Strangely nervous, yet quietly excited—that is what comes to mind when I think back to that Saturday morning in June, the day before Father’s Day, when I boarded a Trans-Bridge bus in New York City and headed home in the misty rain. Home to the place I was born, Allentown, Pennsylvania, whose citizens had long taken great pride in its designation, three times, as an “All-America City” (by the National Civic League), a pride that sustained itself in the sneaky, encircling warmth of Gemütlichkeit. Allentown had been through many transformations in the years since I came of age in the fifties and sixties, demographically and otherwise, and I was, frankly, both apprehensive and curious about what awaited me. I was hoping to find out whether it is ever possible to come home again and not just to be passing through, fully aware that the concept and deep-seated notion of “home” and “place” is different for everyone. I felt fortunate to have grown up in King’s America—Martin Luther King Jr. being the only king who ever mattered to me and the only one I recognized—but in a Pennsylvania Dutch culture that required me to learn German in school. (The learning of that unlovely language was not easy, but it helped me better understand certain expressions—warsh and mox good and quit rutchin—and, best of all, led me to an ongoing love of the poetry of Rilke, thanks to my eleventh-grade English teacher, the incomparable Dorothy Papp. So I offer no complaints.)
I had last been back in 2004, when my mother died, a trip that had been difficult in many ways, just as our relationship had been. When my daughter Logan was born, in 1993, just three months after my father died, it saddened me that he would not be able to take her, as he did me, to Hook’s Diner on Sunday mornings for breakfast, to hear him say, “Doris, my granddaughter will have hotcakes, thin and brown, thin and brown, and please bring her a glass of chocolate milk, made from scratch with Hershey’s Syrup. And a side of well-done scrapple.” Doris and Mabel and Hilda—all of them wore squeaky shoes with rubber soles and happily put up with his repeating an order they knew by heart. I know of no other way to put this: My father loved being from Allentown. It’s the third-largest city in Pennsylvania but has the distinct feel of a small town, where he could enjoy being a well-liked, everyday guy, a Rotarian and owner of Coleman’s Department Store—not to mention having a bookie and the luxury of being able to go to Vegas on all-expense-paid trips. I knew he would have wanted Logan to understand she was in, and of, a place where eating Habbersett scrapple (with either ketchup or syrup) was part of what you did and part of who you were, in the same way that another Allentonian, the actor Amanda Seyfried, of early Mean Girls fame, continues to long for the Shrove Tuesday fastnachts made by Mary Ann Donut Kitchen on Liberty Street.
I was surprised not to know of Seyfried’s connection to Allentown until recently. We had gone to the same high school, William Allen (the city’s founder, a Colonial grandee, and a Loyalist during the American Revolution), the front of which looks the way a high school should—imposing, with many steps to climb before you enter, the best sort of challenge. Before heading home that day, I was interested to learn that Seyfried, who also worked in the school’s candy store when she wasn’t auditioning in New York, continued to view Allentown and the greater Lehigh Valley as her true home. “I hope you can feel my Allentown roots,” she told an interviewer, “because they live in me forever.” Not only are her parents still living in the house where Amanda grew up, but her father continues to look after her cat.
On the bus that day, over the course of ninety-one miles almost directly west, I also thought about Lee Iacocca, the Ford and Chrysler titan who had gone to William Allen as well, and who will forever be known as the Father of the Mustang, among many other accomplishments. In the spring of my sophomore year in high school, before I had a driver’s license, Cheryl Iacocca, a year older, swung by to pick me up in a baby-blue Mustang convertible on our way to see a movie at the Rialto Theater with another couple.
In Allentown, though, the name “Iacocca” was primarily associated not with sports cars but with the family hot-dog business. Yocco’s, owned by Cheryl’s father and his brother (Lee’s first cousins), has been in business since the 1920s. Assimilation can take many forms, and some of them are practical ones. Once the family realized how much trouble most people had pronouncing their name—nearly everyone said “Yo-co-ca”—they called it Yocco’s, and the rest, as they say, is history. Today, they have six locations and ship all over the world.
But on the day of that trip to the movies, I tried to be “cool” and blithely asked Cheryl where on earth she got wheels like this. “It was a gift from my uncle Lee,” she said. “This was his invention, his baby.” I also remember asking how often she saw him, and she said that the whole family saw him a lot. Not only that, but he phoned his sister every day, no matter where he was. “He may be a big shot in Detroit, but he comes home whenever he can. He recharges his engine here. He loves Allentown, and we don’t give him special treatment,” she laughed.
