WHEATLAND FLATS IV: Once Upon A Time

by Ann Angel Eberhardt

This is the last in a series of blogs recording memories of Wheatland,  a small town near the western border of Pennsylvania where my family lived from 1945 until 1949.

---

WHEATLAND FLATS IV: Once Upon A Time

More About the Slag Dump

A recent email from Tom Hoovler, a former resident of Wheatland and Farrell, PA, vividly describes his memories of the red-hot steaming slag that was dumped over a hillside by the local steel mill:

Steel Mill Slag Ladle.

Ah, what memories. When I was growing up, you could see the light from the dumping of the ladles all over the valley. Up on the hill in Farrell, where I lived, the night sky would light up with a bright orange glow. This was even more intense in the winter when there would be snow on the ground that would reflect the glow from the sky.

And quite often, you would hear a dull thudding sound, when the engineer would lurch the train forward to shake loose the nearly solid slag residue that remained in the ladles. If you were watching from a fairly close distance, as I would sometimes have the opportunity to do, you would see that remaining solid residue come tumbling from the ladle in one big chunk, and it would finally collapse into the pit. Quite often, this didn’t happen until the engineer had made the train lurch several times in order to shake it loose.

My father worked for Dunbar Slag Company on Ohio Street, just on the opposite side of the river from Wheatland. This was located on Sharon Steel property and the molten slag pits were not far from their location. There were times we would go over there at night to see the dumping of the ladles from a close proximity. Very good memories, indeed.

Elementary & High Schools, Revisited

More memories (and a correction) from Tom Hoovler:

Your experience of walking to the Wheatland elementary school seems comparable to the stories my mother has always told, especially about the trains. And your description of the elementary school experience at the time was not all that different from hers, in fact, it really wasn’t all that different from mine, with the exception of the walking distance. Fortunately, I never had to walk more than three blocks when I was in elementary school.

There is one thing, however, that you were incorrect about and that relates to the Wheatland high school students being bussed to school. They never actually did that. As my mother would attest, they had to huff if up over the hill all the way to Farrell High School. And walk home. Everyday. Apparently, you weren’t aware of that because you had moved to Sharpsville by then. 

Even in my day, when the Farrell School District starting busing elementary students to schools outside of their own neighborhoods, all high school students still had to walk. I had a one-mile walk to the high school, but at least it was not as steep a grade as the Wheatland students still had.

Professor King 

One of the most colorful figures in my Wheatland recollections was Professor King, my first piano teacher. I can still see him, hovering tall over me, dressed in dark clothing that contrasted sharply with his flowing white hair and leaning on a cane. I had the idea that he wore a black cape, but maybe that was just because he loomed so large in my eyes. We always called him “Professor King.” I don’t recall ever knowing his full name. My father describes in his memoir:

One of my well-worn music lesson books from the 1940s. [Photo by AAE]

There was room in the shack [on Second Street] for an upright piano that the nearby Methodist Church gave me when the church was donated a new one. Both Michael and Ann began taking piano lessons from Professor King and did so for many years afterward. The Professor was a retired older man, who was impressively tall, intellectual, and always meticulously dressed. He made house calls to his students, a modern-day version of the traveling musician.

The Professor would walk from one house to another in Wheatland, teaching children, black or white, the basics of playing the piano or violin. My brother and I continued our lessons with him when our family moved to Sharpsville. By this time, we rode the bus to his Wheatland residence. Eventually, he lived in an apartment in Sharpsville, and we walked to our lessons with my mother. I remember that, as she took her turn at her violin lessons, I would lose myself in the stories and black-and-white photos in his stack of Life magazines.

My brother and I continued our piano lessons with various teachers throughout high school (and I did so into my college years) thanks to our parents’ encouragement. Looking back, I now appreciate not only my parents’ resolve but also the Professor’s efforts to provide us with a solid foundation in the study of music.

Bicycles, Roller Skates, and Cherry Trees

Mike Angel & playmate. Wheatland, PA, April 1950.

The area in which our family lived in the Wheatland flats was semi-rural, allowing us children plenty of room to play at our various outdoor activities. Dad bought us second-hand bicycles and helped us learn to ride them. The bikes were a bit too large for us at first which made learning to ride them a challenge. But we persisted, and soon enjoyed the feeling of freedom and the excitement of speed as we rode with our friends up and down the cinder-covered dirt road that was Second Street. I think my brother’s blue bicycle was a Schwinn. I know my red and silver bicycle was a Raleigh. It had a wire basket and a curious row of holes along the rim of the rear fender. I either imagined or was told that string or wire used to be threaded through the holes and connected to the axle, forming a protective web that kept little girls’ dresses from being caught in the spokes.

