My dad has always been a storyteller. I've always known that. Although he never attended a college to obtain a degree in the art of storytelling, my father is an accomplished one. I can remember Sunday evenings after church, when my parents would take us kids to join Warren and Lib Stiffler for a pizza at the Claysburg Pizza Shop. Dad and Warren would trade stories about the past - about people they had known, who by then had passed away - about hunting trips to Clinton County - about my grandfather and my dad's grandfather - about Danny Musselman and... But I don't want to tell his story; I'll let him tell it.

  Now by calling my father a storyteller, I certainly don't mean to imply that he prevaricates or tells fictional tales. I mean it in the sense of passing on to the next and next generations, by oral means, the record of things that happened in the past, as he experienced them. They are things that reveal family life in the Appalachian hills of Pennsylvania throughout the 20th Century. (He was born in 1919, and so experienced the better part of the 20th Century). They are things that provide glimpses of the "Americanized" European families he descended from who farmed, worked in factories and occasionally made moonshine liquor during prohibition days. They are things that, as a child, he experienced, growing up in the company of grandparents who still spoke German around the house. They are things which are necessary to be perpetuated in order for his descendants to know what made him who he was. And they are things that the community of which he always was a part will recognize as familiar.