Boogaloo Is Back in Town
Robert Ulaner, a childhood friend, picked me up at the bus stop. He and his wife had just come from a No Kings rally, one of many that had been taking place all over the country that day, and they were exhilarated. For health reasons, they had moved to Florida for two years, but it wasn’t for them, and the pull of the Lehigh Valley was too strong. “Johnny C,” Robbie said with affection, hugging me tight and flashing the wry smile I knew well from all the times he would conjure up evening plans that could change at a moment’s notice but always promised all manner of adventure. Robbie was a sort of pied piper. He and his brother Richard were ten months apart in age, and I considered them family. We hooped at Muhlenberg College’s outdoor courts—the sound of a ball going through the chains on the baskets even more thrilling than the quieter one when it would go through twine—and we played pinball and ate cheesesteaks at Bud Kivert’s Cut-Rate on the corner of Twenty-third and Liberty, across from the Campus Shop where I bought comics and baseball cards (for the gum just as much as the cards) and got my hair cut at the barbershop downstairs. We belonged to the Jewish Community Center, the place where everyone would call out “Freddy” when my father went for a schvitz and a massage on Sundays after our breakfast at Hook’s. For me, though, that place held a certain terror because I performed poorly in the Biddy League and Hal Grossman, the athletic director, would bark at me constantly.
The Ulaner home was airy and open—open to all, actually—and I always felt welcome there. As soon as I saw Robbie, I said that I fully expected him to pick me up in the metallic-blue Corvair Monza we had traveled many miles in, often to places we were not necessarily meant to be, such as the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia, mainly responsible for my barely disguised desire to become a backup singer in the great Motown tradition. “But how could that even happen?” people would ask. “You’re a white boy.” And I would tell them about the Magnificent Men, the first white group to ever play the Uptown, who became known as “our blue-eyed soul brothers.” Even though Robbie and I had never lost touch—Facebook helped with that—just hearing him call me “Johnny C” and “Boogaloo” (from the song by Johnny C, “Boogaloo Down Broadway”) stirred something in me, a time when our lives seemed simpler, when all things seemed possible.
Although I was born to Jewish parents, being Jewish in Allentown meant little to me because I never felt discriminated against. I was surrounded by German Lutherans, by Mohrs and Moyers and Diefenderfers and Hochstetters and Stoltzfuses, and I not only felt at home with them but warmly welcomed to eat with them, to partake of rivels and suppe and both kinds of Lebanon bologna and strawberry pretzel salad and pepper cabbage and the best rice pudding known to man. I am sure there were those who didn’t like Jews, but I was unaware of them.
My maternal grandparents, on the other hand, kept a kosher household, were among the original founders of their synagogue, and inhabited a much smaller world. My grandfather was part owner of a factory that made undergarments, and my grandmother played canasta and mahjong and made a coconut cake every Friday. They ultimately dissuaded my mother from marrying someone who was not Jewish, just as my grandmother made it clear that she did not want to meet the woman I married, whom everyone else adored, and so I did what I had to do, which was both easy and hard—break off ties to a woman whose home I would come to as a child nearly every Friday night for the Sabbath, often staying overnight, but whose funeral I did not attend.
More than Rust Belt Despair
As Robbie and I went to have lunch, I suddenly found myself thinking of every Seder I had attended on the first night of Passover, of the moment when the youngest child poses the mysterious, hard-to-answer question: Why is this night different from all other nights? In that moment, I substituted the word “place” and “places” for “night” and “nights” and kept that as a loose frame of reference as I re-entered the world of my upbringing.
Nearly every time someone asks where I grew up (“Where ya from?”) and I proudly say, “Allentown,” their response is almost always—predictably, even annoyingly—the same: “Oh, from the song?” Yes, that one, the one by Billy Joel, in 1982, the one that plaintively begins:
Well, we’re living here in Allentown,
And they’re closing all the factories down.
I was born years before the song, so my irritation with the innocent-enough question is that I immediately find myself on the defensive, ready to climb into the ring and take on all comers.
The Allentown I grew up in was far more than “Mack Truck Country” and Lehigh Portland Cement and Western Electric and silk factories and neighboring Bethlehem Steel—that was the place Billy Joel was singing about, but also the place he was praising for its toughness, its resilience, in the face of an economy changing from manufacturing to service. Local reaction to the song as a struggling Rust Belt city was decidedly mixed. But once the blue-collar anthem became a big hit, with its universal themes of hopes and dreams, both realized and dashed, it was widely embraced.
