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 1949
Photo
This
page was created to bring back our memories of the "Good
Times".
  
  
  
"The
only thing new in the world is the history you don't know."
- Harry Truman
 Click
on links below for:
Historic Langhorne Association
Lauble Family Pictures, Bucks County Dirt Roads
Our
Early transportation (Trolleys)
Langhorne
Pictures 50's
musical tour
Click here to view
my garden of the week by F.L.E.G.C.
The sights of town:
People actually set on
their front porches, pre television, and recreation rooms, and
communicated with one and other. Everyone seemed to have
seed or Sears Roebuck catalogs looking at them wistfully. These same porches had milk and bread delivered
to them by the "Bread man" and the
"Milkman". Cloths hanging out on cloths lines on wash day,
some actually washed outside in the summer with their Maytag
wringer washers. Mothers at home tending to the
children. The "Child Care" of our day meant being
watched by grandparents or aunts and uncles, since people
generally lived in the same hometown with their relatives. Kids taking groceries home from the local
markets in there "little red Wagons," or pulling a
brother or sister around town in them. Walking or riding our bikes
around town on the sidewalks, not the streets, and respecting
private property. People fixing inner tubes with patches,
repairing our bikes and other toys not made of plastic. People
working on and repairing their own cars, yes, in these times it
was possible. Things
getting repaired and not replaced, then handed down to a younger
brother, sister, or neighbor. It wasn't recycling then it was
called making do with what you had. Everyone could see what us kids
did, and they kept us on the straight and narrow. Children
occupying themselves and playing without many amenities and
enjoying it. The High School (L.M.H.S. pre Neshaminy) Kids
rushing to the Playwicki Luncheonette for lunch and fun at
noon or walking to Wood Shop class on Pine Street. At Halloween
the stores large windows painted with fall & ghoulish murals
by the High School kids. Kids going to the drug store's soda
fountains for a real Cherry Coke, Breyer's Milk Shakes, or Penny
candy. The Bell Telephone operators, yes operators, changing
shifts at the Bell building on Bellevue Avenue. Summer time and most of the homes only had the
screen door shut all night, doors and windows open, and you
slept without fear. No burglar alarms most had dogs, not
purebreds though, mostly mongrels.
Parades, the town decorated with flags and homes festooned with
red, white, and blue, especially Memorial Day, and the picnics
and family gatherings that followed.
The sounds of town:
On quite evenings lying in
bed you could here the steam trains and sometimes it's whistle
on the Pennsy line or the Reading line in "South
Langhorne," pre Penndel.
Click here to see trains and the sound of the whistles. Who can forget the sound of coal
going down the coal shoot to the basement coal bin. When it rained, the many tin roofs
in town gave off a hypnotic, almost trance inducing tone, to
sleep by. The Jesse W. Soby Post Cadets Drum
and Bugle Corps practicing at the American Legion Post on
Richardson Ave. The High School band playing at the football
games at Cherry Street, the crowd cheering our team, and the
cars honking horns all over town when we won. Yes, even the sound of horse and wagon, the last
being Shelton from down in Langhorne Manor who was plowing and
working his horses till the mid-fifties and Sagorski the baker
on Bellevue Avenue. Cattle mooing, walk two blocks east on Maple
or five blocks west and you could see cattle grazing in the
pasture, Woods School's Steers or Vogenberger's Cows. Even
waking up in the morning to the Rooster's morning cry, Mr.
Cuffee behind us had many chickens; Chicken coops seemed common
for eggs and "fresh chicken dinners." Hunting season
you could hear the guns going off, or target practice down by
the railroad and the Neshaminy Creek, and no one was
"cowering" in town worried about it. Click here for:
Remember When (Rifle Clubs) Phones had
different rings to them because many had party lines and you
needed to dial only four numbers for local calls. The siren calling
the firemen and the town clock tolling the time. Sundays the
church bells tolling, calling people to worship. Songs on the
old 78 and 45 records, click here to take a: 50's
musical tour of
our area.
The smells of town:
In the spring Honeysuckle
and Lilac. Lilac seemed to be a popular shrub of the time, and
Honeysuckle grew most everywhere, this was pre weedwacker and
power mower time so lots of areas grew up. Ah, the smell of
manure freshly placed on the numerous town gardens. In the
summer everyone knew what the neighbors had to eat, since the
windows always stayed open, pre air-conditioning time but plenty
of fans. On warm summer evenings with a slight breeze you could
smell the surrounding farms mown hay. If it was a wet summer you
could smell the cesspools, but then sewers and the development
it allowed came, boy those cesspools would smell good now. In
the fall the smell of burning leaves, a smell I love to this
day, even though it's against the law. In the winter the smells
of coal, wood, and kerosene used to heat at the time.
