Gina Gargano (in camo shirt) leads her tour group through Pottsville. PHOTOS BY JACQUELINE DORMER
Originally published in the Pottsville Republican-Herald on September 19, 2021.
POTTSVILLE - “Up is the American direction,” says Gina Gargano, board member of the Schuylkill County Historical Society, as she walks up Mahantongo Street. “Everywhere you wanna go, up. I want more money, I want more things, up.”
John O’Hara, the author born and raised in Pottsville, wanted to be “up.” He felt he was more “up” than anyone else, as far as writing talent was concerned. He wanted the best of everything - cars, clothes and social connection. Due to what Gargano calls “an accident of birth,” he could only go up so far. O’Hara spent the first 20 years of his life on Mahantongo Street, which became Lantenenego Street in his novels and countless short stories.
As she led a handful of O’Haratics on a walking tour of the author’s childhood, Gargano’s colorful stories transformed Pottsville into O’Hara’s Gibbsville.
Gina Gargano points us up as she talks about John O'Hara.
“Now we’re gonna go down,” Gargano said, leading the group to Norwegian Street (Christiana Street) and Market Street (which remained Market Street). “Down is not the American direction. You’re gonna see a big difference in who lives down and who lives up.”
Kerry Hogan and her husband Rich, who came from Philadelphia to take the tour, got their picture taken with the bronze statue of O’Hara on Centre and Howard Streets.
“I’m a huge fan,” Kerry said. “His writing style is just so relatable and down-to-earth, and I mean, everybody talks about his skill with dialogue, but even today it resonates and sounds like real people. I think the way he writes about the Pennsylvania towns is unique.”
“We’re both from a town that reflects a post-industrial history,” Rich said. “John O’Hara’s love for Pottsville isn’t always obvious at first, but it’s there, and that resonates with us.”
Kerry and Rich Hogan
O’Hara loved Pennsylvania’s coal region and considered himself its protector, although after he left, he seldom returned.
“I love him, I’ve read almost everything he has,” Gargano said. “John is an American 20th-century writer, and he’s a darn good one.”
Gargano gets a lot of questions about O’Hara and his Pottsville roots: “Who is he and who does he write about and does the family still live here and blah, blah, blah.”
The people of Schuylkill County inspired O’Hara’s characters, who he portrayed with brutal honesty regardless of their social status.
“He said it about rich people, who are off limits, man, they’re off limits,” Gargano said. “And people got mad about it! He was very candid, he was very frank.”
O’Hara was born in 1905, in a Pottsville divided between extravagant wealth and brutal poverty. People did not trust each other, and O’Hara frequently addressed societal distrust in his work. He was the oldest of eight children, the son of a doctor who believed he was descended from Irish royalty (“But every Irishman at the bar does,” Gargano said). The tour began at Trinity Episcopalian Church, which Gargano called “WASP Heaven.” O’Hara was torn between two worlds - the Anglo-Saxon milieu that his father’s prominence gave him access to, and his Irish Catholic heritage that distanced him from Pottsville’s elite. There was also the problem of his ornery personality.
“He was miserable, and to know him was to dislike him,” Gargano said. “He was rebellious, he was pushy, he was personally irascible. He was as difficult as the day is long. He had tremendous insecurity that he addressed with aggressive egomania.”
Behind Trinity was Sharp Mountain (called “Point Mountain” in O’Hara’s stories). Gargano’s granddaughter Charlotte Hedemann, 10, picked berries from a bush and crushed them between her fingers. A spotted lanternfly landed on O’Hara’s head.
Gargano then took the O’Hara devotees to the Necho Allen Hotel (John Gibb Hotel) on the corner of Centre and Mahantongo Streets (Main and Lantenengo Streets).
“Not a lot of imagination when coming up with names,” Gargano said.
Gargano explains John O'Hara's relationship to the Necho Allen Hotel.
O’Hara was a frequent customer of the Necho Allen’s old Coal Mine Tap Room, which appears in his short story “The Man on the Tractor.” Like all the great writers of the 20th century, O’Hara drank like a fish. Next to the Republican-Herald building is O’Hara’s childhood home, now occupied by Pressed Coffee & Books. The tour continued up Lantenengo Street, to the Church of Saint Patrick (Saint Peter and Paul’s) where O’Hara worshipped. A flock of little birds congregated along the church walls and on the gutter. O’Hara longed for acceptance from the folks who worshipped at Trinity, and to be worshipped by them. O’Hara created a character based on his younger self, Jimmy Malloy, who starred in stories based on O’Hara’s Schuylkill County childhood.
“He’s an observer,” Gargano said. “He’s a writer even when he’s not writing and when he thinks he’s not writing.”
Jimmy Malloy dated girls in Collieryville (Minersville), Swedish Haven (Schuylkill Haven), Mountain City (Frackville) and Fairgrounds (Cressona). In real life, O’Hara dated girls who were too high-born for him to marry. His drinking and nasty attitude would have been tolerable if he had enough money, but his upper-middle-class Irish Catholic background made such tolerance impossible.
Young O’Hara was kicked out of three prep schools. As punishment his father made him take up menial jobs, from railroad clerk to soda jerk. Thanks to this, and his frequent haunting of bars by the railroad tracks, he mingled with people of all social classes.
“He will see poverty,” Gargano said. “He will see sadness. And he will see the unfairness of life and fate.”
It was noon. All around, the bells of Gibbsville rang. Gargano took the group to 606 Mahantongo Street, where O’Hara lived from 1916 to 1928. The Yuenglings lived here, before they “moved up.” Incredibly, O’Hara, Pottsville’s quintessential native son, did not write about Yuengling. He focused his attention on Rutters Brewery, which once stood on Market Street. The O’Haras had servants to cook, clean and care for the horses in the back. Even so, the house is modest compared to the stained pediments and voluptuous Mansard roofs of the Victorian mansions across from it. All, however, suffered the same fate - the parlors and ballrooms were gutted and turned into apartments.
“His dad died there, in that room there,” said Bob Stanley of Forty Fort, pointing to a third-floor window. “When was the last time the sign was stolen?”
In the past, historical marker at 606 Mahantongo Street was routinely stolen, but Gargano was proud to say that the sign had not been stolen for at least ten years.
“Most people disliked him,” she said. “Today, we’d call him a poser. He wanted to be more than he was.”
O’Hara’s father died in 1925. John refused to go to any school that wasn’t in the Ivy League. None would accept him, so he got a job as a reporter for the Pottsville Journal. It was this sense of entitlement that made him notorious.
“He wrote to Yale and asked for an honorary degree,” Gargano said. “They were like ‘Bugger off dude!’ I mean who does that? He did!”
After fellow novelist and friend John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize, O’Hara wrote “Congratulations. I can only think of one other person who should have it.”
Gargano was stunned by the audacity of it.
“That’s what the coal country view is,” Mark Stavish of West Wyoming told her. “You don’t write it about yourself, you wait ‘till someone says it about you. He broke the coal country rule.”
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