Tin Town, Pennsylvania

Colombia Plate Glass Factory, Tin Town, Pennsylvania.

Diverse Tintown relived by former residents

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Sunday - Aug. 17, 2014

By Jeff Himler

Friday, June 24, 2005 

BLAIRSVILLE--Some argue the flood of immigrants arriving in America in the late 1800s and early 1900s resulted in a melting pot, others that the meeting of European ethnic groups was more like a mixing bowl.

However one believes the process took place, one of the best examples of different cultures coalescing was in the now-vanished community of Tintown. At its height, the small company village consisted of about 70 families living in double houses in a low-lying area between the current end of Blairsville's South Liberty Street and the Conemaugh River.

Though originally named for an older, smaller tin mill, for much of its existence, between 1901 and 1935, the community housed workers for the adjacent Columbia Plate Glass plant.

Blairsville's John Vukman, born in 1923, lived in House No. 53 at Tintown until he was in his early teens.

"Most all of the people came from Europe," he said. "It was a mixture of Italians, Slovaks, Croatians and some others. They came here and were hired right into the factory."

Vukman's father, Stephen, who hailed from Croatia, worked as a heat treater at the Columbia plant, overseeing a step in the process when sheets of hot glass would be rolled out and gradually reduced in temperature.

"If you wanted a job, you went to the glass factory: everybody worked there," according to George Carmo, a neighbor then in Tintown and now on South Brady Street.

Carmo was born in Parma, Italy, in 1918, and arrived in Tintown with his family when he was three years old.

His father, Louis, though a shoe repairman by trade, found employment on the Blairsville plant's glass-cutting tables.

Carmo recalled that harmony prevailed among Tintown's blue-collar households.

"The people were of all nationalities, but everybody got along," he said.

Crime was not a problem in Tintown, he added, even though, "Everyone had a skeleton key that could open the door of every house in town."

But, he noted, some families might be startled from their sleep when "the ones that were drunk got the wrong house."

Eventually, African-American families lived alongside those of European extraction in the main section of the community, which consisted of five rows of brick company houses. But, Vukman noted, most of the former were housed in smaller wooden dwellings located closer to the river.

In addition, 10 families resided in the separate "Ten Commandments," a row of 10 single wood frame homes. "They were bought from Sears and Roebuck," Vukman said.

The American Foursquare, a Sears, Roebuck & Co. kit home, was a staple of small American towns between 1908 and 1940. More than 100,000 of them were built in America. Homes built prior to 1980 make up 80% of the housing stock in the United States. Sears offered 15 styles of Foursquare kits, which were available through the mail-order Modern Homes program. These homes arrived via boxcar, making them particularly common in neighborhoods near rail lines. The design is simple to understand and elegant in its efficient enclosure of space. Most of these designs are nearly perfect squares, with a footprint ranging from 28 ft. to 34 ft. and are two stories in height. They are typically crowned with a pyramid-shaped roof detailed with dormers.

Vukman pointed out Tintown's brick homes all were identical save those in the row nearest to "Hilltop"--the name for the adjacent neighborhood which extended north along Liberty Street, from the intersection of Fourth Avenue.

Exterior staircases provided separate access to the second floor on both sides of each house.

"They were made for four families to live in one house," Vukman concluded. But, "By the time I was growing up, there were just two families in each house."

Not that the homes were necessarily any less crowded.

Vukman observed, "There were a lot of big families in Tintown"--including the Grdgons, who had a dozen siblings under one roof. The Petrikovic family numbered nine, the Paouncics eight, including the parents.

On top of that, "Almost every house had boarders"--usually fellow countrymen, often relatives, of those who were renting the home from the glass company.

Counting the boarders, Vukman estimates there were as many as 500 people living in Tintown at a given time.

When Vukman's father first arrived in Tintown, he was put up by another Croatian family, the Paouncics.

In turn, once the Vukman family residence was established, two of the three upstairs bedrooms were set aside for boarders.

"They slept in shifts," John Vukman recalled. "When one guy got up to go to work, the other one would go to sleep in the same bed."

Rent for the company home, which included a kitchen, dining room and parlor downstairs, was reasonable.