Although our street had no sidewalks, that didn’t stop us from roller skating even if we had to carry our skates to other blocks in the neighborhood to do so. The sidewalk in front of the church on Church Street was our favorite because part of it consisted of dark gray slate slabs. Oh, how smooth that surface was compared to the bumpy ride on concrete walks! Our skates were all-metal with leather straps, typical of kids’ skates in those days. We used a skate key to turn bolts and lengthen the skates as our feet grew and to tighten the clamps that held the skates to our shoes.

In those days, we had no inkling of smartphones or video games, but we had plenty of things to do. On long winter weekends indoors, we had coloring books and comic books (which we traded with friends) to keep us busy. Then there were the summer playground activities that were provided for us by the town. I created quite a few brightly painted plaster of Paris figurines — including small busts of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington — for my parents to display on the family bookshelf.

We also had our own personal playground in the form of the cherry trees in our front yard. Their short height and widely spaced tree limbs were perfectly designed for climbing. The trees encircled a small open area with a table and benches, where our family and friends would sometimes gather for a nighttime bonfire under the stars.

The Traveling Carnival

A high point in our summers in Wheatland was the week or so when colorful tents and rides of a carnival would spring up, as if by magic, in the middle of an empty field across from the church. My brother and I were given a few coins and then sent off, unaccompanied by any adult, to roam about the carnival grounds to our hearts’ content, carefully deciding how our handful of coins would be spent.

I no longer can recall the rides or the food at the carnival, but the freak show stays in my mind, as grotesque to me now as it was then. Hearing the carnival talker shout, “It’s all right here! Sights that will scare you, that will astound you! See the bearded lady, the strongest man in the world, the amazing contortionist!” piqued my curiosity enough to pay the entry fee and enter the tent to see for myself. One of the shows featured the Spider Lady. You peered into a lighted box and saw the head of a lady on the body of a huge black spider. It was obvious even to my young mind that it was an illusion created by mirrors. Another “freak” was a man who claimed he could bite the head off a chicken. This was the most disturbing act, but it too was trickery, which was fortunate for the hapless chicken.

Of all the carnival games, I was sure to visit the Duck Pond because I won a prize every time I played. All I had to do was pick up one of the little yellow rubber ducks from the many floating by in a trough of water. The number on the bottom of the duck matched a number on one of the various prizes displayed on the shelves along the back of the tent. I never won the grand prize of a large stuffed toy animal or a curly-haired doll in a fancy gown, but I was happy enough winning trinkets, such as a shiny ring, a plastic comb, or a tin whistle.

Demographics Once Upon a Time

Indeed the flatland in the southern part of Wheatland was once a little community, populated by residents of various backgrounds. According to the U.S. Census of 1940, many of them were relatively new to the United States, including Romanians (as was my grandfather), Polish, Hungarians, Slovakians, Austrians, Germans, Lithuanians, Czechs, Scots, Croatians and Italians. There were others who were African-American and white southerners (including a few of my mother’s relatives from the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky) who traveled north to find work.

The men were mostly hard-working clerks or laborers in the local sheet mill, steel mill, Malleable Steel, Tube Company, Westinghouse, tin mill, the coal yard, on the railroad or the “road project.” The women kept the household running and the few who were employed were teachers, waitresses, seamstresses in the “sewing project” or domestics. The projects were possibly home-front WWII efforts.

There were still over three decades yet to go before the tornado destroyed the town. Although I no longer lived in Pennsylvania by then, I can imagine the succession of families quietly living out their lives in the flatland of the Borough of Wheatland, Pennsylvania, before the community was gone forever.

Sawhill Memorial with this message: “Dedicated to the memory of those who suffered the death and destruction caused by the tornado which crossed this site on May 21, 1985. Wheatland PA.” Location: Corner of Clinton and Main streets, Wheatland, PA. [Date of photo: June 1993]

---

Residents of the Borough of Wheatland who lost everything, and in some cases their lives, in the tornado are memorialized by a monument on the corner of Main and Clinton streets. The word “SAWHILL” etched in the granite refers to the two plants of Sawhill Tubular Products which were among the buildings that suffered the greatest losses in lives and property. [See the Memorial as of August 2014 on Google Street View here.]

