Thomas M. Malafarina, Growin’ Up Skook, Crave Press, 2024, ISBN 978-1-952352-25-6, 149 pages.

Thomas Malafarina’s memoir of his childhood in Ashland, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, in the late 1950s and 1960s captures a working-class upbringing in a community that had seen better days yet engenders longing for a distant past in a now far-away place. Malafarina’s Ashland is described from a young Baby Boomer’s perspective in the decades after World War II, as American culture shifted from the conservative 1950s to the more liberal 1960s. The area’s primary industry, Anthracite coal mining, had long since faded, and next door, Centralia was beginning to burn underneath. Malafarina’s Ashland, as he states, was not Mayberry, North Carolina. I would add it was also not Bedford Falls, where George Bailey roamed, realizing his “wonderful life.” But there were a lot of common elements. Interesting characters and situations abound, and in Malafarina’s world, they are oddly dark or unfortunate, calling to mind scenes from Stand By Me and To Kill a Mockingbird. Cohabitating with cockroaches and making sport of eliminating the nearby rats is enough for most. The tales of the wildcats in the hills could be made into a B-movie! And then there are the uncles, one who portrays as a young Don Corleone, and the other Luca Brasi, offering to take care of any “family problems” “for two thousand each.” I couldn’t help but imagine Malafarina describing life in the Anti-Bedford Falls: Potterville, the place decimated by Mr. Potter’s greed in It’s a Wonderful Life. The one-legged grandfather could certainly have hobbled on his crutches to the “Anti-Martini’s” bar, where Bailey nearly gets into a fight while viewing the horrors of economic decline.

Somehow, though, Malafarina manages to navigate some heavy topics lightly, maintaining the innocent perspective of a naïve child living with a family he loved and respected. His narrative undulates from humorous to serious and benefits from his well-crafted wordsmithing, learned over many years of writing short stories and novels. We are given a glimpse of a window in time for one family and a segment of a community in late-stage decline. Thomas could certainly fill volumes with more detail and additional stories, but he leaves us with a solid, consolidated “greatest hits.”

Readers interested in the subject matter might find Joe Tarone’s Some Stones Shine (Sunbury Press, 2011) to be equally interesting, highlighting life in a patch town in the Coal Regions decades earlier, in the 1920s and 1930s. Mike Breslin’s Robbing the Pillars (Milford House Press, 2011) is a novel about coal mining in the region. Patchtown by Jolene Busher (Sunbury Press, 2012) provides the perspective of life in Eckley Miner’s Village from the late 1800s until the 1920s. More recently, Penn State professor Philip Mosley’s Telling of the Anthracite (Oxford Southern, 2023) provides a survey of the cultural memory of the coal region via a variety of media.

Lawrence Knorr

Historian, Author, Publisher

August 3, 2024