Clark DeLeon, Pennsylvania Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff, Second Edition. The Globe Pequot Press, 2004. Photographs, index, 242 pages, paperback $13.95 (ISBN 1548- 2987; 0-7627-3039-0).
The writer is billed as a "popular humor columnist" and a long-rime contributor to two Philadelphia newspapers. The book is a collection of short pieces about Pennsylvania, and it may indeed be a gathering together of some of his columns.
With such a background we might have expected much about Philadelphia in this book. In fact, there is little about the brotherly love town and much more about the rest of the state. After a somewhat painful introduction in which Mr. DeLeon makes light of the way Pennsylvanians "tawk funny," he divides the state into five sections, southeast, southwest, northeast, north central, and northwest, and then proceeds to recount the humorous, the quixotic, the bizarre, and the unusual in each area, some of it trivial, silly and unimportant, but not all of it.
We may not care a lot about the woman in Darby who walked around all day with a knife in her neck, but we should care about Milton Hershey, his chocolate bars and his creation of one of America's great, but always controversial, charitable uses. I did not need to know that The Blob was filmed in Chester County, or that there is a Zippo Lighter Museum in Bradford, but the brief look at Albert Barnes and his even more controversial Barnes Foundation is well done, as is the story of the Horseshoe Curve and how that engineering marvel of 1850 made possible train travel to the west without canal boat detours.
We are reminded again that York was, ever so briefly, the capital of the thirteen colonies struggling to become a nation when the Continental Congress, in flight from imperial pursuit, convened there and adopted the Articles of Confederation. We learn again that if Louis VXI and Marie Antoinette had been able to find faster horses they might have made it to French Azilum, in Bradford County, in 1793, instead of taking their one-way trip to the guillotine.
Kevin Patrick, Pennsylvania Caves & Other Rocky Roadside Wonders. Stackpole Books, 2004. Photographs, maps, diagrams, visitor information, bibliography, index, 248 pages, paperback $19.95.