— Tom Hoovler, FHS 1976, Buffalo, NY, and
Ann Angel Eberhardt (SHS 1958), Goodyear, AZ, December 1, 2016.

---

See Also:

WHEATLAND FLATS I: Third Street

WHEATLAND FLATS II: Second Street

WHEATLAND FLATS III: Elementary School & Pony Pictures

---

WHEATLAND FLATS II: Second Street

by Ann Angel Eberhardt

This is the second in a series chronicling my memories of 1940s Wheatland, Pennsylvania, a tiny village in the Shenango River flatlands of western Pennsylvania, that was totally destroyed by a tornado in 1985.

In this installment you can read about my family’s move to a barn, our neighbors and playmates, grocery stores big and small and one on wheels, the first television I ever saw, my dad’s cow and sheep, and the dumping of the slag.

---

Wheatland Flats II: Second Street

Thinking about our family’s 1945 move from 199 Third Street to 32 Second Street in Wheatland, PA, reminds me of The Jeffersons’ theme song, “Movin’ On Up.” We had not only moved to higher land to avoid the periodic flooding from the nearby Shenango River. We were moving upward financially as well, just as many families were able to do following World War II.

A year after my dad returned from the war, he decided he didn’t have much of a future in subsistence farming and accepted a position with Sharon Steel Company as a draftsman. Later, with the printing training and experience he had gained before the war, he secured a position in the composing room for the local newspaper, The Sharon Herald.

The Shack and the Barn

Having sold the Third Street house and now earning a regular income, Dad was able to remodel my grandfather’s barn into a home for our family. During the year this went on, our family stayed in a small three-room house adjacent to the barn. It had been my grandfather’s home since the 1930s. By 1946, Grandpa was tired of Pennsylvania’s cold winters which he felt contributed to his arthritic aches and pains. So, at the age of 62, he rode the Greyhound bus from Sharon across the United States to a small town in California where he contentedly lived out the rest of his life.

We called Grandpa Angel’s house “the shack” since it was roughly built with board-and-batten and tarpaper and didn’t have much in the way of modern conveniences. I remember bathing in a galvanized tub on the table in a very chilly kitchen. In place of an electric refrigerator, my mother would store food on a shelf outside the kitchen window in the winter and used an icebox that contained a huge block of ice in the summer.

I don’t recall the actual move to the remodeled barn, but it must have been a big occasion for my parents. We could now enjoy the marvels of a telephone, a modern refrigerator, a hot water tank, an indoor bathroom and lots of space! The only reminder that it was once a barn was the sliding barn door on one end of the building. It led into a hayloft, still full of sweet-smelling hay.

I visited Wheatland several years after the devastating tornado of 1985, only to find fields of weeds scattered with debris. No landmarks were left to help with orientation, except the street signs. All I could find of my childhood home was its stone foundation.

Ann Angel and her mother, Susie, in front of barn being remodeled into a house. September 1947, Wheatland, PA..

Left to rt: Simone, Ann & Mike Angel, Beverly. May 1947, Wheatland, PA.

Ann and Mike Angel with playmate, July 1945, Wheatland, PA.

Playmate, “Kitsy.” May 1947, Wheatland, PA.

Click on an image to enlarge.

Neighbors and Playmates

After the move to the remodeled barn, which involved using a horse and wagon to haul our household belongings, my memories begin in earnest. After almost 70 years, I can still name some of the families in the area of this short section of the unpaved cinder-covered Second Street, most of whom provided one or two playmates for my brother and me.

At the very end of the street on our side were two families, the Papadics with a son named Murrell, and a mother and her daughter, Beverly, whose last name was Blosz. Our house was the third one from the end of the street and was across the road from Mr. and Mrs. Dobbs. They were a kindly African-American couple in their 60s from whom my grandfather and mother sometimes bought home-made herbal medicine for our aches and pains. In his memoir, my father wrote:

Mr. Dobbs was an herbalist who had a big following of “patients.”… He was well-liked and held in high esteem as a professional throughout the immediate area. Mr. Dobbs was not hesitant to show his knowledge of which greens to pick and prepare for medicinal purposes. Mr. Dobbs was literate, a good conversationalist, and a non-active member of the Masonic Order. … Mrs. Dobbs, a slender, small person, was also liked by all the neighbors. She doted on our children as if a grandmother. …We were welcomed in her home, as she was in ours.

