John Povelones Jr. Childhood
Dad was born October 25th, 1940 at Reynolds Memorial Hospital in Glendale, WV. At that time, FDR was president and America had just come out of the Great Depression and was just 1 year away from the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor, the event that launched America into WWII. His parents, John and Irene met in at a boarding house in Moundsville, WV where they were married. Apparently, at that time, when Irene became pregnant, there wasn’t a hospital in Moundsville which is why they had to travel to Glendale to deliver the baby.
When Dad was born, his father was working as an engineer with the Civilian Conservation Corps, a work relief program that gave millions of young men employment on environmental projects during the Great Depression. After his time with the CCC, he got an engineering job with the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard which prompted the family to move to Philadelphia, PA.
During their time in Philly, their family was very poor. Dad remembers living in “a project,” as he referred to it. Once he remembers delivering a rent check for his parents for only $40. However, in the 1940’s, minimum wage was somewhere around $0.30 – $0.40 an hour which would have been around $15 per week. So that seemingly small $40 rent check would have been a little over 2 ½ week’s pay for his Dad.
Dad remembers Philly as being “very rough”. Crime was running rampant and gangs were very prevalent in Dad’s neighborhood. When I first heard this, it seemed a bit ominous. My vision of gangs is from what I’ve seen in the movies – tough thugs, violence, guns, drugs… etc. But, Dad would have been around 10–12 yrs old or younger at this time. So the “gang activity” consisted mostly of young boys getting in small fights over who would be able to play on the neighborhood basketball hoop. However, Dad does remember some of his friends carrying around chains to use during the inevitable confrontation with a rival gang. I asked him if he remembers himself ever getting in a fight. He told me one story of getting beat up on the way home from the little drug store where he had stopped in on his way home from church to buy some rock candy. He said he was never really nervous about getting in fights. The were just “something that happened” and didn’t really make that much of a difference.
“There wasn’t much to do in South Philly,” Dad would say. Him and his friends would mostly play basketball and stickball. He said he never really felt like he fit in. Many of his friends would steal and break into houses, something Dad was never comfortable with and never partook in. He said he could handle the occasional fight, but was most nervous about getting accused of stealing because of his friends. Two of his close friends in Philly were Raymond Smith and Bobby Renner.
Dad lived in Philadelphia up until he was 12 years old. In 1952, his Dad got a job with Dupont in Wilmington, DE, at which point they moved to Russellville, PA and bought an old farmstead.