President's Comments - March 2026

I am happy to report that the oral history program is coming together as Executive Director Jonathan Bogert and I start to work on how we envision the program and what we need to make that happen. We are busy pulling together a release form, a letter of welcome explaining the program, and learning what we need to do in order to make our oral histories usable by the Indiana University of Indiana’s Cultural Anthropology Department and History Department. I believe that there we need to have a program that will be usable for academia in research. I hope that in a year we can talk about how working relationship with IUP is progressing.

As I wrote this (February 15^th), here in Indiana County, we’re coming out of an extended period of cold weather with between one and two feet of snow on the ground . It feels good to have temperatures rise above 25F.

The weather recently got me to thinking about winter 60 some years ago when I was around 10 and at an age when I loved being outside with my friends enjoying the snow. On the morning of a good snow, we would get up early and tune in to KDKA-AM radio to hear if our school (Belle Vernon Area School District) was cancelled for the day. We would tune in to Rege Cordic and “Cordic and Company” and later Jack Bogut and “Bogut in the Morning. “Uncle” Ed Shaughnessy worked with both broadcasters doing the news and often read the school cancelation notices. 

My parents bought a lot in 1958 in the Sweeney Plan area of Rostraver Township, Westmoreland County. George Sweeney divided his farm into lots to sell to home builders in post-World War 2. Many veterans bought lots and built houses there. The Plan was built over two big hills. Nobody put up fences, so the backyards became our playground and a great place to sled in the winter. The Plan was a closed area when I grew up. There with no through streets until 1967, when the “new” high school building was opened on my street. 

With limited traffic, the streets were our preferred place to sled. For street sledding, we used the classic wood sled with metal runners that we would wax to make it extra fast. If you had a Flexible Flyer, you were ‘high class’. For backyard and cow pasture sledding, toboggans, metal saucers, and bus inner tubes were the chosen method of sledding. There was a cow pasture across the street from my house. The hill was long but having a creek at the bottom and a long walk back up the hill made it a little less desirable.

If school was cancelled, the neighborhood kids would gather around 8:30 am – 9:00 am for sledding. Our preferred place for sledding was Pleasant Valley Boulevard. In the 1960s, the section of that street that we sled on had only six houses. (It now has 14 houses.) At the top of the hill the street went from a paved road to gravel at that time. The slope part of the street was paved and about 100 yards in length. We would sled ride down Pleasant Valley to Atwood Drive, which was where it leveled off some. 

In the 1960s, road maintenance crews did not spread road salt, they spread cinders instead. School buses and many cars had chains put around the tires for grip. There were also studded tires that would make a metallic clacking noise on dry pavement. In a snow of three to five inches, even with cinders, street sledding was fantastic. 

My mom would bundle my sister and me up with a long sleeve shirt, a sweater, a heavy coat, thick socks, scarf, a hat with ear flaps, plastic bread bags would go over our sock covered feet (to keep them dry), and rubber galoshes with metal clips. We would be outside until lunch. When we came inside, mom would have us take our cold wet clothes off. She would put the clothes in the dryer to dry them and warm them for our afternoon sledding. Lunch was always soup and a sandwich. Around an hour or so later, we would bundle ourselves up and go back out until dark. 

If we were sledding in the backyards, we had houses at the bottom of the hill that were an obstacle. For backyard sledding we used metal saucers and a bus inner tube that my dad got for us. Because you cannot steer a saucer or inner tube, we would build snow mounds to guide us. We would pack the snow and make a walled track with some bumps. I would get a spray bottle filled with water and mist the inside of the track to make it solid and slick. The backyard rides were short but fast.

These photos were taken in 1971 in our backyard. I am the boy wearing glasses. I was 14½ years old. The white house, owned by the Ririe family, at the bottom of the hill is the one we had to avoid hitting. There was a row of pine trees to left of that house that formed the property line. My sister, Doris – age 12½, is kneeling to the right. She is a retired psychologist and lives in Colorado. My kid brother, David – age 3, has a red hat on. He is a physiatrist and has his medical practice in Missouri.

I hope that this has jogged some memories of your childhood experiences in Winter. These are the types of memories that I hope to collect in the HGSIC’s oral history project. I will be sharing some other memories from my past in future president’s comments.