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David Pietrusza's
TOO LONG AGO:
A Childhood Memory.
A Vanished World.
A Family. A City. A Rust Belt Tale.
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"poignant and fascinating"—The Schenectady Gazette
"rollicking . . . sardonic charm . . . imaginative prose . . . self-
deprecating humor . . . Pietrusza’s story-telling skills carry the day.
Anyone who has ever thought longingly about days gone by in picture-
perfect small towns will devour these enjoyable reminiscences . . . a
striking, nostalgic look at the up-and-down fortunes of an evolving
town in the 20th century, sure to entice those who long for the 'good
old days.'"BookLife
"polished and gently humored . . . a graceful blending of personal
insights with historical content . . . The author’s voice as a professional
historian is memorable and accessible. . . ."—BookLife Prize
"This book is just so much fun. Don’t even think about it or ask why."
—Dean Karayanis, Host, "The History Author Show"
"The Sage of Amsterdam"—E. J. McMahon, The Empire Center for
Public Policy
An Amazon Best Seller:
- Kindle Edition - Top #100 Best Seller List - Ethnic and National Biographies
- Top #10 Best Seller in "New Releases in Ethnic & National Biographies"
- Best Seller in "New Releases in Memoirs"
At last . . . a memoir finally worthy of comparison to the uproariously funny fiction
of the great Jean Shepherd, author and narrator of the beloved A Christmas Story.
Only . . . it’s all true. Sometimes . . . sadly true.
Award-winning presidential historian and baseball scholar David Pietrusza’s witty
and wise tale of growing up in the 1950s and 60s, Too Long Ago is no Leave It to
Beaver or Father Knows Best episode.
It’s a unique glimpse into an unjustly ignored and forgotten immigrant
experience—Eastern European and devoutly pre-Vatican II Catholic. A tale of a
tight-knit Polish community, transplanted from tiny, impoverished Hapsburg-ruled
villages to a hardscrabble, hardworking, hard-drinking Upstate New York mill town.
It’s how the first rust corroded the Rust Belt, sidetracking dreams but not hope.
It’s a lively saga of secrets and hard times, of insanity, of manslaughter and
murder, of war and postwar, Depression and Recession, bar rooms and churches,
unforgettable personalities and vastly unpronounceable names, of characters and
character, of popular culture (sometimes surprisingly high by today’s standards),
of homelessness, of immigration—first to America and then from Rust Belt to Sun
Belt—of vices and virtues, and how a sickly, bookwormish boy who loved history
and the presidents finally discovered a national pastime and made it his own.
Alternately sharp-edged and warm-hearted—sometimes shocking and always
surprising—Too Long Ago is a poignant tour-de-force, a no-stopping-for-breath,
coming-of-age narrative, akin to cross-breeding Jean Shepherd’s boisterous A
Christmas Story with Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo’s gritty semi-
autobiographical novel Mohawk (set mere miles from Too Long Ago) and
presenting the genre-bending result in the mesmerizing form of a decidedly non-
WASPY rendition of an epic Spalding Gray monolog.
Excerpt (Beginning)
I was born.
Stuff happened before then . . . so they tell me.
Stuff happened afterward . . . which nobody can deny.
So, while my arrival would certainly have generated some darn swell reality TV,
my significantly less graphic plan is breathtakingly simple.
First, to tell you about the stuff that happened “before” my arrival—crimes and
misdemeanors to which I solemnly plead “‘not guilty.’ I have an alibi, officer.”
Secondly, to devote the remainder of these pages to nearly a couple of decades of
various stuff happening “afterwards.” Some of those latter misdeeds I might be
guilty of.
So I take the Fifth.
Translation: let’s get this delivery room stuff out of the way.
To be precise (I’ll try to be as precise as bearable), I arrived at 6:35 p.m. on a cold
and windswept St. Cecilia’s Day, Tuesday, November 22, 1949.
The site: Amsterdam, New York—deep upstate—at its old City Hospital.
Why we didn’t travel a few additional blocks down the street to Amsterdam’s more-
modern Catholic hospital, St. Mary’s, I really can’t tell you. Perhaps, everyone
(myself included) just wanted to get it over with.
Amsterdam City Hospital is no more. Its site is now a park and playground. The
site of its maternity ward is, as far as I can fathom, a tennis court, a happier fate
than what’s befallen far too much of the city itself—a rags-and-patches legacy of
abandonment and decay.
You’ve probably heard of 1949—but probably not Amsterdam, New York.
There’s a reason for that.
Amsterdam has survived. It has not prospered.
It’s endured decades of industrial decay—a once-thriving community that in a
quintessentially rust-belt way has now simply . . . rusted.
Many of my memories remain good. Good people. Good places. Good times. What
I often see now is not good.
Too many of even the city’s once “better” neighborhoods betray a gloomy, tired
shabbiness. The worst neighborhoods are far worse. Downtown is a largely
business-free wreck. Churches and civic organizations have, one upon another,
shuttered their doors. Jobs and people long ago fled by the thousands.
The block on which I spent my teenage and early adult years, once fastidiously
maintained, is now the stuff of dystopian films. Buildings torn down. Homes burnt
and abandoned. Windows broken and boarded up. Windows broken and not
boarded up. Porches filled with junk. Piles of garbage on the sidewalk. I expected
to be saddened and depressed.
I was horrified.
As in vast swatches of upstate, the bloom has long since faded from Amsterdam’s
rose. But even if Amsterdam’s economic future had proven less desolate, my
childhood world would still be a vanished one. Richer or poorer, Amsterdam would
have moved on. The world itself would have traveled even further.
It certainly has.
.
So, I’m here to tell you about my vanished world—the old Amsterdam—a place of
faith and families and neighborhoods, of hustle and, yes, often, hustling, where
ethnic traditions and an extraordinary sense of belonging still lived.
Because, I fear if I don’t write it down, nobody else will
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