The Home Front — Allen E. Sweigert, Sr.

Dear Catherine

Through nearly three years overseas, Allen and Catherine — not yet married, still Catherine Kline of Cressona — kept in touch by mail and, when a letter was too slow, by cable. This telegram, sent via RCA from his Army Post Office overseas, is one that survives.

Western Union cablegram, Allan Sweigert to Catherine Kline, Cressona, Pa., sent via RCA from his overseas Army Post Office.

“Everything fine. Your mail arriving. Writing weekly. Will send more pictures soon. Always thinking of you, with all my love.”

Allan Sweigert, Telegram To Catherine

The telegram's delivery envelope, addressed to Catherine Kline, Cressona, Pa.

They married on October 14, 1944, a week after Allen came home. The Rev. Mark G. Wagner officiated, on a license issued by the Clerk of the Orphans' Court of Schuylkill County.

Allen and Catherine, their wedding portrait — his master sergeant's chevrons still on his sleeve, her veil and corsage just visible.

Allen E. Sweigert and Catherine S. Kline's original marriage certificate, October 14, 1944, Cressona, Pa.

Catherine's own certification of birth: Catherine Sarah Kline, born December 21, 1919, Schuylkill County, to Earl Ambrose Kline and Sarah Marion Reiger.

Allen and Catherine, decades later, at one of Catherine's birthdays — still together.

Before and After

Atlantic City, Named in Print

The redistribution station has rested on his own memory. The Pottsville Republican of Tuesday 7 November 1944 puts it in print, with the station’s own designation, five weeks after he landed:

“M/Sgt. Allen E. Sweigert, son of Mr. and Mrs. Earl J. Sweigert, Railroad st., Cressona, has reported to the AAF Redistribution Station No. 1, Atlantic City, N. J., after thirty-two months of service overseas in the Asiatic-Pacific theatre of war. Sgt. Sweigert served as a communications technician on a B-25 Mitchell, A-20 Havoc, while overseas.”

Three things come out of four sentences. The station has a number, No. 1, which no other source here gives. The thirty-two months appear for the third time, from a third direction — his discharge paper, his wedding notice and now a news item, none of them copying another. And the aircraft are named: a B-25 Mitchell and an A-20 Havoc, the two types the 90th Squadron flew, which is the nearest thing in the collection to a statement of what he actually worked on.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 7 November 1944, p. 9.

How he came back: the Golden Gate to Fort Dix, September 1944 – 1946. His way home, drawn here for the first time.

This drawing, set out in words

Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, where he landed in late September 1944. His foreign service ends on the 29th.
East across the country to Trenton, and home to Cressona, where he married Catherine on 14 October 1944.
Atlantic City, the redistribution station, in November.
DeRidder, Louisiana, with the 399th Fighter Squadron from 16 November 1944.
Stuttgart, Arkansas, from about February 1945.
Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he was separated on 8 June 1945.
Chicago, for the Coyne Electrical School, in 1946.
A filled disc marks a place he is documented to have been. An open square marks a place documented for his unit rather than for him. An open square with a diagonal tick marks his own squadron. A dashed circle marks a place that is inferred rather than recorded.
A brass ring crossed by a bar marks a place he never stood on — a target, or somewhere his group went without him. Each carries the words HE WAS NOT THERE.
A solid line is a journey whose means of travel is recorded. A dashed line is a move that is documented while the means is not. A dotted line rests on his own account alone.
No drawing here works out a distance for you. His own “about 12,000 miles” already stands beside a measured 9,500 to 10,200, and a third figure, quietly arrived at, would only muddy the two that were honestly come by.

Unit Foreman, Electrical Department, January 1958

He was certified as an electrician in 1951, after a three-and-a-half-year apprenticeship, and he spent the rest of his working life as an electrical foreman, retiring in 1977. What the family’s own papers never say is when he stopped being the one and became the other. A local paper does.

“Allen E. Sweigert, Cressona, has been named unit foreman in the electrical department at the Cressona Alcoa plant. He had been serving as temporary foreman.” Title, department and month, in two sentences. The same four lines also carry the war, as his own town had it and owing nothing to his discharge paper: “He is a veteran of World War II, serving as master sergeant in communications with the Army Air Force. He served in New Guinea.” It prints no suffix after his name, though Allen Jr. was then ten.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 31 January 1958, p. 16.

Pottsville Republican, Friday 31 January 1958. Four lines that date a promotion this document could only describe. Credit: Pottsville Republican. — Pottsville Republican, Friday 31 January 1958. Four lines that put a date on the promotion. Credit: Pottsville Republican.

Radio operator training became a trade. After the war Allen finished Coyne Electrical School in Chicago, where his department grades were 91.3 in General Electricity and 94.5 in Radio-Electronics, and then came home and opened his own shop on Chestnut Street in Cressona, selling and repairing radios and electrical appliances. The rest of his working life went to Alcoa, where he was certified as an electrician in 1951 after the prescribed 3½-year course of training.

A 1948 advertising calendar for Allen's shop.

A second 1948 calendar: “Allen E. Sweigert, Radios - Electrical Appliances, Chestnut Street, Cressona, Pa.”

Allen and his father, Earl J. Sweigert, on a Chicago street, 1945 — while Allen attended Coyne Electrical School.

His official Coyne Electrical School transcript, Chicago — graduated January 1946; instructor's remark: “In all work assigned to him he displayed very good industry, cooperation and mechanical ability.”

His Alcoa electrician's certificate, Cressona Works, April 30, 1951.

An Adequate Wiring Certificate for the Sweigert home on Charles Street, Cressona, 1957 — built by “Father and Son,” wiring installed by Mr. Allen Sweigert himself.

The 1943 dedication of the Roll of Honor, Cressona, Pennsylvania, honoring residents serving in the armed forces.

Program for the Cressona Welcome Home Celebration, November 16, 1946, “dedicated to those who served during World War II.”

“A Soldier's Dream,” by Sgt. John H. Neely, U.S. Army — a wartime keepsake kept among Allen's things.

Courtship, College, and Home

Catherine Graduates from Kutztown, May 1941

She has been in this document as the girl who waited on the tables in 1935 and the young woman at the hot-dog roast in 1939. Here she is on her own account, on the front page of her own county’s weekly. The Call of Friday 23 May 1941, under the heading WILL GRADUATE AT KUTZTOWN: “Misses Betty Fitzpatrick and Jean B. Reber, Roy A. Brown, alumni of Schuylkill Haven High School, and Miss Catherine Kline of Cressona, will graduate from Kutztown State Teachers’ College on Monday, May 26. The commencement will take place in the new Nathan Schaeffer auditorium just completed this year.”

Catherine Kline took a teaching degree, and she finished it on Monday 26 May 1941, at twenty-one. The hall was brand new that year; Kutztown’s Schaeffer Auditorium still stands.

The timing is worth holding still for a moment. Six weeks before she walked into that auditorium, Allen had handed back his sergeant’s stripes at Camp Stewart and enlisted in the Army Air Corps; by the following February he was on a ship for Australia. She spent the war years with a teaching qualification and he spent them in New Guinea, and they married a fortnight after he landed in San Francisco Bay.

Sources: The Call, Schuylkill Haven, 23 May 1941, p. 1; Pottsville Republican, 12 April 1941, p. 4.

A Doggie Roast on the Blue Mountain, June 1939

Allen put the start of it at “maybe 38, 39” and left it there. The Pottsville Republican of Thursday 15 June 1939 supplies a date, a place and eleven other names. Under the heading CRESSONA: “A group of young people from town held a doggie roast on the grounds of the Scout Camp on the Blue Mountain, Wednesday evening. Those in the party were: Miss Catherine Kline, Miss Hilda Bittle, Miss Marie Wagner, Miss Claire Wagner, Miss Arlys Yiech, Miss Claire Specht, Robert Seitz, Allen Sweigert, Charles Beck, George Strauch, George Buttler, Clark Rauch and Robert Dando.”

Six young women and seven young men, on the Wednesday evening of 14 June 1939. She was nineteen and he was twenty. This is the second time a newspaper puts the two of them in one place — the first was the school banquet of May 1935, where he gave a talk and she waited on the tables — and the first time they are in the same small group rather than the same large room.

It does not say they went together, and this page will not say so either. Thirteen young people at a hot-dog roast is a crowd and not a couple. What it does is put his own “38, 39” on firmer ground than a man’s memory at eighty-seven, and it says where they were: up on the Blue Mountain at the Scout camp, on a summer evening five years and four months before they married.

The setting is worth a second look. Four months after this, the same paper has him running a Boy Scout troop in Cressona. The camp on the mountain was already his ground.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 15 June 1939, p. 17; Pottsville Republican, 26 October 1939, p. 2.

The Banquet, May 1935

The Pottsville Republican of Monday 27 May 1935 reported the Cressona High School junior-senior banquet at length, down to the menu: fruit cup, Irish potatoes, peas and lettuce, pickles, olives, celery, saltines, French rolls, nuts, mints, cake and ice cream. Three names in that report belong to this document.

Among those who gave short talks during the evening: Allen Sweigert, then in the junior class, sixteen years old.

Among the sophomore girls who served the tables: Catherine Kline.

And among the mothers who aided in preparing the menu: Mrs. Earl Sweigert — his own, Helen.

He told his grandson in 2006 that he thought he had started courting Catherine “maybe 38, 39.” That is his own memory and it stands. What this adds is that they were in the same school hall on a May evening in 1935, he on his feet giving a talk and she carrying plates, nine and a half years before they married in St. Mark’s. One more name in the serving list is worth marking: Hilda Bittle, who in October 1944 stood up with Catherine at that wedding in a blue silk street length dress.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 27 May 1935, p. 8; The Call, Schuylkill Haven, 20 October 1944, p. 4; his interview, 2006.

The Call, Schuylkill Haven, Friday 20 October 1944, page 4. The wedding was the Saturday before — 14 October, at two o’clock, in St. Mark’s Evangelical and Reformed Church, the Rev. Mark Wagner officiating. Credit: The Call, Schuylkill Haven.

MRS. ALLEN SWEIGERT. Catherine, as the paper captioned her six days after the wedding.

M/SGT. ALLEN SWEIGERT. Twenty-six, a master sergeant, three weeks home from New Guinea after thirty-two months overseas.

The Notice, and the Two Portraits

This is the best photograph of Allen in the collection and the earliest picture of Catherine as a married woman. The paper set them one above the other in the right-hand column and captioned them MRS. ALLEN SWEIGERT and M/SGT. ALLEN SWEIGERT.

