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WILKES-BARRE —If time travel were possible, history teacher Clark Switzer would like to visit just about every era he’s researched.
“Not that I’d want to live there, but to visit would be a great idea,” he said. “I’m just thinking about Judge Jesse Fell’s tavern and sitting around as people came in off the stagecoach and you could listen to their stories about life on the road.”
If you could manage a February 1808 visit to Fell’s tavern, which once stood at the corner of South Washington and East Northampton streets in Wilkes-Barre, you might even feel the heat as Fell burned anthracite for the first time in an open grate.
But not every scene from the past is so cozy.
During the past several years that Switzer worked on the documentary “Scratching the Surface: 300 Years of Wyoming Valley History 1675-1975,” he came across images that speak to the hardships of men, women and children whose lives revolved around the coal industry.
“Obviously the men had a dangerous job working in the mines, but the women had another story, which I think is largely untold. Just trying to do laundry for example,” he said. “How long would it take to boil water and try to get your clothes clean, and tend your garden where you’re trying to keep the rabbits and squirrels and chipmunks from eating it because that’s your food. You couldn’t say ‘OK, I’ll go to Gerrity’s.’ That wasn’t the thing for them. And all the while, you’re anxious about your husband and sons going into the breakers, below ground.”
Switzer divided his 112-minute documentary into five chapters and, earlier this year, presented it in segments shown at Luzerne County libraries. He continued to fine tune it based on suggestions from those who viewed it.
“I might learn something on a Monday and by Saturday’s presentation I would change it,” he said. “I’d go to video editor Michael Tobias (of Swoyersville) and we’d change the copy.”
The updated DVD is available for purchase now, he said, adding all 10 of the libraries in the Luzerne County Library System have some in stock for $20. You can also order one by calling Switzer at 570-654-1057.
The DVD introduces such people as John Durkee, the Connecticut Yankee who laid out the plan for Wilkes-Barre in 1770 with boundaries of North Street, South Street, Pennsylvania Avenue (then known as Back Street) and River Street (then known as Front Street.)
“If you lived outside that area,” Switzer said, “you were in farmland, the boonies, so to speak.”
Other accomplished people mentioned in the DVD are Dr. Stanley Dudrick, a Nanticoke native known as “the father of intravenous feeding,” former U.S. Secretary of Defense and National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci, who was born in Scranton; founder of the Pennsylvania Ballet Barbara Weisberger of Kingston, Tony Award-winning designer Santo Loquasto, who grew up in Hanover Township and anthracite sculptor C. Edgar Patience, who lived in Wilkes-Barre.
One of the most fun facts, Switzer said, has to do with a job the mother of hotelier Gus Genetti had in her younger days. “Did you know she used to dive off the steel pier in Atlantic City on a horse?” he said.
For more information that didn’t fit into the documentary, Switzer said, interested folks can log onto an online resource he created at ourhistoryinitiative.org.
