“Chops” Laughery Recalls Unusual Home Invasion
Today’s column by Glenn Tunney is the second installment of a three-part interview with longtime West Brownsville and Brownsville resident Harold “Chops” Laughery, who passed away recently at the age of 96. These columns first appeared in the Herald-Standard in January 2004.
It was a terrifying situation.
“My wife had her suitcase packed. She was scared, knowing that it was inside the house, right on the other side of this door. I wasn’t scared, but she was. And to make matters worse, the power was out. All we had was a flashlight.”
Harold Laughery of West Brownsville was standing in the hallway of his Main Street home a few weeks ago, describing a traumatic night that he and his wife Frances experienced nearly 20 years ago. Harold motioned toward the closed wooden door that leads to his basement stairs.
“If it had come any further up the steps,” he said to me, “Frances would have left. Fortunately, when it reached the top step, it paused. We waited to see if it was coming any further.”
The filthy intruder that had crept up the Laugherys’ basement stairs in the dark was too powerful to be stopped by any man, no matter how courageous. The menace had been in the Laugherys’ basement before, but it had never threatened to come upstairs . . . until that night.
On that night, Harold opened the basement door in the dark, stepped back, and shined the flashlight on the invader. It had reached the top basement step. Harold and his wife stood silently a few feet away, watching as it paused in its ascent, seeming to decide whether it should enter their living quarters. Then after several agonizing minutes, it began an almost imperceptible retreat. First down one step, then another. Frances breathed a sigh of relief and set her suitcase on the floor. It looked like she would be staying.
“That is as close as we’ve come to having the Monongahela River flood the main floor of our house,” Harold told me. “It was 4 inches from running over onto the main floor. The basement was completely in the river.”
I shook my head as I contemplated living with that anxiety each time there was a heavy rainfall or a quick thaw.
“How many times have you been flooded?” I asked Harold.
“Since we moved to this house in West Brownsville in the late forties, I’d estimate we’ve been through 18 or 19 floods.”
Harold’s home is on Main Street, several blocks from the west bank of the Monongahela River. Homes and businesses closer to the river are more vulnerable to serious flood damage than the homes along Main Street, which usually escape the worst of the devastation. The 1985 Election Day flood, however, was different.
“Before the Corps of Engineers raised that river,” Harold explained, “we would only get water up to Middle Street and a little bit in the back yard. Now we get it in the house. In the 1985 flood, the water reached the top basement step in our house. My wife had a little suitcase packed. She was scared.”
The Corps of Engineers actions to which Harold referred involved the locks and dam at Charleroi.
“When they rebuilt the Charleroi dam,” he explained, “they backed the river up to Brownsville. Before that, when I was working on the riverboats, this river was approximately eight to 10 feet deep. Now it is 12 to 15 feet deep.”
“Is that all?” I had assumed the river was deeper than that.
“Oh, there are spots that are deeper,” he said, “but on average, that is the depth of the channel. When I worked on the boats in the summertime, we would stir up mud with a nine-foot barge all the way down to Clairton.”
“What do you mean by a ‘nine foot barge?'”
“That is how much water the barge was drawing . . . how far below the river’s surface the bottom of the barge is. Most barges were about 11 feet from top to bottom on the inside. About 32 to 35 inches of the barge would be above the water line, and that was called the ‘freeboard.’ The rest of the barge, about eight-and-a-half feet, was underwater.
“In the old days when the river was lower in the summertime, we might scrape bottom with that barge. Now the river is several feet higher, which makes the average flood worse than floods were in the past.”
“You said that even the 1985 flood didn’t scare you. Don’t you worry about your electricity, your utilities?”
“In ’85, they shut off the electricity to this area. Now every time the water comes up, they shut off the gas and the electric.”
“I have heard it said, by people who do not live along the river, ‘I would only go through one flood if I lived along the river, then I would move.’ What has kept you from moving?”
“Money. Working all of these years to acquire everything we have in this house, then just giving it away and starting all over.”
“I see what you mean about ‘giving it away.’ The threat of flooding surely affects the property values in the flood-prone part of West Brownsville. What about flood insurance?”
“It is expensive, and here on Main Street, we don’t usually have a lot of flood damage. One of the fellows who lives back there,” Harold motioned toward Middle Street, “when the river came up last month, he walked out of his house, locked the door, and took his cars to his relative’s house. I had 24 inches of water in my basement; he had five feet. But he has flood insurance, and they paid for just about everything.”
“You would think he would have a hard time renewing that flood insurance if he keeps filing claims, wouldn’t he?”
“Once you have it, they can’t take it off of you. I get letter after letter offering me flood insurance. I know some people whose properties are lower than I am here, but they just can’t afford it. The fellow I was talking about earlier is paying over $500 a year. And how many years go by that we don’t have a flood? When we do, I don’t have that much damage in this house, only in the cellar. When the water goes down, I usually have mud to contend with.”
“Usually?”
“Yes,” he explained. “This flood we had last month ? there wasn’t any mud in my basement, because the water came up through the sewers. The river never went over its banks.”
“Is there a system in place to warn people that the river is flooding?”
“Before, there wasn’t. It was just done by word of mouth. Now they blow the fire whistle. You are going to bed knowing the river is high, so when you hear the fire siren, you know what’s happening. You start putting stuff up higher, moving cars up to Main Street.”
During our discussion about the flooding of the Monongahela, a long train rumbled past the house, causing the light fixtures, dishes, and everything else in the kitchen where we were sitting to vibrate. Railroad tracks run down the center of Main Street, and that has made for a touchy relationship between Main Street residents and the railroad over the years.
“The people of West Brownsville seem to have ongoing complaints with the railroad,” I said, “including dirt from the coal, the track bed sinking in the middle of the street, trains blocking intersections, and heavy trains damaging sewer lines under the tracks. Were there always that many problems with the railroad?”
“Not as many as we have now,” Harold asserted. “Before diesels, when they had the steam engines, they had fewer cars on a train, and each car was lighter. There may have been 40 or 50 cars in a train, and the trains came by less often. They used the river more to transport the coal.
“Make no mistake, those old steam engines were filthy. You couldn’t hang clothes outside because of the steamboats and steam locomotives. But when it would rain, it would wash that coal dirt right off the house, and everything would be nice and clean again.
“But this diesel dirt, it sticks. It doesn’t wash off. The diesel engines put out a lot of smoke, and it is oily and gritty smoke, very hard to clean off. I could take you outside right now and take a rag and show you how my siding is oil-stained. I wash this house every spring.”
“And what about the vibration and the constant need for repairs to the track bed . . .?”
“With the diesel engines, the trains are longer now. They may have 144 cars, and each car is heavier than before, one hundred tons or more. There is a tremendous vibration in the house when a train goes by. I have light bulbs that unscrew themselves. I think the diesel engines and heavier cars do a lot more damage than occurred in the old days.”
Harold chuckled and shook his head. “Folks on Main Street joke that we have a river in the basement and a railroad through the parlor.”
Ironically, the coal-laden trains pass within yards of the remnants of an old mine that was located in the center of West Brownsville. Harold worked in that mine for a short time many years ago. When our conversation continues, Harold will share his memories of the old Collins mine, located across the street from his present home.
Glenn Tunney’s popular books, “Looking Back: The Best of Glenn Tunney (Volumes One and Two), may be purchased at the Brownsville Free Public Library, the Fayette Chamber of Commerce (65 West Main St., Uniontown), or the Flatiron Building Heritage Center in Brownsville, or may be ordered for mail delivery by calling 724-562-8886. Price of each volume is $19.95.