The notice also settles two things from outside the family’s own papers. It gives his rank as master sergeant in October 1944, which is the grade on his discharge eight months later, and it says he had “recently returned from New Guinea, having served overseas for 32 months” — a figure that matches, to the rounding, the 31 months and 29 days his own discharge paper carries and the 32 months the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania computed when it paid his compensation in 1950. Three documents, three different purposes, six years apart, one number.

Sources: The Call, Schuylkill Haven, 20 October 1944, p. 4 (Newspapers.com image 302604466); Enlisted Record and Report of Separation, 8 June 1945; Pennsylvania WWII Veterans’ Compensation application, April 1950.

Her Side of the Notice

The notice is as much a record of Catherine as of Allen. It names her parents as Mr. and Mrs. Earl Kline of Wilder Street, Cressona — her father’s name and the family’s street, set down by a stranger rather than by the family. It has her out of Cressona High School in 1937 and through Kutztown State Teachers’ College in 1941, which is exactly what she says herself on her own tape in 2013. And in October 1944 it places her on the faculty of Cressona High School.

The detail the paper thought worth printing is the dress: a street-length two-piece frock of fuschia silk, a blouse of white lace, black accessories, a white orchid corsage. Her attendant Miss Hilda Bittle wore blue silk. Mrs. Clark Rauch played the organ, Miss Claire Speacht sang, and Clark Rauch stood with Miss Bittle as the attendants. The reception was in the social room of the church, after which “the couple left on a wedding trip.”

Sources: The Call, Schuylkill Haven, 20 October 1944, p. 4; home-front.html, Catherine’s own interview, 2013.

Catherine at Kutztown State Teachers College, and the family before and after the war.

Allen and Catherine dating, before the war — she crosses a woodland stream on stepping stones.

Catherine leans on a footbridge railing — Allen and Catherine dating, before the war.

Catherine poses playfully on a boulder in the woods, the same outing.

Allen and Catherine, arm in arm, both smiling broadly.

Allen leans on a wooden bridge railing, smoking a pipe — the same courtship-era outing.

Catherine in cap and gown at her Kutztown State Teachers College graduation, while Allen was overseas. — Catherine in cap and gown at her Kutztown State Teachers College graduation, 26 May 1941.

Catherine and friends beside a sign: “Kutztown State Teachers College, Class of 1938.”

Catherine and college friends pose around a lion's-head fountain on campus.

Catherine swings a bat playing ball with friends in a wooded park.

A 1930s sedan parked on a street of Victorian rowhouses.

The family dog barks from atop a brick porch pier.

Coyne, Chicago, 1946 likely

The “radio and electric school” in Chicago was Coyne — spelled with an e, where the family’s records have “Coyn.” Coyne began in Chicago in 1899 as a branch of the Coyne Electrical School of Boston, started advertising radio classes in 1922, and from 1925 to 1929 even owned a Chicago radio station, until the head of its radio division decided a school had no business running one. By the 1940s its radio instruction was its strongest suit, and Allen’s year there falls right in the middle of it: the school’s own Coyne Electronical and Radio Troubleshooting Manual and the Coyne Radioman’s Handbook both carry 1946 imprints, the year he finished. His own transcript, shown above, gives his graduation as January 1946, which puts the course itself across 1945.

He was formalising a trade he already had — Scott Field had taught him the Army’s version of it, and eight airstrips from Charters Towers to Hollandia had taught him the rest. The family says he went on the GI Bill, which is what thousands of veterans did at schools like Coyne; his enrolment record has never been seen, so that part rests on family memory. He finished, worked for a Chicago radio distributor for a while, and then took the trade home to Cressona and opened his own shop.

Sources: Coyne College — Wikipedia; Coyne American Institute: A 100-year-old training gem — ACHR News; Coyne Electronical and Radio Troubleshooting Manual (Coyne Electrical School), 1946 — Internet Archive; Coyne Radioman’s Handbook, 1946 (World Radio History).

“Somewhere on Oceania”

An Army Post Office number was a deliberate blank. It let a soldier be reached by mail while telling nobody — not the enemy, not his mother — where he actually was, and Allen understood exactly how the trick worked from the inside: he knew the place the number stood for, and he could not write it down. Read against the Army Postal Service’s own register, the eight numbers he later copied into his service record book turn out to be a route, in order: 501 for the theatre headquarters in Australia, 922 for Townsville, 710 for Charters Towers, 929 for Port Moresby, 503 for Oro Bay, the port that supplied the Dobodura strips, 713 for Lae, downriver from the Markham Valley fields, and 565 for Hollandia.

Several name the mailing point rather than the airfield, but each one serves a stretch of the 3rd Bombardment Group’s advance, and no register date contradicts the group’s own. Even the order of them tells you something: 922 comes before 710 because the Townsville post office opened on 18 March 1942, eight days after the group reached Charters Towers, while no post office was established at Charters Towers itself until 17 September 1942. The first number on his list, 1106, is the only one that will not decode.

Sources: Numerical Listing of APO’s, January 1942 — November 1947, Army Postal Service and Strength Accounting Branches, Adjutant-General’s Office (1949); WWII Army Post Office (APO) Locations — searchable transcription of the 1949 AGO listing; 3rd Bombardment Group station list, HistoryOfWar.org; APO-locations.csv — structured transcription of the 1949 AGO numerical listing (4,948 rows), armypostoffices.org.

They built the plant on the fairground

The factory Allen would spend his working life in stands on the ground where Schuylkill County used to hold its fair. The Cressona fairgrounds were big enough that local boosters claimed them in 1931 as the largest by area in the United States, with the fastest horse track east of the Mississippi. The Depression and the loss of the trolley service finished the fair; the last one of that era ran in October 1941.

The tract went at sheriff’s sale and passed, by the fair association’s account, through a Pottsville bank and a private buyer before it was taken in 1942 for the federal defence programme. The government put up the works there that year and handed it to Alcoa to operate; from the spring of 1943 the Cressona Works was extruding wing spars, aluminium tubing and artillery shell casings, and at its peak it employed 2,800 Schuylkill County people, a great many of them women. Allen was in the South West Pacific through all of it — while he was servicing radios in B-25s, the fairground of his boyhood was being turned into a plant that made parts for aeroplanes like them.

Sources: Ron Devlin, “Workers at Cressona defense plant played a vital role in WWII,” Pottsville Republican Herald, 31 August 2025; “Schuylkill County Fair marks ‘40 Years of Growing the Future’” — history of the Cressona fairgrounds, the 1941 final fair and the sale to the Federal Defense Corp.; History of the Schuylkill County Fair (Schuylkill County Fair Association); Hydro Extrusions Cressona, PA — current operator of the 1942 site.

Sorting what came back

One thing Allen says about coming home can be checked against the record, and it is exactly right. He describes taking a job at the Cressona plant just after his discharge, when it was “processing all material that was brought back from the war zones” and redistributing it. The plant’s own history agrees with him: from 1944 to 1946, a 2025 Republican Herald account of the wartime works records, the government-owned Cressona Works was run as a reclamation depot, before Alcoa resumed extrusion work in peacetime. Allen came home in the autumn of 1944, was discharged at Fort Dix on 8 June 1945 and left for Coyne Electrical School in Chicago in 1946, so the two or three weeks he describes fall squarely inside the depot period. A man who had spent thirty-one months in the South West Pacific came home and spent a fortnight sorting through the salvage of the theatre he had just left.

Sources: Ron Devlin, “Workers at Cressona defense plant played a vital role in WWII,” Pottsville Republican Herald, 31 August 2025 — “From 1944 to 1946, the Cressona Works was used as a reclamation depot operated by the federal government”.

Twenty-Five Years at the Plant, January 1973

The plant kept its own count of him, and once it printed it. The Pottsville Republican of Saturday 3 February 1973, under 5 Alcoans Enter 25 Year Club: “The following Cressona Works employes entered the 25 Year Club during January: Raymond Carl, Schuylkill Haven; Bruce F. Hartman, Tamaqua; Leo J. Ney, Cressona; Samuel E. Beck, Pottsville; and Allen E. Sweigert, Cressona.”

Each of the five then gets a paragraph of his own working life, and Allen’s is the only account of his Alcoa career in anybody’s words but his: “Allen Sweigert was hired as an engineering and maintenance electrical trainee. Al has been classified in engineering and maintenance hourly and salaried positions. At the present time, he is a mill maintenance shift foreman, the post he assumed on April 1, 1969.”

Three things come out of that. The company called him Al. The word for how he started is trainee, which is what the apprenticeship certificate of 1951 describes from the other side. And the note above this one has him named unit foreman in the electrical department in January 1958; this one has him a mill maintenance shift foreman from 1 April 1969. Two foreman’s posts eleven years apart, neither of which the family papers record.

The month is worth something too. Twenty-five years counted back from January 1973 puts his service date at about January 1948. The apprenticeship certificate, counted back three and a half years from 30 April 1951, puts the start of his training at about the end of October 1947. The two are roughly ten weeks apart and this document does not merge them: a company’s service date and a trainee’s first day are not obliged to be the same thing, and neither figure is exact.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 3 February 1973, p. 8; Pottsville Republican, 31 January 1958, p. 16; Alcoa apprenticeship certificate, Cressona Works, 30 April 1951.

Thirty years, and then the plant shut down

Allen says he ran his own radio shop in Cressona “for a while” and then went to Alcoa for about thirty years, “until the plant shut down.” He had the end of it right: Alcoa operated the Cressona Works until 1977, which puts his hire somewhere around 1947 or 1948 and makes his own arithmetic sound. The site did not stay dark — it reopened in 1979 as the Cressona Aluminum Company, and since 2017 has been run by Norsk Hydro as the largest aluminium extrusion plant in North America. Some of the original wartime extrusion presses, built in Germany in the 1930s, were still standing in the building into the 2020s, which means the machines Allen worked around for three decades were the same ones installed to make aeroplane parts while he was overseas. His working life began and ended with that plant, and so did the war’s physical presence in his home town.

Sources: Ron Devlin, “Workers at Cressona defense plant played a vital role in WWII,” Pottsville Republican Herald, 31 August 2025 — Alcoa operated the plant until 1977; 1930s German-built presses still in place; Hydro Extrusions Cressona, PA — site history, 1979 Cressona Aluminum, 2017 Norsk Hydro; Hydro Cressona Expands with New Extrusion and Recycling Capacity, Light Metal Age; Hydro Cressona Expands with New Extrusion and Recycling Capacity — Light Metal Age (“the biggest aluminum extrusion plant in North America”; plant built 1942; two presses built 1938).

