True Grits: Tough Times, Tough People

By Raymond A. Uzanas

During the latter months of 2008 a financial calamity was unfolding and fears of another Great Depression were sweeping across the globe. In America, once all-powerful behemoths of corporate finance were collapsing into a mere shell of their former selves under a debt avalanche of unknown proportions. Unemployment was rising rapidly and showing no favorites among white and blue-collar workers. Personal and business bankruptcies and foreclosures would skyrocket.

In March of 2009, with the U.S. stock market averages down over 50% from their record highs of a couple of years earlier, Uzanas set out on a road trip through much of the Middle Atlantic and Southeastern United States. From the coal country of western Virginia to the gilded avenues of Palm Beach, Ray visited places and met people that mirrored a wide swath of Americas complex profile.
True Grits is a collection of his stories from those travels that portray the varying challenges faced by Americans as they adapt to an uncertain, but decidedly altered economic landscape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467039024

Raymond A. Uzanas

Raymond Uzanas was a chemist working in the industrial diamond industry and former President of Amplex before he left the corporate world to pursue a world of writing, photography and outdoor adventure. His travels have taken him to all regions of the globe in search of interesting, scenic and culturally diverse places. His first book, Odyssey of a Wayward Traveler, was published in 2007. Ray was born in Hartford and when not globe-trotting, lives in the quintessential New England seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut.

Book preview

© 2011 by Raymond A. Uzanas. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 10/18/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4670-3903-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-3902-4 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011916843

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover illustration by Pulitzer Prize nominated political cartoonist,

Philip Uzanas

Contents

Introduction

Once Upon a Town

Hamming It Up

Peanuts and Sailors

Good Night Mrs. Calabash

Beauty and the Beach

Newport of the South

Tribal Rebirth

Wandering Aussi

Is the Celebration Over

The Tile Man

Sugar, Drugs, and Water Skiing with Gators

Capital Prosperity

From Hunting Plantation to Museum Curator

Tornado or the Times

Southern Belles

Coronation, American Style

The Road to Ashville and Baseball’s Bad Boy

It’s Only a Paper Plume

Women for All Seasons

Coal Miner’s Daughter

The Writer

Hiking Old Rag

Farewell Henry

Commentary

Acknowledgments

I dedicate this book to Steve, Cher and Chris.

Your understanding, encouragement and support have enabled me to undertake journeys of every kind and duration throughout the world. Thank you. Love, Dad

Introduction

I wasn’t alone watching nature’s unfolding drama. Grizzly bears were also keen observers of the annual elk mating ritual. As a solo hiker, armed only with a canister of pepper spray, I remained wary and vigilant to their presence.

It was a bright, sunny day in the third week of September, 2008. An early autumn chill filled the air as I trekked along a remote trail in northern Yellowstone’s fabled Lamar Valley, a region rich with wildlife in our nations’ oldest national park, often referred to as America’s Serengeti. Resident wolf packs were in and about their distant hillside dens, barely visible at times with the aid of binoculars or a spotting scope. Rutting season for the elk herds had arrived and the bugling mating calls of the bull elks reverberated throughout the valley and surrounding canyons. Hiking less than fifty yards away from a bull elk guarding his harem against competing males with his aggressive charging actions, bellowing calls and wild runabouts, I felt as though I was immersed in nature’s primordial opera.

This is as exciting as it gets, I thought at the time. Only after I returned to Mammoth Hot Springs Lodge that evening would I learn from news reports and conversations overheard among hotel guests that the real excitement was taking place 2,500 miles to the east in the canyons of lower Manhattan. While I was avoiding the defensive charges of testosterone-driven bulls and watchful of the whereabouts of Yellowstone’s’ territorial bears, the bulls of Wall Street were in a chaotic retreat with no place to hide while the bears were stampeding across the collapsing financial landscape.

A global monetary crisis, the magnitude of which had not been experienced since the years following the 1929 Crash was unfolding as banks and other financial institutions were perched on the ledge of bankruptcy. Most frightening was the widely reported notion that nobody in government or the private sector had any clue where the financial calamity was headed. It was a sobering and unpredictable scenario. The Darwinian defined life of survival among Yellowstone’s wildlife population seemed so much more orderly and predictable.

