Because this blog, during its relatively brief lifespan of several years, has noted the decline of Greater Johnstown, people might think I believe our area was all sunshine and lollipops decades back. Not in the least.
Having lived here for the entirety of my 67-plus years, I am all too familiar with things that have been less than ideal over that stretch.
It’s just that the negatives seem more pervasive now. But that doesn’t mean we lacked scandal and bad actors back in the day.
In the early 1970s, it came to light via a federal indictment that the mayor and two councilmen had accepted $15,000 in bribes to provide Teleprompter a 10-year cable television franchise for the city in 1966.
In 1989, Judge Joseph O’Kicki, a Johnstowner serving in county court, was convicted of several felonies, including official oppression, criminal coercion and bribery. Some of the payoffs were reported to be laughably small at $500 each.
O’Kicki was acquitted on such charges as asking secretaries into his office while he was in his underwear, or seeking a bribe from a strip mining company.
Through the years we’ve had a boom and bust economy, for a long time riding the economic tides with Bethlehem Steel, which was oft-accused of keeping competing industry out of the area in order to preserve its labor pool. I’ve known people who moved to California, or other areas during the slack times in the steel industry, looking for jobs. Often they moved back. Sometimes they didn’t.
During my two decades of working for the Johnstown newspaper (1974 to 1994) mostly in sports, I got to hear of the seamier side of the area from news reporters, and saw enough myself up close and personal.
We had a considerable mob presence in Johnstown during my very early years of life, dabbling in mob-like things such as illegal gambling and prostitution, and based in a “cigar store” located within spitting distance of City Hall.
There was just one high-profile murder with mob implications back then, that of bookie Pippy DiFalco in 1960.
Contrast that to the regular reports of drug-related shootings now, or just general mayhem being visited upon our area by the criminal element. As I type this, there are reports of a woman being stabbed (not fatally) at an Ebensburg senior center, and a Johnstown businessman having been beaten to death in recent days.
Beyond these anecdotal observations, take the time to do a quick Internet search on Johnstown crime and you will encounter statistical evidence of our high rate of crime, particularly bad when compared with areas of similar population.
Economically, we’ve replaced boom and bust with flat-lining at a very low median income level. But the nonprofit organizations continue to prosper and reward their management extraordinarily handsomely.
We have governmental, quasi-governmental and veritable secret societies holding secret meetings, with Facebook watchdog John DeBartola having announced just today on his Revitalize Johnstown page about ferreting out yet another example.
To put it bluntly, you now are more at risk living in Greater Johnstown and surrounding areas, in terms of personal safety and economic opportunity, than when mob influence was at its peak, city officials were taking bribes, a county judge was operating like some feudal lord, and Bethlehem Steel was the economic lifeblood.
It was not perfect many years back; not even close. It was, however, much better.
Sam Ross Jr's site 