The roll of honor, 1943 likely

The family archive holds a photograph of a roll-of-honor dedication in Cressona in 1943, and the object in it would have been familiar in every small American town that year. These were community-built boards — painted panels under an eagle and a flag, the names of the borough’s serving men and women listed in columns — put up by fire companies, churches and Legion posts and unveiled with a parade, a band and a short address.

They were dedicated as the lists filled: one New York fire district, by its local historian’s account, dedicated its board in June 1943 for ninety men; Hopewell Borough, New Jersey, chose 16 May 1943, “I Am An American Day”; Baraboo, Wisconsin, dedicated its own on 12 December 1943 with 1,370 names. Allen’s account of running into a younger Cressona boy on the far side of the Pacific is the same fact from the other end — a borough of seventeen hundred people had men scattered from New Guinea to Arkansas, and the board on the square was how the town kept them all in one place. Nobody has yet turned up a printed account of the Cressona ceremony itself, so for now the family’s photograph is the whole record of it.

Sources: “World War II: Honoring those in service was a way to raise morale on the home front,” The Altamont Enterprise — Westmere honor-roll plaque dedicated June 1943, ninety men, first parade in the district’s history; “Where are the Hopewell Valley WW II Honor Rolls?” Hopewell Valley History Project — dedication of 16 May 1943; World War II Honor Roll, Acton Historical Society — construction and appearance of a typical board; Baraboo Veterans Honor Roll — 1942 and 1943 dedications and name counts.

The One Thing He Was Expressly Forbidden To Do

Of everything the Army told a soldier to keep out of his letters, the one thing Allen actually did was the thing it warned about most sharply. War Department Pamphlet 21-1 instructed him plainly: “Don’t attempt to formulate or use a code system, cipher, or shorthand, or any other means to conceal the true meaning of your letter,” and added that violations of that rule “will result in severe punishment.” The same pamphlet warned that trying to get a message out around the Army Postal Service — by civilian mail, or by handing it to someone travelling home — would bring severe disciplinary action against the sender and the go-between alike.

A salutation code was not a loophole in the censorship rules; it was the specific offence the rules anticipated, and the reason the Army anticipated it was that the trick was obvious to anyone who had thought about the problem for five minutes. Two honest qualifications belong here. The printed pamphlet is dated eighteen months after Allen sailed from San Francisco, so the wording above is not necessarily what his squadron was read at the port of embarkation in January 1942. And no record has been found of any American soldier being tried for arranging a private code with his family, so nobody can say what the punishment would have come to in practice.

Sources: Secrecy in Wartime: U.S. War Department Pamphlet No. 21-1 (29 July 1943), prohibition on codes and ciphers; 90th Attack Squadron (lineage and WWII stations: arrived Archerfield, Brisbane 25 February 1942).

He Was Not the Only One Who Thought of It likely

Private arrangements of this kind were widespread enough that Australian researchers describe them as ordinary: “Many troops would devise codes etc to allow them to keep their family informed of their whereabouts,” Peter Dunn’s Australia @ War records, and he offers his own father, James Thomas “Jim” Dunn of the 42nd Battalion, who used a numbered code in his letters home to his mother in Rockhampton. At the more elaborate end, British prisoners of war ran genuine ciphers past German camp censors inside letters about the ordinary business of the camp; a code buried in the letters John Pryor, a young Royal Navy officer, sent home from Germany went unread for some seventy years, until historians at the University of Plymouth worked it out.

Allen’s version is worth keeping for how little machinery it needed. He did not hide anything in the body of the letter, where the censor was looking; he put the message in the greeting, a place a reader’s eye passes over on the way to the text, and he needed no key beyond a slip of paper his mother and his girl kept at home. No published example of this particular salutation trick has turned up anywhere else, so his account stands as a rare first-hand description of something historians believe was common and which, by its nature, left almost nothing behind.

Sources: Censors in Australia during WW2, Australia @ War (Peter Dunn); Secret code within WWII POW’s letters cracked 70 years later, CBS News.

V-Mail Caught Up With Him Overseas

Allen remembers V-mail as something that appeared after he was already in the theatre, and the dates bear him out: the service opened in June 1942, five months after he sailed, and ran until November 1945. And he had the reason for it exactly right. A letter written on the standard one-page form was censored by the unit officer, then photographed onto 16mm microfilm at a laboratory near a designated Army Post Office, flown as film, and printed back onto paper at about a quarter of the original size — a finished sheet some four and a quarter inches by five — so that thirty-seven sacks of ordinary letters collapsed into a single sack of film, at roughly sixteen hundred letters to a hundred-foot roll.

The cost was intimacy. The form held a single sheet with no enclosures, the reduced print was hard on the eyes, and many servicemen thought the glossy little photograph less than a real letter. More than a billion V-mails were processed before the war ended, yet ordinary first-class letters stayed far more popular with the families who wrote them: in 1944 a Navy man received something like six of them for every V-mail that reached him.

Sources: Mail Call: V-mail, The National WWII Museum; Victory Mail, Smithsonian National Postal Museum; Innovations of Postal Mail during World War II, Kentucky Historical Society; Wrap Securely, Address Correctly: Innovations of Postal Mail during World War II, Kentucky Historical Society (six regular letters per V-mail, 1944).

Why the Papers Came in a Pile and the Letters Came by Name

Allen had spotted something the Army arranged on purpose: his own letters were addressed to him and had to be collected personally, while the newspapers and magazines came off the truck in a heap with no names called. Most of that reading matter was never individually addressed in the first place.

Special overseas editions of popular magazines were printed small and light with the advertising stripped out and shipped in bulk to hospitals, headquarters and individual units through the Army’s Special Services Division rather than through the mails; Time’s “Pony Edition,” Newsweek’s “Battle Baby” — never for sale, and obtainable only if the Army or Navy handed it to your unit — and The New Yorker’s “pee wee edition” all appeared in this form in 1943, and the Saturday Evening Post’s sixty-four-page “Post Yarns” booklets followed in 1944, ten million copies given away in boxed libraries of thirty-six. Yank, the Army Weekly, written by enlisted men, reached a circulation above two and a half million across twenty-one editions, and the one that served his part of the war, the Down Under edition, began with its first number on 6 August 1943, while Allen was at Dobodura. So the heap on the ground with men picking through it was not the postal service failing; it was how free bulk periodicals were meant to arrive, and that is exactly why nobody called out a name over it.

Sources: Magazines, The Best-Read Army in the World: the Power of the Written Word in World War II, Grolier Club; Magazine Editions of Yank: the Army Weekly, Library of Congress Research Guides; Yank, the Army Weekly; 90th Attack Squadron — WWII stations (Dobodura, New Guinea, 21 May 1943 to 5 February 1944).

Catherine

Catherine sat for her own interview in 2013, recorded the same way as Allen's: a family member asking the questions, Catherine answering in her own words. Three passages from those recordings follow, chosen by the family.

Kutztown State Teachers College

Catherine00:03

Yep. Hello, my name is Catherine Sarah Sweigert. My father's name was Earl Ambrose Kline, and my mother's name was Sarah Marion Reiger, and I was born on December the 21st, 1919, on Grove Street in Cressona, Pennsylvania. I have one, I had one sister, who was Betty Ann, and she married Harold Straub. I married Allen Sweigert on October the 14th, 1944. We had two boys, Allen Jr. and John. Allen was the son of Earl Joshua Sweigert and Helen Fessler.

Jeremy01:01

A little bit about your schooling, and then your full-time job.

Catherine01:10

I went to, uh, Cressona schools, uh, graduated from Cressona High School in 1937. And that fall, I went to Kutztown State College, and I was there for four years and received my Bachelor of Science degree with... with, uh, a major in Library Science and in Social Studies and a minor in English. I, uh, taught at Port Carbon High School for one year after I graduated. Then I came to Cressona for three years, and then I got married, and I had children, two boys, uh, and I didn't go back to school to teach again. Uh, and I didn't go back to school to teach again. Gee, I don't remember what year it was, but I was at Schuylkill Haven for thirteen years. Schuylkill Haven High School, where I was a high school librarian. Ah, that's about all I can tell ya.

Jeremy02:25

All right. Um, what year did you graduate Kutztown?

Catherine02:30

1941.

Jeremy02:33

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that pretty extraordinary at the time? What?

Catherine03:05

Well, I was pretty fortunate in being able to go. I made a lot of great friends there.

Catherine, a formal portrait from her Kutztown years.

“I think the reason I lived this long was I was well taken care of, because I had a husband that was one of the best in the world. And he lived a long life, too, so I guess we got along well.”

Catherine S. Sweigert

A Husband, A House, A Tree House

The House They Sold to Build This One

Catherine describes the house going up without dating it: “He built the house we’re in right now... One Thanksgiving, he was up putting the roof on this house.” Two Cressona addresses had come down with the papers — Railroad Street, his father’s, off the dog tags, and the Charles Street house of the 1957 wiring certificate, built by Father and Son. What paid for the second, nothing in them said.

The Pottsville Republican of 29 September 1955 gives the earlier address and the moment one house turned into the other. “The dwelling property of Mr. and Mrs. Allen E. Sweigert at 30 N. Fourth Street, Cressona, was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. George A. Head of R. D., Pottsville, Pa.” — and then: “The Sweigert family are planning to build a new home, construction of which will start in the immediate future.” The sale went through the office of Walter F. Mullen, local realtor, and Head was another Alcoa man. So the roof went on in the Thanksgiving of 1955 or 1956, and the Charles Street snapshots of raw earth and new concrete belong to those two years.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 29 September 1955, p. 26; Catherine S. Sweigert, interview, 2013.

Pottsville Republican, Thursday 29 September 1955. The sale of 30 North Fourth Street — and, in the same paragraph, what it was for. Credit: Pottsville Republican.

Jeremy00:00

Okay, there's another question. This one might be mind-boggling, but what do you believe is the secret to your longevity?

Catherine00:11

Well, I really don't know, because at one time I smoked, and I'd take a drink once in a while, not often. You like your Yuengling Lager, I believe.

Jeremy00:20

Huh?

Catherine00:21

I think you like your Yuengling Lager. Yeah, I like that, a little bit. Not a lot. I'm not much of a beer drinker. I like scotch and soda better. Whew! That's heavy stuff. But, I tell you what, I think the reason I lived this long was I was well taken care of because I had a husband that was one of the best in the world. And he lived a long life, too, so I guess we got along well. Yes, we did. He built the house we're in right now. Yes, he built it. He sure did. One Thanksgiving, he was up putting the roof on this house. He and George Strach and Johnny Green.

Catherine01:17

And it was a Thanksgiving day, I remember.

Jeremy01:20

Let's not forget the second house he built. What was that? Oh, you don't remember?

