My wife, Jess, grew up behind the West End levee in Warren, Pennsylvania. The Allegheny River runs along the base of this levee, and the river here is scalloped with gravel bars and boulders and fishes well for smallmouth in the summer. I fished there a lot before I met Jess on the Internet. This is pretty far from the good trout water, so take it with a grain of salt, but my wife’s brother, Joe, claims he caught the biggest trout of his life there on a rooster tail.
Jess’ dad, Joseph “Pittsy” Muscaro, lived in Warren his entire life, in three different houses on Pine Street. His dad’s parents came from Italy in the 1880s and his mom came in 1907, when she was 3. A combination of affordable transatlantic passage, poverty in southern Italy, and an industrial complex that needed laborers for mines, mills, and railroads, drove a period of intense chain migration to Western Pennsylvania. The west end of Warren is still significantly Italian—the Barardis, Barones, Muscaros, Thomasonis, and Girardis still live there—and you can still eat at Chiodo’s Ferro Cucina.
My wife’s paternal grandfather enlisted in the Army when he was 18 and fought in WWI. When he was discharged he took a job at Struthers Wells, a metal-fabrication company in Warren that made equipment for the first successful oil well in the world, which opened in 1859 in nearby Titusville. At
