I grew up in Mt. Penn in the 1950s, a fun place to come of age.
We had two nearby playgrounds at St. Catharine of Siena Parochial School and Mt. Penn Elementary School to play basketball, wiffleball, softball, hardball, touch football, box hockey, wallball off a pavilion roof as well as frolic on the swings, the monkey bars and the merry-go-round.
And the large oval-shaped Antietam Valley swimming pool with its catwalk was just a bike ride away on my three-speed Schwinn Corvette.
A slice of heaven indeed. We ate it all up like it was soft ice cream.
But there was much more. Neversink Mountain was just a few blocks from our house on Fairview Avenue. That was a whole different adventure of hiking, exploring, playing army in the woods and building a tree fort.
We flocked to the mountain like ants to a honey hill, good times that were indelibly etched into my memory banks.
As a preteen I thought Neversink meant that the mountain was guaranteed never to sink. Later I learned the name derived from the indigenous Lenape word “navasink” that meant at the promontory.
A promontory is a high point of land projecting into a body of water, in Neversink’s case the Schuylkill River.
Mike Zielinski
I also didn’t know at the time that Neversink Mountain once hosted a spectacular, albeit ephemeral, resort community attracting pleasure seekers from as far as Philadelphia through the 1930s with its hotels and recreation areas.
The Neversink Mountain Hotel and the eight-mile water-powered electric Neversink Mountain Railroad were showcases during that tourism boom but were gone by the time my buddies and I were trekking Neversink’s trails.
I vividly remember hanging out at the Witch’s Hat Pavilion, the only remains of the once grand Neversink Mountain Hotel. It was formally named the West End Pavilion but was dubbed The Witch’s Hat due to its appearance.
We loved walking on the railroad tracks looping around Klapperthal Junction and climbing the rocks at a stone quarry.
We also discovered an abandoned log cabin stockpiled with firewood. We found it strange that there was no nearby fireplace. Likely swallowed up by the mists of time.
Some summer nights we would tote our sleeping bags to the mountain and sleep in the woods. Everything was as still as a cathedral with the trees standing by like silent sentries.
Of course, we didn’t sleep much. We were too busy talking, marveling at the stars in the night sky and trying to get comfortable lying on hard ground that always seemed to have a buried rock sticking into our ribs.
Then there was the clearing in the woods, a corridor carved out by Met-Ed for its transmission lines that interrupted Neversink’s wooded ridge.
The first time I was ever on the mountain was as a young boy hiking with our elderly neighbor Mr. Hartline and his dog Teddy. I recall being intimidated by those transmission lines that buzzed, crackled and hummed, wondering if they were going to zap us at any moment.
I was too young to realize that at high voltages the electric field around conductors can ionize nearby air molecules. That creates a partial electrical discharge, producing an audible crackle or hiss.
Back then we didn’t have to worry about lurking ticks blindsiding us because the explosion of Lyme disease in Pennsylvania was 30 some years in the future.
I lost touch with the mountain during my high school years but did visit it twice thereafter.
On my last evening of summer vacation prior to my senior year at Temple University, my childhood best friend Paul Faranda and I took a nostalgic trek on Neversink. But we lingered too long and the woods became so dark we could hardly see a hand in front of our faces.
Fortunately, our memories of the trails kicked in, and we somehow found our way home through the darkness.
About a decade later I took my oldest son Jeff, then a toddler about 5, up the mountain and improbably bumped into another childhood friend Bobby Loiselle, who was there showing Neversink to his girlfriend. They were living in Paris at the time.
I guess the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Seine River, Versailles Palace and Notre Dame Cathedral were no match for the rustic charm of Neversink Mountain.
Mike Zielinski, a resident of Berks County, is a columnist, novelist, playwright and screenwriter.