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August 30, 2007
Bruce Springsteen and Western PA
I really do think that the kiddos like Bruce Springsteen. I won't be feeling any movement, and then I turn on the greatest hits CD I have, and a dance party will get started. One side of me feels like I should be teaching them to like Beethoven and Bach, rather than Springsteen, and the other side of me wonders if they'll like Bob Dylan, too.
I've been musing why I have such a thing for Bruce Springsteen right now. I never really got into him before now. And then I realized...
His songs are incredibly Western Pennsylvanian. "Johnstown company store," "Grove City bus," "textile mill closing down," etc. He even played in a band called "Steel Mill"! Wikipedia talks about him as having blue collar New Jersey roots, which I guess is close enough for me to feel a Western PA flavor to his music.
I love Pittsburgh and the surrounding Western PA area. I love the fact that the immigrants worked so hard to survive in a new place and to preserve their cultural heritage. I love the hills and the rivers, and the urban-yet-still-country flavor. I love the toughly-independent yet community centered approach to life that people have. I love the fact that Pittsburgh has reshaped itself into an incredibly attractive city, yet fiercely preserves the immigrant cultures that helped to create it.
Springsteen's song "My Hometown" captures the incredible love that people have for their own places in Western, PA, a loyalty not based on the perfection of the city or town, but on something deeper, I'm not sure exactly what.
The Deer Hunter really captures some of this. A very disturbing movie during the Vietnam parts, but it captures this feeling of Western PA in its portrayal of life in Clairton, PA--close to the Johnstown/Altoona area where Tim grew up. The deerhunting, the beer drinking, the Steelers, the steel mill, the Orthodox wedding, the unbelievable loyalty to friends.
I suddenly realized that this is going to be part of our kids' heritage. They'll have the blood of immigrants and coal miners and steel workers flowing through their veins. I hope they have the strength and independence of spirit that I've seen in Tim's family. It just struck me that the heritage of two families will blend in these two children--it's not just my history that they'll inherit, it's Tim's history as well.
And then another insight dawned on me--I have a little of this blood running through my veins as well, maybe that's why Pittsburgh felt like home to me in such a deep way. My mother's mother is a second generation Polish immigrant who grew up--at least for part of her childhood--in Western PA. She and her family were rescued in the 1936 Johnstown Flood. She (as a small child) was pictured in the local newspaper because she refused to climb out the second story window into the rescue boat until the rescuers agreed to take her cat as well.
Pittsburgh | By Tim and Jo | 3:14 PM
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