Catherine01:26

He built a three-story house for his grandson. Oh, yes, he did. He built a tree house out back. Oh, that was a while. That was a wild time. That was a wild time.

Jeremy01:38

Let's see how many floors we can put on this baby.

Catherine01:41

It got pretty high. That was all right. No girls allowed. The word is a lud. Ay, ay, ay. Some of the best times we all had was when we went to the shore. Oh, yeah. We all liked the shore. Going to Wildwood.

Allen and Catherine with their grandchildren, 1986.

Advice to the Youth Today

Late in the second recording Jeremy put the questionnaire down and asked her something it did not cover: what a woman born in 1919, who spent her working life in a classroom, would say to children now. The passage below runs from there to the end of the tape.

Jeremy03:03

All right. Now, we’re going to go completely off interview topic here for a minute. We’re going to ask a question. Now, as you have grown up during what they call the greatest generation, and you were in... You were in... You got to teach children in school. And you see how the world is today. What advice, not just for Braxton your great grandson, but what do you think about how things are in the world today and what the best way is to... Today, with all the distractions, the best path to take to stay on the straight and narrow? In your opinion, if you could speak to the youth today, if you went back to school and you were teaching...

Catherine

Listen to your parents, for one thing. And listen and pay attention in school. Kids today do not pay attention. And I could see that that was... When I stopped teaching, I could see it changing then. You could see the change. I wouldn’t venture to give kids advice today because they just laugh, I think.

Catherine04:21

And I think this happened... It happened over the years when Mom went to work. Hmm. I think that’s what... My mother never worked. She was at home. My husband’s mother never went to work. She was at home. And I think that made a big difference. We didn’t come home to an empty house or a babysitter. We didn’t know what a babysitter was.

Catherine05:01

Kids today have it pretty easy, don’t they? Yeah, I guess. Maybe a little too easy.

Jeremy05:08

Well, I probably would have did better in school myself if I wasn’t surrounded by so many distractions.

The speaker labels here are the ones the transcribing software assigned, not anyone’s later judgement. At 05:01 the whole exchange — “Kids today have it pretty easy, don’t they? Yeah, I guess.” — is given to Catherine, though the reply in the middle is almost certainly Jeremy’s. It has been left as the machine heard it rather than quietly corrected. Nothing in this passage came back marked doubtful.

The Philco Dealer for Cressona

Which Came First, the Shop or the Plant

His grandson’s instinct was that Alcoa came after the radio shop, and Allen says exactly that on the tape: “I come home to start up my own business and radio repair in Cressona. And for a while, and then went to work at Alcoa.” Two passages in this document had the order reversed, with the shop opening before he had finished the school that qualified him for it, and they have been put right.

The certificate dates the second half of it. It reads “having satisfactorily completed the prescribed 3½ years Course of Training… for the classification of Electrician”, and it is dated at Cressona Works on 30 April 1951. Count back and the training began about the end of October 1947. That is firmer than the estimate this document used to carry, which was thirty years counted back from the 1977 shutdown — and thirty years was his own round number, not a date.

Which answers something left open on the Philco page. The dealership was announced on 3 December 1947, about five weeks after the apprenticeship started, and the shop’s own advertising calendars are printed for 1948. So the shop did not close when he went into the plant. For a year at least he was an Alcoa apprentice by day and the Philco dealer for Cressona by name, with a wife, a baby son born that January, and a shop on Chestnut Street.

One more thing is on that certificate, and it settles a question from the other end of his life. The company wrote his name out in full: Allen Earl Sweigert. His birth certificate says the same, in a registrar’s hand in 1918; this is an employer saying it in 1951.

Sources: Allen E. Sweigert, interview, July 2006, Part Two; Alcoa electrician’s certificate, Cressona Works, 30 April 1951; Pottsville Republican, 3 December 1947, p. 9; two 1948 advertising calendars, family collection.

The Army taught him radio, sent him to Scott Field for twenty-two weeks, and then spent his war on it. He went on selling and servicing it under his own name. In December 1947 Philco took a full page in the Pottsville Republican for its Christmas trade, and listed its dealers across Schuylkill County town by town. Pottsville has ten. Saint Clair, Minersville and Frackville have two each. Orwigsburg has one. And under CRESSONA there is a single name, which is his.

The foot of the right-hand column: CRESSONA, and one dealer for the town.

The dealer list entire, from the same page — Philco’s own account of who sold its sets in Schuylkill County that Christmas.

Pottsville Republican, Wednesday 3 December 1947, page 9 — the whole page as it ran. The Philco 1270 at the lower left is $359.50, about four months’ wages for a man in the aluminium works. “Wednesday is Bingsday: Philco Radio Time with Bing Crosby — 10 PM, WPAM, 1450 on your dial.” Credit: Pottsville Republican.

One Name, and No Address

Philco listed dealers, not employees. The name under CRESSONA is Allen E. Sweigert’s own, with no shop name, no street and no company attached to it, which is how a one-man dealership appears in a manufacturer’s advertising. He is the only Philco dealer the town had.

The advertisement gives no premises, no trading name, no first day and no last. It is one of two dated points. The other is three weeks earlier: the Pottsville Republican of Wednesday 12 November 1947 runs the same dealer list under the headline “America has bought 20,000,000 Philcos”, towns set in italic capitals with the dealer beneath — FRACKVILLE, The White Shop and Bowe Electric; CRESSONA, Allen E. Sweigert; ORWIGSBURG, Claude Stoyer. So he was Philco’s man in the town by the second week of November 1947 at the latest. It was a crowded moment to be one. He was twenty-nine, married three years, and Allen Jr. had been born that year. It falls between two fixed points in his life — the Coyne Electrical School in Chicago in 1946, and thirty years in the aluminium plant at Cressona — and the dealership ran alongside the plant work: the apprenticeship began about the end of October 1947, a fortnight before the first of these two advertisements.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 3 December 1947, p. 9 (Newspapers.com image 450337336).

The House, the Dog, and the Years After

“Mrs. Earl Kline”, Absent likely

The caption’s list of those absent includes Mrs. Earl Kline, history and invitations. Catherine’s certification of birth names her parents as Earl Ambrose Kline and Sarah Marion Reiger, of Cressona. A woman styled Mrs. Earl Kline on a Cressona committee of the late 1960s could therefore be Allen’s own mother-in-law, on the same committee as her son-in-law.

It is a lead and it is written as one. The Pottsville Republican’s death index carries exactly one Earl Kline across its run, with an obituary in October 1974, and a Sarah M. Kline in December 1980 — so both were alive when this was taken, and no second Earl Kline exists in that index to compete for the name. But the index is comprehensive only for certain windows, the caption gives her no first name and no relationship, and the same index holds a different Sarah Kline. Until a vital record or an obituary settles it, this is probable and unconfirmed.

Sources: Pottsville Republican death index, Pottsville Free Public Library; Catherine’s certification of birth, 21 December 1919.

A Committee Seat Called Alcoa

A borough of under two thousand people had a committee seat named after a factory, which tells you what the factory was. The works went up in 1942 as a federal defence plant and was handed to the Aluminum Company of America to run, extruding aluminium shapes for the war. Alcoa operated it until 1977. Cressona absorbed it so completely that the borough’s street grid includes an Alcoa Street.

It is also where Allen worked for thirty years, and where he was named unit foreman of the electrical department in January 1958. So the man sitting on this committee as utilities chairman had spent his working life inside the plant the man two seats along was there to liaise with.

Sources: Hydro Extrusions, Cressona — plant history; Pottsville Republican, 31 January 1958, p. 16.

Utilities Chairman, About 1969 likely

Three things bracket the picture. The Cressona Homecoming that Merlyn J. Jenkins chaired — and the caption seats Jenkins as general chairman — is on the record in the Pottsville Republican in June and July 1969, launched with a concert by the Cressona Band. Jack March, whom the caption calls mayor, is documented in that office in June 1967. And the committee has an Alcoa chairman, a title that has to predate 1977, when Alcoa shut the Cressona plant.

The clothes agree without adding precision: sleeveless shifts, two teased bouffants, narrow lapels and narrow ties, heavy rectangular frames. The economical reading is that this is the committee for the 1969 Homecoming, taken in the run-up to it. That is a reading and not a dateline. Nothing in the frame carries a year, a paper’s name or a photographer’s credit, and if the Homecoming recurred and Jenkins chaired it more than once, the picture could belong to another year of the same series.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 12 June and 1 July 1969, p. 16; The Call, Schuylkill Haven, 8 June 1967; Hydro Extrusions, Cressona — plant history.

The Cressona Homecoming Committee. Allen stands fifth from the left in the back row, listed in the caption as utilities chairman. About 1969 — the photograph carries no date, and the reasons for that year are set out below.

Allen and his grandson Jeremy, 2001. Five years before the afternoon Jeremy set up a camera and asked him to start at the beginning - the recording this whole document is built on. — Allen and his grandson Jeremy, 2001. Five years before the afternoon Jeremy set up a camera and asked him to start at the beginning — the recording this whole document is built on.

Elder, and Chairman of the Pulpit Committee

The church office his obituary gives him is member and property committee chairman of St. Mark’s United Church of Christ. The Pottsville Republican of 7 March 1966 gives him a different one, and an earlier one. The caption to a photograph of an installation ends: “Rev. Rumley and Elder Allen E. Sweigert, chairman of Pulpit Committee of S. Mark’s Church.”

Elder is a lay office. The pulpit committee is the body that finds and calls a minister. So in the spring of 1966 he chaired the committee that brought the Rev. James D. Rumley Jr. to the congregation, and there he is in the photograph at the installation, on the Sunday evening before a Monday paper. It is a second office rather than another name for the first, and the earliest dated evidence of any church office he held at all. The caption garbles twice, printing “St. John’s Pnited Churcho f Christ” and “S. Mark’s”; both are the paper’s, and it also calls Rumley second from right while listing four names left to right.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 7 March 1966, p. 5.

St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, Cressona, Sunday evening 6 March 1966. Allen at the right, the only man in the frame not in clerical dress, at the installation of the minister his committee had called. Identification is by the caption’s left-to-right order.

The Church Had Another Name Then

His obituary calls him a member and property committee chairman of St. Mark’s United Church of Christ. In April 1956 the same congregation is named on this page as “St. Mark’s Evangelical and Reformed church,” and the page says why that was about to change: an item on the Rev. George C. Hosler’s pulpit exchange ties it to “the union of the two denominations scheduled for June 1957.”

The forecast was right. The Evangelical and Reformed Church and the General Council of the Congregational Christian Churches united as the United Church of Christ at the Uniting General Synod in Cleveland on 25 June 1957. St. Mark’s was Evangelical and Reformed for the first thirty-nine years of his life and United Church of Christ for the last fifty-five. Catherine is in this page too, in the cast of a play at the reception for new members.