Vukman said, "I remember going up the street and paying $5 per month for rent," collected by notary public Jimmy Turner at his East Market Street office.

With only two siblings, Vukman's family was one of the smallest in Tintown.

But, he noted, he still was part of a post-World War I baby boom. As a result, "There were 210 kids in my freshman class in high school."

That same uptick in births appears to have contributed to the need for an addition to the South Burrell grade school, a now-defunct institution which educated the children of Tintown and Hilltop through grade 8.

According to information he received from an older Tintown native, the late Herman Colench, Vukman related, "Originally, the school was laid out in an 'L' shape. Then they built onto it and made it into a 'U' shape."

During expansion of the brick structure, in 1922 and 1923, "The kids had to go to school at the Sokol Club"--in its original location near the end of Liberty Street--just uphill from the school yard, not at the club's current South Spring Street site.

The school was divided into four classrooms, each housing up to two grade levels, with one spare room. "There were certain grades they had to break up," Vukman recalled.

When he was young, Vukmans said, "My father taught me my ABC's in Croatian," which features two additional letters than the English counterpart.

"Then, in school, they taught me the regular alphabet, and my Dad said, 'That's it.' He didn't want me to get confused, so after that, I only learned English."

But many other Tintown residents were unable to avoid the routine twisting of foreign tongues by English-speaking officials at both the local school and the glass plant.

As a result, many families found themselves saddled with multiple name spellings.

"They wrote the name down the way it sounded to them," Vukman said. So, a late cousin, whose real surname was Radakovich, was alternately known by the name "Rodish."

In a similar situation, Carmo revealed the surname he now uses is not the one he was born with: "Caimi."

He explained, "When my dad went to get a job at the plant, the timekeeper changed the name to Carmo, and we grew up with that name."

That led to a complication when Carmo enlisted in the Marine Corps, two years prior to the U.S. entry into World War II.

He said, "When I joined the service, I had to have naturalization papers. I was listed on my father's papers, so I had to use the name Caimi."

Serving as a gunnery sergeant, he participated in several Pacific Theater landings, including on Midway Island and Okinawa.

After he returned to civilian pursuits as a carpenter and photographer, he added, "I got married as Caimi. But then I had to legally change my name back to Carmo because they thought my brothers and sisters were half-brothers and -sisters."

Vukman noted most of the young men and boys in Tintown also gained an alternate to their given name.

"Everybody had a nickname," Vukman said. "There was Peaches and Chippy...."

Carmo was referred to as "Renzo" as he grew up.

He and his family lived in House No. 91, in the row closest to the river.

"I lived almost in the last house," Carmo said. "It was over a mile and a half to walk to the high school."

Vukman had even farther to walk, beginning in the fifth grade, when he switched from the South Burrell School to the SS. Simon & Jude Catholic School, which now is closed.

Once he had reached that age, he said his parents "thought it was safe enough for me to walk up the street," navigating through downtown traffic.

"About half the kids in Tintown went to the Catholic School," he noted.

In 1926-27, just a few years after Vukman made his Tintown debut, the Columbia glass plant underwent a $1.5 million modernization. The move paid off, as annual production soared to a high of seven million square feet of glass along with peak employment of 492 laborers and 18 supervisors and office workers.

Advances at the plant were paralleled by improvements in the community.

Originally, the glass factory had its own coal-fired power plant to provide electricity for its manufacturing process.

Eventually, the Tintown residents also got turned on to electricity, after years of illuminating their homes with gaslight.

Said Vukman, "When I was a little kid, they put a wire up through the gas line so you had one electric bulb in every room."

As for exterior streetlights, "There were only two or three in the whole town," Carmo noted.

Coal-burning pot-belly stoves handled both heating and cooking chores for the Tintown households.

To help keep them burning, youngsters positioned themselves on either side of a tipple, where rail cars would unload coal for the glass plant.

"Anything that fell off the cars on your side, you would get to pick up," Vukman said, pointing out, "Coal was expensive, and there was no money back then.

"Sometimes, the guy in the tipple would be nice, and if no one was looking, he'd throw out a lump of coal or two."

Vukman noted the cement foundation of the tipple is one of the few remnants of Tintown and the glass plant which still can be seen on what today is federal Army Corps property.

