Saturday, August 6, 2011

Rural Glamour











I was born in 1955 in a small coal mining town in western Pennsylvania and when I was a child there were still a lot of these old metal framework bridges with wooden decks still standing. On back roads, many unpaved, the wood planking starting to rot, we still used them and so did a lot of coal trucks. I'm still amazed that they didn't collapse killing the poor guy who just happened to be heading into town that day. In 1921, when this picture was taken, this bridge was probably only a few years old. A year or so after Prohibition went into a effect, I like to think that this young lady was headed off to a roadhouse, thumbing her nose at all the moralists who tried to solve the real problem of alcohol abuse with legislation that had no chance of working. When I was in my early twenties, I worked at a mine in West Virginia. The older residents had a saying, "Coal mine, moonshine, or movin' on down the line."

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