Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Pennsylvania (8 page)

In 1998, on the 50th anniversary of the tragedy, the town erected a historical marker. And in 2008, the Smog Museum opened downtown. It's filled with photographs and artifacts from the five days when smog smothered Donora. The museum's motto: “Clean air started here.”

 

 

In its history, Pennsylvania has had some pretty dumb laws. Example: Did you know there used to be one that disqualified gubernatorial candidates who had participated in a duel?

 

John Updike once said that he and fellow author John O'Hara “could have been nurtured only in Pennsylvania, not in Boston or Brooklyn.” Here's how the state shaped them . . . and other famous wordsmiths
.

Hometown:
Doylestown, Bucks County

Michener was born in New York City, but he was adopted by a widow from Bucks County, Mabel Michener. He always considered himself a Pennsylvanian and credited his early years in Bucks County with fostering his storytelling abilities. Michener said later,

My mother read to me when I was a boy. I had all the Dickens and Thackeray and Charles Read and Sinkiewicz and the rest before I was the age of seven or eight. And so I knew about books. And there was a good library in our town, and I read almost everything in there. But primarily, I had very good teachers—teachers who wanted to make kids learn.

Michener went to Swarthmore College on a full academic scholarship and graduated with honors and a degree in English. He then taught at several schools in Pennsylvania. But when World War II broke out, he joined the navy and was sent to the South Pacific. He drew on this experience to write his first novel,
Tales of the South Pacific
, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. He went on to write more than 40 other books. The most famous:
Hawaii, Centennial, The Source, The Bridges of Toko-Ri, Chesapeake
, and
Space
.

Keystone Fact:
Michener dabbled in Pennsylvania politics. In
1960, he was chairman of the Bucks County Committee to Elect John F. Kennedy, and in 1962, he ran for Congress as a liberal Democrat in predominantly conservative Republican Bucks County. Not surprisingly, he lost.

Hometown:
Perkasie, Bucks County

Pearl Buck grew up in China, where her father worked as a missionary, and Chinese was her first language. She became a Pennsylvanian later in life, when she moved to Bucks County in 1934 and bought a 60-acre farm called Green Springs. Buck spent the last 38 years of her life there, writing . . . and winning awards. Some of the books she wrote at Green Springs:
His Proud Heart, The Patriot, Today and Forever
, and
The Child Who Never Grew
. But she's best known for the now-classic novel
The Good Earth
, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize.

Keystone Fact:
Buck's oldest daughter, Carol, was born with severe mental and physical disabilities, and Buck herself was unable to have additional children, though she did adopt. This experience inspired Buck to found the Welcome House Adoption Program in 1949. The organization concentrated on placing biracial children who were, at the time, considered unadoptable. Today, Welcome House is part of the larger Pearl S. Buck International foundation, a humanitarian foundation headquartered at Buck's Green Springs farm in Perkasie.

Hometowns:
Reading, Shillington, and Plowville

The man who would become one of America's most famous novelists spent his early years in and around Reading, Pennsylvania.
When he was 13, he and his family moved to his grandparents' farm in Plowville, where the elders spoke Pennsylvania Dutch almost exclusively. After high school, Updike went to college at Harvard but returned home in the summers to work for the
Reading Eagle
, a local paper. He started out as a copy boy and went on to write features.

Updike published his first book,
The Poorhouse Fair
, in 1959. That story was set in New England, but Pennsylvania played an important role in some of his other works, including
The Centaur
, which won the National Book Award in 1963, and the Rabbit series, five books that tell the story of 1950s Pennsylvania everyman Harry Angstrom. (Two of the “Rabbit” books won Pulitzer Prizes.)

Keystone Fact:
Updike has also published many stories in the
New Yorker
that are set in a fictional Pennsylvania town called Ollinger, a stand-in for Plowville.

Hometown:
Pottsville, Schuylkill County

Like Updike, John O'Hara also created a fictional Pennsylvania landscape modeled after the town where he grew up. In 1934's
Appointment in Samarra
(and in several short stories), his characters inhabit a coal-mining town he called “Gibbsville.”

O'Hara had a reputation as a drinker and carouser, and most of his stories dealt with depravity and alcoholism. Class struggles also played a role, inspired by O'Hara's own experience of falling into poverty after his father, a prominent doctor, died in 1924 when O'Hara was 19, after which the one-time prep-school student could no longer afford to go to Yale.
Appointment at Samarra
was initially criticized for its forthright discussions about sex, and
BUtterfield 8
tells the story of a call girl who poses as a model.
(Elizabeth Taylor won an Academy Award for her role in the 1960 film adaptation.)

Keystone Fact:
Penn State's Special Collections Library houses an exact reconstruction of O'Hara's study and a collection of his papers.

A writer of horror stories and often called the father of the mystery novel, Edgar Allan Poe was born in Massachusetts in 1809. His parents died when he was two, and he lived with a foster mother until she died when he was 20. He spent several years moving from place to place around the East until he landed in Philadelphia in 1838. He lived there for six years and wrote several of his most famous works while in Philadelphia.

Poe rented a house on North Seventh Street, where he lived with his wife Virginia, his mother-in-law, and a beloved cat named Catarina. This was where he wrote “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat” (inspired by Catarina), and “The Gold Bug,” which won a newspaper-sponsored contest. He also began work on “The Raven” while living in Philadelphia, though the poem—which made him internationally famous—was later published in New York.

Keystone Fact:
Poe's home at 532 North Seventh Street is now the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site. Self-guided tours lead visitors through the house and the cellar, which looks a lot like the fictional cellar where a murderer kills his wife in “The Black Cat.” Recitations of Poe's terrifying tales and spooky candlelight tours take place throughout the year.

Witty and wise, Benjamin Franklin certainly had a lot to say
.

B
etween 1732 and 1758, Benjamin Franklin published an annual almanac—he took the pseudonym “Poor Richard” and called the publication
Poor Richard's Almanack
. Many of the famous phrases attributed to Franklin came from that work. See how many you recognize.

“Fish and visitors stink after three days.”

“God helps them that help themselves.”

“The noblest question in the world is: What good can I do in it?”

“A good example is the best sermon.”

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

“There was never a good war or a bad peace.”

“He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.”

“Work as if you were to live a hundred years, pray as if you were to die tomorrow.”

“To err is human, to forgive divine; to persist devilish.”

“Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”