Nick Durand grows from childhood to adolesence in St. Ives, a small mining town in the hard coal region of upstate Pennsylvania during the Depression years of the 1930s. As the adult world around him struggles with economic hard times and reacts to explosive national and internatioinal crises, he witnesses outbursts of social violence in the street outside his home, hard fought political campaigns, acts of personal kindness and treachery, and games of adult passion and ambition that he only dimly understands. At the same time he experiences with a loosely knit gang of same-age friends adventures, torments, and startling joys of eary youth. In the course of the book one of Nick's mother's closest friends, the vivacioius Thelma Lark, becomes entangled in a dangerous affair with a charismatic local politician, Nick and his father try to solve a mysterious apparent murder, Nick fears that a "hex" has invaded his home, holidays and weddings are celebrated, mysteries of life and death are pondered, prayers are raised, and Nick feels budding drives of desire and romantic love while discovering moral complexity in his family and friends as America moves toward entrance into the Second World War.

TIME BEFORE TIME

By A. James Reichley

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2011 A. James Reichley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4670-3712-9

Contents

LIFELINES..................................................11. Second Son/Only Child...................................32. Christmas Candy.........................................63. A Knack for Addition....................................124. The Night They Blew Up the Bank.........................225. The Morning After.......................................306. The Good Son............................................357. Homer's Roundtable......................................448. Heaven Bound............................................529. The Dreamer.............................................55ENCOUNTERS.................................................6910. The Gang...............................................7111. Words..................................................8012. Wanamaker Christmas....................................8713. Mortality..............................................9814. The Road of Life.......................................10315. Discipline.............................................11516. First Day..............................................12417. The Boy at the Bottom of the Shaft.....................13318. Colored Chalk..........................................14419. The Black Hole.........................................150INTERSECTIONS..............................................16120. Munseytown.............................................16321. The Family Business....................................17022. The Big Fear...........................................17923. The Great World........................................18724. Landslide..............................................19625. Talking Dirty..........................................20426. Death and Matrimony....................................20727. The Girl Almost Next Door..............................21128. Growing Up Christian...................................21529. Betrayal...............................................226BRAINSTORMS................................................23730. Camelot................................................23931. Really Not Far Away....................................25131. Restoration............................................25733. Character Building.....................................26634. Body, Mind, and Spirit.................................27435. Lady in Trouble........................................27836. Google.................................................28537. Petty Crime............................................29238. The World of Tomorrow..................................30239. War Games..............................................313NORTHERN LIGHTS............................................31940. "We Want Willkie!".....................................32141. Dirty Politics.........................................33042. Hot Passion and Early Love.............................33943. Falling Star...........................................35244. Mystery................................................36045. Passage................................................37146. Aurora Borealis........................................379

Chapter One

Second Son/Only Child

Nick Durand was born in the coal-mining town of St. Ives in the hard coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania at fifteen minutes to midnight on the day before Herbert Hoover was inaugurated as President of the United States. When Nick was a boy his father used to tell him that if he had been born fifteen minutes later they would have called him "Hoover"—a statement that in childhood he accepted as literal truth.

Nick's first squalls came from his parents' brightly polished brass bed on the second floor of his family's home on Second Street, St. Ives' main business artery. Being born at home even in those days was regarded as unusual. Most of the boys and girls Nick grew up with, he later discovered, had entered life in the Lassinger Hospital in Peelsburg, the nearby county seat. He never asked his mother, let alone his father, why they had chosen to have his birth at home. Their decision may have grown out of a longstanding family distrust of hospitals. Or it may have been because his mother at the age of thirty-eight had gone through a difficult pregnancy, her second, and Dr. Jim Bingham, the family physician and a high school classmate of his father, thought she would be more comfortable in the surroundings of her own bedroom.

On the morning after Nick's birth, Homer Gearhart, his father's first cousin, took a fresh box of Phillies cigars out of the glass display case just inside the entrance to his Drug Store, two doors down Second Street on the other side of the Bijou theatre. Lifting the lid with his penknife, he put the box beside the cash register with a handwritten note: "Take One on Durand." When Nick's father came down later that morning to the Drug Store (Nick always thought of it with capital letters, designating the Gearharts' home as well as the pharmacy) he saw the note on the half-empty box. He paid Homer for the cigars that had already been taken but told him not to put out any more.

That evening the Peelsburg Chronicle—St. Ives had no newspaper of its own—carried among the "Personal Announcements" on one of its inside pages a terse report that a baby boy had been born the day before to Blaine and Sarah Durand. No name was given for the new arrival, since Nick's mother and father, under conflicting cross-pressures from the Harbeson family on his mother's side and the Durands and Gearharts on his father's, had not yet reached agreement on what the child was to be called.

A few days later in the distant mountain community of Munseytown in southwestern Pennsylvania, just above the Maryland panhandle, a slightly fuller account of the birth, though still without a given name, appeared at the bottom of the front page of the Munseytown Gazette, a weekly newspaper:

An event, the news of which traveled over the wires to Munseytown, occurred Monday, March 4, at the home of Blaine G. Durand of St. Ives, Lenape County. At 7:40 that morning a boy was born to Mr. and Mrs. Durand, he being their second child. Grandfather J. N. Durand of Munseytown assumed his new honor with becoming dignity and pleasure. As for the boy, it was an auspicious day to be born—the presidential inauguration day. With the incentives provided by the successful firm of Durand Bros., Lumbermen, and the thought of the highest elective office in the land, the little lad will have plenty of scope for his ambition.

Beneath this report a brief message from the Munseytown Grain & Supply Co. announced: "We have Frederick County burr ground Buckwheat flour in stock. Buckwheat sausages go fine on these frosty mornings for breakfast."

Except for being wrong by one day on the date of birth—which may have resulted from simple confusion or perhaps from the editor's wish to establish a closer connection with the inauguration of the new president in Washington—the story in the Munseytown paper was correct. J. N. Durand, always known to Nick as "Boppa," had indeed for a dozen or more years made his legal residence for voting and tax purposes in the home of his brother and business partner, Frank, in Munseytown, though he still spent almost half the year in St. Ives, sharing the house he had built almost forty years before with his son and daughter-in-law.

It was also true that an earlier child...