The Billobocky (Bielobockie?) family lived next to the Dobbs and included a little curly-haired girl named Simone. Farther down Second Street, on the corner of Second and Church streets, was the Behr (Bayer?) family. Kathleen Behr, who introduced herself as “Kitsy,” was my very first friend, whom I met when we first arrived in Wheatland. Her house was a mansion in my mind. It was a tall two-story wood frame structure and had not one, but two bathrooms upstairs. At the edge of the road in front of the house was a once-ornate but now weathered stone step. I was told this step was used to step down from horse-drawn carriages in the days before autos.

Other names are a bit fuzzy now, but studying the U.S. Census of 1940, I’m reminded of the Ludu’s and the Radu’s, who were among our Romanian friends. And I recall the Roach family, whose little girl Judy was another buddy of mine. They lived a block away on First Street, next to a little mom-and-pop grocery store. 

Grocery Stores Big and Small and One on Wheels

The little corner store in Wheatland Flats must have had a name but I don’t recall it. The steps up to the store’s front door seemed high and steep to a little girl, but the climb was worth it when I had a penny for a piece of candy. In case one’s preference was on the sour side, the store had a barrel of pickles in front of the candy counter. For most of the items you wished to purchase, you told the grocer what you wanted and he retrieved it from the shelves behind the counter. On the left was a meat counter and behind it was the butcher working at a thick wooden table set on a sawdust-covered floor. The store served as our “mini-mart” between the family’s weekly visits to Wheatland’s Golden Dawn Supermarket on Broadway or the A&P in Farrell.

Occasionally, our house was visited by the driver of a brown and yellow Jewel Tea Company truck. This little door-to-door “Home Shopping Service” on wheels sold pots and pans, dishes, cleaning supplies, groceries, and dry goods. And a Hopalong Cassidy coloring book that my mother purchased for me and which I treasured for years.

My First Ever TV Experience

Indian Head Television Test Pattern by RCA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

---

I watched my very first television at the home of another playmate, Emile, who lived on what was probably West First Street. TV programs would only air in the evening and while we anxiously waited for them to begin we would stare at a test pattern featuring an American Indian. I’m not sure what we watched in those early days, but I do know the pictures were black and white and rather snowy. Sometimes the picture would start moving up or down as if a film projector malfunctioned, but there was a “horizontal”  button on the TV set to fix that. There was also a “vertical” button and a dial to lighten or darken the screen. To change a channel, the father in the family would pull on cables that ran from the TV through the floor and to the antenna on the roof. I remember the ghostly figures of nearby residents politely standing outside of the living room windows also watching this amazing combination of radio and a moving picture.

Cows and Sheep

Even after Dad left farming to become a wage-earner, he kept one of his cows. She was a docile orange/red and white spotted cow, whom we simply called “the Guernsey.” Every morning and evening, before and after work, Dad would walk to the end of Second Street and down into the pasture with a milk bucket and stool, followed by several of us kids after school, and a cat or two. Our job was to use small thin tree limbs to switch at any flies pestering the cow. The cow produced enough milk to share not only with the cats but with neighbors. Mom turned the cream into butter, using a wooden paddle churn that was operated by turning a handle. Although we children enjoyed these gifts from our cow, the best part of all was the pastureland itself, an acreage of thick green grass which we could romp in and explore as we pleased. 

Ann Angel and the sheep. Second Street, Wheatland, PA, 1947.

Dad and Mike Angel with our cows. Second Street, Wheatland, PA, 1947.

Click on image to enlarge.

For awhile, Dad also pastured a couple of sheep in our large expansive front yard. I’m not sure what he intended to do with the sheep. Maybe he was channeling his Romanian father’s occupation as a sheep farmer before coming to America. In any case, the sheep were useful in keeping the grass and weeds trimmed.

The Slag Dump

Hot slag pours from smelter. This is not the view from Wheatland, but it gives an idea of how dazzling bright that slag was. (Wikipedia Commons)

“They’re pouring the slag!” was the call to run outside and watch one of the most spectacular night-time sights of our childhood. Along the top ridge of a hill about a half-mile from our house, a switcher engine pulled a string of huge pots into place. Then each pot would tilt two by two, pouring parallel rivers of hot molten slag down the slope. The slag was the byproduct of steelmaking by the local steel mill and in those days was discarded as waste. We marveled at the brilliant orange-yellow-red colors of the slag lighting up the sky, as thousands of sparks and huge plumes of smoke rose upward, accompanied by the odor of burning metal. It was as thrilling an event as any fireworks display and it occurred for our viewing pleasure several times a month.