In those times our
recreation: Riding our American made
J.C. Higgins or Schwin bikes down to Bridgetown or Playwicki
Park, to go swimming or fishing in the Neshaminy Creek. Getting on the PTC
bus and for five cents going to Highway Pool, admission twenty
five cents, to go swimming. "Thumbing" or hitchhiking
a ride most anywhere, one of the older kids thumbed to
California and back. Amazing, our parents didn't have to
fear for our lives, from traffic or perverts. When it got real
hot, the wash tubs in town showed up outside, with the kids
thinking boy this is great fun. Playing ball all day, using
friction tape to keep the bats and balls usable. Playing cowboys and Indians with our cap pistols. Climbing
trees, building tree houses or log forts in the numerous
wooded areas around the town. Target practice with our Daisey BB
guns which everyone seemed to have. Going
hunting or trapping, right outside of town. Playing with
electric trains or building with an erector set. Playing cards,
checkers, chess, board games, marbles, hopscotch, hide and seek, or mumblety-peg. Roller skating
with clamp on skates, hoping you didn't loose the key for
tightening them. Making home made Kites and flying them at the
Pine Street playground or Cherry Street sports field. Collecting baseball cards, looking for our
favorite Philadelphia A's players, a Gus Zernial, Ferris Fain,
or Bobby Shantz card. I put Yankee
players in the spokes of my bike, making it sound like it had an
engine.
In the winter, sledding on
the golf course or down Marshall Avenue. Snow ball fights, building snow forts,
and Igloos in snow drifts, why did it seem like we had more snow then?
Ice skating on frozen ponds or going to Silver Lake by Bristol.
Playing Ice Hockey on St Mary's pond in Langhorne Manor without
any goal nets.
Our entertainment:
Going to the movies in
Newtown or South Langhorne, the big trips where to Trenton and
Bristol. Our movie heroes, Abbott and Costello, Tom Mix, Gene
Autrey, Roy Rodgers, remember the Saturday serials at the South
Langhorne Movies? Attending a performance of the Langhorne
Players, in the Players Barn by Bucktoe. Getting the opportunity
to see some of our friends perform and many of their parents,
all this in a barn modified to accommodate viewing very good
acting. Poor heating, no air conditioning, yet these happened to
be well attended locally important events. Prior to using this
barn, performances were at the Morris Barn on the Old Lincoln
Highway. Then came the modern Lincoln & Roosevelt
Drive In Movies, the air conditioning, opening your windows or a
dash board fan. Then to Greenwood
Dairies for a Pigs Dinner. A really big reward, a trip to Willow Grove
Park to ride the Thunderbolt and visit the Fun House. Listening to the radio and playing
"78" records on the "Victrola," WOW, when
the 45's came along what an improvement. The Saturday night
dances held at the Community House. The yearly firemen's
carnival, bingo & card parties and dinners held at the
firehouse. Going to Langhorne Speedway and watching the dirt
cars and Indy cars, or the drag racing on most Saturday nights
near its end.
Actually reading books, and listening to the "radio"
with such shows as, The Shadow, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,
Amos and Andy, Name that Tune, Superman, Jack Benny, ball games,
and boxing matches. When television (black and white) showed up we had
I Love Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet, Gunsmoke, Lassie, and Frontier Playhouse to watch, boy,
the Roller Derby and Wrestling sure seemed exciting and real
then. The out doors was glorious color, so we went out and
enjoyed it!
Our Schools:
The Friends School on Maple
Ave., the Pine Street School (once the High School) with the High School wood shop
behind it, the old Langhorne Middletown High School on Cherry
Street, and on to Neshaminy Junior/Senior High School on the Old
Lincoln Highway. Our teachers where Mrs. Johnson, Mr. Franks,
and Miss Fox, not Ms. Becky or Mr. Dan. Kids actually expected to walk to school in all
sorts of weather, rain coats, galoshes, and lunch boxes or brown
paper bags as standard needs. No cafeterias or government
breakfasts, taxes that weren't taxing to our parents, how did we learn? Maybe because they actually educated
us then, and not indoctrinating us. Click
here for L.M.H.S.
Alma Mater.
Class
of 1959 web page
Excerpts
from e-mails to me: Those
were the days weren't they! Life was so simple then.
