I did a lot of traveling during my days as a sportswriter, including prolonged stays in various parts of vacation meccas such as California (for a Super Bowl, NFL playoff games and a Rose Bowl), in Florida (Super Bowls, college bowl games, NHL Stanley Cup playoff games and Major League Baseball spring training), Louisiana (Sugar Bowl), Texas (Alamo Bowl) and Arizona (Super Bowl, Fiesta Bowl).
I made visits of shorter duration to almost every major city that had a pro baseball, hockey or pro or college football team.
I even worked for a Pittsburgh newspaper, but chose to commute and never moved from the Greater Johnstown area. My line at the time was that this was a nice place to live – if you had a job.
We had a low cost of living, from housing right on down. We had a relatively low crime rate. We had good schools — if you lived in the right area.
Traffic wasn’t a problem. We were close enough to Pittsburgh if your wants tended toward big city offerings.
But I wasn’t a Pollyanna regarding Johnstown, either. I’d lived here all my life and seen political corruption and hints of same first-hand.
Cambria County had a reputation as being extremely corrupt politically, although the local Democratic house organ that masquerades as a newspaper ran a series eight years back trying to knock down that assertion.
The usual dial-a-quote sources were consulted. That series aside, I’m still seeing Cambria County as long on corruption through the years.
Even when the conduct isn’t illegal, there’s an unhealthy trend for the crowned elites to wield power and influence in relative secrecy.
Remember, I worked for the local newspaper, when it still was a newspaper, for 20 years from 1974 to 1994. Although mostly I worked in sports, I had occasion to see first-hand how the sausage was made in various non-sports aspects, and to get first-hand insight from colleagues on the news side about the behind-the-scenes goings-on. Sometimes the best stuff never made print, for legal concerns.
Fast-forward to 2022 and the Johnstown I knew from my younger years, not a bad place despite the unseemly underbelly, is disappearing, replaced with a community lacking even the superficial niceties.
My wife spent part of last night listening to a police chase on the scanner. The object of the pursuit was said to have an outstanding warrant – from Philadelphia.
Crime reports, when the local left-wing house organ deems them fit to print, are heavy on misdeeds committed by people with Philadelphia connections, or from other areas that are less than Utopias.
During various trips to Philadelphia over the decades, I borrowed the term Filthydelphia, due to the garbage on the streets, and walking them.
Now the Filthydelphia element is strong in Johnstown. No one wants to claim ownership of this migration, but the migrants didn’t just stick a pin in a Pennsylvania map and found Johnstown.
Lately our myopic visionary operation, guided by behind-the-scene puppet masters, is looking to boost the area with all manner of come-ons to refugees from whatever foreign, war-torn or economically bereft land is oozing residents. No need to discuss any of this in public, of course.
Ironically, the refugees are being welcomed to move here even as the current Johnstown city manager won’t lower himself to move into the county.
There has been back-and-forth commentary between mouthpieces for the lack-of-vision people and public citizen watchdogs seeking to shine the light of publicity on their non-public background dealings.
I get to witness this on social media when I make my daily checks using my son’s account on Facebook marketplace looking for hobby car sales listings.
There are ad-hominem attacks on the watchdogs by elites who got their seat at the table not through their success, but the old-fashioned way, that being inherited wealth.
But they know better than you or I what’s good for the area, or maybe for them.
Our area is rife with non-profits and charities in which the people in management take home hefty pay. We have a cottage industry of people who specialize in shaking the begging bowl to get federal grants.
I have said it before, but it bears repeating: For all the money spent to attract business to the area, all the promises made over the decades, our growth industries remain crime and poverty.
That’s the reality and it is not likely to change until the public has more of a say in who’s wielding the power, and making some coin in the process.
Sam Ross Jr's site 