Sources: The Call & Orwigsburg News, 12 April 1956, p. 9; United Church of Christ.

Fifty-Eight Dollars and Sixty-Eight Cents

The same Lions item reports that “The April paper and scrap drive netted the Lions $58.68 which will go to the development of the Veteran’s Memorial playground.” The story does not connect him to it and says nothing about anyone’s service. It did not need to: five years earlier he had signed the charter of the association the playground was being built by, which is set out further down this page.

The Cressona Lions describe a long history of providing playgrounds for the town’s children, and Veterans Memorial Park, about ten acres, stands in Cressona today. So the newsprint records to the cent one stage in building a veterans’ memorial playground in his town, with him in the room, eleven and a half years after he came home from the war. Whether he worked on it, voted for it or proposed it, nobody set down. The apostrophe is the paper’s: it printed Veteran’s, singular.

Sources: The Call & Orwigsburg News, 12 April 1956, p. 9; Cressona Lions Club; Cressona parks listing.

Father and Son on One Page, 1956

This page was once the earliest dated evidence of his Lions membership anywhere in the collection, and the only source for it other than his obituary. It is neither of those things now. The club’s charter of 18 June 1947 carries his name, and the county papers put him in the room in April 1948, June 1949, May 1950 and November 1953. What this page still does, and nothing else in the collection does, is print father and son together. The sons-and-daughters night lists “Allen E. Sweigert Sr.” among the Lions present and “Allen E. Sweigert, Jr.” among the guests; Allen Jr., born in 1947, was nine.

The pairing is not a guess about suffixes. The first ten surnames of the guest list run in the exact order of the member list — Strauch, Schwartz, Kunsman, Kurtz, Becker, Schappell, Sweigert, Beck, Ferrier, Butler — skipping only the two members with no child present, and the correspondence continues more loosely afterwards. The two lists were taken down in one pass, member and child together. The obituary’s word “charter member” is not just the obituary’s, and it is no longer undated: the club was chartered on 18 June 1947 and he is on the printed roll of charter members, as set out further down this page. So this 1956 item finds him nine years into the club, not at the start of it.

The suffix was in the same column seven months earlier. The Cressona News of 8 September 1955 carried a standing list headed “Birthdays,” and under “September 9” it printed his name with Sr. after it — the day before he turned thirty-seven. No earlier printing of it has been found: the seven matches in the same newspaper search that predate it were read on 24 September 2026 and none carries the suffix, but sixty-nine of that search’s hundred and two matches are still unread. It is not the earliest use of it either. He signed himself “SWEIGERT, SR” on his compensation application in April 1950, five years before it turns up in any newspaper here. The 1955 item is a transcription and not a page image, so how the name was actually set is not established.

Sources: The Call & Orwigsburg News, 12 April 1956, p. 9, “Cressona News” by Albert L. Krommes; The Call & Orwigsburg News, 8 September 1955, p. 3, “Cressona News”; Pennsylvania WWII Veterans’ Compensation application, April 1950.

The Cressona News column in The Call & Orwigsburg News, Thursday, 12 April 1956. Allen and Catherine and their nine-year-old son are all on this one page — he at the Lions with Allen Jr. as his guest, she in the cast of a play at St. Mark’s. Credit: The Call and the Orwigsburg News.

“Puppy’s out on the porch. She come running out, jumping all over. … And she hung with me all that night until I went to bed that night.”

A colour snapshot of two people on a dark green sofa banked with orange cushions: Allen in heavy-framed glasses and a red plaid shirt, and his son John in similar glasses and a blue plaid shirt, with a black-and-white dog lying between them. One of them reaches a hand out toward the camera; the wall behind carries a printed scenic wallpaper and the corner of a gilt picture frame shows at the top left.

Allen, in a crew-neck sweater and wire-rimmed glasses, leaning on a rustic log rail beside Catherine in a short-sleeved buttoned blouse and a checked skirt, her hands clasped in front of her. Dense conifers and hardwoods cover the slope behind them.

A thick-coated dog in a tagged collar stands on the concrete cap of a brick porch pier, the clapboard wall and shuttered window of a house behind it. Its tail is blurred by movement.

A two-tone four-door sedan with whitewall tyres on a paved road below a wooded ridge of bare trees. John Sweigert, Allen's younger son, looks out through the front side window, with two further figures indistinct in the back seat. — A two-tone four-door sedan with whitewall tyres on a paved road below a wooded ridge of bare trees. John Sweigert, Allen’s younger son, looks out through the front side window, with two further figures indistinct in the back seat.

Earl Joshua Sweigert, Allen’s father, in a dark flat cap, a work shirt with the sleeves rolled back, dark trousers and high boots, sitting against the clapboard wall of a house and holding a thick-coated dog steady between his knees. A creeper climbs the wall at the left.

Allen sits cheek to cheek with his granddaughter Jessica in a restaurant, in a red and navy patterned sweater and heavy-framed glasses; she is in a green plaid shirt. A framed still life of wine bottles hangs on the wall above them and white louvered shutters stand at the right.

A single-storey house seen from the driveway, with a brick chimney, two-tone siding, a shingled roof and a decorated front-porch railing. A two-tone sedan is parked on the drive, the concrete walk and steps are newly poured, and mounded bare earth fills the foreground.

The front of the same low house from across the street, evergreen garland swagged along the porch railing with a pale ornament in each loop and the front of a car cut off at the left edge. The new concrete walk runs down to two freshly poured steps set in raw earth and gravel at the street.

A thick-coated dog lies at the edge of a concrete walk with both forepaws over a large bone, a picket fence and a flowering shrub behind it.

A June Wedding Is Being Planned, October 1975

The Pottsville Republican of Thursday 30 October 1975 ran a page of photographs headed Area Couples Engaged To Wed, and one of them is Keim — Sweigert.

“Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth R. Keim of RD1 Tower City announce the engagement of their daughter, Kathy Marie, to John Samuel Sweigert, son of Mr. and Mrs. Allen E. Sweigert of Cressona. Miss Keim is a 1975 graduate of Williams Valley High School. She is employed by Bestok factory, Tower City. Mr. Sweigert is a 1973 graduate of Blue Mountain High School and a 1975 graduate of The Pennsylvania State University, where he received a technician’s degree in pesticide technology. He is employed at Gold Mills, Pine Grove. A June wedding is being planned.” A photograph of Kathy runs with it.

The Call carried the same announcement a week later, on 6 November, under Engaged to Wed, and closes it with the year: “A June 1976 wedding is planned.”

This is Allen’s younger son and the woman he married — the grandson who set the camera up in 2006 was born to them in 1978. The document already had the year of Kathy Keim’s birth, 1957, and nothing else about her. Here she is at eighteen, out of Williams Valley High School that summer and working at a factory in Tower City, and John is twenty, out of Penn State the same year.

The wedding itself is not in these papers. A search of the whole archive for Allen’s name turns up no 1976 report of it, which may mean it was not published, or was published without naming him, or is simply not digitised. The engagement is dated; the marriage is not.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 30 October 1975, p. 23; The Call and the Orwigsburg News, 6 November 1975, p. 6.

Still Holding Hands

No document in this collection would tell you this, and nobody outside the family could. Well into their eighties, Allen and Catherine still went out to restaurants together, still held hands across the table, and were affectionate enough about it in public that their grandson noticed — his word for it is “kissy.” They had been married fifty-five years by the time both of them were in their eighties, and they carried on exactly like that.

He also walked. A few miles a day in his eighties, on purpose, to keep himself in shape. Set that beside the photograph the Republican and Herald ran in October 2005 — eighty-seven years old, at an 1855 grave, with a walker — and the two do not contradict each other. They are in order.

Source: Jeremy Sweigert, his grandson, September 2026.

The Borough Cemetery, and Twenty Years On Its Commission

He Helped Found the Veterans’ Memorial Park, June 1951

The Pottsville Republican of Saturday 2 June 1951: “Charter application for the Cressona Memorial Park Association has been filed in the office of Prothonotary Noakes. Listed as incorporators are the following: Elvin H. Kunsman, Allan A. Becker, Theodore Hayle, William H. Laubenstein, William S. Boussum, A. C. Kantner, Allen E. Sweigert, Adam D. Singley, Francis E. Hanney, all of Cressona. The purpose of the association is to develop playgrounds as a memorial to war veterans.”

Nine men, and he is one of them. This is the strongest civic evidence in the collection: not attendance at a meeting but a name on a charter, filed by a Pottsville law firm, for a body set up to build something.

It also corrects this document. The 1956 Lions item that records $58.68 raised “for the development of the Veteran’s Memorial playground” was written up here with the caution that the story “does not connect him to it” and that he was a member in the room when it was read out. He was more than that. Five years before that collection was counted, he had put his name to the charter of the association it was being raised for. Veterans Memorial Park, about ten acres, stands in Cressona today.

Three of the nine were his own Legion officers eight months earlier — Adam Singley and Francis Hanney, with Allen himself in the chair as commander. The post founded the park.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 2 June 1951, p. 12; Pottsville Republican, 5 October 1950, p. 21; The Call & Orwigsburg News, 12 April 1956, p. 9.

Executor, by June 1978

The document has followed Allen’s father through a marriage in 1914, forty-three years on the Reading Railroad, a retirement in June 1959 and a golden wedding in October 1964, and then loses him entirely. It has no date for his death. This is the nearest thing to one.

The Pottsville Republican of Monday 5 June 1978 printed its weekly column of property transfers, and in the middle of it: “Allen E. Sweigert, executor of the estate of Earl J. Sweigert, deceased, to Terry L. and Brenda L. Ellex for $17,000 in Cressona.”

So Earl was dead by the first week of June 1978, and his only son was settling what he left. What the seventeen thousand dollars bought is not named in the column. The golden-wedding notice of 1964 gives Earl and Helen’s address as 147 Railroad Street, Cressona, which makes that house the obvious candidate and does not make it a fact.

A dollar figure sits oddly beside the other one in these pages. Thirty North Fourth Street came to Allen and Catherine for a dollar in December 1948. Thirty years later he sold his father’s property for seventeen thousand, as executor rather than as owner, and the same column does not say what became of the money or whether Helen was still living.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 5 June 1978, p. 24; The Call and the Orwigsburg News, 15 October 1964, p. 7; Pottsville Republican, 23 December 1948, p. 16.

His Parents’ Golden Wedding, October 1964

Searching the papers for St. Mark’s turned up something much larger than a church item. The Call of Thursday 15 October 1964, page 7: MR. AND MRS. EARL SWEIGERT OBSERVES 50TH ANNIVERSARY. In four hundred words it sets down more about Allen’s parents than everything else in this collection put together.

