Mom's family, when she was a little girl, lived in one half of a double house just east of the south end of Robinson Avenue in Pen Argyl.She told me many things over the years about her early life in that house, about her brothers and sisters, and her immigrant parents, who had come from the Ukraine sometime at the dawn of the 20th Century. She had 3 sisters and a brother who had been given borderline brain damage when my grandfather, in a drunken rage, had kicked him down the steps of their home in Palmerton. He had been only a few years old, but it gave him a lifetime of mental handicaps.
But there was still humor in his situation that anyone can identify with. One such incident happened when he was about 9.My grandfather smoked a pipe and in those days the tobacco wasn't available in the colorful pouches it is today, but loose in whatever container the store had. His taste ran to the stronger tobaccos. One in particular was favored by many of the Italians who lived in the same area. Like most boys my uncle must have been prone to experimenting with it, even though he was told not to.
One day he must have gotten into his father's tobacco and pipe and was smoking behind the shed in the yard, where they kept the goat that provided milk for the family. My grandmother was in the yard for some reason when she thought she saw smoke rising from behind the shed. Sneaking around to the back she saw Uncle John puffing away on his father's pipe. Without revealing her presence, she retreated to the house and told my grandfather about what Uncle John had been doing when he came home from the slate quarry, where he worked as a basket controller.
Nothing was said all through supper. After supper was concluded, my grandfather, as was his custom, lit his pipe, which Uncle John had been careful enough to clean thoroughly, after having stoked it with the foulest tobacco he had in his stash. He got it going real good and then handed it to Uncle John and told him to smoke the entire thing. He was not a man you said no to, so Uncle John smoked it and turned several shades of green and got very sick. That was the end of his smoking for many, many years.