For more than a century the blast furnaces of Bethlehem Steel have loomed over the south side of the company’s hometown, towering icons to the Industrial Age and one of the toughest, most dangerous ways to make a living ever conceived by man.
From a distance, they are inspiring.
Up close, they are impressive.
Standing just yards away on a steel-grate walkway 45 feet in the air, they are downright awesome.
That’s the point of the Hoover-Mason Trestle – a 2,000-foot long walkway that gives visitors a view of these massive artifacts previously seen …

You’d think that a building big enough to hold a couple dozen Mack trucks would be easy to find. Uh-uh. The Mack Trucks Museum is hidden away on the back side of Allentown’s Queen City Airport, nestled on a hilltop overlooking the scenic Lehigh Parkway.
There’s a reason for the subterfuge that makes finding this gem a little like participating in a road rally where you have to find and follow clues to reach the prize – it used to be the Test Center and Track where Mack developed their new …

There’s an old joke that holds that when Squanto saw the Mayflower drop anchor off Plymouth Rock, his first reaction was “There goes the neighborhood.” I’ve never believed that Native Americans lived in peace with each other before the white man arrived, and we destroyed a paradise. There is ample evidence that the original tribes had their share of problems and wars. We just brought better weapons.
But there is also ample evidence that they had an extensive civilization that matched anything the Europeans brought to the North American continent. They …

My friend Theresa is a Musikfest junkie. Seriously. The woman schedules a week of vacation for the beginning of August each year, books a room at the Hotel Bethlehem and wanders from platz to platz all day long. The scary thing is, she’s not alone. Musikfest has its own groupies just like many of the bands and artists that play there every year and they all swear it is the best thing to hit the Bethlehem since a now-departed steelmaker set up shop on the banks of the Lehigh River.
“To …

Ever look at the calendar and say, “Oh, crap, where did the time go?” Happens to me all the time. I think it’s true that time moves faster when you’re getting closer to being over the hill. For instance, I realized last week that it was August and the last time I posted here was April. I’m still trying to figure out what happened to May, June and July. (Heck, I’m still trying to figure out what happened to the 1980s and 90s.) Truth is, the paying side of my …

Approach Fonthill on a gloomy afternoon in late March and you can easily imagine Jane Austen or one of her heroines opening the large, heavy front door, dressed in a gray cloak and headed out to consummate another doomed love affair.
Approach the foreboding Gothic structure in the dark shadows of twilight and your imagination is more likely to picture Barnabas Collins or Vincent Price answering the bell, and all of a sudden your imaginary novel takes on a bit more, um, bite.
But while there is a room in Fonthill called …

The first time I visited Cabela’s in Hamburg, Berks County, I felt like I had walked into a Jeff Foxworthy skit. I saw more plaid shirts than Larry the Cable Guy’s closet and more severed heads than Stephen King’s nightmares. Ok, so they were critters mounted on trophy boards, but still, there were a LOT of them coming out of the store.
I was pretty convinced, too, that Larry the Cable Guy lived in the back of the store. Really. There was a pick-up truck in the Bargain Cave with a …

Days before he died in September 2010, Allentown’s Jack McHugh summoned Joe Garrera to his home. McHugh, a beloved principal at the city’s William Allen High School for years and an equally admired community leader during his long retirement, was also an amateur historian and an inveterate collector of presidential memorabilia. He had already bequeathed a substantial amount of material about Franklin Roosevelt to the FDR Library in Hyde Park, N.Y. and now he wanted to make sure the rest of his collection was properly preserved.
He knew that Garrera, executive …

Eastern Pennsylvania just got a dumping of somewhere between 9 to 18 inches of snow, depending on where your shovel hit the pavement, and to be honest on days like this I don’t like to travel farther than the wine store down the street. I’m a warm-weather person. If I go out in the snow and cold, it’s usually to some place with a great heating system and some warm spirits.
I know I was in the minority last summer when many people were complaining about the constant heat and string …

Let’s see, we’re wrapping up the first week of January and another snowjob, er, storm is headed for Pennsylvania. That can mean any of three things:
One, the Farm Show is coming up.
Two, the gang in Harrisburg is back from the holiday break and up to its usual mischief.
Three, it’s January and that’s what happens around here this time of year.
Nah, let’s stick with the first two.
There are a lot of new people in our state capital this week as the Commonwealth gets underway with a new Legislature and prepares to inaugurate …