Bernard as a boy

“We humans unlike plants are only a possibility when we are born.”  Crystal Woman

Bernard McManus, born in Horning, Pa. a mining town in Allegheny County, was the second son of Mary Elizabeth and Patrick McManus.  We moved back to Roscoe a few months after his birth when I was about three years old.  Nothing about our first home made any impression that I remember but the home on Underwood St. did.  The fireplace, its flickering light in the early morning and the crackling sounds can be recalled to-day.   I always thought that Bernard was so named because he was burnt often - once as he stepped on a hot poker before that very fireplace which was the focus of many of our activities during the winter months. The pre-school days soon pass.

The elementary school days are important ones in our lives. Bernard always did his school work well, always charismatic, a leader with the boys.  One incident shows how a teacher can create problems for children. He came home one day from sixth grade class angry, determined to never go back to school, a substitute teacher demoted him to Class B.  Mother acted, going to the class politely asking for the underlying reason - she got little response.  Bernard went the next day - to class A. 

Our personalities develop to a greater degree in some individuals outside the structured classroom. Bernard’s did.  Big, strong, always the leader interested in the rough and tumble of play, he also was fun loving, often displaying another side - interest in poetry, reading and music, drumming on the piano often.  He, I often thought, should have had the music lessons I had had.  

His character was influenced by friends, one of whom was Buck O., not too well mentally endowed, but who did teach him to look at all possibilities before he acted. Buck who had planned a robbery of Weiner’s (sp?) Store failed to realize the Weiner’s were smarter than he.  He fled the scene without mishap.  His first confrontation with tragedy occurred one early summer night when Robert Robinson our neighbor, same ages as Bernard, was shot by Henry Giles, one of a group of boys from Presbyterian Church on a hike near Dixons Nob.  Bernard was a PallBearer. I saw a grief stricken eleven year old boy. Another near tragedy happened to his cousin Eddie Murphy about which I have already written.  It was a time of fun and sorrow, of joy and woe.  That may be how our lives will always be.  

The years from 1907 until the depression were not easy ones for miners. Many parents were filled with anxiety about how they could take care of simple physical well being. But not Mother, I never heard her say that we were so poor that we might have no food - I always thought that we were not poor, always would have enough. However all of us wanted to get jobs as early as possible. Bernard, eleven years old, came home on Armistice Day anxious to get to Charleroi to get a job carrying water to the Glass Works. I laughed, so superior at fourteen.  Child labor for one night almost killed him. A few months later he had a job in Matt Gollis Pool Room setting up pins in bowling alley. Later the same man gave him a promotion, ticket collector in the Gollis Movie Palace (I loved it, one fringe benefit-all our family could go to every movie free). These jobs developed qualities necessary during that era: punctuality, dependability, desire to do work well. 

Another important area in all our lives was the Church. Our lives were permeated with Christian principles, at home and at Church. He went to Mass every Sunday and Holy Day, to Catechism study and all other formal rituals. But it was in the home where prayer habits were reinforced - morning and night, before meals and taking part in Rosary presentation. The teaching of Christian values is primarily the reason for our seeking the truth so that our lives will be meaningful, fulfilled, and happy. 

Excerpt from the biography of Bernard McManus