With the 36th annual Apple Butter Frolic slated for Oct. 3 in Lower Salford, Ellis Kriebel of Harleysville thought this would be a timely photo to use.


According to Kriebel, “busy making apple butter on the Kriebel Farm on Fretz Road, Lower Salford, adjacent to the Salford Schwenkfelder Church are sisters-in-law Sarah N. (Kriebel), wife of Samuel H. Freed Jr., and Rosa Idella (Freed), wife of Isaac Vincent Kriebel.”

The long-handled paddle they are using stirs the apple butter, being made in the huge pot over the open fire.

He also noted that “apple butter on buttered bread and on fried scrapple was often a part of the breakfast meal in the mid 1930s, when this photo was taken.”

Thanks, Ellis.

And if you want to check out how apple butter was made, visit the Apple Butter Frolic on Oct. 3.

It runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., rain or shine, at the Indian Creek Road Farm, Lower Salford.

Parking is available at Harleysville Insurance, 355 Maple Ave., Harleysville, with continuous shuttle buses traveling to the Frolic.

Highlights include fresh cooked scrapple, corn pies, sausage sandwiches, funnel cake, ground cherry pies, demonstrations of corn shelling with a dog-powered treadmill and corn binding with horses.

There also will be demonstrations of crafts such as rug hooking, quilting and fraktur drawing, plus children’s activities.

Admission is $6 for adults; $2 for ages 6 to 12; ages 6 and younger are free. Proceeds support the Mennonite Heritage Center. No pets please. Call (215) 256-3020

With the start of the new school year fresh in everyone’s minds, perhaps it’s time to go back to an earlier school day.

And you can do just that on Tuesday.

To commemorate the 85th anniversary of the first graduating class of Hatfield High School in 1924, the Hatfield Museum & History Society will present, “School Days — Remembering Hatfield School” for its Tuesday, Sept. 22 program.

This photo shows Hatfield students posing next to their school buses in front of the Hatfield Joint Consolidated School building in this circa 1925 photograph.

The Hatfield Joint Consolidated School was built in 1921-22 as a joint effort between Hatfield Township and Hatfield Borough to provide a modern 12-grade facility for their students.

The Class of 1955 was the last to graduate from Hatfield High School, after which high school students attended the North Penn High School in Lansdale.

A slideshow photographic presentation will take a look back at many of the students, faculty members, clubs, plays, operettas and sports teams that make up the Hatfield School’s history.

In addition, there will be many tables filled with more photographs, yearbooks and memorabilia from the school for attendees to enjoy.

Anyone who attended or worked at the Hatfield Joint Consolidated School will not want to miss this program, which will be held in the Hatfield Fire Company banquet hall, 75 N. Market Street, beginning at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.

The program is free and open to the public. Refreshments will follow the program.

For information call (215) 362-0428 or visit www.HatfieldHistory.org.

When Judy McCann Weiner of Lansdale saw that The Reporter was doing a special Remember When section in August, she just had to send in a photo.

Although it didn’t quite fit into that section, we could not resist using it today, plus a second photo she just dropped off.


In the one photo, Judy and Jimmy Covelens, who was her neighbor back in 1951 when these pictures were snapped, are just “hanging out in Memorial Park” in Lansdale, as she said.

They decided to pose on the cannon in Memorial Park, and in the photo where you can see more of the park in the background, it appears that a nativity scene may have been set up.


At least that’s what we’re guessing, because you can make out some camels and a small stable.

But Judy and Jimmy can be seen sporting their Lansdale Huskies sweatshirts. The Huskies, she said, were her school mascot back then.

In the other photo, where the kids are seen more face-on, the other person in the photo is her friend Nancy Harrar. Guess they weren’t quite as brave, because they aren’t seen “straddling” the cannon in this shot.



Judy noted that she and neighbor Jimmy lived in the Moyer Building above a store at the corner of Main and Walnut streets, now the North Penn Florist.

She also noted what a small world it is, saying that she was talking to her landlord’s son one day and showed him the picture of the cannon and he mentioned that his best friend’s father was Jimmy Covelens.

Yes, the same Jimmy.

Judy also remembered some of the other old hangouts in the area, noting that she met her husband, Richard, at Bunton’s Barn in Lower Salford, where dances were held, being introduced by Frankie Pier from Ambler in 1959.

They also used to go the Rec in Lansdale and the Hatfield Speedway. She also used to work at the R&S Diner, and she and her husband used to patronize the Big Pixey.

Do you remember the days when it seemed like a different deliveryman would walk down the street every day, or when shopping was done at corner stores down the street instead of at big box stores or online?