“Mr. and Mrs. Earl Sweigert, 147 Railroad St., Cressona, celebrated their golden wedding anniversary Saturday. The couple was married Oct. 10, 1914 at St. Mark’s Church, Cressona, by the Rev. Schaeffer.” The date was already in this document from their marriage record; the church and the minister were not, and it is the same church Allen would marry in thirty years later.

Then the part that was missing altogether. “Mr. Sweigert retired June 14, 1959 after being employed as an engineer for the Reading Railroad Co. for 43 years.” Forty-three years on the railroad, from about 1916, and a member of the Brotherhood of Railroad Engineers. Allen grew up in a locomotive engineer’s house on Railroad Street, and went into radio.

It also reaches back a generation further than anything else here. Earl was “the son of Joshua and Sara Lengle Sweigert”; Helen, “the former Helen Fessler, was born at Friedensburg, the daughter of Samuel and Esther Nagle Fessler.” Those are Allen’s four grandparents, in print, and the Fessler and Nagle names match the family’s own handwritten tree.

And one sentence settles a question that had been left open. “The couple has one son, Allen E. Sweigert, and two grandsons, Allen and John Sweigert, all of Cressona.” Allen was an only child. So the other Sweigerts who turn up in the Cressona papers are not brothers and sisters: Merlin Sweigert, on the Gettysburg Scout train with him in 1931, is named here as Earl’s brother — Allen’s uncle. Earl also had a sister, Mrs. Ida Stichler of Schuylkill Haven; Helen had a sister, Mrs. Annie Berger of Cressona, and two brothers, William Fessler of Cressona and Sterling of Baltimore.

The celebration itself was a family dinner on the Sunday at Reeser’s Restaurant in Reading, and the guests begin: “Mr. and Mrs. Allen E. Sweigert and children.”

Sources: The Call and the Orwigsburg News, 15 October 1964, p. 7.

The Last Time, September 2011 — and the Flag That Replaced Them

The final appearance of his name in a newspaper before his obituary is six months before he died, and it is this. The Republican and Herald of Tuesday 27 September 2011, in the state police round-up, under a heading about flags and rods stolen from a front porch:

“Troopers said Allen E. Sweigert reported that someone stole two flags and the rods that they were attached to from holders on the front porch of his home and fled. The flags, one an American flag and the other a New York Yankees flag, are about 3½ feet by 2½ feet in size, troopers said.” It happened between six on the Thursday evening and seven on the Friday morning.

He was ninety-three. A master sergeant of the 90th Bombardment Squadron, thirty-two months in the South West Pacific, a past commander of his Legion post and twenty years on the borough cemetery commission, ringing the state police because somebody took the flag off his porch in the night. And beside it a Yankees flag, which is the kind of detail no record sets down about a man unless something goes wrong.

Three days later his son answered it in print. The Republican and Herald of Friday 30 September 2011, page A11, under YOUR VIEWS: Theft of flags is thoughtless act.

“I was sitting here at my desk when the phone rang and on the other end were my parents… My mother went on to inform me that when she went out on the porch to retrieve the morning paper, she noticed that their flags were gone… they stole their U.S. flag and their Major League Baseball flag, including the poles. My parents are 93 and 92 years of age. They will be married 67 years in another month. They still live in the house, in a nice residential neighborhood of Cressona, which my father and grandfather built after World War II.” Signed John Sweigert, Bethlehem.

The letter never prints his name. He is “my father” throughout, so the police item of three days earlier still stands as the last time his own name is set in type before the obituary. But everything else in it checks. He turned ninety-three on 9 September 2011, three weeks before it was written. They were married on 14 October 1944, so the sixty-seventh anniversary was a fortnight away rather than a month — a son rounding, not a son misremembering.

And one clause in it is worth more than the rest of the letter. “which my father and grandfather built after World War II.” The Adequate Wiring Certificate for the Charles Street house, issued in 1957, is made out to “Father and Son”. Two documents fifty-four years apart, one a utility form and the other a complaint to a newspaper, neither written to record the fact, and they agree: Allen and Earl built that house between them. The son also calls it a Major League Baseball flag where the state police called it a New York Yankees flag, which is the difference between how a family describes a thing and how a trooper writes it down.

And the flags were replaced. The family’s account is that a Pennsylvania congressman, hearing what had happened, sent him a new United States flag. This document records that as what it is — family testimony, given by his grandson — and not as a newspaper fact, because no newspaper found here reports it.

The looking was not casual, and the scope is written down so that nobody has to do it twice. Between the night of the theft and the day he died, the whole of the searchable archive carries his surname and the name of his town together on exactly two pages, and neither is about him: a court list and another family’s obituary. His surname with the word congressman, across 2011 to 2013, returns three pages, every one of them a different Sweigert. The word flag beside his name over the same fifteen months returns the theft, the letter, and a run of high-school football. Whatever office sent that flag sent it without a press release — which, for a replacement flag posted to a ninety-three-year-old man whose own had been taken off his porch in the night, is rather to its credit.

One pointer for whoever looks again. Cressona lay in Pennsylvania’s 17th congressional district, held from 2003 to 2013 by Tim Holden, a Schuylkill County man who had been the county sheriff before he was the congressman — and the son who wrote the letter lived in Bethlehem, in the 15th. This document does not know which office it was and does not claim to. It sets the districts down only as the place a later search should start.

Sources: Republican and Herald, Pottsville, 27 September 2011, p. A14 (“Flags, rods taken from front porch”); Republican and Herald, 30 September 2011, p. A11; Adequate Wiring Certificate, 1957. The replacement flag: family testimony, Jeremy Sweigert, September 2026.

The Gift to the Museum in New Orleans

His elder son gave to The National WWII Museum in New Orleans in his father’s name. That is the family’s own account, from Allen Jr.’s nephew, and at the time of writing it is the only account there is. When the gift was made, and what form it took, this document does not know.

The museum’s public registers do not carry it, and this note sets out where the looking went so that nobody has to do it again. The Brick and Paver Locator, which indexes the commemorative bricks and pavers of the Colonel Battle Barksdale Parade Ground and Founders Plaza, returns nothing for Sweigert and nothing for Sweigart. The museum’s own site search returns nothing. He is not on the Honor Roll of Charter Members. The Digital Collections oral histories hold exactly one Sweigert — a first lieutenant named phonetically by another man describing a night patrol in Holland, killed there, and no relation.

None of that argues against the gift. A museum publishes its bricks because a brick is a public object with a name cut into it. An ordinary gift is a donor record, and donor records are confidential. Finding no public trace of one is not evidence that it was not made; it is what a gift looks like from outside.

What would settle it is a letter. The museum can look a gift up by the donor’s name and the honoree’s, and the family has only to ask. Allen Jr. died in 2020, so an acknowledgement or a receipt, if it survives, would be among his papers. Until one of those turns up this page records the gift on the family’s word, which is how it records the replacement flag above, and says plainly that it has no document behind it.

Sources: family testimony, Jeremy Sweigert, September 2026. Searched: The National WWII Museum Brick and Paver Locator (Sweigert, Sweigart), the museum’s site search, the Honor Roll of Charter Members, and the Digital Collections oral histories at ww2online.org — 25 September 2026.

How They Came by 30 North Fourth Street

The house has been in this document only as something they sold. The Pottsville Republican’s weekly column of property transfers, Thursday 23 December 1948, shows how they got it: “Eva Mae Mosher to Allen E. Sweigert and his wife, Catherine, all of Cressona, dwelling at 30 N. Fourth st., Cressona, for $1.”

A dollar is not a price. It is the figure a deed carries when a house is being handed over rather than sold — within a family, or as a settlement, or on terms the deed does not record. Who Eva Mae Mosher was to them, this document cannot say; Moshers are a Cressona family and a Mosher is on the Scout train with him in 1931.

It completes the shape of it. They took the house in the week before Christmas 1948, with a son not yet two. They sold it on 29 September 1955 to build the Charles Street house, which was roofed on a Thanksgiving day and wired by Allen himself in 1957. Just under seven years in the first house, and the rest of their lives in the second.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 23 December 1948, p. 16; Pottsville Republican, 29 September 1955, p. 26.

In the Room, 1948 to 1953

Between the charter night of June 1947 and the sons-and-daughters night of April 1956 the county papers put him at four Cressona Lions meetings. Singly they are thin. Together they are nine years of a man turning up.

April 1948 is the one worth reading twice. Under CRESSONA the Pottsville Republican has the club at Ed’s Grille on Pottsville Street, and gives the evening a speaker: “Lewis H. Murray, Pottsville, program director of Station WPAM. His subject was ‘Radio For The Future.’” Allen is in the list of those attending. He had been Philco’s dealer in Cressona for five months by then, with a shop on Chestnut Street, and WPAM is already on this page — it is the station in his own Philco advertisement of December 1947. The item says nothing about his trade and does not say he spoke. It is only that a man who sold radios sat through a talk on the future of radio.

June 1949 and November 1953 are attendance and nothing else. Twenty-six men at the high school the first time, twenty-eight at the weekly meeting the second. Perfect-attendance buttons went to nine men in 1949 and he was not one of the nine. Neither paper dates its meeting — each dates only its own page — so both are ceilings rather than days, and neither is entered in the register.

May 1950 records an office. The Republican of Thursday the 18th, under LIONS ELECT NEW OFFICERS, has the club meeting on the Tuesday and electing a slate for the year beginning 1 July: Elvin Kunsman president, and “director, two years, Wm. Laubenstine and Allen E. Sweigert.” The Tuesday before a Thursday paper was 16 May. He was thirty-one. Three months later he took command of Stanley Dengler Post 286, set out further down this page.

That slate also narrows something the obituary leaves open. It calls him a past president of this club and gives no year. For the year beginning 1 July 1950 the president was Kunsman and Allen was one of two directors, so the presidency was not that year. Every other year is still untested.

What none of the four items gives is anything he did. No motion, no word spoken, no committee. The only man who does anything in the 1953 report is a district governor up from Portland to talk about the International Convention. Four times across nine years, Allen is a name in a list — which is most of what belonging to anything looks like from the outside.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 14 April 1948, p. 15; 2 June 1949, p. 10; 18 May 1950, p. 2; 12 November 1953, p. 30. Obituary: Republican and Herald, 30 March 2012, p. A12.

