Golden Childhood Memories from Wyalusing

By Wes Skillings

How did a nice little Jewish boy survive growing up in a Gentile town in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s? The answer is he didn’t just survive. He flourished.

Most of Barry Aronson’s childhood was spent in Wyalusing to which he came in 1936 at the age of eight and didn’t leave until the age of 18 when his family moved back to Wilkes-Barre. His memories of his childhood in Wyalusing are golden and he still treasures the friendships he made here. Many of those old friends have passed on but remain alive in his memory.

 “Wyalusing was a magnificent place to grow up,” Barry says today.

He was born in 1928 and will be 76 this year. Known by most as the owner of Towanda Iron & Metal, from which he has retired and turned over to his son, Brad, he also gained local fame on the musical stage and as a patron of the arts.

Barry Aronson

Barry remembers the love for plays and music growing up, starting with the play, Rumplestiltskin in which Dick Dibble played the starring role and Barry’s character got to yell at him incessantly. From then on, it seemed there were a lot of plays and performances.

He remembers the cold milk at the old creamery on Riverside Drive, which the creamery manager, Fred Friery and others workers there would let the kids drink on hot summer days.

He remembers there was a Social Studies teacher at the high school who picked on Malcolm Dunklee and his brother, Keith, came over “and got a hold of the teacher, put him against the wall, and said, ‘Touch him again and I’ll break your $%^# neck.’”

“Keith walked out of the school, walked down the stairs and joined the service.” There are vivid memories of Ted Cobb going off to war and word that he was killed—one of the first from Wyalusing to die in World War II.

He talks about a day when he was in “fifth grade or so” when Sadie Taylor was his teacher and a student we’ll merely identify as Jake, who was the stereotypical bully. “He was a little older than we were, being in the third grade three or four years, and he used to bully us all the time.”

“We decided one time we were going to get him during recess. We all ganged up on him and took him down.  Sadie Taylor came out and was hollering, ‘Don’t you touch my Jake… He’s my Jakie and you leave him alone.’ That was the last time he bothered us.”

His most poignant memories, aside from his childhood friends, center around a couple of incidents involving his father.

His parents, Jacob and Sophie, rented a house on John Street from Will Gannon in what was known familiarly in those days as the Improvement Grounds. He and his friend would go in the field across the road, today known as Wyalusing Borough Park, and play football. It was Barry who owned the football they played with. Such luxuries were rare on the heels of the Depression and not taken lightly by a boy or his peers.

“One day we’re out there playing and my mother comes out and yells, ‘Barrrryyyy! Come and get your violin lessons!’ I took my football and went home. That was the end of the game.”

That might seem fodder for some terrible ridiculing—a boy being called from a manly contest to practice  the violin, but Barry says his Wyalusing friends all had divergent interests and talents and respected their own uniqueness. “That’s one thing we never did. We never harassed each other about things like that.”

In fact, musical talent was highly respected. “We were all involved in singing,” he says of those times. “We all had a great time with the singing and all the other activities we were involved in at school.” To this day, Wyalusing has the reputation as a musical community, and Barry Aronson still fervently supports high school and community musical productions here.

One of Barry’s famous true stories—he also tells a lot of more fictionalized stories that end with a punch line—is from Wyalusing involving his father, L.V. Murphy and Fisher Welles at the Peoples State Bank. For Barry, it shows, in a nutshell, the difference between how we do things today and how they did them in the 1930’s.

He was probably about eight or nine years old and went to the bank with his father who needed a $100 loan to buy some scrap iron. It was just a matter, as his father saw it, of buying the material, selling it at a profit and paying back the money in a matter of days. However, Mr. Murphy, who was both bank manager and cashier, had certain guidelines he had to follow to keep his bank board and auditors happy. Those who remember Mr. Murphy will tell you that he was both efficient and resolute in the performance of his duties.

