111 Reservoir Street, Oil City, PA

 

My great aunt Gene was my mother's, mother's sister.  She was the oldest of seven children born to Glenn Pressey Clinger and Elmina Marsh Clinger.  The family lived in the Erie, Pennsylvania area.  Aunt Gene wrote a series of 'chapters' about life and family growing up in the 1920's and 30's organized by the addresses where they lived.  For posterity, I am providing them here.  They are edited for flow and clarity.  I have also added current day images from Google maps, real estate pages and newspapers for further information.  

*****

Whether we had to move or why I don't know but I do know that I did not like this place at all.  Perhaps it was the only house in the West end that would take a bunch of children.  The house belonged to an old Jewish family and every casement over a door there was a little container with a Yiddish prayer inside.  There was a porch across the window to the left hand side of the house.  I do remember there was a spring house in the back with a path going up to it.  My mother always put the milk in it. We children used to walk up the run to where, according to the legend, cows drowned.  The reservoir was quicksand and we would pick huckleberries.    Dad worked at the store with Aunt Ethel, May McVeigh and Grandpa.  Grandpa was able to go to the store those days.  Next door, at 113 Reservoir, there was a barn where Mr. Freedman had a junk business or junk yard.  It was a horrible place.  I hated it.  

I turned 12 at this house and was determined to have a birthday party.  After all, I was twelve on the twelfth month and the twelfth day.   I can't remember if I had a party or not but I do remember Mother and Father trying to talk me out of it.  

One time while my father was upstairs there was a knock at the door.  It was my Uncle Andy, my Aunt Ethel's husband with a gun.  He was going to kill my father but my Mother stepped in and what she told Andy I don't know.  The reason Andy was so upset was something about Dad meddling in his and Aunt Ethel's private life.  I think Uncle Andy had another women on the string.  

As I told you, there was a barn next door and Carolyn, Ted and Cork were playing in it when they all came screaming home that there was a man on the second floor.  It could well have been a tramp.  Mother just got them in the house and closed the door.  That was the end of that.  I remember I had a sinus infection and was in bed when all of this happened.  I remember a robin built a nest on the window sill going down stairs and we would watch and watch that nest, baby birds and all.  

We lived in this house when Cork took a ride in a wagon down a large embankment behind the house.  He came to tell Dad that the wagon went "like a female" down the hill.  He also called "Oh Come All Ye Faithful", "Oh Cowboy Be Faithful".  He always swore up and down that it was "Oh Cowboy Be Faithful".  

All the children, Carolyn, Ted, Cork and Doug had chicken pox in that house.  I remember my cousin Bill coming down with them and Carolyn first getting spots on her belly.  They quarantined in those days, even putting up a sign outside the home stating someone had chicken pox.  I didn't get them.  Haven't had them to this day but I couldn't go to school.  I remember not coming home until after 8pm.  It was winter and I would sled ride until then.  

I can remember watching my father leave and drive down the alley and away he went.  Mother and father must have had words because she told me and the other kids to stand by the window and watch him go.  I never found out what happened but I do know he used to go to the Acadia Club and the Masonic Temple and play cards there.  

I remember one rainy day, Cork scrambling up the bank in front of the house after something.  It was a baby rabbit trying to find his home.  I think about that sometimes and how Cork let it go and it running away.  

I played radio with the family, Bill and Aunt Ethel.  Dad was the announcer and we kids put on plays and things.  Dad would call out KDKA-the Pittsburgh call letters.  I remember going across Reservoir Street to the Shaffer's and listening to some president being sworn into the office.  I think it was Franklin D. Roosevelt, the damn democrat.  He repelled prohibition and started the county drinking in the open instead of in a speakeasy.  

I do remember mother and father going to Uncle Art and Aunt Lib's wedding.  The wedding was October 9, 1933.  One Christmas I remember getting a zeppelin for Cork at Prince's store.  It cost all of 50 cents and was big enough for him to sit on.  I remember stopping at my grandfather's store to show dad and Aunt Ethel that I had got the zeppelin for fifty cents.  That was when money was cheap.  This is all I remember about Christmas in this house.  

We had our first female dog here and she had puppies.  The mother dog got poisoned and the puppies also- from the mother's milk. I can still see those puppies out in the side yard and Ethel and Mother pouring syrup of Buckthorn down the puppies throats.  We lost the mother and all the puppies and buried them up on the hill behind the barn.  

One day Mother had a headache and I went over to the Shaffer's to use the phone and call dad.  They would not let me use the phone because Andy's oldest brother had shot his wife, Sarah, and his daughter Virginia and then turned the gun on himself.  They were waiting on a phone call.  This happened in Erie.  There was a son, Leonard, in the Navy and he came home for the funeral.  Mother received a fur skin cape from Aunt Ethel and it laid on the cedar chest in Carolyn's and my room.  I used to scoot by it because it came from the house where Virginia died.  She was 23 and I was 13.  

This is all I remember about 111 Reservoir for, as I stated before, I hated the house and having to live in in was even worse.  

Gene Nelson

7/25/95

The News-Herald

Thu, Jan 26, 1933 ·Page 1

The Conneautville Courier

Wed, Feb 01, 1933 ·Page 8