Then come relive those memories, and maybe share a few of your own, as the Lansdale Historical Society presents “Going, Going, Gone,” its first fall community program this year.

“It’s going to be kind of an eclectic program, of all sorts of things that just don’t exist anymore,” said LHS Vice President Steve Moyer.

He’ll be giving the presentation at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, at Lansdale’s Parks and Recreation building on the corner of Seventh Street and Lansdale Avenue.

And he plans to tell his audience all about plenty of things that just aren’t around anymore.

“We have a whole lot of images of businesses, places and professions that no longer exist,” Moyer said.

“For example, there used to be somebody that brought ice to your house to put it in the icebox, there used to be somebody who brought milk to your house, there used to be a rag man that came to your house and picked up rags,” Moyer said.

“There were lots of delivery trucks back in the day, and there are lots of businesses that we don’t have many pictures of but we know were around,” he said.

Blacksmiths, seamstresses, leather workers, nail makers, weavers, shoe shiners and tanners are just some of the professions we know Lansdale once had but just don’t see anymore, he said.

Some have disappeared with time, like the men who’d come to your house to collect insurance money each week, and some have been lost to technological progress, like telephone operators and horse carriage drivers.

“There used to be butter and egg men who came to your house, milkmen, vacuum cleaner salesmen, encyclopedia salesmen; there wasn’t much that couldn’t be delivered right to your house,” he said.

“But I don’t know if you can even buy an encyclopedia today thanks to the Internet,” Moyer said.

Tuesday night’s presentation is free to the public, but come early because seats tend to fill up quickly with area residents looking to relive days long gone.

“Most of our programs take anywhere from 100 to 200 hours to build up by the time we’re done, but it sure doesn’t seem like that much when you’re sitting here working on it,” said Moyer.

He’ll even discuss some hidden gems that very few people are still around to remember, like an old air raid shelter that was built near the corner of Broad and Main streets during World War II.

“It used to be behind the Tremont hotel, which was where the Rite Aid is now. Dick Shearer, our LHS president, says the shelter must have worked because they never attacked us during the war,” Moyer said.

When we published our special Remember When section on Wednesday (see the blog entry below this one), it brought back a lot of memories for many residents throughout the area.

Quite a few called or e-mailed to tell us they remembered this or that, and what fun it was to see the old diners, speedway, amusement parks and the like.

But two people helped us add a bit of information to what we published, so we’d like to offer that today.

Jerry Bertucciati of Ambler both called and stopped in to help solve one of the mysteries of a photo of the former White’s Line Diner, which had been located in Upper Gwynedd.

He and his late wife, Donna, were the couple that had been listed as “unidentified” in a photo that showed the diner decorated for the holidays.



Bertucciati said it was a New Year’s Eve gathering — and he had a copy of the same photo we published.

“I don’t know how we even got the photo,” he said. “Maybe they sold them there. It’s just so great to see this photo — it brings me full circle.

“My wife was pregnant when that photo was taken; unfortunately she lost the baby shortly after that,” he said.

Now he also has lost his wife, but the photo still brought him great joy.

“I had forgotten about it. I never thought I’d see it again, and then I opened the paper and there it was,” he said. “It brought back great memories.”

Also show in this photo are, at back from left, Charlie Delp, Lou Cardy, Bobby Landis; the couple in front of them that HAD been unidentified but we now know are Jerry and Donna Bertucciati; the young man standing in the back is Al Zeller and next to him is Dave Mayberry, and sitting next to him is Royce Heebner. In the booth near the front is Arlene Miller with an unidentified boy with his back to the camera. Sitting near the back is “Deppie” Detwiler and the man sitting in front of him is Norris Anders.

The other photo was taken by Ray Masser at the Hatfield Speedway and shows an accident that took out part of the outer metal fence; behind the fence, the Wayne Avenue water tower can be seen.


It turns out that Howard Bilger, who delivers The Times Herald, a sister paper to The Reporter, was driving car 36 when the accident occurred.

“I raced at the speedway just about every Saturday night,” Bilger, of Lansdale, said. “I was bruised a little in that accident, but not really hurt.

“And I wouldn’t let a little thing like that stop me from racing,” he said.

He raced there for five or six years, he said, and then was out of racing for several years. He moved to Arizona and when he came back, then raced at Grandview Speedway in Bechtelsville.

He said racing was great, but noted that he certainly wouldn’t speed around the area as he delivers his newspapers.

Thanks, Jerry and Howard, for helping us bring a bit more life to these photos!