My Allentown, though, was the Allentown of lush parks and rustic trails and small bridges over creeks; of a quarry I was deathly afraid to jump into and curious hex signs on barns and stone houses (which I love); a place that had three department stores, one of which, Hess’s, was—and always will be—the crown jewel, the cornerstone, the true signifier when people say the word “Allentown.” It had opened in 1897 as a small dry-goods store run by two German-Jewish immigrant brothers, Max and Charles Hess, and soon became a place to which people, sprucing themselves up, would often come from miles away, a place with art-deco pizzazz, occupying nearly a full city block and featuring a forty-five-foot neon sign that was the largest outside of New York City, and drawing the likes of Zsa Zsa Gabor and Bob Hope, among many others, for store appearances. It had its own “French Room,” so that shoppers—who would uncomplainingly wait in long lines to burst in the moment the store opened—could see, and perhaps buy, what was being worn in Paris. And it was the first place—in the world!—to have automatic talking elevators that would entice you at each of its five floors by letting you know what was waiting for you if you chose to get off—Second Floor, Ladies’ Fashions, Fourth Floor, Toyland. Comely models, in their teens and from the area mostly, would sashay around the store, under the crystal chandeliers. When Nancy Cummings and Stephanie Sikorski and Suzanne Lechner ventured outside the store in August 1965, they instantly drew a crowd.
Max Hess’s son, known to all as “Junior,” was a marketing genius. He knew that a city like New York or Paris wasn’t for everyone, either by choice or circumstance; so he did everything imaginable to give Allentown a feeling of urbanity and chic for those who sought, or even required, such things in their lives. If that sounded too lofty and did not necessarily appeal to you, if you wanted to remain on the terra firma of the place you liked just as it was, the Patio restaurant in the basement served up the best strawberry pie in the world. It was the best because they said it was.
In his song, Billy Joel made no mention of Hess’s—which stayed in business for one year short of a century. The anchor store expanded to many more, nearly eighty in all, before the recession in the early 1990s led to its closing, in 1996. It wasn’t just the closing of a store; it was the end of an era. Before it was razed four years later, people still came in droves, but it was in the hope of bidding on something to have as a keepsake, from the smallest item to one of those chandeliers.
While Billy Joel—given a key to the city by the mayor, who praised his recording as “a gritty song about a gritty city”—may have elevated the country’s awareness of Allentown as a metaphor for what many cities were struggling with at the time, it bears remembering that Frank Sinatra had sung about it years earlier in “The Train”:
All the passengers for Allentown wait closer to the track
It’s hard for me to realize you’re really coming back
The crossing gate is coming down I think I see the train
The sun has gone and now my face is wet with heavy rain
The passengers for Allentown are gone
The train is slowly moving on
And the hit musical 42nd Street—which came out in 1980 but was adapted from the classic 1933 film—featured a character named Peggy Sawyer, who came to New York City from Allentown, under the shadow of the Depression, with little more than a pair of tap shoes, hell-bent on rising above the eternal procession of aspiring hopefuls and finding her place under the bright lights of Broadway. The star of the show suffers an injury, and Peggy gets her opportunity just before she is to board a bus home, Allentown being a place, the play suggests, that is anywhere and nowhere.
Anywhere and nowhere. I knew better. Knew that that perception of where I came from puts the proverbial chip on your shoulder, the kind that drives you each day to get after it, however you choose to define what “it” is.
Everything’s Waiting for You Downtown
Robbie and I had lunch that Saturday at a place called Union and Finch, soon learning that our waitress was originally from Vietnam. If I needed evidence that I was in a “new Allentown” (Lehigh County ranks among the top 5 percent of counties in the United States where people have come from other countries), I glimpsed the first traces of it in her delightful presence. When I said I grew up in “King’s America”—the America that Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to move toward becoming a “beloved community”—that wasn’t entirely true. That was the America I wanted to be a part of. But in Allentown, the black population was minuscule and concentrated on the east side of town. There were four public junior high schools (and one Catholic school), and, realistically, the only opportunities to meet kids from other schools came on Friday nights, at the YMCA. Just as adults dressed up to go to Hess’s, we did the same, not only to dance to Motown music and Allentown’s own Jay & the Techniques (“Apples, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie,” “Keep the Ball Rollin’”) but, if you were lucky, to meet someone and make out in the darkened corners of the room. Those Friday nights, longed for all week, were sublime (except for the kind of fights and disagreements that occur anywhere there are hormone-fueled teenagers). But my world was still white. And that fact, I see even more clearly now, was one of the main reasons I would sneak away to Philadelphia, sometimes with Robbie, to go to the Uptown Theater or to the WIBG Spectacular at the Convention Center, which didn’t end until the Isley Brothers were done at ten minutes past two in the morning. At the Uptown, I would see and hear the groups that formed the soundtrack of my life—the Delfonics, the Unifics, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, and the Iceman, Jerry Butler. How fortunate was I that I could set off in the morning from Allentown, head to either Philadelphia or New York, and be back home by day’s end without anyone knowing I was gone? Very, but it still didn’t make up for the fact I never saw Sam Cooke perform live.