In the months that followed, there were prognostications, forecasts, and warnings in print and on TV with economists, politicians, media pundits and alleged financial wunderkinds comparing the current meltdown and its possible aftermath to that of the Great Depression. Though the events and immediate repercussions of that tumultuous episode in our country’s history occurred before I was born, I know of it, in part, through the writings of the American novelist and short story writer, Sherwood Anderson.

In the Great Depression years of the 1930’s, Anderson often traveled from his New York City home and wrote about labor conditions and life, mainly in the South. In a 2008 Wall Street Journal essay, Wesleyan University professor Sean McCann described Anderson’s trips as self-styled missions to see first hand how the Depression was affecting those whom Anderson referred to as the common people. What Anderson found were people stunned by the breakdown of their most cherished beliefs. Traveling through the southeastern part of the country, he witnessed a population confused by a collapse they couldn’t understand. He called what America confronted, a crisis of belief.

His book, Puzzled America, published in 1935, is a collection of essays based on those travels.

Anderson wrote about the people he met. Their stories often mirrored those I heard nearly eighty years later in 2009. For example, he picked up a hitchhiker whom he described as an old man, respectfully dressed, like a well to do working man of ten years ago. Five years earlier the man had been a big wheat farmer in the Midwest. He told Anderson he had a great deal of land but wanted more so he went into debt to buy it. Although already enjoying a successful business, he said banks were offering easy access to credit for potential borrowers and he figured he could grow more wheat by increasing his farm acreage and thus make more money. Sound familiar?

Unfortunately for the farmer, wheat production shifting to foreign lands and lowered worldwide demand for the crop, combined with the crash of 1929, caused the price of wheat to plummet. He owed money to the bank but couldn’t repay his loan. Soon the bank examiners called in all delinquent loans. He ended up losing his farm, home, all personal belongings and, before long, his wife. I have become a common workman, he said, but who wants me?

If I substitute the word house for farm, or the phrase sub prime mortgage for easy access to credit in this story it may not read much different from many being told today.

Anderson’s journeys connected with people of many lifestyles from a European princess to a train tramp. However, a common thread woven through his stories was the optimism and resilience of the citizenry and their embracing of the American spirit. The people he encountered were, in many respects, the essence of the America of that period.

He chose to understand the trials and challenges faced by his countrymen in an intensely personal way. My own curiosity was further piqued as I thought about the America of the early 21st century. What stories would I find on a journey of the sort Sherwood Anderson set out on three quarters of a century earlier? This too was a time of economic uncertainty. Unemployment rates were rapidly rising into double digits and fears of job loss were omnipresent. The challenge of somehow mirroring Anderson’s explorations excited me, so I decided to take a motor trip in the spring of 2009 to see for myself how people and places were being affected by this century’s first major economic downturn.

Anderson’s travels were mostly through America’s South; my trips were more circuitous routes through the mid-Atlantic and Southern states. Regional diversity was important to me. This meant visiting seaside towns as well as interior locations of the same states where the commerce and lifestyles were very different from each other. Where I stopped and whom I met was often serendipitous, occasionally it even resulted from suggestions from someone I’d met along the way. Our interstate highway system, a product of the Eisenhower years, was used only over short distances to and from a few major cities. I preferred the secondary roadways, the Route 66 type, where the time line of contemporary America is ingrained with its prototypical past. These routes afforded me the best opportunities to meet residents of the cities, towns and hamlets along the way.

With few exceptions, I was unsure where I would be the following day. In this vein, I am reminded of the quotation attributed to the French chemist, Louis Pasteur: Chance Favors the Prepared Mind. Or as I would paraphrase it, When opportunity knocks, open the door.

