Bowling and other strange customs of Pennsylvania

ShareThis

As a former Pennsylvanian, I'm both pleased and a little alarmed at all the attention my home state is getting in the run-up to its April 22 primary.The political reporters covering the Obama-Clinton campaigns act like foreign correspondents in an exotic land of strange food and weird customs.Bowling, for example, is not a weird custom; it's just something people do, although in Barack Obama's case not well. He performed miserably at a bowling alley in Altoona, handling the ball as if it might explode.I'm not sure what political calculus linked an awkward appearance in bowling shoes with whomping up Barackomania in an aging railroad town, but people do get paid to make these decisions.What was interesting about this festival of gutter balls was that the traveling media handled it in that owlish, non-judgmental way of polite cultural liberals faced with some bizarre foreign ritual, like that game where the Afghans go tearing around on horseback tossing about a headless goat.For example, the Associated Press reported in uninflected prose with no attempt at interpretation or broader context: "About five lanes over, a young man in a T-shirt that said 'Beer Hunter' fell on his backside while bowling and still recorded a strike." It's all there -- quaint, if odd, behavior while wearing colorful native garb.When an Obama press release misspelled "Pittsburgh," a New York Times political blogger took the opportunity to show off her newfound knowledge of local quirkiness. "It's Pittsburgh With an 'H'," she headlined, adding, as if to show that she had really immersed herself in Three Rivers culture, "Now we'd understand if someone had trouble spelling Monongahela," effortlessly spelling it correctly.There's something about Pennsylvania, and especially Pittsburgh, that makes the cable-TV talking heads adopt this (begin ital) faux (end ital) blue-collar persona. They try to project a sense of "I may be a multimillionaire celebrity with a designer haircut, professional makeup and famous friends, but at heart I'm just a rugged workingman -- maybe a steelworker doing something that involves lots of sparks -- who likes to belly up to the bar of the Legion Hall for a shot and a beer."If you search diligently in Western Pennsylvania, you might find a steel plant, and a more exacting search might even turn up a steelworker or two, but the industry is long gone from Pittsburgh, replaced by medical complexes and higher education. The bars of the South Side, I am proud to report, made the transition almost seamlessly, and the last time I went drinking there it was with a hospital administrator and some law students.Still, the outsiders seem to find the place irresistibly exotic. Wrote a New York Times reporter, "Question to our Keystone State readers: What is it with this Pennsylvania fetish for bizarre world food combinations? In Johnstown, this New Yorker encountered the artery-clogging prospect of cheese fries."Cheese fries? I'm thinking he was either overcome by the sheer foreignness of Johnstown, a city that puts the grit in gritty, or else he was the victim of an overly sheltered childhood. Cheese fries are readily available all over Manhattan, although perhaps not at the kinds of places where he dines.Maybe Pennsylvania is as strange as the national press thinks and growing up there you just don't notice it. I was back in Pittsburgh for a convention of mainly out-of-staters and the hotel served what it called a Pittsburgh buffet -- city chicken (breaded veal on a stick), kielbasa, stuffed cabbage, pierogi. The guests seemed to find this novel and unusual fare. I thought, "I'm back in my high-school cafeteria."Ask permission before photographing the natives.(Contact Dale McFeatters at McFeattersD(at)SHNS.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com)