When Jakie Aronson requested the loan, Mr. Murphy asked what he had for collateral. After all, $100 in those days was often more than a month’s pay for most of the middle class. Having been virtually wiped out by the Depression in Scranton a few years earlier and renting the house in which he lived in Wyalusing, the elder Aronson was making a new start. In fact, the early years of the business, he would drive back and forth every day from Scranton in his truck, one of the few material things he was able to keep after his businesses went under, and would drive around collecting scrap from local farmers. That was the start of the Wyalusing Auto Wrecking Company.

But the industrious and honest Jacob Aronson, despite being a relative newcomer, was apparently well thought of by the powers that be here. One of them was Fisher Welles, father of Clayton “Cappy” Welles, who would become one of Barry’s closest boyhood friends. Fisher Welles also leased the land on which the Aronson scrap metal business stood just off the bend linking John Street to Riverside Drive. The business was on both sides of the roadway in the vicinity of where Park Place and the sewage treatment plant now stand.

That brings us back to the loan request at the Peoples State Bank, which was then located on the corner of Main and Church Streets, where the Gannon Insurance Agency now stands. Jacob Aronson had no collateral. As he informed Mr. Murphy, “All I got is my name.” Sorry, the stalwart bank officer informed him, but you can’t get a loan without collateral. Leaving the bank with his young son, his body language betraying his dejection, they met Fisher Welles coming in.

“Jakie, what’s the problem?” the senior Welles, a director of the bank, asked. He was informed that he had come for some money to buy material and that he had intended to pay it back Friday of that very week.

That’s all it took. “Murphy, give Jakie the money,” Mr. Welles commanded. “He’ll pay you on Friday.’”

“I’ll always remember that,” Barry says today. They just shook hands. Didn’t even sign any papers. It was a matter of trust and respect between two men.”

He also recalls another incident in which a local farmer needed a carburetor for one of his vehicles.

“My father turned to John Heeman, who worked for him and says, ‘Johnny, go out to that vehicle and take the carburetor out….’ John went out and got the carburetor and brought it to my father. The farmer says, ‘How much do I owe you?’ My father says, ‘Fifty cents.’”

The farmer didn’t have that kind of money on him and Jakie Aronson assured him: “You can pay me tomorrow or whenever you get the chance.” The next day, Barry recalls, his eyes crinkling into a smile, “the farmer shows up with fruits, chickens, vegetables, you wouldn’t believe.” It was bartering in its simplest form, with each man, be he farmer or banker, providing what he could afford and often with great generosity.

“That’s the way things were done in those days,” he noted. “A man’s word was law in the thirties. There was no question about it.”

Another of his favorite stories came when he was older, playing with the Wyalusing High School basketball team. The coach was Willis Benson and it was in the middle of winter when the team had to travel to St. Basil’s in Dushore. There were no buses for transportation, and the team—five or six of them— all piled in the car with the coach.

“It was snowy, slippery, and we were going around a corner… He went right straight through a field, missed the curve. There we were in the middle of the field, stuck.”

The players clambered back out and immediately threw themselves into the task of pushing that car out of the field. “It took us more than an hour… and we got to St. Basil’s an hour late. We were so tired we couldn’t play. They beat us by 100 to 10 or something.”

He remembers playing at the old gym in Camptown, with fans seated along the sidelines, barely out of bounds. “We’d be running down the court and people would stick their feet out and trip us… I’ll never forget that.”

Barry Aronson’s treasure trove of Wyalusing memories between 1936 and 1945 doesn’t stop there. A few of the highlights follow.

• One Halloween they picked on a fellow who worked for the railroad by the name of Mr. Probst, who lived across the road from the old high school on Church Street. One night they put flour on the porch. “We rang the bell and raun like hell. He comes out, ‘Who’s there? Who’s there?’ He goes back in the house, flour all over his feet, and his wife could have killed him.”

• “The worst thing we ever did was smoke cigarettes and maybe drink a beer or so… My father caught me once and that was it.”

