Lynn, you are a great storyteller! Your children will be left with such a gift! I was quite young when I lived in Glenside...we were never allowed to wander down by the Tully or the Schuylkill, even though we had older friends who would adventure down there, especially to go swimming. In 1939, when she was seven years old, my mother's 5 year old brother drowned while he & a friend were playing near the Black River, across the road from their home in upstate NY. The boys were not allowed to cross the road and get close to the river, but they snuck out and did anyway. The rapids in the springtime were just too strong and fast...he was pulled out about 200 yards downstream, but could not be revived. So my mother was adament that we were NEVER to go to the Tully without an adult. My boundaries where I was allowed to wander were the Glenside side of Schuylkill Ave, The NE library branch, the Glenside elementery school property and of course, the fence at the rear of the Hensler Homes. We would stand at that fence and watch the trains at Carpenter Steel. Anywhere I went within those boundaries I need to have a friend along, I was to never wander by myself outside of our "front and back" home rows. Even when we walked to school, the kids in our block would walk together as a group. But when we visited at the farm, all those restrictions would be lifted! We could wander where we pleased, climb the trees and just run and be free. One of my favorite things was to come across a milkweed pod that was about to burst, popping it open and blowing the wisps into the breeze and imagining where the wind would take them. I remember often taking things I found at the farms (like milkweed pods, horse chesnuts, blown out guinea hen eggs) to show and tell. BTW, it cracks me up to hear non-natives try to pronounce Schuylkill for the first time. LOL we always just called it the SKOO-kul. ~Karen from Berks

Karen says, "BTW, it cracks me up to hear non-natives try to pronounce Schuylkill for the first time. LOL we always just called it the SKOO-kul. I may be repeating myself; but, in PA-Dutch, we called it "Dair SHOOLkill Revver". The German word for river is "Fluß". In PA-Dutch, it was "revver". http://www.schuylkillriver.org/ says that Schuylkill (pronounced SKOO-kill) is Dutch for Hidden River. If that is true, we have a redundancy. We are actually calling it the Hidden River River. (The PA-Dutch word for hidden is fahshteckelt). This was one of the things I found amusing when we moved to Florida. The river at Fort Myers is called the Caloosahatchee River. Hatchee is the Indian name for river; so they are actually calling it the Caloosa River River. Richard Emlin Reed Wesley Chapel, FL