If Friday nights in junior high were for the dances at the Y, Saturday was for heading downtown, to the four-block area on Hamilton Street that surrounded Hess’s, including the place where my mother worked, Cinruss Creations, the brainchild of the debonair Ed Russoli. My mother Sylvia had style, and she was beautiful, and young people were drawn to her. I was happy when she was working, because working made her happy. When she was not, well, that is a different story. My mother may have been the first woman in the Lehigh Valley to subscribe to Women’s Wear Daily. She always insisted she was, but I can’t prove it. In any case, she knew what was going on and had it going on. As they did with Hess’s, teenagers lined up well before Cinruss opened, to get ID bracelets and initial rings—their sterling-silver jewelry had such a distinctive look, as did the jewelry of C. Leslie Smith, that it became known to jewelers everywhere—and bell-bottoms and strawberry incense and floppy hats and Nehru jackets. It was where you could get Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. When the Beatles came to America, Russoli made sure kids from Allentown had the items they needed and didn’t feel left out. Same with the Summer of Love, in 1967. He became known as a counterculture guru of sorts, and if kids became hip to what was happening in Haight-Ashbury, he wanted them to feel they weren’t missing a beat. The woman he eventually married, Candy Hunt, was two years older than I and she had friends who came of age at Cinruss and then went to California after high school and never returned. Ed Russoli’s Cinruss (and all its niche offshoots) enabled an entire generation to feel cool and “groovy” (a word that had great currency at the time). As it turns out, he was a good-looking Nixon Republican, a smart businessman committed to giving people what they wanted and who later wrote a book with Candy about Ike Eisenhower as a surprisingly good cook.
A Contemporary of Myself
When I returned to Allentown this past summer, I deliberately chose to stay within that same four-block radius of Hamilton Street, intent on retracing my steps. I confess to being a creature of sentiment, but I strive, at the same time, to always be a “contemporary of myself”—thanks to the sage advice a mentor gave me years before. Just as one can re-read a book a number of times and find that one’s reaction to it can change with each reading, I wanted to take the Allentown of today on its own terms, a place that was still making things, but things such as medical devices and semiconductors instead of Mack Trucks.
Hamilton Street had become Hamilton Mall (when downtown business dwindled and people were drawn to the indoor coziness and free parking and piped-in Muzak of the new Whitehall Mall, the city responded by trying to imitate that, making it an area for pedestrians only), but by 1999, it had become Hamilton Street once more. As I walked the streets, I saw a number of eating places with Spanish names and stopped in at Elsa La Reina Del Chicharrón and ordered some caldo de res and mofongo. My palate had expanded exponentially from the cheesesteaks and hoagies of my youth (which I still love, by the way), but seeing family businesses like this in Allentown and hearing Spanish spoken in much of the same rapid-fire way my daughter does made me wonder if returning here to live might be feasible after all. Coming full circle in one’s life does not necessarily equate with moving backward. That Allentown had managed to push far beyond a mainly white population, in 1960, to more than 50 percent Hispanic today was, in my view, a sign that Allentown had opened up and left behind its parochial past.
I wandered into a coffee spot called Gems & Joe, a family business owned by an African American woman named Jewel Jones. Her father, Felton, manages the store, and her sister, Jayonah, is the barista. When I walked in, Felton and a young Canadian engineer named Michal Kononenko were engaged in a quietly fierce battle of chess, and an Asian American mother and daughter, who hadn’t seen each other for a while, were at the next table. Once the chess match concluded, I asked Michal, who was thirty, what had brought him to Allentown. He explained that he had come during the pandemic and had never met his supervisor at Infinera (now Nokia) in person until he arrived. He said he loved the area, and I was curious to know why. “If you can live in a place with one skyscraper [the twenty-four-story PPL Building, which once boasted the world’s fastest elevator], one art museum, one symphony [the smallest in the country to own the place in which it performs, a place where, years before, I used to sneak into burlesque shows], and one concert band [in continuous operation since 1828, the Allentown Band has traveled far and wide], what more could I possibly ask for?” He went on to say how the proximity to New York, where he goes once a month to take part in a heady book club in Brooklyn, and to the Pocono Mountains holds great appeal to him, and he wanted to make sure I knew that the organ currently being played at the newly reopened Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris had been built by the Allen Organ Company in neighboring Macungie. The moment he said “Macungie,” I was reminded of how much I always loved saying the names of the towns that surrounded Allentown—Fogelsville, Hellertown, Catasauqua (where my stepfather was once the chief of police), Wescosville, and Emmaus (where I was fortunate enough to know many girls). Michal Kononenko may have come to Allentown for a job, but from what I could observe, he had acclimated, or assimilated, quite well.
