Interview with Ray Jurgens

Ray Jurgens, our family friend, is a very active and an energetic citizen of Montrose. For the last thirty years he has been working for NASA at Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a radar astronomer. Mr. Jurgens’ passion for science occurred when he was just a child. Spending many years traveling as a child around small towns, Mr. Jurgens learned many valuable lessons from others and realized the most important goal in his life—education. As he looks back at the fun that he had experienced in small towns, Mr. Jurgens recalls the happiest time of his life.

I moved to a little town on the Ohio River, Pomeroy, Ohio when I was about fourteen and lived there until I was about seventeen years old. There were about only two thousand people and everyone knew everyone. To get to the town you come on a little road 33, which comes down to the Ohio River into a town and the first street it hits is a Front Street. The town only had two streets: Front and Back. Front St went along a river and Back St went along a block from river. All the stores went along the Front St and there weren’t many stores on the Back. And the other thing in town was that between every store there was a bar. So, there was always plenty of drink down there. I mean you didn’t have to go far to find a bar.

The house that we lived in was on Back St. It had both the backs of businesses and some houses, and some apartments. However, more people lived in what you called “Runs.” Runs were the streets that started out at some place, went up around a hill, wandered around and came back to the same place they started from. They were named like “Monkey Run,” “Sugar Run,” and strange things like that. Anyway, when we moved in we noticed that the house had buckled floors that bulged here and there. And there were water lines on the ceiling and on the second floor where the river came and flooded an entire area. And every now and then the river would overflow onto banks.

The very first year we moved there it flooded and the water came up to the house. My mother and sisters pulled out and left me with my father. They went up North back where they lived with my grandparents until the water came down. Of course it was a big deal when the water came up and flooded. It meant everything in the stores had to be evacuated to the second floors. And all the kids had jobs for a while and they all got paid. But there was no work to be done around the town. So everybody went down to the Martin Motel’s second floor from Back Street by boats and they partied for the rest of the time, until the flood stopped. They expected the river to come up now and then so they got used to that happening. And of course when everything came back down, all the stores were full of mud. Mud was everywhere and so the keepers came up with hoses and tried to hose all mud out of stores. Eventually it all came back to normal, but for them it was just another excuse for celebration.

Yeah, we did have some fun down there from time to time. The town citizens thought that they were a big leader of producing broiling chickens in the whole world. Of course New York State produced more chickens than anybody, but Pomeroy Ohio believed they were the biggest producers! So they had a parade each year called “A Broiled Festival” and all those funny looking cars went down the Front St. The big chicken cooks showed off to see who could cook the best chicken in the long pits of charcoal. They walked around with big sprayers on their backs and sprayed juice on the chickens. Almost everybody participated in the parade, but I cannot remember if my parents did.

New Year Eve wasn’t particularly interesting. Christmas we celebrated pretty much the same wherever we were. Because we lived in poverty everybody celebrated a little differently. Pomeroy was right on the border between West Virginia and Ohio and it was a coal-producing town. Most of the people that had jobs worked for the coal companies, or they worked for the riverboats, or in soil mills. So it was a very poor kind of town. Actually, the place was a mess. A lot of kids weren’t taken care of down there. I mean it was a town where there was an extreme poverty among people who came from the countryside.

There were only two schools: Junior High and High School, but no colleges. Education wasn’t an important issue in the first place down there. What they all cared about was football or basketball. And only thing that girls cared about was who is the best football player and that’s all they ever talked about. Getting dates and fighting with each other over who’s going to study with whom was on their minds. And of course in the town like that there weren’t many cultural activities. About the biggest thing that happened was a football or basketball game. Football and basketball were very big in state of Ohio anyhow. And even in small town like Pomeroy they had high inspirations for the kids being football stars. For the girls the big thing was to be a cheerleader or a flag girl so that they could be close to the football stars.

Most of people in the town were brought up together as children. They all knew each other through grade school and anybody that came as an outsider appeared very suspicious to them. One time, a very beautiful girl came to town. And she set up a shop up on the Front St close to the river. She had a store in the part of town that wasn’t yet occupied by the biggest stores. She dressed very differently… she wore tight shorts and little T-shirts. As she walked down the street everything just stopped in that place. Every man in store would look out a window as she passed by. Well, of course the women of the town didn’t appreciate her “walk” much. So when I decided finally to talk to her I noticed that she wasn’t as bubbly and bouncy as usual. Then she told me that she had to move from Pomeroy Ohio because women of the town started lot of ugly rumors about her. And, so few days later the store was empty and she had disappeared.

About thirty years ago I went back to Pomeroy, Ohio to see a friend of mine and I got a clear picture that nothing had changed since I left as a teenager. It was sort of de ja vu kind of thing. I met some old friends at the bar and they still were telling the same dirty jokes, and were chasing girls around the parking lot as they did in High School. And you can’t even believe how pleased I was not being one of them.  

         Interviewed by Dina Sirotkina