How Mount Pleasant Revealed My Family’s Past And Hinted At My Family’s Future
By
Leonard Zwelling
In the early 1900’s, probably 1903 according to my father’s self-published autobiography, my paternal grandfather Harry arrived in the United States from what was then Austria-Hungary. He settled in Zanesville, Ohio and plied his trade as a tailor. From the photographs I have of his store front, he and his brothers looked very successful. I have a suit he made for himself and his tuxedo. I even have his sewing machine.
Unfortunately, he, like many Americans, lost a lot of money in the Great Depression. My father was 11 when the Depression took hold. He was the fourth of five children and, apparently, a bit of a wild child who was first saved by his older brother gaining him entry into Ohio University, and then by volunteering for the Army before the outbreak of WWII. He was saved again when instead of staying with the unit with which he went through basic training, he was sent to Officer Candidate School and became a first lieutenant. Many of the men with whom he trained, were killed in the Battle of the Bulge. My dad was running a motor pool in London and awoke on June 6, 1944 to the sound of hundreds of planes heading across the English Channel on D-Day.
He returned to Ohio University after the war. He met and married my mother and went back to New York, her home, to find work. He was an engineer, but as a Jew, could find no work. He became a salesman in a then-new field—plastics.
My father became a New Yorker only because he followed my mother to her home. He adapted rapidly. Without that move to New York, I might have been brought up in Zanesville or Columbus, Ohio where the rest of my father’s siblings settled. My father was a small town, mid-Westerner who became a sophisticated New Yorker. Lucky for me. Zanesville was his past. New York became my future. It was the nurturing through competition for success among the children of first-generation Jewish Americans like my parents that was critical to my success. My parents and the parents of my friends were determined that their children would do better than they, intellectually and financially. The center of that drive for the American dream among Jewish-Americans in the post-WWII era was New York. I was part of all that. So were an entire generation of doctors and lawyers who are now retiring.
My son was born in Washington, DC, but his life after the age of four was in Houston. He was educated at Duke and NYU. He became a very sophisticated New Yorker at NYU and after he wed, he settled in Brooklyn. Then, for professional reasons and the desire to be near family, he and his wife moved to Sugarland where they had two sons.
Although I do not know all the details affecting their decision, he and his wife, without consulting with me or the BW, decided to move to Mt. Pleasant, PA, his wife’s hometown. We just visited them for our annual week’s stay as I have related in the past two blogs.
Mt. Pleasant is a very small mid-Western/western Pennsylvania town that, like Zanesville, Ohio now I suspect, has seen better days. But unlike Houston or New York, it is very quiet, slow, and not so competitive. It is also very white and dense Trump country. Where my father entered the world of high stakes competition in New York 80 years ago by following his wife home, my son has exited that world by following his wife home. Thus, in my father’s move, I found my future. In my son’s move, I may see my father’s past and possibly the future of my grandsons.
But, I’m smarter than that.
It is my sincere hope that my grandsons are sufficiently exposed to the greater world so they can decide for themselves whether small town life and plying a trade will be their future. Or, will they be like their great grandfather and gravitate to the competitive life in a big city after attending a university hoping their offspring will outdo them.
I know that their ability to make that choice has been secured with funds set aside for that purpose should they choose the life of their grandparents, the BW and me. They have been brought into the environment of my father’s past. I can only hope they choose a future more like the life of their paternal grandparents, us.
I thank my lucky stars my father escaped Zanesville for a life in New York. My sincere hope is that my grandsons know they have all the choices his escape provided me.
My whole generation of professionals is very worried because the societal forces that gave birth to the post-WWII growth of America and the expansion of professionals among the children of the Greatest Generation, may be in abeyance. In medicine, we see a shift in who is becoming a doctor. Once again it is the children of immigrants and first-generation Americans but from Latin America and Asia—men and women. That is not my grandsons. And all I want is their ability to choose their own futures despite having come from a part of America that many have forgotten and where everything with regard to their future will depend on input from their parents because the environment that so nurtured the BW and me is not in Mt. Pleasant. Little is.
I have gotten several comments saying my criticism rural life is too harsh and that a small-town upbringing may be preferable to that which can be had in the big city. Indeed, it might be. Just tell me where the opportunities to learn about life choices are in Mt. Pleasant? Go ahead.
