Port Allegany was, and still is, as akin to Andy Griffith’s Mayberry as imaginable. I want to liken it to Harper Lee’s Maycomb, thanks to a running thread of pure racist tendencies, but I can’t, simply because Port Allegany sits so far North of the Mason Dixon Line that there is no Black population. Literally, none.
When I was a kid, I did not notice this. In the early 1970’s, it was simply, genuinely not part of my consciousness. It was part of my parent’s knowledge, though. They had moved away from a rickety rental home on Clarissa Street in one of Rochester, NY’s less prosperous neighborhoods in large part due to the racial tensions of the late sixties, wondering if they would be able to fit in, sensing the undercurrent of anger and the rising heat that would permeate the next decade. They retreated to their hometown nestled high in the Allegheny mountains, an idyllic preserve of country ways and winding two-lane roads and tree-lined streets where their kids could learn to ride bikes and roller skates, and where the community would lend a hand in raising them.
When they first moved back, they couldn’t afford to buy a house outright, so my mother’s mother offered to renovate her husband’s former law office, which was adjacent to her own house, into a fitting apartment. It was an ideal situation. She would be able to rent to her daughter and son-in-law for a few years to offset the cost of renovation, and then herself be a landlord of the property, giving her a passive income for years to come. It was a wise move. My parents, on the other hand, were able to rent from a familiar person, not risking falling prey to a shady or belligerent landlord and could save the funds to buy a much nicer house in a few short years.
That’s how we lived next door to my grandmother for the first eight or so years of my life. Until the summer before third grade.