Monongah’s five new Christmas street lights have arrived at the Monongah Town Hall.

Gushed Susan Staron Sanders, the Angel of Thomas Street who has spearheaded the Charge of the Lights Brigade fundraising that will result in TWENTY ONE lights adorning the town every holiday:

“The committee is thrilled and we thank you all who purchased a light to help us make our town shine.

“I love this town.”

So do I, Susan.

It gave me the best childhood ever, a townful of adults who watched over me as if I were their child when I was out of sight of my parents, and folks who, by their examples, gave me role models for having a good life and career.

Most of all I respect the coal miners, including my father, who went into that dark dungeon day after day to feed, clothe and educate their children. It is America’s most dangerous job, and has been for more than a century.

Coal miners have far more courage than I will ever have.

Mayor Greg Vandetta said that the five new lights and the 16 holdover lights will be erected the week of Thanksgiving and will be taken down the week after Christmas.

If Susan and her Charge of the Lights Brigade keep it up, astronauts in space will be using Monongah’s Christmas street lights as their beacon for their returns to Earth.

Susan, Class of 1971, is an administrative assistant at Personnel.

She is married to Ron Sanders. They live in the Thomas Street home once occupied by the Mangino family that moved to the Germantown section of Philadelphia long ago.

 

It's next door to the Olesky rental with the two-holer outhouse that we occupied before my parents purchased the Church Street home from Consolidation Coal Company.

When I visited the Manginos as a teenager, Philomena “Boss” Mangino greeted me with a slap on the face and a warning: “Go home; your mother is worried about you.”

No wonder.

It was between my freshman year at Fairmont State and my sophomore year at WVU that I hitchhiked from Monongah to Chicago, where my Futten grandparents had friends from their days in Italy; then to Loyalhanna, Pennsylvania, with another family that knew my Futten grandparents in Italy; and to Philadelphia.

After the loving face-slap (I think it was loving), I hitchhiked home to Monongah.

My mother gave me two $20 bills when I left home and told me to put one in each sock. When I got back from the 1,700-mile hitchhiker’s odyssey, I still had one of the $20 bills, unspent, in one of my socks.

Let me tell you, the smell of money is not as pleasant as you would think after a $20 bill hides in my sock for nearly two weeks.