The Mother-Daughter Banquet, by May 1949

The Pottsville Republican of Wednesday 18 May 1949 carried a Cressona item headed DAUGHTERS AND MOTHERS DINE. “The annual Mother-Daughter banquet was held in St. Mark’s Evangelical and Reformed Church, Cressona. A ham dinner, prepared by the women of the church was served by a group of men.” Then a programme, a gift list, and a long roll of those present. It is the first time the church he married in is named in full in these pages.

Four women in that roll belong to this document. Mrs. Allen E. Sweigert is Catherine. Mrs. Earl Sweigert is Helen, Allen’s mother, styled exactly as the same paper styled her among the mothers at the 1935 school banquet. Mrs. Earl A. Kline is almost certainly Catherine’s mother — her certification of birth names her father as Earl Ambrose Kline — though a church attendance list is not a vital record. Mrs. Wm. Fessler is thinner still: William Fessler of Cressona was Helen’s brother, but the paper gives this woman no first name and nothing here names his wife.

One run of five names is worth more than the rest of the column: “… Mrs. Harold R. Straub, Betty Jane Straub, Mrs. Allen E. Sweigert, Mrs. Emma Bartholomew, Mrs. Earl A. Kline …” Catherine said on her own tape in 2013, “I had one sister, who was Betty Ann, and she married Harold Straub.” That sentence has until now been the entire record of her sister. Here is a Mrs. Harold R. Straub in print, two places from Catherine, carrying a middle initial the document did not have. Betty Jane Straub, who took the gift for youngest daughter, stands between them and is listed without a Mrs., so she reads as a child. Catherine said Betty Ann and the paper says Betty Jane. Whether that is a mother and her daughter, or one woman whose name one of the two sources has wrong, nothing here settles.

Allen is not in it. The men served the dinner and the paper names none of them, so nothing in the column puts him in the building. Nor does it date the banquet: 18 May 1949 is the day it was printed and the latest it can have been.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 18 May 1949, p. 18; 27 May 1935, p. 8; Catherine’s own interview, 2013; Catherine’s certification of birth, 21 December 1919.

The Women’s Guild at St. Mark’s, 22 August 1950

Fifteen months later the same paper has the women of the church at work. Under CRESSONA — WOMEN’S GUILD MEET AT CHURCH: “The Women’s Guild of St. Mark’s Church at Cressona held their monthly meeting in the social room in the church, Tuesday evening. Due to the inclement weather, they had to postpone their meeting at Brommer’s cabin. A ham dinner was served…” The paper is dated Wednesday 23 August 1950, so the Tuesday was the 22nd.

The business of the evening was this: “A pre-school clothing drive for needy children in Europe was discussed… It is planned to have things for needy children such as old clothing which the children of the church can’t wear.” Five years after the war, in a borough of under two thousand people, the women of St. Mark’s counting out what their own children had grown out of. The item records a plan and not a report; whether the drive was held, it does not say.

Catherine is in the attendance list, and so is Helen, and directly before Helen stands Mrs. Wm. Fessler again. Catherine holds no office in it: not on the committee, not among the four delegates picked for the annual Guild meeting at Schuylkill Haven in September.

Immediately after her the paper sets BUDDY SWEIGERT. It gives no relationship and no age. The nickname is not in doubt — his obituary in 2012 calls him Allen E. “Buddy” Jr. — and Allen and Catherine had exactly one child in August 1950, John not being born until 1955. The column also sets the same surname twice running all the way through, the older person first: “Mr. and Mrs. Ray Bubeck, son Billy”, “Mrs. George Strauch, Jean Strauch”. What the paper establishes is that a Buddy Sweigert was in the room. The rest is this document’s reading, and on that reading it is the earliest appearance of Allen Jr. in a newspaper found so far — three and a half years old, at a church meeting, with his mother.

One other name. The item has “Rev. George Hosler” giving a few remarks and “Rev. and Mrs. Geo. C. Hosler” among those attending, without calling him the minister of St. Mark’s. The only other Hosler date in this collection is April 1956, so this puts him at the church five years and eight months earlier than anything else here does.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 23 August 1950, p. 6; The Call & Orwigsburg News, 12 April 1956, p. 9; The Call, Schuylkill Haven, 15 October 1964, p. 7; Republican and Herald, 30 March 2012, p. A12.

The Lions Charter, 18 June 1947

The obituary called him a charter member of the Cressona Lions and this document could not date it, because nobody had found the club’s charter. Here it is. The Call of Friday 20 June 1947, on its front page: “Cressona Lions Club Chartered Wednesday Night. The Charter Night banquet of the Cressona Lions club was held on Wednesday evening at the Necho Allen hotel, Pottsville, with Schuylkill Haven as the sponsoring club.” Wednesday was 18 June 1947.

The Pottsville Republican of the day before, 19 June, prints the whole roll under CRESSONA LIONS GET CHARTER, and Allen is on it: “The charter members are: Cloyd Bagshaw, Mark H. Bast, C. Fred Beck, Allen A. Becker, Arthur R. Berger… William H. Strauch, George W. Strauch, Allen E. Sweigert, Russell Wagner, Mason Wagner, Rev. Mark G. Wagner, Maurice D. Walborn and Chester A. Wilson.” Thirty-seven men, and he is one of them. He was twenty-eight, with a five-month-old son and a shop on Chestnut Street.

The same report lists who came, and he did not come alone: “Mr. and Mrs. Allen E. Sweigert.” Catherine was at the charter night too.

One name in that list is already in this document for another reason. The Rev. Mark G. Wagner, a director of the new club, had married Allen and Catherine at St. Mark’s two and a half years earlier.

And the rest of the list is the same small group of men who keep reappearing. Archibald Kantner was the club’s first secretary, William S. Boussum its tail twister and Francis Hanney its lion tamer; four years later Kantner, Boussum and Hanney signed the charter of the Cressona Memorial Park Association with Allen, and in between Hanney was the acting commander who handed the Legion post over to him. A borough of under two thousand people ran on about forty men, and he was one of them from the age of twenty-eight.

Sources: The Call, Schuylkill Haven, 20 June 1947, p. 1; Pottsville Republican, 19 June 1947, p. 20.

Commander of Post 286, October 1950

His obituary calls him a past commander of the Cressona American Legion post and gives no date. The Pottsville Republican of Thursday 5 October 1950 gives both the date and the post’s own name. Under the heading LEGION HEADS ARE INSTALLED: “The monthly meeting of the Stanley Dengler Post 286 was held at the Legion Home, with Acting Commander Francis Hanney in charge. The newly elected officers of the Post were installed by the Commander of the 13th District, Joseph Halka of Mahanoy City. They are: Commander, Allen E. Sweigert; Sr. Vice Commander, Adam Singley; Jr. Vice Commander, Thomas Callahan; Adjutant, Clair Artz; Finance Officer, Francis Rubright; Historian, Charles Beck; Sgt.-at-Arms, Charles Marberger.”

He was thirty-two, five years out of uniform, with a three-year-old son and a shop on Chestnut Street. Post 286 is Stanley Dengler Post, a name this document did not have.

The officers around him are the same men again. Charles Beck was at the hot-dog roast on the Blue Mountain in June 1939 and away at Guard camp that August. Francis Rubright was on the school Press Club staff with him in 1935. Adam Singley and Francis Hanney turn up again eight months later, on the charter of the Cressona Memorial Park Association.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 5 October 1950, p. 21.

A Third Borough Body: the Police Pension Committee

His obituary lists the offices in a row and the eye slides over them. Read one at a time against the rest of this document, every one of them is here already — the Lions, the Melvin Jones Fellow award, the American Legion Post 286 command, St. Mark’s — except one. “He also belonged to the Cressona Police Pension Committee.”

Nothing else in the collection mentions it, and the obituary gives no dates. A police pension committee in a borough of that size is a small standing body that looks after the fund the borough’s officers retire on, and a man sits on it because he is trusted with other people’s money over a long horizon. That makes three borough bodies he served on at one time or another — the cemetery commission, the police pension committee, and the Homecoming committee where the caption seats him as utilities chairman.

Sources: Republican and Herald, Pottsville, 30 March 2012, p. A12.

September 2004, and What the Silence Is Worth

2004 is the year the 2005 feature points to when it says the commission witnessed a changing of the guard. Apart from the Legion’s Service to America certificate of 29 May, it is the only thing in the collection from that year, and it mentions neither the cemetery nor any borough office.

What it does show is a man of eighty-six at a public gathering of Cressona’s World War II veterans, eight months into that year: out in his town and in company, and nothing beyond that. Silence in a photograph caption proves nothing either way. Two cautions go with it. The caption calls him an Air Force veteran; he served in the Army Air Forces, and the United States Air Force did not exist until 1947. And it says medals were presented to the veterans recognised, not that he received one — the medal visible in the frame hangs at Frei’s chest, and nobody recorded what it was.

Sources: Republican & Herald, 23 September 2004, p. 4.

Republican & Herald, Thursday 23 September 2004. Allen at eighty-six, right, with Warren H. Frei and his wife Jean S., after a breakfast at the River Inn, Cressona, where the county’s surviving World War II veterans were recognised. Photograph by Nick Meyer, staff.

The Rest of That 1982 Slate

The item names the whole slate, which is worth keeping, because otherwise only two of the commission’s members are known — Allen and Emmett Rauch — with the rest of the borough out of the frame. Appointed with him were Forrest Schwartz to the sewer authority for five years; Daniel Dauksis to planning and zoning for four; Lori Reichert and Marilyn Reedy to recreation for five; and Robert Llewellyn to the zoning and hearing board for three.

None of them goes to the cemetery, and the item never names his fellow commissioners, so it does nothing to date Rauch’s service. The paper also uses a different word from the ordinance — cemetery committee, where the borough code provides for a Cemetery Commission of three citizens. The three-year term it reports is the term the ordinance sets, and on that one point the newspaper and the borough code agree.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 5 February 1982, p. 1; Cressona Borough Code § 33.35.

February 1982: the Twenty Does Not Fit

Counting twenty years back from a step-down in 2004 puts the start of his service at about 1984. The Pottsville Republican of 5 February 1982 rules that out. “CRESSONA — Council named the following persons to various positions: Allen E. Sweigert, cemetery committee, three-year term.”

He held the seat in 1982, so he cannot have begun in 1984 or 1985. Whether February 1982 was his first appointment or a reappointment, the item does not say. If it was his first, then service running to a step-down in 2004 comes to twenty-two years and not twenty: he was rounding, not counting terms. If it was a reappointment, he began earlier still. One more caution. A change of commissioner ought to register in January, at council’s organisation meeting; these appointments were reported on 5 February.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 5 February 1982, p. 1; Republican & Herald, 16 October 2005, p. C1; Cressona Borough Code §§ 33.35–33.36.

