Story Telling and History

Abstract

I am looking at a digital image of a photograph shot on November 22, 1958 at the American Legion Post 585, in Duryea, Pennsylvania. I was then six years old, and I have no memory of this particular photograph. But similar ones, capturing the same event, later appeared in the Pittston Dispatch, a weekly newspaper. I remember those quite well, and the blow ups they caused at home. Pittston was the biggest town between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton in the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania. It had a movie theater and a few stores and restaurants downtown, though like every nearby community it never recovered from the collapse of the mining industry. With a population of a few thousand, Duryea did not have its own newspaper, or library, or many amenities.