Remember when the High School was still in Langhorne and the
night before a home football game we always had a pep rally and
bonfire in the school playground. There wasn't a spare
piece of wood in town and the high school band paraded all over
town. And also all the boys were removed from the school to the football field at
3PM to move the bleachers. Can you imagine what these
spoiled kids of today would have to say about that. Click
below for football history
Neshaminy Football History page
#2 When
we first moved to Pa. from Md. in '52, I attended 3rd grade at
the country club, does anyone remember that?
click below for:
Tribute
to Flight 93 (Heroes) on 9/11, one a 1961 Neshaminy graduate
Lorraine Souders Bay (she was senior flight attendant on that
flight). Who also attended Langhorne United Methodist Church
as a youth with many of our friends.
Our Churches:
Langhorne United
Methodist,
Langhorne Presbyterian, St. James Episcopal, Bethlehem A.M.E.,
First Baptist Church, and the Friend's Society.
Our Commerce:
Kauffman Brothers Contractors,
Candy's Greenhouse & Florists, Vogenberger's Farm, Clayton Ervin Plumbing, Ryan's and then McCloy's Unity Frankford
Store, A&P Store, American Store, Clark's Groceries, Playwicki
Luncheonette, The Flame, Sagorski's Bakery, Davenport's Chrysler Plymoth Dealership,
Anderson's Garage, Rollin's Esso Station, Bell Telephone, the
Post Office in the Borough Hall Building, Irwin's Drug Store, Langhorne
Drug Store, Nangle's Department Store, Carfagno's Langhorne
Cleaners & Tailors,
Sataski's
Shoe Repair, Langhorne Hotel, our Barber Shops, Tursi's,
Hamilton's and Vince's (when going for a hair cut was a social
event as well to catch up on the town news and gossip),
Defrehn's Hardware Store, Hibbs, Colter, and Lauble had trucking
Businesses, Rossiter Real Estate & Insurance, Townsend
Realty & Insurance, Peoples National Bank, Langhorne Savings
& Loan, Woods School, Delaware Valley
Advance, Reed's Print Shop, and Langhorne Country Club
Our Doctors:
Dr. Noe, Dr. Connors, Dr
Eden, Dr. Weinstein, Dr. Strause, Dr Cooley, Dr. Skull, Dr.
Wixon, Dr. Reinquist, Dr. Smith Yes, many of these caring
gentlemen made "house calls" to the sick and charged
the astronomical fee of "one or two dollars". The
nearest hospitals, Abington or Trenton.
Our earned money:
Caddying at the golf
course, finding and selling golf balls, mowing lawns, finding
and returning soda bottles for the deposit (five cents),
delivering groceries, newspaper delivery, sifting
coal ashes and returning unburned coal, and shoveling snow in
the winter. Some kids had trapping lines and sold the fur,
others went to Newtown or Bristol and set Bowling Pins for 15
cents a game, pre automatic pin setters. Some
worked part time at Woods School, lots of us got to do the
manual labor on the many farms still around then. Others got
jobs at the local stores, maybe dipping Ice Cream or making
"real" milk shakes at Greenwood Dairies or Irwins Drug
Store, stocking shelves, cleaning up, or whatever to make a
buck.
Our cars:
No longer made are the Crosley, Hudson, Packard, Nash, Edsel and
Kaiser made but one year in 1954. Boy I miss the Rumble seats on
the cars still around at the time, what fun riding in them and
gee whiz no seat belts. Foreign cars in these days, yup foreign
to us then.
Our fears:
Polio and other diseases
that medicine hadn't come up with cures for. The A-bomb, we had
to practice at school "drop and cover", and they
tested the fire siren once a month with the air raid sound as
opposed to the fire sound. The Nike sites might have to be used.
Our parents, our teachers, our
neighbors, authority figures and God. Parents were respected and
their rules were law.... Children did not talk back.....And yes, a good old
fashioned spanking from our caring parents, whose tough love
taught us many lessons.