Pottsville Republican, Friday 5 February 1982 — the item that breaks the arithmetic. He is on the cemetery committee two years before twenty years back from 2004 would have started. Credit: Pottsville Republican. — Pottsville Republican, Friday 5 February 1982 — the item that will not fit the twenty. He was already on the cemetery committee two years before a 1984 start would allow. Credit: Pottsville Republican.

In October 2005, when he was eighty-seven, a reporter from the Republican & Herald came to Cressona to write about the borough’s cemetery, and the man she quoted at length was Allen. He had sat on the three-person commission that ran it for twenty years, and had stepped down the year before. He never mentioned it on the tape, and his obituary does not mention it either: that lists the church, the Lions, the American Legion and the police pension committee, and leaves the cemetery out.

Cressona Cemetery, October 2005. Allen, right, at eighty-seven and on a walker, with Robert A. Barr, borough council president, at one of the earliest graves in the ground — that of Theodore Alexis Classen, a native of Finland, from 1855. Allen had come off the cemetery commission the year before, after twenty years on it. Photograph by Jacqueline Dormer, Republican & Herald.

Cressona Cemetery, October 2005. Allen at the right, reaching across to point something out, with Robert A. Barr, the borough council president, beside him. The paper's own caption reads: — Cressona Cemetery, October 2005. Allen at the right, reaching across to point something out, with Robert A. Barr, the borough council president, beside him. The paper’s own caption reads: “Robert A. Barr, borough council president, left, and Allen E. Sweigert, retired cemetery commission member, right, look over the grounds at the Cressona Cemetery.”

Two Photographs, One Afternoon

The Republican and Herald ran the cemetery feature across two pages on Sunday 16 October 2005, and it carried two pictures of Allen, not one. This document had only the second. The first, on the section front, is the closer of the two: he and Robert A. Barr in their coats among the stones, with the flags out along the rows behind them.

The caption names them left and right and leaves the gesture unattributed, and at a glance the pointing hand looks as though it belongs to the man on the left. It does not. That sleeve is pale, and the left-hand man’s coat is black to the cuff. Allen is pointing, from the right, across in front of him.

He was eighty-seven. In the other frame, taken the same afternoon at the 1855 grave, he has the walking frame beside him.

Sources: Republican and Herald, Pottsville, 16 October 2005, pp. C1 and C3.

“I hear the people talk about our cemetery. All the people in Cressona are proud of it.”

Allen E. Sweigert, Sr., 2005

An Office Left Out of the Obituary

His obituary gives his civic life four clauses — church property committee, Lions, American Legion Post 286, Cressona Police Pension Committee — and then the line that he is buried with military honours in Cressona Cemetery. The 2005 feature adds an office none of them mention. He “served 20 years on the commission,” and he and Emmett Rauch, both longtime members, stepped down in what the article calls last year.

The article calls it a three-person cemetery commission, which is exactly what the borough’s own ordinance provides for, and the ordinance names the predecessor the article leaves vague as “private owners.” Beyond that phrase the article gives no start year and no end year, and the twenty is his own figure rather than a count out of the books. He is buried in the ground he looked after.

Sources: Andrea T. Turano, “The borough cemetery,” Republican & Herald, 16 October 2005, p. C1; Cressona Borough Code § 33.35.

How the Commission Was Made, and What It Could Do

It was a body made by borough ordinance under the Pennsylvania Borough Code. Section 33.35 of Cressona’s code provides that “a Cemetery Commission of three citizens shall be appointed by the Borough Council to take care of, manage and operate the burial grounds formerly of the Cressona Cemetery Association, now owned by the said borough,” and lets the commission write its own rules.

Section 33.36 sets the appointments: made by council at its organisation meeting, one commissioner a year on staggered three-year terms, vacancies filled by council, and every commissioner serving “without pay or other compensation.” Section 33.37 hands the commission the powers the old association held, including a perpetual-care fund and the hiring of employees; 33.38 keeps title to every lot in the borough’s name; 33.40 requires a written report to council at least once a year, and 33.41 requires the president and treasurer to be bonded. So the office he held for twenty years was unpaid, renewed a third at a time, and answerable to council in writing.

Sources: Cressona Borough Code, Ch. 33, §§ 33.35–33.41; 8 Pa.C.S. § 2801, Management by cemetery commission.

Which Twenty Years likely

The article gives the figure and no dates. It appeared on 16 October 2005 and says the commission witnessed a changing of the guard “last year.” Taken plainly that means 2004, and twenty years before 2004 is 1984. The ordinance settles where in the year a change would fall: commissioners are appointed at the organisation meeting of council, and Cressona’s minutes put that meeting in January. So a step-down would come in January, which fixes the month of his last term but not the year his service began.

There is a looser reading. A reporter writing in October might mean by “last year” the most recent reorganisation, January 2005, which would give 1985 to 2005. Either way the finish is in the middle 2000s. The start is not in the middle 1980s: the council item of 5 February 1982 already has him on the cemetery committee, so he began in 1982 or earlier and the twenty is his own rounding. He was eighty-five at the January 2004 meeting and eighty-seven when the article ran.

Sources: Republican & Herald, 16 October 2005, p. C1; Cressona Borough Code § 33.36; Cressona Borough Council minutes, 3 February 2020 and 20 January 2025.

Emmett Rauch, and Where Both Men Lie

The other man who stepped down can be named and dated. Emmett Harold Rauch, born 3 July 1921, died 14 June 2009, is buried in the Cressona Cemetery; his wife Emma, born 1925 and died 2018, lies in the same ground, and her obituary records sixty-three years of marriage and a long residence in the borough. Her obituary does not mention his years on the commission, and nothing else does either. The 2005 article is the only source for them, and no obituary of his own has ever been found.

By those dates he came off the commission at about eighty-two, with four or five years left to him. Allen, born 9 September 1918 and died 29 March 2012, is buried in the same cemetery. The two men who handed the commission on both lie in the borough ground they had been keeping — which is what Allen meant when he spoke of residents who did not want to be left out of town.

Sources: Find a Grave memorials 112137700, 191055169 and 194484457; Obituary of Emma Elizabeth Rauch, 1 July 2018.

Resident Allen E. Sweigert, October 1990

He is seventy-two, thirteen years retired, and he has gone to the borough council meeting to complain about children.

The Pottsville Republican of Tuesday 2 October 1990 reports the meeting at length — a possible suit against an engineering company, a repaving contract for $4,088.70, fire marshals named for the year — and then: “Resident Allen E. Sweigert said that youngsters have been setting up ramps in a lot at St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, 30 Pottsville St., and their bicycles jump off and do stunts. The church’s pastor, the Rev. Carl Jones, told the youngsters not to set up the ramps, but he later saw them using the ramps again. Borough Police Chief Wilfred S. Daubert said he will look into the matter.”

Three things arrive with it. The church has its address here for the first time in these pages, and its post-1957 name. Its minister in 1990 was the Rev. Carl Jones, which puts a fifth name into a line of ministers that otherwise runs Schaeffer in 1914, Mark G. Wagner in 1944, George C. Hosler in 1950 and 1956, and James D. Rumley Jr. from 1966. And the councilman quoted higher up the same report is Robert A. Barr, who is council president in the photograph taken beside Allen at the cemetery fifteen years later, and who sits on the cemetery commission now.

The rest of the page is about skateboarding. The borough had just banned it, and a fifteen-year-old named David Brady told the paper: “We’ll just go someplace else, but it’s a shame. I mean we live here and we have to go to Pottsville or Tamaqua or Orwigsburg to skate.” Allen had been a Scout at thirteen and a scoutmaster at twenty-one. At seventy-two he is the resident at the microphone about the ramps behind the church. The report says only what he said, and nothing about what he meant by it.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 2 October 1990, p. 15 and p. 16.

Robert A. Barr, Who Later Took the Seat

The man standing at Allen’s left in the photograph is still at it. Cressona Borough Council minutes of 3 February 2020 have him in the roll call, moving and seconding business through the meeting, and at a council meeting of 20 January 2025 he was retained to the cemetery commission, abstaining from the vote on his own appointment.

So the borough council president photographed beside Allen in 2005 now sits on the commission Allen left. That he was president in October 2005 rests on the photograph’s caption alone; nothing else found says who presided over Cressona’s council that year. What is not in doubt is long and unbroken council service on both sides of the article.

Sources: Cressona Borough Council minutes, 3 February 2020; Cressona council meeting of 20 January 2025; Republican & Herald, 16 October 2005, photograph caption.

The Ground Itself, and Whose Prices Those Were

The cemetery is indexed everywhere and described nowhere. Find a Grave places it on Ash Street at a little over 3,700 memorials, seventy-nine per cent of them photographed, and the entry — created in February 2001 — still says the cemetery has no description. One contributed photograph is captioned as a Civil War section. BillionGraves and FamilySearch carry separate indexes of the same ground, and the Pottsville Free Public Library holds a plan made in the summer of 2009 showing five numbered sections, a shed and the Ash Street frontage. Not one of them gives a founding date, an acreage, or the date the borough took the ground over.

The prices Allen quoted the reporter — three hundred dollars for a full lot of twelve graves, a hundred and fifty for a half — appear nowhere in the borough’s ordinances, which set no schedule of charges at all. Under section 33.35 the commission adopted such rules as it thought necessary. Those figures were the commission’s own to set, and his to quote.

Sources: Find a Grave, Cressona Cemetery, cemetery ID 332878; BillionGraves; FamilySearch cemetery site 52272; Cressona Cemetery plan, Summer 2009, Pottsville Free Public Library; Cressona Borough Code §§ 33.35, 33.37, 33.38.

The Paper’s Own Claim, Tested

The article’s deck says Cressona is one of few municipalities to operate burial grounds. As printed, that will not stand up, and what has been found runs the other way. Pennsylvania’s Borough Code gives borough cemeteries a chapter of their own, running from appropriations for upkeep through management by commission, transfer out to a company, transfer in from one, neglected and abandoned grounds, and the purchase of plots for deceased service members. A legislature does not write that chapter for one borough.

The examples are not hard to find. The Old St. Clair Cemetery is owned and cared for by the borough of St. Clair, in Cressona’s own county. Carlisle and Youngwood boroughs both carry cemetery chapters. Denver Borough’s code creates a cemetery association of three appointed members. No published count of municipally owned cemeteries in Pennsylvania exists; the state does not know how many cemeteries of any kind it has. Uncommon is defensible. One of few is not, and the claim is the paper’s.

Sources: 8 Pa.C.S. ch. 28, Cemeteries; Borough of St. Clair; Carlisle, Youngwood and Denver borough codes; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation of Pennsylvania cemetery oversight.