Happy 250th Birthday, America

     Growing up in the 1950’s in a small town in Southern Illinois, I was surrounded by my father’s friends, all of whom served in the military in WWII. It was a very patriotic place with speeches on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July and summer concerts by the High School band with all kinds of patriotic music. My father’s best childhood friend became the town’s most admired lawyer, and it was often Jim Wham who gave the rousing speeches when we all gathered at our Carnegie Library near the bandshell that was home of the summer concerts.  As a child, I thought of Jim as eloquent as Abraham Lincoln – a twentieth century statesman.

    My hometown has three distinctions. The first was the tragic mine explosion that occurred on Good Friday in 1947. It was the worst mine explosion ever in the USA. 111 of the men working there died on that terrible day; one of them was my grandfather who started working in the mine at 13. In the years since then, he had risen to be a foreman. He died along with his men on that day. The tragedy touched the whole town – among the victims were brothers, cousins and friends. I never met my grandfather; I was born nine months after the explosion. Soon after hearing about the explosion, Woody Guthrie memorialized the tragedy in three songs, “Waiting at the Gate”, “The Dying Miner” and “Talking Centralia” Some miners left messages to their families on which he based his songs.

      The next distinction was that the whole town loved high school basketball. Throughout the decades, the team members were the stars in town, and everyone knew their names. For many years the team was led by a well-loved coach who taught the town’s young men teamwork, good values and the thirst to work hard to win. So much so that our team, the Orphans, became the winningest high school team across the whole United States. They won several state championships and got close several times throughout the whole of the 20^th century. Recently, the Orphan mascot was voted the most unusual mascot across the entire U.S.

Lastly, we were surprised to find in 1960 that the US Census proclaimed that Centralia, Illinois was the Center of Population for the USA.         

     (Coincidently, just as I was writing about the three distinctions of my hometown, I received a series of texts from my younger brother who just happened to find some interesting information. I want to share the fourth distinction that was news to us both – way before our time! It seems that Centralia, founded in 1853, was the site of the Illinois State Fair in 1858. Both Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas stopped by the fair as they traveled between campaign stops. But it wasn’t the famous Senate candidates at the Fair that got the attention. Centralia Attracts Abraham Lincoln and Hot Air Balloons in 1858 — The Greater Centralia Chamber of Commerce  )

       As a child, I never thought of my earlier ancestors or when they might have come to the USA. That is until one of my mother’s brothers (there were six brothers and four sisters raised just outside town on a farm during the Depression.) did some genealogy work and shared it with me. If I ever had thought of those ancestors, I assumed that they were new immigrants like the many European folks in town, mostly those with Italian and German names. Didn’t really think about it – they were just my friends; never wondered where they came from or how long they had been here.

       You can imagine my surprise when my uncle sent our family tree. He found ancestors that had been brave and adventurous like all of our ancestors since most of us are descended from immigrants. I was amazed to find out that on every side of my family tree there were people who braved great odds to come to the New World. One part of the family arrived on the Ark and were among the first Catholics to leave England to settle the new Maryland colony. They arrived in the new world on March 25, 1634. The colonists made friends with the Piscataway and Yoacamato Indians who gave some of their land to establish the first Maryland village they called St. Mary’s. March 25 is still celebrated in the State of Maryland as Maryland Day. Generations later, the same family braved the wilderness to settle the Kentucky frontier and set up the first of Kentucky’s distilleries – have you heard of Old Granddad’s? He is my granddad! (News to me!)

     My uncle discovered that some ancestors arrived in New Amsterdam (later New York) in 1651 settling in Breucklijn (later Brooklyn) from Holland. Somehow or other, they eventually braved the difficult conditions moving to New Jersey and then continued West to southern Illinois. One ancestor in the North Carolina colony was forced west after his plantation was burned by the British in the War of 1812. He became the first schoolmaster in Marion County, Illinois – that was a long, arduous journey of 700 miles for him and his large family.

      Like your family, whether they arrived recently or centuries ago, the U.S.A gave them and us opportunities we would have never had anywhere else. For that I am grateful and appreciate the hard struggles they suffered to give us the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” Let us protect it and honor their legacy forever. God bless America.