High school rivalry: Easton v. P-burg

One of the longest high school football rivalries is between Easton PA and Phillipsburg NJ. For a century they've played every Thanksgiving morning, today being their 100th meeting. They are two small towns across the Delaware River from one another. Moreover, this is the home turf of my parents and one of the few areas of the country where "Deemer" is a common name.

Once, in fact, years ago, I was sitting in a tavern in P-burg (as it's called) with my dad, waiting for some auto repairs. It was a weekday afternoon and only half-a-dozen folks were there. It ends up that everyone in the tavern was named Deemer! Dad tried to figure out if he was related to any of them.

Dad joined the Navy as a teenager in order to escape the fate of P-burg men, which was to work in the mill. He succeeded. Well, actually, he started working at the mill in his mid-teens, hated it, and enlisted to escape. Once, walking on Main Street in nearby Milford NJ (where Mom's Cafe has scrapple for breakfast: you even get to pick from several brands!), we passed an old gent whom Dad had not seen in years. After we walked on, Dad told me that he had worked at the adjacent machine in the mill when both were kids -- and the old guy had retired at the same task, going through several generations of machines. "That's why I joined the Navy," Dad said.

Mom was from the PA side, Bucks County. Right after high school, a benefactor set her up in business with her own Beauty Shop in Belvedere. After mom had died, I was in Belvedere doing something or other at the courthouse. I stopped by the building of Mom's old beauty shop. I got in a conversation with an elderly lady who had been one of her regular customers! "No one did my hair better than Flo," she said.

It's nice to have these memories, even from three thousand miles away. And the football game was on ESPN this morning, which I recorded, and which brings back this rush of memories from the Delaware Valley, where my parents met and fell in love.