132 Walking Around Monongahela: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

 

132 Walking Around Monongahela: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Walking Around Monongahela

 

We're back in Monongahela now, a town of strong principles even if some are wacky or

plain wrong. Pragmatism is a secondary theme here, scorned by most unless it keeps to

its place, a bittersweet oddity because practicality is the town's lingua franca. The

phenomenon of open scorn for the lower orders isn't seen in my Valley, never to the

degree I experienced it later in Ithaca, Cambridge, and Manhattan. The oppressed are

insufficiently docile in Monongahela for anyone to revile openly. So the Pinkerton

detectives found out when they went to do Andrew Carnegie's dirty work at Homestead

during the steel strike of 1893. There is only one restaurant in the town proper, "Peters."

 

 

 

It's a place where the country club set drinks coffee alongside rubber jockeys from the

tire vulcanizing shop across the street.

 

Several nights a week, long after dark when house lights were blazing, Mother would

gather Sister and me for long quiet walks up Second Street hill to the very top, then along

the streets on the ridge line parallel to the river. From these excursions and the morning

walks on River Hill I learned to listen to my senses and see that town as a creature in

itself instead of a background for my activity. We would walk this way for hours,

whispering to each other, looking in windows, and as we walked, Bootie would deliver

an only partially intelligible stream of biographical lore about the families within. I

realize now that she must have been talking to herself. It was like having a private

Boswell to the Dr. Johnson of town society. When she had some money, which was now

and then, we would buy candy at the little grocery at the top of the hill and share it

together, sometimes two candy bars for the three of us or in flush times a whole bar

each — and in the weeks following Christmas when there was holiday money, two each.

On two-candy nights the atmosphere seemed so filled with chocolate perfume that I could

hardly sleep.

 

When my granddad was a boy in Monongahela he watched John Blythe, a planing mill

operator, rebuild large sections of the town in the Italianate style. Blythe had no degree,

and the religion of professional licensing was still in infancy, so he just did it without

asking anyone's permission. Whole sections of the town are now handsome beyond any

reasonable right to be because nobody stopped him. If you see a keystone over a window

molding, it's likely to be one of John's.

 

When my granddad was a boy in Monongahela he used to sit in Mounds Park, site of two

ancient burial mounds left there by the Adena people three thousand years ago. In 1886,

the Smithsonian robbed those graves and took the contents to Washington where they

still sit in crates. To compensate the town, the government built a baseball field where the

mounds had been. When my granddad was a boy, school was voluntary. Some went, but

most not for long. It was a free will choice based on what you valued, not a government

hustle to stabilize social classes.

 

The College Of Zimmer And Hegel