Unlocked door reveals surprise
It was an amazing historical find. The telephone call that led me to it came late in the afternoon. A familiar female voice said, “Glenn, there is something you just have to see. When I saw it, you were the first person I thought of, because I remember what you wrote about Mr. . . .”
She stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, then said, “Can you meet me in a few minutes?”
My curiosity was aroused. “Where?” I asked.
“Come to the old Brownsville borough building at the intersection of Market Street and Albany Road.”
“I’ll be there in 10 minutes.”
The sun was setting as I parked in the Flatiron Building lot and walked up Market Street hill toward the old borough building. It had been the Brownsville municipal building until a few years after the 1933 merger of Brownsville and South Brownsville boroughs, when it was replaced by the current municipal building at Second and High streets.
As far as I knew, the old borough building had been vacant since then. A year or two ago, the building’s owner at that time, Mrs. Olga Gazalie, donated it to BARC (Brownsville Area Revitalization Corp.). In recent months, BARC had been cleaning it up to host computer training classes and other activities.
I saw my telephone correspondent standing on the sidewalk in front of the building, shielding her eyes from the blinding sunset as she watched me approach. I crossed Albany Road, walked up to her, and saw that she held a key in her right hand.
“I guess we are going inside?” I puffed, somewhat out of breath.
“Yes,” said Norma Ryan, a member of BARC’s board of directors. “Thanks for coming.” She looked up and down the sidewalk, then quickly slid the key into the lock and entered the building.
I followed her inside. Norma turned on the hall light and immediately started down a flight of stairs.
“We’re going down to the jail cell?” I was a bit startled. “But I’ve already seen that, Norma. Remember, you showed it to me right after . . .”
“That’s not why I’m taking you down here,” she interrupted and said nothing more.
I withheld further comment and followed her down the wooden steps. Norma twisted an old-fashioned round light switch, and the harsh glare of a ceiling bulb illuminated the forbidding jail cell door, solid iron except for a small window at eye level. For me, it brought to mind Charles Dickens’ “A Tale Of Two Cities.”
“That jail cell looks so medieval to me,” I shuddered, and was about to say more when Norma abruptly turned to the right, away from the cell door and toward the farthest corner of the room. There in the shadows was a door I had not noticed on my visit the year before.
Norma approached the door.
“We’ve been cleaning out this building,” she explained, “but no one could find a key to this door.” Norma was speaking in hushed tones, which struck me as odd since there was no one in the building but us.
“Earlier today,” Norma continued, “I had the hinge pins removed so that I could see if there was anything in this closet.” She turned to face me with an odd expression on her face.
I waited. “And was there anything in it?”
“It isn’t a closet.”
Norma turned the now-unlocked door knob and released it. The door swung slowly into the dark void beyond, and I immediately noticed a stale, musty odor. Norma stepped back.
“Go ahead.”
“You first,” I said uneasily.
Norma stepped through the doorway, reached above her head, and pulled a string. I was a step behind her when the overhead light came on. I stopped in my tracks.
We were standing in a cramped office, no more than eight feet square, furnished like the set of a 1930s movie. Against the opposite wall was an old-fashioned wooden desk, topped with three lengthy horizontal rows of pigeon-hole compartments. The wooden desk chair was turned to the right, facing a flat typewriter shelf that had been pulled from its inset above the three desk drawers. On the shelf sat an antique typewriter.
On the left side of the desktop was an inkwell and a fountain pen. Next to them, a pair of spectacles rested on fully open stems, perched as though a weary hand had just removed them and set them there. Like everything else in the room, the lenses of the spectacles were covered with a thick layer of dust.
To the right of the desk, hanging neatly on a hook on the wall, was a suit jacket. The tip of a bow tie protruded from its vest pocket. As I scanned the room, my attention was captured by a large wooden box labeled “Zinfandel Raisins” sitting on the floor next to the desk. On top of the box was a two-foot high stack of folded age-yellowed newspapers, at least 40 or 50 of them.
I leaned over to study the front page of the top newspaper. The headline and date simultaneously thrilled and confused me. Disbelieving, I carefully lifted that newspaper to look at the one beneath it and was equally astonished by its headline and date.
“Norma,” I exclaimed excitedly, “these newspapers are issues of the Brownsville Telegraph. But look at the dates and headlines. The top one is dated Jan. 27, 1915, and the headline reads, ‘TELEGRAPH PUBLISHES INAUGURAL EDITION.’ The second one is dated April 18, 1921, and reads, ‘BROWNSVILLE TRUST COMPANY OPENS DOORS.’
