Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I grew up in a small community called Slatington. There’s no reason to tell me you’ve never heard of it; I assumed that. Unless you had a deep and passionate interest in the slate mining industry, you would likely never have heard of Slatington. Or maybe relatives who lived there.

I moved from Slatington to Lock Haven in September of 1990. I considered it a temporary move at the time; I didn’t plan on living in Lock Haven for the rest of my life. Or even past a few years. I sure as hell never planned on one day sitting down to write a newspaper column about my thirty-fifth anniversary being a Lock Haven citizen.
Yes, it’s been thirty-five years as of this week. I was thirty-one when I realized I’d lived there ten years, forty-two years old when I realized I’d lived in Lock Haven half my life, and now I’m fifty-six, and I’ve been here for thirty-five years.

My dad drove me out to Lock Haven in a moving van with all my stuff in the back. I had just turned twenty-one; if the whole thing had crashed and destroyed all my possessions, it would have cost me a good fifteen bucks to replace everything. The first thing I discovered in Lock Haven was the Regatta, which was a pretty cool way to be introduced to my new city.

The second thing I discovered in Lock Haven was the murder; there was a murder here my first week. Which was exciting, if not as welcoming as the Regatta. It was big enough to make statewide news, though not as big as the bombing that happened in London the same week. My younger brother, who was in London, got a panicked midnight call from my mother, while I got a postcard saying she hoped I wasn’t murdered. My brother has been upstaging me for decades.

The third thing I discovered was that I’d arrived during the term of Lock Haven’s only female mayor. Diann Stuempfle was elected in 1984, and still the mayor when I moved here back in 1990. I remember seeing her in a parade at the time, and being impressed that we had a female mayor. (Many years later, I met her in person when she came to help me with some research on a fort; she was a lovely and wonderful human being.) She served until 1992, and remains our only female mayor to this day.

At the time, my plan was basically to stay for a while, until something better came along. Nothing ever has. I fell in love with Lock Haven within those first few years, and by 1997, I couldn’t see myself ever living anywhere else. (There was about a year I planned on living in Utah because I was engaged, but that was a disaster. We do not talk about Utah.)

I’d lived here for a bit over ten years at the time I got married. We bought a house in Lock Haven, which I later discovered was haunted. I’ve written about that many times. In 2014, we adopted my son, who is now eleven years old. And along the way, I became known as the local history and paranormal expert.

At this point, I’ve probably written a couple of thousand columns on our local history. I love Clinton County, love digging into it and finding out all of its quirks, solving its mysteries. It’s my home in a way that Slatington never was, and nowhere else ever will be.

After all these years, I belong here. Lock Haven and I are a part of each other. This is my place, and if I have thirty-five more years coming to me, I want to spend them all here.