• One day they were standing at the corner downtown where the old Peoples State Bank used to be, now Gannon’s Insurance, and somebody gave them some stogies. “We tried to smoke those stogies. One by one we went back of the hotel and threw up. Boy did we get sick!”

• There was a swimming hole down on the creek and they had a rope they used to swing out on. One day Ingham Kintner was all dressed up in nice clothes and his mother, Mae, had sternly warned him to stay away from the creek and not mess up his clothes. “Don’t you dare go down and go swimming!” she ordered.

“We got down there and he said. ‘Look, push me in. I’ll tell Mom you pushed me in the water.’ He got away with it.”

• Mickey Bodnar lived near the old Arey’s Lumber Yard just off Taylor Avenue and had recently married, prompting an impromptu ritual known as belling. “We started ringing the bells and blowing the horn and he came out, ‘What the $%# is wrong with you guys?’ Then he ended up getting so involved in what we were doing he forgot about his wife.”

 • Sneaking into the Red House as kids in the late thirties and early forties (now the Homer Funeral Home) which had been abandoned years before by members of the Welles family living there. It was almost eerie, with things left there as if someone would come back at anytime. There were even dishes on the table and toys in the rooms upstairs. “It was completely unbelievable. We used to sneak in through the cellar. We used to play with the toys. They had toys. We never stole anything or damaged anything. We used to play in here, that’s all.”

“The clothes, the dishes, everything was in there. It was unbelievable.”

Barry was 18, not yet finished with his schooling in Wyalusing, when his father decided to liquidate the business here, Wyalusing Auto Wrecking, and move back to Wilkes-Barre. That’s why he ended up graduating from GAR High School there.

His years in Wyalusing were, as he often says, “wonderful,” but the Aronsons were the only Jewish family in town and his religious training suffered a bit. It was in Wilkes-Barre where he gained an appreciation for his heritage and religion. He took some college courses and worked in his father’s business there, before a job offer came that brought him back to Bradford County. This time it was Towanda, where Sol Spitulnik had a scrap business, Towanda Iron & Metal, up for sale. That was 1947 and that’s how the Aronsons returned here.

Barry had a chance to pursue a career in Texas at a business known as Co-Metals in Dallas after he got out of the Army at the end of the Korean War. He almost went, but he opted to stay and nurture the business his father had so loving nourished.

He had married Ruth in 1950 and was drafted a couple of years later. There were some life decisions for the two in close order during the early 1950’s, including military decisions and the Texas job offer, but Barry ended up staying here, and he and Ruth raised their family in Towanda.

Jakie, who had learned some hard lessons from the Depression after being a successful business owner in Scranton before the stock market fell (see accompanying story), resisted expanding too quickly with Towanda Iron & Metal, despite his enthusiastic and ambitious son’s prodding to buy more modern equipment.

As he told another reporter more than a decade ago: “His answer to me was this, ‘I went broke in the Depression through credit and borrowing money, and I’m not going to go broke again by buying something that I’m going to owe someone for…”

He has been “retired” for some time now, but it took him a few years to wean himself out of going to his own office at the business on an almost daily basis.  Not only did he hand over a prosperous, solid scrap business to the third generation of Aronsons, but by getting into recyclable plastics and working with E.I. DuPont, he started another business, TIMI Plastics, Inc.

(Writer’s Note: For the writer of the article and its subject, there are a number of interesting connections, which some may regard as irony and others as coincidence. For starters, the home on John Street that Jacob and Sophie Aronson rented was owned by Will Gannon. He was the grandfather of Mary Gannon, who married me and with whom I eventually took up residence more than 40 years later, at that same address. Back in 1973 while I was still a cub reporter in Williamsport and some six years before Mary and I returned to the area, Barry became the toast of the regional arts scene with his performance as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” in a summer theater presentation in Northeast Bradford. About a dozen years later, I reprised that role for the Wyalusing Community Theatre, but only one of us is still remembered as Tevye. Barry once told me, “You didn’t do a bad job for a Methodist.”—wls)