— Ann Angel Eberhardt, SHS 1958, Goodyear, AZ. October 2016.

---

See Also:
WHEATLAND FLATS I: Third Street
WHEATLAND FLATS III: Grade School & Pony Pictures
WHEATLAND FLATS IV: Once Upon A Time

---

WALNUT STREET: Early Businesses

by Ann Angel Eberhardt

 

Mahaney’s, a men’s clothing store on the corner of Main and Walnut streets. Torn down in the early 1970s. Source: Donna DeJulia.

Typical store front on Walnut Street in the early 1900s through 1950s.

Years ago, the borough of Sharpsville, Pennsylvania, population approximately 5,000, had its own little “downtown,” a place I knew well in the 1950s and 1960s. It consisted of a row of businesses on either side of a block-long two-lane paved stretch known as North Walnut Street. Side-by-side, in buildings possibly constructed in the late 1800s, were stores offering a variety of goods and services, such as hardware, men’s or women’s wear, insurance, jewelry, newspapers and magazines, barber services, groceries, lunch, or miscellaneous items in a five-and-ten-cent store.

The Sharpsville Advertiser Printshop

Around 1950, my father, August Angel, began his printshop business in a storefront on that street while our family was still living in nearby Wheatland. The following is an excerpt from his memoir, Trivia and Me:

One day, as I leafed through the classified section of The Sharon Herald, I saw a three-line ad for the sale of a print shop in nearby Sharpsville. For further details, I drove from Wheatland to Sharpsville and was greeted by Mr. Cubbison, who was seated behind the counter. A young high school boy was operating a 10 x 15 C&P [Chandler and Price Co.] hand-fed press in the back of the room. I scanned the shop quickly and asked the sale price. Both shop and price were favorable because I realized the shop’s potential as a moneymaker.

Mr. Cubbison must have been startled when I told him to write a receipt of $700, and I would take over the shop as soon as he could let it go. He said I could start the next morning if I wanted to, so I gave him the cash and we shook hands. Mr. Cubbison came out from behind the counter, seated in a wheelchair and aided by his young helper. As he beamed over the unusual and spontaneous sale, I asked for his good wishes. He remarked that I made a good deal and would find the shop profitable, then wished me the best of luck.

We shook hands again and he was wheeled to his car for his last commute to Youngstown, Ohio, where he lived. He was glad and relieved to give up the shop and eliminate a long daily drive to work. I was happy and proud to be the owner of my first print shop. Though I hated to lose the income from the steady work at the Sharon Steel [as a draftsman], I was enthusiastic about the new adventure and gave Sharon Steel notice of my departure. The purchase of the shop changed the direction and goal of my life.

My brother, Mike Angel, and I would both accompany our dad in his Model A Ford panel truck to the shop on weekends. While Dad printed flyers, booklets, letterhead stationery, programs, receipts, etc., on his hand-fed presses, Mike and I would pretend we were office-workers as we played with the assortment of rubber stamps and scrap paper. We have never forgotten the distinct smell of printer’s ink and the solvents Dad used to clean the presses.

Memories of Other Walnut Street Stores

More about Walnut Street in the 1950s and 1960s from Mike:

I spent a lot of time on Walnut Street (most of it was doing useless things): Lee Supply and Company, Chuck McCracken’s News Stand, the pool hall, where I spent many unproductive, but wonderful hours learning how to be a punk, Five & Dime (the lady working there would not take old money, only shiny new coins and crisp bills).

Next to an apartment building sat Mahaney’s Clothing Store. When Mahaney’s store closed, I remember they either auctioned or sold vintage items such as button shoes and knicker trousers. The owner, George Mahaney, was the mayor when we moved to Sharpsville.

Across Main Street from Mahaney’s was the drug store and the grocery store. Underneath that row of buildings was a tunnel where the creek ran. We would walk through the tunnel for the entire length from Mahaney’s Store to the railroad tracks.

A crowd gathered at “Hurley’s” on North Walnut Street to bid farewell to several of the town’s young men as they boarded a bus for the U.S. Marine Corps base in South Carolina, 1960. Photo courtesy of the Angel Family.