Since it was Father’s Day weekend, I wanted to spend some time with my own. The back road to Beth El Memorial Park is the same one my father would take to make the short trip to Coleman’s Department Store in Northampton, which his father had started in 1905. It was a tiny store compared to Hess’s, and it had men’s, women’s, and children’s clothes throughout its three floors. I worked there for a time and learned early on that business was never good or great or bad; it was, always and forever, “spotty” or “so-so.” If Fred Coleman took lunch at all, it was usually next door, at a small luncheonette counter, and lasted fifteen minutes. Sometimes, if he was feeling more relaxed, he would take me to Cossie Snyder’s. He would order for me there, too; he liked to do it and so I let him. (He helped me open my first bank account at Cement National, an account I held onto for a long time, in part because of the solidity of the name.) Coleman’s had big and tall sizes long before they became a capitalized selling point, and when he began to lose customers to the Whitehall Mall, he always said, “They’ll be back. The stores at the mall don’t have what I have.”
And he was right. When they returned, they took his kidding good-naturedly, while either Louie or Porky would get them squared away in pants with a fifty-four-inch waist or a jacket that today would be 4XL. When school started, he would let each of my friends come to the store to get a new outfit, as well as a new pair of shoes. On one occasion, there was a problem. My friend Wayne Hoffman, who went to the University of Virginia with me and remains one of my closest friends, was explicitly told by his father, an accountant at Bethlehem Steel, not to come home with loafers. I knew his parents well enough to know that his mother would not have objected, but she did not interfere. To this day, we still laugh about that warning from “Dave,” which seemed to come from nowhere. Once Wayne got to Virginia, he did what he wanted, and he still enjoys the distinction of having the first (and perhaps only) owner-operated establishment within a fraternity house in the university’s history. It was called the Hofbrauhaus, and (until word got out and it was shut down) it offered precisely the sort of things you would expect of a proprietor who had come from Allentown: Slim Jims, liverwurst and Lebanon bologna sandwiches with yellow mustard, pickled eggs, chocolate milk, and, most important, frozen Milky Ways. Had he been allowed to have loafers, the narrative might have been completely different.
Once I got to the cemetery, I went first to my father’s grave. For whatever reason, it was the farthest from the other Colemans buried there, as well as the Berkowitzes (my mother’s family). I told him how good it felt to be home, that, thanks to him, diners had continued to be a crucial part of my life, that, much as it might upset him, I had also continued to try to find my sister (whose very existence he would never confirm), but that I loved him none the less. I regaled him with stories about Logan, how she had been to visit him the previous November and had always enjoyed her trips to Allentown—to Yocco’s, the Farmers Market at the Fairgrounds, and feeding the ducks by Lake Muhlenberg; and, in particular, how much pleasure the sturdy wooden Coleman’s Department Store truck had given her growing up. I placed a stone on his grave and planted a kiss on it. I found the other Coleman headstones and placed stones on them as well. I did the same with those of my maternal grandparents, my mother’s brother, and, finally, my mother, who had a plain footstone. I smiled when I thought of how much joy she experienced when Logan would play the violin for her, only wishing that the deep connection between the two of them could have gone on a bit longer.
As I took the bus back to New York later that day, stopping in Bethlehem long enough to take the full measure of the haunting remains of the five huge blast furnaces of Bethlehem Steel, I was in a pensive mood. The trip had been a lot—a lot to absorb emotionally, and there would be, I knew, a lot to sort out—but I was glad to have made it. The country was foundering on so many levels, run by someone my father would have dismissed as a gonif and a shmegegge, and I was angry and distressed about it each day. But this trip, oddly enough, gave me some unexpected hope. Far from feeling alienated and hopelessly estranged, I was pleased to sense I still belonged, to realize I could still remember the bracing feeling of a growing-up spring, that I could still recall and savor such deceptively simple things as the air—the distinctive scent of Allentown, of the Rose Gardens as well as my father’s cigar—and the roars from the football stadium where my friends played on Friday nights in the largest high-school stadium east of the Mississippi, one of whom, Kim McQuilken, became a quarterback in the NFL. You carry these things with you; they may fade from time to time, but they never leave you. Ever. They are part of the inestimably deep spirit and sinew of a place, the elusive intangible that keeps drawing you back.