WHAT IT'S LIKE IN JERSEY SHORE
by Kathy, copyright 1999
Gonzo fans might know the slight shock that HST had when
he came to Jersey Shore. Many people think that there's a beach there,
but alas...Kathy is a good friend of TGTH, perhaps one of the oldest.
We have some pictures for this story, and they'll be posted when they arrive :-)
--Christine O
If you take Route 44 west from Allenwood off Route 15 in Pennsylvania,
you come to this place in the middle of nowhere called Oval. I was
doing a Little League game out there. Milton vs. whatever team, I
forget. Girls softball. Sectional championship. Big game. The winner
goes to States. The thing is, though, the cellular wouldn't work from
the field. I got a really weak cell from the van, which I had parked
about 50 or 100 yards from the diamond. So after every half inning, I
ran really fast to the van, called the station with the score, then ran
really fast back to the field to keep stats on the game. Anyway.
That's what brought me out that Saturday afternoon.
If you meander out there past Oval, you'll eventually run into Jersey
Shore. A small town, Jersey Shore is close to Williamsport, which is a
small city or large town, depending on your perspective. I had Jersey
Shore on my mind a lot lately. I had just finished reading Hunter S.
Thompson's "A Proud Highway," a book of letters HST wrote as he was just
starting out on what would become his career. One stop on his journey
was Jersey Shore.
HST did not think highly of Jersey Shore. Actually, any town in Central
Pennsylvania that HST landed in at the time would have probably drawn
the same reaction. Central PA in the 50's was an ugly, desolate place,
especially around Williamsport. Williamsport's high school's nickname
is "The Millionaires." The "millionaires" were the lumber barons who
settled in Williamsport, and proceded to rape the forests bare.
Williamsport was built along the Susquehanna River, and logs were
floated down the river to mills and to railroads for shipping.
Central Pennsylvania's forests are vibrant, healthy, and beautiful now.
But in the first half of the century, this part of the state was
literally denuded of all trees. Even today, the forests here sport
relatively young trees, most are less than fifty years old. I can't
even imagine how ugly it must have been when HST lived here. Once, on a
college field trip, my geography class went to the only virgin forest
left in the entire region. It was just a few acres big. A few acres
small, I should say.
What with the environmental movement, and the powerful sportsmen
contingent here, the forests, as I said, have rebounded very well. I
was positive that Jersey Shore's ambience had to have been much improved
since HST's stay. I planned on proving it to him, too. I was going to
take some pictures of Jersey Shore, and especially, if possible, from
the rear of his address at 1220 Allegheny Street. He had described the
view from his window as abysmally bleak. I just knew it had to be
better now.
I was wrong, though. The view from the rear of 1220 Allegheny was
almost exactly as HST had described it, some 40 years earlier: "....an
eyesore of a barn about 100 yards to the rear, several run down houses
in the vicinity, and another eyesore of a hill - covered with scraggly
trees and grass...." The eyesore of a barn looked more like a toolshed
to me. And the eyesore of a hill was nought but a slag heap. Pitiful.
I was rather disappointed, to say the least. The pictures I took (just
two) were all I had the heart to take, and I knew I was not going to
send them to HST for a lark.
One of these days, though, I plan to go back to Jersey Shore and see if
the Jersey Shore Herald is still in existence, and if so, if they have a
morgue. I think it would be fun to read through the sports pages and
see what HST wrote about high school athletics. He only stayed a short
time. The letters in "The Proud Highway" from Jersey Shore run from
November to December of 1957. He may have seen some football, too early
for any championship wrestling or basketball. Had he arrived in August,
he might have found something to enjoy in the area. Williamsport, just
a few miles away, is world headquarters and the origin of Little League
Baseball. The Little League World Series the biggest thing around.
