Thanks for the memories
It’s with sadness I write that another of my childhood institutions will not be opening this year, the pool at Shady Grove.
I can’t remember the order in which they closed, but it was St. Cecelia’s Park where every weekend there was a softball tournament, concession stands, a polka band on Saturday nights and people.
Starlite Drive-In, where we’d sneak in to watch the movies on the big screen — a real education to our young, naïve minds.
Gathering courage to go to the concession stand when the not-so-blue movies played to get a 25-cent Coke. There were see-saws, slides, swings and people.
Now, Shady Grove has been regulated to the point of closing the biggest hole in the ground filled with water for swimming in the area.
A lot of great memories and good times were made and had there.
The high dives that used to be high, the diving board, the lifeguards yelling “Get off the rope!,” the roller rink where Buck Owens and the Hagar Brothers played before it burnt down and people.
Gone/closed are these places of public meeting and mingling, and that was just in Lemont Furnace.
We can talk to Australia on our smartphones in two minutes, but most folks won’t go to the fence to talk to their neighbors.
We have become so technologically advanced with our communications, yet we have never been so insular and isolated from human interaction in our history.
And we wonder what happened to us.
Jim, Toni and the rest of the Tesauro family, Mr. and Mrs. T especially, thanks for the memories.
Bob Kelley
Point Marion