The Great Aunt Alice Collection: A Memoir and Mostly-True Story

By Megan Schreiber-Carter

Wild souls, free spirits, and savage thoughts live on in the remarkable attic of a young girl growing up in the mountainous Pennsylvania Wilds, during the 1960s and 70s, among the grand, historic remains of a turn-of-the-1900s Boomtown. (Richly Illustrated text)

The Great Aunt Alice Collection presents tall tales and telling truths told in rural, Elk County, PA, from the late 1870s to the late 1970s.

"If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday." Pearl S. Buck

Author Megan Schreiber-Carter is a third-generation native of Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains and a career writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781951448011

Book preview

Devil

The Attic

"Don’t go up in the attic—there are Indians in the attic." Dad told us this, and we believed him. Following any subtle creak from the thirdfloor ceiling, my eyes grew wide with the proof that savages were up there, just waiting to get at me.

I was one of the third generation living in Mom’s tall, old, family house in a remote, Pennsylvania-mountain town. The town was well into its decline by the time I was born into the family, in 1963. By then, our attic had been collecting abandoned keepsakes for about half a century.

Eventually, I noticed that Dad came and went from the attic without being attacked. "I made peace with the Indians, he told me. If I go up in the daytime, just me, long as I’m quick about it, they stay hidden."

Once I was old enough to sneak up the stairs, but not tall enough to reach the light switch, I got my first peek at the spooky, shady place. I saw it through one eye, from around the corner, and just at the top of the landing. A thin path led the way past dark piles of odd shapes and boxes. I felt certain the sheet-covered shapes were Indians because they’d hide from you. I took off.

In bed that night, I began feeling sorry for the Indians, up there in the dark with all that stuff and dust and having to hide and be so quiet. I wondered why they stayed, how they got there….

The Basement

Like me, Dad was relatively new to our brown-shingled house. He stored mysterious stuff in the basement. Content as an outdoorsman and a bachelor, he’d never planned to marry and was in his fifties by the time he had and we were born. Not only had he been a college football player, he’d also been an Army captain and a boxer during WWII, in the Pacific. Until recently, he was our borough’s manager. Now, he was the natural science teacher and winning football coach at our county’s Catholic high school.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Dad said, on the day he’d enlisted his three, little girls to help him straighten up in the basement. "Where’re you going with those C-rations? No, no, those aren’t trash. Those are good! Let’s take those upstairs. We’ll have those for lunch. We watched his powerful hands peel back the weird, green-brown-metal lids, with the attached, metal key. He said these combat rations were used when fresh food or mess-hall food wasn’t available. Nothing else would do—he insisted that, at least, we had to try them. The peanut butter, jelly and crackers weren’t good, but they were better than the other decades-old stuff, like the chocolate, which tasted like dust. One of my sisters started choking on it. Can it, clowny," he said. She stopped.

That afternoon, Dad showed me a grand, black staff with a bulbous, mother-of-pearl top. He kept it tucked up in the basement’s rafters and said it was given to him as a gift of gratitude by the chief of a Pacific-Island nation. I stood there, mouth open, picturing a kingly, native man presenting the staff. I was impressed. It seemed like a black-and-white Tarzan movie to me.