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HAZLETON — Penny Roberts and David Reiss whooshed out of the sky on a Saturday afternoon — each securely strapped to a colorful parachute and an instructor.
“I did it,” said Reiss, appearing a trifle dazed as he regained his bearings after his first sky dive.
“I’m just so proud he did it,” second-time jumper Roberts said as she hugged her friend.
The pair, who live in the Lehighton area, recently were among 20 to 50 people who come to the Hazleton Municipal Airport each weekend to get an adrenalin rush with Above the Poconos Skydivers.
“You start at 10,000 feet,” co-owner Don Kellner said, pointing to the altimeter on his wrist. “You free-fall from 10,000 to 5,000 feet in 30 seconds. Then the parachute opens and you spend the next five minutes enjoying the view.”
Kellner, who began jumping after his Air Force career ended, has been instructing beginners at the Hazleton airport since 1984. His 15,000th sky dive, back in 1991, put him in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most sport jumps — a record he still holds.
Midday on a recent Saturday, he was up to “45,943 or 44” jumps.
“People come here from all over the world,” said Kellner’s wife and fellow instructor, Darlene, adding the couple never tires of welcoming beginners to the sport.
“Their joy radiates back to you,” agreed instructor John Donahue, of Sugarloaf Township. “It reminds you of the first time you jumped.”
Recent first-time jumpersseemed more excited than nervous.
“It was really, really fun,” Victoria Padmos said after marking her 18th birthday with a jump.
“It was worth it,” said her friend, Rhys Lombardino, who accompanied Padmos and jumped, too.
The young women hail from Tannersville and said all they know about Hazleton is that you can skydive here.
But the area in and around the city — Luzerne County’s second-largest, with a population of 24,659 — bustles with activity, from the Can-Do and Humboldt industrial parks to small family businesses and festivals that reflect a rich ethnic diversity.
At the Madonna Del Monte Festival, set for Aug. 11-13 at Most Precious Blood Church, you can see a procession with a statue of Our Lady of the Mountain — imported 118 years ago from Italy — and you can feast on porketta and pasta fagiole.
Homemade pizza, fried meatballs and cannolis promise more Italian flavor Aug. 19-20 during the St. Mauro Festival at Queen of Heaven Church. If you prefer Polish-style potato pancakes and haluski, wait for next July’s bazaar at Holy Name of Jesus Church in West Hazleton.
And if you missed the fried empanadas and pasteles wrapped in plaintain leaves during the recent Latin Festival at Community Park in Hazle Township, you might want to prepare similar dishes at home. If you need ingredients, the Mexican Produce Deli on East Diamond Avenue is abierto 7 dias a la semana, or open seven days a week, as its ad in the Spanish-language newspaper El Mensajero explains.
Nearly 40 percent of Hazleton’s population is Hispanic, and you’ll often find some of the area’s youngest Latinos at the Hazleton One Community Center, where Penn State Hazleton students recently helped lead programs in science and singing.
While the young vocalists were practicing songs in English — “Neverland is home to lost boys like me …” and Spanish — “Sí, sabes que ya llevo un rato mirándote,” science fans worked on experiments in another room.
“On Tuesday we made slime!” 11-year-old Dafnis Batista enthused, as her 9-year-old brother, Daniel, and 9-year-old friend, Ruben Cruz, explained their supplies included glue and borax.
For another project, 8-year-old Xavier Perez poured peroxide into an empty soda bottle and Steven Almonte, 9, added a squirt of dish soap. Devin Perez, also 9, added food coloring to make the coming explosion of foam appear even more dramatic. Johanel Perez, 11, added the final touch — yeast and water that sparked a chemical reaction.
“With science, you have to be very precise,” center director Elaine Maddon Curry reminded the children.
Maddon Curry, a retired medical librarian and former member of the Luzerne County Council, devotes most of her time to the center, which she and her husband, Bob Curry, established in 2013 with support from her cousin, Chicago Cubs manager and Hazleton native Joe Maddon.
An offshoot of the Hazleton Integration Project, the center offers English as a Second Language, citizenship classes and GED preparation to adults as well as enrichment programs to youngsters.
“She’s been such a good role model,” Maddon Curry said of 18-year-old Maria Aliaga, who tutored children at the center while earning high honors at Hazleton Area High School.
“I just helped with their homework,” Aliaga said modestly.
Aliaga, who came to the United States from Peru with her family, will be a freshman this fall at Northwestern University in Chicago. She plans to study biology, with an eye toward possibly becoming a surgeon.
Whatever her career path, Aliaga said, she’d like to follow it in Hazleton.
“This is where my family is,” she said.
Seeking opportunities in a new country is a familiar theme for Gary Kreisl, who runs Hazle Park Quality Meats on South Washington Avenue with his wife, Trudy, and sons Gary Jr. and Henry II.
The business, which sells lots of hams, steaks and its own freshly made cold cuts, traces its roots to a butcher shop Kreisl’s grandfather, Anton, opened in Hazleton in 1915 after he and his wife, Rose, immigrated from Austria.
Kreisl is delighted that Rose’s Austrian/Tyrolean influence lives on in the recipe his wife uses to make large dumplings called knödel, when she adds to ox-tail soup.
But when he thinks about his grandmother’s life, Kreisl said he’s glad she relinquished a prejudice she had harbored.
Sharing a bit of family history, he said his grandparents hired a Polish cleaning lady who, one day when she wasn’t feeling well, sent her daughter to clean for her. Kreisl’s father, Henry, fell in love with young Leona, and after they eloped, the grandmother — Rose — wanted nothing to do with her son and his Polish-heritage bride.
When another son fell in love with an Italian girl, Rose was ready to disown him, too — until Anton spoke up and said the sons and daughters-in-law must be accepted. “You can’t drive my sons away,” he told her. “We are all Americans.”
Heartily approving of his grandfather’s attitude, Kreisl believes established Hazleton residents should welcome newer arrivals.
“We were all immigrants once,” he said.
When he was a boy in the 1950s, Kreisl said, Hazleton was a trusting place.
“You could go into a store, and the owner would size you for shoes or put a shirt on your back and make a note of it,” he sad. “Then your mother would come by in a week or two, or if she didn’t come until three weeks later, that was OK, and pay the bill.”
Kreisl feels nostalgic for that neighborly feeling, and hopes it’s not gone forever, like the milkman and “rag man,” whose horse-drawn wagons figure prominently in his memories.
In the mornings before school, Kreisl said, he helped the milkman with deliveries, “running up and down steps to the houses.” Much later in the day — unknown to his mother — he might visit a bar to play his accordion for nickel tips. When adult patrons had too much to drink, young Kreisl sometimes helped the “rag man” take them to the wagon.
“The wives would pay him 50 cents or a dollar,” he said. “For bringing their husbands home.”
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