I was astounded by what I was seeing. I knelt on one knee next to the newspapers and gingerly slid my hand between two newspapers near the bottom of the stack. Lifting the papers that were above my hand just an inch or two, I could read the headline and date on the front page of the newspaper that was revealed.
March 15, 1925. MODERN MONONGAHELA HOTEL GREETS FIRST PATRONS.
I shook my head in amazement. “These Telegraphs were published before 1927,” I said to Norma. “That was the year when a fire destroyed the Telegraph building, including its archives. It was a terrible loss, because no copies exist of the Telegraph from 1915 to the summer of 1927. At least, that is what everyone thought. But look at these newspapers. They all appear to be . . .”
I stopped as a new thought occurred to me. I stood up, stepped back, and looked around the room with renewed curiosity. Why were these newspapers here? Whose cubbyhole office was this?
Then it hit me, and immediately I realized that the clues were everywhere. The pile of rare newspapers, stacked chronologically as a conscientious historian would do. Scholarly glasses resting on the desk. A suit jacket with a bow tie in its pocket. A secluded office in the former borough building, easily accessible to someone who worked for the borough – such as a town councilman.
Could this possibly have been the office of . . . ?
I turned to Norma to voice my suspicion and was surprised to see her staring at me with a smile on her face and tears in her eyes. She realized that I had guessed the identity of the man who had worked tirelessly in this private hideaway.
Without speaking, Norma gestured toward the far end of the desktop. I followed her gaze to a thick pile of loose typewritten sheets. It had escaped my notice earlier because it was pushed back into the alcove beneath the pigeonhole compartments.
I felt a chill go down my spine as I realized what those papers might be. If this office belonged to the person whom I suspected, then could this pile of typewritten papers be . . . a manuscript, perhaps?
I reached toward them, carefully pulled the pile of papers to the center of the desk, and gently blew the dust from the top sheet. The typewritten words that were revealed, all in capital letters, froze me in mid-breath.
“THE SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF BROWNSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA: 1749-1957, by JESSE COLDREN.”
I gasped. This was Jesse Coldren’s missing manuscript – his long-lost history of Brownsville, the one he had been reputed to have worked on for decades, only to have it disappear upon his death in 1957. Many had subsequently questioned whether such a manuscript had ever existed. And now, here it was before me.
I felt like Howard Carter, the discoverer of King Tut’s tomb. Ever-so-carefully, Norma and I leafed through the loose pages of Jesse’s manuscript, awestruck at chapter after chapter of footnoted descriptions of the people and events that shaped our town’s history.
It was surreal to be reading this almost-legendary document. And as an incredible bonus, we had also discovered Jesse’s cache of dozens of pre-1927 Brownsville Telegraphs bearing stories and advertisements that would help fill glaring gaps in our knowledge of early twentieth-century Brownsville.
Despite the chill in the basement, Norma and I were both perspiring nervously as we pored over Jesse’s treasure. Intensely curious, I turned to the final page of his manuscript, anxious to learn which historical event Jesse Coldren had chosen to be the last one recorded in his masterpiece.
But instead of the concluding paragraphs of his final chapter, I discovered that the last page bore only a single paragraph. Stranger still, that paragraph was written in longhand, in blue ink that had faded almost beyond legibility. I paused, glanced thoughtfully at the fountain pen and inkwell, then turned to Norma and said, “What do you make of this? Let’s take this page directly under the ceiling light. Perhaps we will be able to read it.”
I gently balanced the single sheet of paper on the tips of my upturned fingers and walked beneath the light. We leaned close to the page and studied the faded handwriting. The message was faint, but we could read it – every word of it.
“To any person who is reading these words,” read the inscription. “Would that it were true that these lost editions of the Brownsville Telegraph were real, and that my long-lost manuscript of Brownsville’s history had now been discovered. But alas, it is my misfortune to reveal to you that you have become a victim of a custom that has existed since long before any of our memories. For you see, my friend, today is the first day of April. And because of that, I must reveal that all which has gone before on these very pages is but a figment of my successor’s fertile imagination.”
And to you, dear reader, I must convey my sincerest wish that the rest of this day will pass without anyone else saying these words to you – April Fool!
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Glenn Tunney may be contacted at 724-785-3201 or 6068 National Pike East, Grindstone, PA 15442. Comments about these weekly articles may be sent to Editor Mark O’Keefe, 8-18 E. Church St., Uniontown, PA or e-mailed to mo’keefe@heraldstandard.com. All past articles are on the Web at http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~glenntunneycolumn/