When he was growing up, Vukman added, South Liberty Street was the only thoroughfare in Blairsville which was paved with cement.

"It was built by the (glass) factory from Main Street down to Tintown," he said. "Every other road in Blairsville was paved with brick."

While the work was in progress, "We had to come down Spring Street"--one block to the east.

According to Vukman, the Chenet family of Hilltop was one of the first in South Blairsville to own an automobile. Most residents, who couldn't afford such a luxury, simply hiked downtown to catch a train or streetcar from East Market Street.

He noted, long-distance travel to destinations like Johnstown usually were reserved for visits to relatives.

Eventually, "I bought the first car in our family, in 1949."

Two of Tintown's three roads were "big dirt streets," Vukman noted. "You could park four cards side by side in them."

With vehicular traffic usually scarce, the youths of the town would congregate in one of the streets to play an impromptu game of ball or hockey.

"We played a lot of marbles, and we made up our own games," Vukman said.

Sometimes, more organized ball games would take place on a field between the South Burrell School and the glass factory, pitting youngsters from one street against those who lived on another.

"There was no money then, so we were lucky to have baseballs," Vukman said. When none could be had, the boys played softball instead.

Vukman noted a fence lined the entire length of the field, meant to prevent children from going down the hill and getting into trouble among the piles of sand stockpiled for making glass.

Every young boy in Tintown eventually wanted to join the older ball players on the community's own adult team. Initially known as the Panthers, they were redubbed the Orioles in the 1930s.

They played neighboring rivals (the still-extant Colts) from the eastern "Brownstown" section of Blairsville, where Vukman now lives, or from across the river at "Coketown," now known as Derry Township's Cokeville Heights.

"At the end of the season, they had a round-robin tournament." But, "Every year, there was no champion. The Colts would beat the Orioles, the Orioles beat Coketown and Coketown beat the Colts."

The Orioles' established players were heroes to Vukman and other younger fans.

One of the best local players was Joe "Deffy" Petrikovic.

Said Vukman, "He played everything: he pitched, caught and played first base. He went to Detroit for try-outs."

"Louie Radakovich was the home-run hitter, and Steve Paouncic was the shortstop," Vukman added.

"Frank Torri used to play second base all the time. They called him the 'Old Man' because he was playing into his 40s."

According to Vukman, "Once you were 16 years old, you were eligible to play" with the Orioles. But actually getting to wear a uniform and take a turn at bat was another matter, he indicated.

"In 1942, when all the older guys had gone into the service, I got a chance to play," said Vukman, who was then an 18-year-old outfielder. "I was proud, just having that uniform on me."

The Orioles' games were played not far from the current Blairsville Little League field, which Vukman helped to develop in the early 1960s. He recalled that the games were a weekly highlight for local sports fans:

"Every Sunday, at two in the afternoon, everybody left Tintown and came up to the game. There was nothing else to do on Sundays."

To make the female fans more comfortable, he said, "They built bleachers behind the backstop." Also, "A lot of people brought their chairs or sat on the hill to watch the game."

Another way to spend a summer day in South Blairsville was to swim in one of several popular areas along the Conemaugh.

"Each part of South Blairsville had its own swimming hole," Vukman noted.

As a youngster, he considered the Tintown spot too deep, at up to nine feet, and preferred going downstream to "the Ripples," where the water was no more than four feet deep.

He explained, "They had a gas line that went across the river there, and there was a ripple where the water flowed over it."

At one of the vacant lots in town, traveling attractions often set up shop in warmer weather, including a medicine man and a carnival.

"The carnival was there two years in a row," Vukman said. In between rides on the ferris wheel, merry-go-round or giant swings, "They had a boxing match and some hootchy-kootchy dancers."

Local music-making also provided a diversion for the Tintown residents, taking their minds off the troubles of the Depression.

Several young men from the town gained a following as the "Moonlight Serenaders String Band." Members included Carmo's older brother Walter, on guitar, along with John Petrikovic, Joe Novak and Conner Muir--with additional instrumentation on bass, violin and mandolin.

Said George Carmo, "They played on all the local radio stations," with an eclectic repertoire including renditions of popular big band tunes.

