizing proper authority.
Of course our public school peers had it pretty much the same, just with lay teachers instead of the nuns. Corporal punishment was the norm; our parents certainly knew the old axiom “spare the rod and spoil the child.” Our teachers, academics that they were, knew it even better.In this new millennium of the years of 2000, my generation harkens nostalgically to the Good Old Days… “My God, kids today…they run home and complain to their parents that the teacher hit them! Back in our day, if we told our parents the teacher hit us… our parents would smack us again!” Oh, we’ve grown to be complaining curmudgeons… but we did try to hide the fact if we got in trouble with a teacher and we sure weren’t going to go home and blabber about it.
In the eyes of our parents, the teacher was always right. If we were punished in school, we deserved it, and we’d be whacked by our parents again for our purported misbehavior. That extra whack was also for the stain on the family name and for putting the teacher to the trouble of enforcing discipline.My butcher friend, Paul Kowalonek had a great line on this. When I’d walk through the doors of his Kielbasi Heaven he’d publically announce in his ringmaster voice; “Another teacher…These days the teachers all make the big money and they don’t even have to hit the kids anymore.” He viewed the corporal punishment as the manual labor part of our job. I suppose all that whacking could fatigue the poor, overworked teacher.
******************As a fourth grader in 1966, I found myself uniquely upon the cusp of a trend that sees the paradoxical “beginning of the end” of the town’s plethora of separate parish parochial schools.
Fifth grade, next year, will find me in St. Casimir’s School which is the school of the town’s largest Roman Catholic Church. In fourth grade at Stephen’s, I was one of just ten fourth graders and we shared a one-teacher-classroom with grades five and six.As a fifth grader in St. Casimir’s Polish Parish I’d be in a single classroom of all fifth graders. Believe it or not, that single classroom had “Sister” teaching 50 of us. Well, the desks were smaller when you were just a fifth grader. We had seven rows of seven desks and one isolated in the back for troublemakers. “These days the teachers make the big money and …and they don’t even have to teach 50 kids in one classroom anymore!”
We began the school day with 7:30 a.m. Mass at the church. It was compulsory! All school children attended mass up in the church balcony. We boys sat on the left and girls on the right. We sat in pews by grade levels and our instructors, the goodly Sisters, sat near us, their charges. We all sang the hymns and recited the prayers in choral unison. Today a weekday mass in the town may get a handful of senior citizens, and there is no singing.Four of the older boys served as the altar boys while Father Andel, our Pastor and sole parish priest, celebrated mass in Latin from an altar that did not have him facing the people. These weekday masses had no homily and would finish in about 30 minutes putting us in school for approximately 8:00 am each day.
Typical weekday masses were requiems, masses purchased in memory of a deceased parishioner from the buying of Mass cards. The mass and prayers helped reduce the time a loved one’s soul spent burning in Purgatory. The fires of Purgatory purged away the venial sins accumulated in life, purifying the soul for the eventuality of heavenly bliss. Or so we were taught.Purgatory was torturous, but eventually the soul would transcend to Heaven. Die with mortal sins, and you ended up in Hell for eternity.
Father Andel wore black vestments; the gospel for a Requiem was always the same. I believe it dealt with Lazarus rising from the dead but we were never too sure because it was delivered to the standing congregation in the now even more dead language of Latin. Oddly, even though it was in Latin, my peers and I had all the mysterious words of this New Testament reading memorized from countless repetitions over the years. Father Andel’s rhythms and the syllables were inculcated in our receptive minds. Maybe we all couldn’t handle the times tables, but we knew that Latin gospel.Following mass, priest and altar boys would come down from the sanctuary with holy water in the spritzer and a censer with white hot charcoal to bless the catafalque in honor of the deceased parishioner. Father would chant the Latin prayers for the soul’s benefit, add incense and spread some smoke, then spritz the catafalque with holy water.
I recall as a very young, impressionable child in first grade thinking this representation of a coffin, the catafalque, was an actual casket with body. It had the proper shape and was draped in black. In my later years as an altar boy I’d be tasked with carrying the catafalque to the back of the church each day. We’d fold it up weekly to be stored in the confessional during Sunday services. No body in it, in fact it was just a fold-up, uniquely shaped metal table, a very uniquely shaped table.Another powerful moment for an impressionable youth was serving as an altar boy at funerals. While almost all the deceased parishioners were elderly strangers, they were still… well… dead. As a nine year old I went with the priest to the funeral home and approached the deceased at the casket. Seems no one ever considered any psychological implications upon a child in his developmental years… and maybe that was for the best. We seemed to turn out ok. Well at least I feel I did…in any case that’s my opinion… and I’m stickin’ to it.
*****By ten o’clock we needed a break. The lavatory was upstairs with us on the second floor, so at about ten o’clock, after our arithmetic class, we would parade in a group, lining up for the appropriate Boys’ or Girls’ Room door and awaiting our turn. I remember learning the word “lavatory.” At first I figured it was a mispronunciation of the word “laboratory,” like the ones the mad scientist had on television.