On the corner of Main and Walnut was Hurley’s [also known as Burke’s Dairy]. Most every Sharpsville male of our age knows of Dick Hurley and the good times we had hanging out at his place. I don’t remember that very many girls hung out there.
Next door to Hurley’s was where an older man and wife had some kind of business. I remember buying certain year pennies from him for my coin collection. The same building was where the Cubbison Printing Company was when Dad purchased the business. 

I can’t remember the other businesses on that side of the street except that another 5 & 10 cent store was established after the one (only shiny new coins accepted) across the street went out of business.

To be continued…

— Mike Angel (SHS 1960), London, KY,
Ann Angel Eberhardt (SHS 1958), Goodyear, AZ,
and excerpts from August Angel’s memoir, “Trivia & Me”, 1996.

---

See Also:

Walnut Street Businesses II
Walnut Street Businesses III
Welch Hotel: Early History

---

BUHL CLUB FOR GIRLS

by Ann Angel Eberhardt

At ten years old I was an uncoordinated and bashful kid, but there I was in 1950, performing with a tap-dancing group of girls of the same age on stage before an audience of mostly proud parents. As the pianist played John Philip Sousa’s march, “Stars and Stripes Forever,” we tapped our feet and twirled tiny batons in approximate unison.

Our costumes, sewn by our mothers, were sleeveless white piqué dresses with short circular skirts. I suppose the horizontal rows of red rickrack across our chests were meant to suggest the braiding on military band uniforms.

We were the youngest of several tap-dancing groups, assembled according to the age or skill of the dancers, and this recital completed my first year of dancing lessons at the Julia Buhl Girls’ Club in Sharon, Pennsylvania.

During the early part of the twentieth century, Frank H. Buhl and his wife, Julia Forker Buhl, used much of their fortune from Sharon’s steel industry – Buhl Steel Co., Sharon Steel Castings, and Sharon Steel – to provide recreational and health facilities for their community. Frank Buhl must have been highly influenced by his father, also a steel magnate, who had owned the Sharon Iron Works and founded the Christian H. Buhl Hospital. Among Frank and Julia Buhls’ many gifts to the area were the F.H. Buhl Club, the F.H. Buhl Farm, and support of a free public library and his father’s namesake hospital. A trust was established and under supervision of the F.H. Buhl trustees, continued supporting their gifts.

After Frank Buhl’s death in 1918, Julia Buhl continued giving to charitable causes. By the mid-1930s, she opened a girls’ club which I remember as a tall red-brick building just off State Street, the street on which their mansion is still located.

It was at the Buhl Club, as we called it, that my short-lived dancing career began. We youngsters seemed to have free reign of the several floors of activities. After our tap lessons in the dance studio, my friends and I could choose to read books in the small library, play billiards, try our hand at duckpin bowling, or pound out a musical piece on the piano in the music room. The facility’s design apparently mirrored the F.H. Buhl Club that opened in 1903 for men, having held the same types of offerings. In fact, when the girls’ club closed in 1987, it was merged with the F.H. Buhl Club, a facility that exists to this day for the enjoyment of both male and female members. (Source of historical description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_H._Buhl_Mansion accessed 11-June-2014.)

To travel the few miles to the club from our homes in Sharpsville, we girls took the public bus, our black patent leather tap shoes dangling by their grosgrain ribbon ties from our hands. I don’t recall whether we paid dues for the dance lessons or club membership, but we did need a coin or two for the bus.

I attended lessons at the girls’ Buhl Club for four years, from 1950 to 1954. I remember dancing at subsequent recitals to “The Hot Canary,” “Tea for Two,” and “The Blue Tango” in costumes ranging from a brown and yellow canary outfit to a blue blouse and skirt ensemble.

As my eyesight dimmed, a result of undiagnosed myopia, I struggled to learn the new steps that were introduced at each session. The teachers were patient, sometimes singling me out to demonstrate the steps to me very carefully, probably assuming I was mentally challenged rather than visually so.

Regardless of my shortcomings, hanging out at the Buhl Club was among the best experiences of my youth. Because of the Buhls’ generosity and concern for others, I gained independence, confidence, and social skills in a grand old building set aside just for us girls.

–Ann Angel-Eberhardt (SHS 1958), Phoenix, AZ, June 2014.

---

See Also:
BUHL PARK I: A 1950s Playground
BUHL PARK II: Clubs & Library
SNAPPING THE WHIP at Buhl Park

---