In Puzzled America, Anderson’s stories were almost always told through the words of the people he met as well as his personal observations. The places served as the props or background for those essays. This wasn’t always the case with my journey. In a few instances, the places were as much the story as the people. Notable examples include an idyllic Florida community besieged by the real estate meltdown and the ravaged, coal mountains of western Virginia. But make no mistake, the substance and flavor of my trip through the American Southeast still flowed from the people, just as it did in Anderson’s day. It was the so-called ordinary man or woman who was my most extraordinary resource.

Some stories were told to me in a simple, homespun manner, while others conveyed the passionate convictions of people proud of their lives and neighborhoods. I was touched by the willingness of those I met to share their personal histories with a stranger and remain profoundly grateful for their openness. Reaching out and speaking with fellow Americans across a spectrum of diversity, and in their own backyards, was truly an enlightening and rewarding experience for me. It was as though I had tapped into the affections and the emotional equity that people bring to the place where they live.

There are both parallels and divergences between Anderson’s America and that which I experienced. But at least one constant transcends the times: everyone, I believe, has a worthwhile story to tell. America’s population has become much more diverse and multi national since Anderson’s time. Those cultural divides present unique challenges. But they also present an opportunity for America. It is that same wonderfully diverse collection of people from around the globe making their home here that will continue to be the axis around which America’s greatness revolve

Once Upon a Town

This is a story about my visit to coal country; at least that’s what it was rightfully called nearly a century ago. Time is the irrefutable agent of change and nowhere has its relentless march been more obvious than in this part of America.

A ghost town has been burning from below for over forty years while its remaining seven residents go about their daily lives. I’m not in any remote, unpopulated part of the country, but in eastern Pennsylvania. This is the heart of the state’s anthracite coal region, where the world’s largest deposits of hard coal were found.

Anthracite is the cleanest burning of all coal types and was the main energy source for the Industrial Revolution in America. Its dominance continued through the early decades of the 20th century, reaching peak production in the years of World War I and shortly thereafter. Industrial uses of the hard coal such as in blast furnaces were supplemented by its use in heating homes and businesses in the populated northeastern United States. However new technologies in oil and natural gas would eventually bring about its decline and by the second half of the 20th century, only a tiny amount of anthracite was being mined in the region.

A half hour drive west of Interstate-81 at the Frackville exit is, or was, the town of Centralia. In those heady, earlier days, almost 200,000 men labored in northeastern Pennsylvania’s coal industry and Centralia was an integral part of that cluster of anthracite mines. It was once a thriving mining town of over 2,000 residents, with seven churches, five hotels, twenty-seven saloons, a theater, bank, post office and fourteen general and food stores.

What remains of Centralia in 2009 are a few single family homes, a church and a modest brick municipal building that houses an ambulance and fire truck. The only other manmade features visible to me were a cemetery, a few road signs, and short sections of irregular, cracked pavement that ran perpendicular to the main road before they abruptly ended. I realized those elongated rectangles of asphalt were driveways that now led to vacant lots, overgrown with weedy vegetation where homes once stood. The houses were gutted in the early 1990’s; the same time the U.S. Postal Service revoked Centralia’s 17927 ZIP Code. In what seemed terribly hypocritical in that dying habitat, an approaching road sign read, Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful, Do Not Litter. What happened to Centralia? That’s what I was there to find out.

On a raw spring morning, I retraced my route back a couple of miles to Ashland. A cold, wind driven rain was piercing whenever I got out of my car, and it made me want for a hot cup of anything. The dreariness of the day seemed to mirror that of the region. Driving along Ashland’s main street of aged, shingled row houses, I spotted a small corner coffee shop. I went inside, sat on the one unoccupied seat at the small counter and ordered a donut and cup of coffee. I couldn’t help but notice the lady seated to my left.

There was an ashtray in front of her with three butts that had been smoked to the edge of their filter. She had a short, pudgy look to her and a thick crop of brown hair framed her rounded face. Her friendly bantering with the waitress suggested she was a regular customer. What most captured my attention was the oxygen breathing assembly by her side that she had disconnected while puffing away on a cigarette. She must have seen me look her way and in a casual tone said,

"Name’s Shirley,