Posted by Lynn Stover on March 10, 1999 at 15:19:01:
In Reply to: Re: Kittanning is cool. posted by Jared on March 08, 1999 at 10:52:56:
: Hmm, maybe if you lived here all your life you would think otherwise.
I spent 12 years in Kittanning, and I am proud to be a
native. I'd love to be in Kittanning now, but I am attending graduate school, and nursing doctoral programs are usually located in larger cities with major medical centers.I have lived in Huntsville, Birmingham, and presently Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and I have traveled extensively. There is truly not another town that even comes close to Kittanning. Yes, almost any native of any town can come up with a few negatives, but there are soooo many positives about Kittanning: the river, the Folk Festival, the YMCA, the school system (much better than other states, don't even ask about K-12 in Alabama), snow, having 4 distinct seasons, good activities for children to participate in, and, of course, nice Yankees!
I recently toured an antebellum mansion in Mississippi with some visiting Japanese nursing students, who I had told previously that I was a Yankee, in an attempt to explain why I talk fast. When the tour guide (a very cul-charrehed genteel Southern woman)started talking about how the bad Yankees ruined trade for the South right before the Civil War and how Yankees burned a few things, the students pointed at me and told her I was a Yankee. Well, her demeanor toward me certainly changed after that revelation! :-)I did explain to the tour guide that Yankees and Southerners were both accepted as good people who can place the past bad relations in the past, with our dead ancestors,and I said it in a most eloquent way!
And, Southerners generally do NOT understand how ice and snow conditions on the road impact driving conditions. In fact, when ANY amount of snow is on the road (light dusting, on up to the BIG 1-2 inches!!!!, the people here go crazy, driving like road conditions haven't changed at all, and they are immune to any possibility of accidents! It's best to stay home on those days! Also, Southerners think that a "big" snow happens whenever flurries fall, even when the temp is well above the required 32 degrees. This is when they all rush to the store to stock up for being snowed in! I just laugh, at home, of course! (The only big snow in these parts was in '93, when we got a very uncharacteristic 2-3 feet of snow for about 2 days. I was skeptical at first, but when Children's Hospital called me in the night of the snow, I started to become a believer on that one, and I left the hospital 3 days later!)
So, please consider how special Kittanning is before you knock it down. There is alot of history there. One popular saying is:'If you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem." If you think that Kittanning is such a bad place to live, then get out in the community and attempt to make a difference, and leave the world a bit better than you found it.