Contributed
Reminiscing:
Charles,
The Langhorne Kids pictures are great, even though I can't
really identify anyone in them! Are the two boys in the identical striped polo
shirts you and Francis? Am I in any of them? I think some of them are
before my time anyway; I didn't move to Maple Ave. until about around 1950 I
think. We lived out in Midway when I was born and then on North Bellevue for a
couple of years. It sure was a much simpler time, even with the drawbacks that we
tend to forget when looking back. Remember the guy who used to come
around with the horse drawn wagon collecting old rags and newspapers? I can
still hear him calling, "Any old rags?!". The little barber shop that
was in front of our house, and was moved over to Richardson, near the little store
where we bought candy and useful things like wax teeth and those hand
buzzer joke things. We grew up with the black residents of Langhorne, went
to school with them and played with them and never realized it wasn't that way
in every
small town. I rode everywhere on my bike without much
worry about traffic; everybody had guns and used them, but I never worried about getting shot, in or out
of school. I
was thinking about that little luncheonette my Mom ran out in
front of our house; I guess we closed up because of competition from the
gourmet food across the street at the Flame :-). Going out to dinner often
meant walking
across Maple Ave. to the Flame. We walked to the drug stores,
hardware store, library, bank, butcher shop, A+P store (our
"supermarket"), even to school. My bike took me to faraway places like the hobby shop in
Newtown, friends in Penndel, Trevose, Feasterville. Weekend shopping trips were to
Mill Street, Lits in Morrisville, or even down to Philly on the Reading. Our
playgrounds were our neighbors' back yards, behind the firehouse, the
greenhouses, the golf course (looking for crawfish under rocks in the little
stream or sledding in the winter), the schools, or just hanging out on
friends' front porches. We had no video games or MTV; how did we ever survive?
:-).
My reply: From left to
right in the photo are myself, my brother Francis, and Ronnie
Davenport. This picture was from our lawn on Maple Ave. the car
is a 1941 Plymouth of my Grandfather's. The apartments across
the street where
Transue's and the left most one was Bunny McIlvaines parents
apartment. The dog was our dog Whitey, a mongrel my brother had.
For the life of me, don't know if you are in any of the
pictures. I am trying to identify everyone with the help of
friends and family.
The drawbacks, which I remember well, taught
us many lessons. Patience, self-control, appreciation,
imagination, adaptation, ingenuity, respect, hard work, and
camaraderie. Maybe a better word would be inconveniences and
challenges that built character.
Charles:
The first thing that popped into my head when I saw the photo of
St. Mary's Manor was the fun we had ice skating on the pond. How
many of us fell through the ice there and had to make that long
trek home uphill -- all the way! --soaked to the bone and frozen
like a popsicle when we reach the house!
Then I started thinking about other childhood
winter entertainment. Waking up Christmas morning hoping Santa
had brought you a new Flyer sled and making the trek to the
Langhorne Country Club golf course to try it out. Your badge
of courage was successfully completing a run down "Suicide
Hill". And, like ice skating on the pond at St. Mary's,
manys the time you'd end up in the 'crik' (creek) at the bottom
of the hills there. I think it was poor planning on the part of
the Boro to have both our favorite winter sports arenas nestled
at the bottom of a long, steep hill!
We had plenty of 'natural' things to entertain
ourselves. One of the biggest thrills was when one of the
familys got a new refrigerator or one of those new fangdangled
square things with tubes they called t.v. and we kids got the
box! Oh the wonderful places you could go in your mind with that
box!, A 'spaceship' transported you to another world; shaped
just right it was a race
car on a grassy knoll;"Keep Out!" never looked better
than on our cardboard box club house; and, it was a ramp for
jumping with your bike until it finally gave out. But you didn't
dare throw it away because the cardboard itself was still good
for making signs for things.
I can remember waking up Sunday mornings to the
harsh odor of smelts boiling on the kitchen stove. I could see
the backstreatch and 3rd turn of the Langhorne Speedway from my
bedroom window on the second floor of the house on Pine and on
race day it was hard to keep still in Sunday School knowing what
was waiting after. Rubbing elbows with the (now) legends. Which
probably explains my love of NASCAR racing now. And my Memorial
Day weekends are planned around the Indy 500.
I had a wonderful childhood in a little Boro in smalltown
USA and life was never better. Those days are long gone, and the
memories are fading, but the love learned there will never die.
Click here for
W. W. H. Davis'
History of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Illustrated 1884
Charles,
Thanks for sending the Bucks County history. It's fascinating.
I've been reading it since 3:30 AM since I have a bad head cold
and can't sleep. It's strange to think that there was once a
trolley system throughout the county. That was before my time,
but I do remember those orange Neibauer buses that stopped
in front of Irwin's Drug Store and would take one to faraway
places like Newtown and Bristol. That's progress, I guess? I
know my
eyes are really getting bad, though, when I'm looking at the
enlarged copy of the Bucks Co. map and still can't find
Levittown. I remember playing in the wreckage for a few days
when "Bellevue" was torn down and before it was hauled
away. Never had that much fun at the Mall. Come to think of it,
before they built the Mall I used to hang out at the airport.
That was a lot more fun than the Mall too! And a great place to
park to watch the movies at the Roosevelt Drive in across the
street.
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Langhorne Kids
