Jul 19, 2025 4 min read

I want to tell you about a typical summer day for a 10-year-old boy in a suburb of Dickerson Run named East Liberty, Pennsylvania. But first, some geographic clarification. The East Liberty where I grew up, or just “Liberty,” as we locals called it, is not a part of Pittsburgh. It is a suburb of Dickerson Run named after the Dickerson family who were early settlers in Fayette County in the 1770s.

I think the “Run” part came from the fact that the Dickersons had a grist mill on a creek which was a 4-mile-long tributary of the Youghiogheny River. We kids preferred to think of Mr. Dickerson yelling at his kid to “Run, Dickerson, Run.” (It was a Forrest Gump kinda thing.)

In older English, “liberty” was a plot of common public land on the outskirts of a town used for grazing. Here is where it gets confusing. Our town’s post office was the Dickerson Run Post Office, but our elementary school was the East Liberty Elementary School. The railroad yard below us was the Dickerson Run Yard, but the church my mother’s family attended in Vanderbilt was the East Liberty Presbyterian Church.

To add to the confusion, of course, there is also an East Liberty neighborhood in Pittsburgh which the locals pronounce “S’liberty.” The flowers for my mom’s funeral ended up at East Liberty Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, but that’s another story for another day.

Back to this tale. It was normal for me to wake up sometime around 9 a.m. I would go to our newly constructed, first-ever bathroom, brush my teeth, and run downstairs where I ate a bowl of cornflakes soaked in sugar and the freshly homogenized and pasteurized milk delivered that morning to our side door by the milkman from Hagan’s Dairy. (Isaac Newton Hagan had started his dairy back in the 1800s.)

After breakfast, it was time for the big decisions. What should I do that day? At 10, I still had my used, blue, $6 girl’s bike. Dad had bought it somewhere on his Knight’s Life Insurance route. Riding a girl’s bike wasn’t a big deal in those days because lots of kids couldn’t afford any kind of bike. Some mornings my buddies and I would go to the school playground to play rubber ball. It was like baseball but without many rules, any umpires, or much skill.

The only problem with playing rubber ball on the school playground was Mack’s house. Their kitchen window was right in the middle of centerfield and often took a beating from strong hitters like Jack Clark or Jimmy Hileman. Mrs. Mack would run out onto her front porch and pepper us with colorful grown-up language.

We would often go to my Aunt Mildred’s store to buy Dubble Bubble bubble gum, and then we would sit on top of the war memorial at the end of the school yard and see who could spit farther.

Later, Roy, Joe, Bobby, or Dale and I would often end up sitting on the stone retaining wall at the bottom of Gillespie’s yard by the state highway that crossed the Dawson bridge. We would look for out-of-state license plates and really old cars.

Later in the day we often played mumbly peg with our pen knives, by throwing open blades at our canvas Keds high-top tennis shoes. Then around 3 p.m., I’d deliver newspapers to my 42 customers. That often meant I’d raid the purple grapes growing on the vines of the house below Tubby Barricklow’s house. I’d also pretend to smoke long green seed pods from what we called Toby trees.

After dinner, we would play “kick-the-can” on Maple Street until dark. That’s when one whistle from my dad, three blocks away would be my sign to immediately head home. It was amazing how effective the threat of corporal punishment could be.

Nick Jacobs lives in Windber.