Anticipating a laboratory, I must admit that the lavatory was a disappointment. I recall thinking it was pretty much the same as a bathroom without a tub. We’d abbreviate it to the cooler word, Lav but many still asked the teacher to go to the bathroom. This was probably my first experience seeing a urinal; we didn’t have any of those in our bathrooms at home. It was a real-man type of thing.The etymology for Lavatory is from “lave” meaning washing. But we needed it for …well, you know… number 1’s and number 2’s as we said back in the day as kids. We were taught to wash our hand afterwards, but that wasn’t the main focus of The Lav in our minds.
While the good Sisters frowned upon us needing to go to the Lav at other times, it was permissible to use it for emergencies. In fact, we even had a code, we’d raise our hand with two fingers up to designate we needed to use the lavatory rather than to ask a scholarly question. It would usually help to be shaking a bit as well with a grimace on your face.
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About the Book
My Shenandoah, 1966 was originally planned to merely record an objective local history, but its enthusiastic fans will assure you the book developed well beyond that into a highly readable, engrossing work for everyone. Its ample supply of endearing personal anecdotes and historical peculiarities make this local history quite an entertaining read.
The book also makes the jump from mere local appeal by embracing the universal nostalgia of the era we know as The Sixties. The original motive of providing a thorough demography of the Coal Region town of Shenandoah, fifty years before its Sesquicentennial, is achieved. However, the book’s scope is much more universal. It is an accurate picture of a small town America in that Golden Age of our nation’s history; it takes all its readers back on a nostalgic tour of that extraordinary decade known as the Sixties.
The first person narrative has two authors in one. You’ll see the Sixties through the innocent eyes of the 9 year old who lived them. Gain his impressions of his education, his views on the town’s diversity and its prejudices. Thrill in the childish enjoyment of life in small town America of this generation. But, realize that child has grown into a 59 year old historian. Explore with him the town and county’s national prominence and historical figures. Look back at the Corner Stores, the Penny Candy, the Supermarkets, the Cars, the Drinking, and the Holidays. Philosophize with him over the changing times. Look back at a firsthand account of America’s most memorable decade and more.
About the Author
Andy Ulicny, a proud coal region native of Shenandoah, was born in the Locust Mountain State Hospital on April 11, 1957. His father Frank was a legendary local figure throughout the area due to his football playing prowess as well as his coaching and teaching careers. Big Frank was a beloved mentor due to his firm yet caring nature. Mother, Anne Zinkiewicz Ulicny, was held in as high an esteem for her ability to raise the couple’s ten children. Many dubbed her as St. Anne.
After splitting his parochial school elementary education between St. Stephen’s and St. Casimir’s schools, Ulicny became a member of Shenandoah Valley’s Class of 1975. The Blue Devil was highly involved in athletics, drama, chorus, and the school newspaper. Following high school, Ulicny matriculated for four years at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and earned Bachelor’s degrees in both English and Anthropology as well as a Master of Science in Education.
For Ulicny, who settled in Shenandoah Heights, the life in education continued for the next 35 years as a teacher and Language Arts Department Chair at Southern Columbia High School. While at Southern he became known for his turnaround of the SCA Tigers Football team as well as his successful softball teams. He served the district in countless capacities. He coordinated dozens of proms, resurrected the Forensics team and Speech Class, initiated Tiger News as a daily televised broadcast, ran the Veteran’s Day Assembly, supervised the annual Graduation Project, prepared Graduation speakers, and initiated a program of summer overseas travel excursions.
Since 1986 Ulicny has partnered with Hall of Fame play-by-play announcer Jim Doyle in broadcasting football games for WHLM Radio in Bloomsburg. His weekends in the fall are happily spent serving as color analyst in covering the Berwick High School Bulldogs, the Bloomsburg University Huskies, the Southern Tigers, and other local teams.
The broadcasting pair was recognized with a “Pennsylvania Excellence in Broadcasting Award” in 2012 when their call of the Bloomsburg at West Chester Game was nominated and then voted as best football broadcast in the state that year. Ulicny himself has been honored with induction into both the Bernie Romanoski and Northern Anthracite sports Hall of Fames. He is also on Shenandoah Valley’s Wall of Fame as an honored alumni.
Ulicny has a fascination with the area’s past and has done extensive research into both Shenandoah and Schuylkill County’s History. He is a longstanding member of the Schuylkill County Historical Society and specializes in local genealogy. His personal database of local family trees has over 60,000 individuals. The harder the challenge, the more he enjoys the digging into a person’s roots.
With the turn of the new millennium Ulicny took it upon himself to see that all the tombstone inscriptions of the cemeteries up the Heights were transcribed. About a dozen, including four of the largest of the Shenandoah Parish Cemeteries, had never been recorded in any manner.
“My Shenandoah, 1966” is Ulicny’s first venture at writing a book.
Andy Ulicny is happily married to his high school sweetheart, the former Deb Berresford...the only girl he ever dated. They have one beautiful daughter, Nicole, the joy of their life, who lives and works in Norristown, PA.