Vukman recalled the versatile players could alter their style to suit a variety of audiences--including families of various ethnicities for whom they would play.

"At Easter and Christmas, they came to our home and all the neighbors would come over to dance," Vukman recalled.

"The Serenaders liked our house because we always had wine and beer," he said. "They played American songs and Croatian songs, too."

He recalled that there were times when the band also would make the rounds of Tintown, stopping outside each home's window to offer a selection--hence, the group's name.

The town additionally fielded its own tamburitzan group, playing on mandolins, Vukman said. "They were good."

Each of Tintown's houses had a large shade tree planted next to it--trees which played a prominent role in annual Halloween hi-jinks.

Recalled Vukman, "The older kids would take swings and chairs off people's porches and put them up in the trees."

"Halloween was a big thing," he said, noting, "Even the old folks used to dress up," taking on spooky alter-egos for the occasion.

"I used to be scared; I'd hide under the table."

When winter arrived, "We'd go sled riding down the road from Hilltop to Tintown," Vukman said.

"The Quilico family used to make bobsleds, and everybody wanted to see who could go the farthest on them."

During the Depression, when cash was scarce, the families of Tintown did what they could to supplement their income, by growing and raising some of their own food.

Vukman recalled that neighboring farmer Ed Johnson permitted a section of his field to be set aside as a community garden for the residents: "He gave a patch of that ground for all the people, so they could plant whatever they wanted."

According to Vukman, his father grew tomatoes, peppers and potatoes in his family's share of the "Tintown Gardens."

"Potatoes were a big crop," he noted. "If you had them, you could eat soup all winter."

Sandwiched between the double houses, along with privies and coal sheds, many families erected outbuildings for livestock.

"I raised rabbits, but most people had chicken coops," Carmo noted.

Vukman's family purchased hogs raised by neighbors and turned them into ham in their backyard smoke shanty.

"We made our own blood pudding," he added, describing a process similar to casing sausage. "You would buy a pig's head and cut it all up. That was like an assembly line every winter."

For other commodities, local residents turned to one of several food purveyors in the community.

"Ed Nakles had the big store," in the Hilltop section of South Blairsville, Vukman said. "On one side of the building, he had food, and the other side was furniture."

"Next door, the Fornis had a store," on Liberty Street between First and Second avenues. Then, "In the 1940s, the Shurinas opened a one-room grocery store."

"Mostly, we bought canned goods" from the local grocers, Vukman recalled.

The family also bought meat for Stephen Vukman's lunch, when he was employed at the glass plant. "Minced ham was the cheapest meat you could buy," his son noted.

In later years, the younger Vukman often ventured downtown, to the A&P store, to pick up supplies for his family's tavern.

He explained the Vukmans were among several local families who looked for a new source of income in 1935. That year, the end of Prohibition cleared the way for the legitimate sale of alcohol while the glass plant, having passed through a series of owners, was closed that August under the cloud of bankruptcy.

Taverns "were popping up all over town," John Vukman noted.

His family's was called the "Columbia Restaurant," because it also served food, and was operated by his mother, Theresa, in a former store near the edge of Hilltop.

Later, when the old glass plant office building went up for sale, the family relocated there, about a block downhill on the opposite side of Liberty Street.

Renaming the establishment "The White Tavern," he said, "We lived upstairs and had the business downstairs.

"There were two big walk-in safes. One of them made a good dark room. I used to go in there and develop film."

At their business, the Vukmans had one of the first telephones in that end of Blairsville--a pay phone.

"Everybody used it," Vukman said. "I used to run to all the houses, saying , 'You're wanted on the phone.' "

As Tintown mothers tended to have full houses and little time to travel to the store themselves, Vukman noted, a number of town merchants specialized in door-to-door service.

"Mike Asper would go from house to house with suitcases of clothes to sell," he recalled. "And if he didn't have what you wanted, he'd order it and bring it next time."

Likewise, he recalled, a member of the Grdgon family made house calls to cut hair.

"When we lived at the beer garden, Dad would give him a couple of beers to cut hair for everyone in the household, and he was satisfied."

The St. Patrick's Day Flood of 1936 was another pivotal episode in the history of Tintown.

