Childhood memories from the Allegheny Mountains and northwest Pennsylvania

Ad for a paperback book about growing up in the Allegheny Mountains and northwest Pennsylvania as a Baby Boomer.

My earliest memories are from the Allegheny Mountains
The Allegheny Mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania are where this Baby Boomer’s earliest recollections took root. Those mountains still feel like home, even though my life is now several hours away. The farm of my maternal grandparents sits atop a spur between the Little Allegheny Mountain and Big Savage Mountain. That's where we lived until 1956, in a small mobile home parked in a pasture field along a narrow back-woods dirt road. The farm of my paternal grandparents was on the other side of Big Savage, and straddled the sparkling headwaters of Wills Creek between Little Savage Mountain and the Allegheny Mountain. If you are trying to keep track, the Big Savage and Little Savage mountains are located between the Allegheny and Little Allegheny mountains, and those are just four of the ridges that comprise the Allegheny Mountain Range. Confusing? You bet!

Although my family moved 156 miles to a different dirt road in northwestern Pennsylvania when I was three years old, our ties to the Allegheny Mountains remained unbreakable. Frequent visits back to the farms of my grandparents punctuated my childhood, and my play and work experiences there were a big influence on my formative years — and my dialect.

Stories about growing up out in the country
Because childhood is so radically different now in the digital age, I wrote a memoir about my experiences growing up that is titled "In the Land of Used to Be." The book is a mixture of coming-of-age stories drawn from my childhood in the Allegheny Mountains and in northwestern Pennsylvania.

Like countless other Baby Boomers who were raised in the country, my life (outside of school and church) unfolded with minimal adult supervision, and my boyhood friends and I were responsible for creating most of our own entertainment. That freedom and independence spawned a variety of youthful escapades, ranging from mild to increasingly audacious (and often dangerous) as we transitioned into our teenage years, and then early adulthood. I think you will enjoy reading about them.

I hope this new book will help to bridge the generational gaps between then and now by transporting younger readers back to a bygone era when rural Baby Boomers still roamed wild and free, creating their own youthful adventures. As for Baby Boomers, I hope my stories of those long-gone days will serve as reminders of their own adventurous youth, and will evoke a flood of dormant 20th century childhood memories. I also hope that my stories will help to illuminate the contrast between rural life then and urban life today.

Get your copy now!
You can pick up your copy of the book at the main MCHS museum (119 South Pitt St., Mercer, Pa. 16137), or have it delivered directly to your doorstep by Amazon.

Lannie Dietle, July 15, 2024

"In the Land of Used to Be" is a rural childhood autobiography set in the Allegheny Mountains and northwestern Pennsylvania in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. It was written to record how things used to be back when Baby Boomers were still young. The cover photo of the book shows the pond on the farm that is adjacent to where we were living in the 1957 to 1965 timeframe. It was the favorite swimming spot of we neighborhood boys back when we were teenagers. (ISBN-13: 979-8327495098, non-fiction, photo-illustrated.)

The author Lannie Dietle in a promotional T-shirt.

This is me after writing the book — a little more gray around the edges, and a little worse for the wear. If you are a Boomer who was raised in the Allegheny Mountains, or elsewhere in western Pennsylvania, I hope the book sparks old memories, and gives you a pleasant stroll down memory lane. If you are a member of a later generation, I hope the book gives you a deeper understanding of the Boomer generation, and the unique era they were raised in. By the way, as I was writing the book, I was saving play money from the Boyer Candy Company (Altoona, Pennsylvania) to get this awesome t-shirt!

A view from the top of the Allegheny Mountain, looking west.

I took this picture from near the top of the Allegheny Mountain, looking west across the valley of the Casselman River. Quite a few of my earliest Somerset County ancestors grew up in this valley. How I wish a few of them would have written down the stories of their boyhood adventures in the Alleghenies back when they were growing up in the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s.

The cover of a book about growing up in the Allegheny Mountains and northwest Pennsylvania as a Baby Boomer.

This is the view from the farm of my maternal grandparents, which is nestled in the Allegheny Mountains.