At that point, Vukman, then 12, his father, and younger brother, Joseph, still were living in House No. 53. His mother, who would give birth that year to a third child, Mary, had moved into a room above the Columbia Restaurant.

"We heard screaming outside, when all at once, water started coming in the cellar window," John Vukman recalled. "My father was yelling, 'Voda!' "--Croatian for "water."

"He got us dressed and walked us up the hill. The current wasn't rapid, but the water came up fast," he said, indicating the level was just above his waist when they evacuated the home and took shelter with his mother.

Returning to the flooded house, "My father took all the furniture he could upstairs. The water stopped two steps away from reaching the second floor."

Once the water had receded, John Vukman also went back down the hill and was awed by the powerful forces of nature.

"When I saw what it did to the railroad tracks, I couldn't believe it," he said of the rising water's effect. "It had just twisted them up."

"The fire company came down with big hoses and washed all the mud out" of residents' homes.

Then he and his father got to work, shoveling mud out of their residence.

"It's a miracle no one died in the flood," said Carmo, who was one of six children in his family.

Like Stephen Vukman, Carmo recalled, "We all carried a lot of furniture upstairs, figuring it wouldn't' go that high. But it almost did.

"The water stopped one foot from the top of the ceiling in the kitchen."

It helped, he noted, that the first floor of the houses was several feet above ground level.

A senior in high school at the time, Carmo temporarily suspended his studies to join workers repairing flood damage to area rail lines.

"They were hiring everybody," Carmo noted. To bring in extra money for their families, "We worked all the time when we were kids.

"A lot of track got washed out down towards Saltsburg," he said.

"We got on a train at Blairsville and went down to Saltsburg. "We put in new fill and helped to lay the track and ties."

After completing the hard labor, Carmo faced the equally demanding task of catching up with his classes.

"It was tough," he said. "But the teachers helped you though, and everything worked out."

Since the glass plant had shut down, and the company had stopped charging rent, it did not help Tintown residents restore their flood-damaged homes.

But, to prevent outbreak of disease, outbuildings were burned and the Red Cross distributed lime to the residents.

The glass plant and its machinery also were cleaned up, but production never resumed.

The plant was scrapped in 1938, and the area was further bulldozed in 1952, clearing the way for construction of the Conemaugh Dam and creation of a flood control zone upstream.

"After the flood, that's when a lot of people started filtering out and looking for other jobs," Vukman said. "My dad went looking in other places, but he couldn't find anything. So we decided to make the best of it here."

Vukman was among a group of 40 young Tintown men who entered the Army in June 1943.

Of that number, he was the only one selected for a signal corps position, he noted, crediting his decision to take a commercial typing class in high school.

Working on various machines, including a teletype, Vukman and his fellow soldiers were stationed in India to pick up and transmit coded signals of Japanese forces operating in the Burma theater.

After he was discharged, in January 1946, Vukman completed automobile training at Blairsville's Vale Tech and initially landed a job at a garage in Mt. Union.

He also helped maintain three trucks his family purchased for a new venture in hauling coal, in partnership with Frank Brozick of Bairdstown.

Eventually, Vukman was hired at the Westinghouse plant, retiring after more than 30 years of service.

In 1989, Vukman renewed ties with many of his old Tintown neighbors when he helped fellow area natives--Norma Piccolin Trifilo and Helen Buco Palek--organize the first of about a dozen annual reunions for those who had lived in South Blairsville prior to 1952.

Held at the current Sokol Club, the gatherings attracted as many as 260.

"We had at least 10 states represented, from Florida to California," he said.

In conjunction with the event, Vukman compiled a mailing list of more than 300 ex-Tintown names, beginning with a survey of gravestones at Blairsville's SS. Simon and Jude cemetery.

"It took me a year, but I made a book listing when everybody who lived there from 1910 to 1940 was born, and if they died."

Unfortunately, as the roster of Tintown alumni dwindles through time, "Every so often, I have to go in and make changes."

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Pittsburgh Tribune‑Review

Jun 24, 2005 - Carmo was born in Parma, Italy, in 1918, and arrived in Tintown with ... to go to school at the Sokol Club"--in its original location near the end of ...