About the Author

I want to answer two questions so that you can learn more about me and this website:
1) Who am I, anyway? My name is Charles Russell Lytle, and I was born in Sunbury at the old Mary S.Packer hospital in 1946. My mother’s recovery room was the hallway outside the delivery room, an early warning of the coming baby boom. For the young amongst us, I’d explain that the hospital was where the new wing of the junior high school building is, but that’s sort of gone, too, soon to be made into a retirement warehouse. (On my last visit home in 2017, I was chased off the grassy hill above the basketball courts by the new co-owner. I apparently was taking nostalgia too far.) My family lived in three houses, all close to Hill School, and I attended that august institution for six and a half years. But that’s gone now too, remade into sad-looking apartments. Our class was the first occupants of the new wing of the junior high, and I was in that incredible first kid population bulge all the way to graduation in June 1964. We went to the Albright Evangelical United Brethren Church at the corner of Fifth and Chestnut Streets. You know that one: the church with the huge, green dome (very oxidized pure copper). Oh yes, that’s gone too, already being made into an “event center,” the white wine and cheese kind. Anyway, I went to Juniata College in Huntingdon, Purdue University, and finally Portland State University. I’ve been a university professor, researcher in neuropharmacology, biochemistry, neurobiology, and in environmental science. I have a handful of degrees and have published a number of research papers. I retired from public service at the end of 2019, my retirement running smack into the whole COVID hysteria. As of this writing, I’m 76 years old and have lived in the beautiful but rapidly overpopulating and rabidly woke state of Oregon since 1971.

2) Why this website? My son and I were in Sunbury in the summer of 1999 to attend a clan reunion in Nordmont, up close to Eagles Mere. (Yes, we’re Scottish.) We had driven up with my older cousin, Richard Lytle, who lives in Ellicott City, MD just outside of Baltimore and who has drawn the many pen and ink illustrations scattered through the stories. He’s a Sunbury native too, whose family left when they closed the Westinghouse plant…a portent of the evil to come. We were driving around all the old neighborhoods and haunts when my son said, “I can’t believe you guys lived in this dump.” Well, both my cousin and I got VERY defensive. But how to describe in just a few words a world that had vanished? And I DO mean vanished. Years later during the 2017 visit, my cousin, my best friend and high school classmate Larry Bassett (checkout his creative writing website www.lawrencebassett.com) and I walked up and down the length of Market Street. I counted 27 vacant store fronts and at least a dozen buildings that had just vanished (Woolworth’s, Newberry’s, Grant’s, Lebo’s, and the venerable uptown “Rea’s” to name just a few). It was if the entire town had been picked up and moved, and THIS was put down in its place. The replaced store fronts had “urban redevelopment” written all over them. In other words, devoid of any hint of architectural uniqueness or humanity.

The last straw was stumbling onto a site of forums about towns and cities all over the country. Buried in the subsection on Sunbury was a general question about what it’s like living in the town. One of the replies (and I’m paraphrasing, here) said that it was all-in-all a safe place to live as long as you didn’t walk in certain sections at night. My eyebrows went up, “You’re calling that SAFE??” I immediately registered and wrote a spontaneous reply. For good or bad, you can read it at the link below:
http://www.city-data.com/forum/pennsylvania/770582-does-anyone-know-anything-about-sunbury-11.html
Life went on until I got an email from the site moderator that my posting had over 19,000 hits in one month. Of course, who’s to say how many of those were “bots?” Regardless, I had accidentally tapped into something. A league of Sunbury boosters? Small-town nostalgia buffs? Lunatics? In perusing an old journal (I have 21 ½ written over the course of 55 years and encompassing over 6,300 pages and ~ 2 million words), I ran across over a hundred pages of reminiscences of my years in public school in Sunbury. At that point, there was no help for it. To mimic the copy on the back of the Newman’s Own salad dressing bottle, I’m out of the journals and onto the internet. So here are the stories, in no particular order.

The website was completely redone just a while ago because the number of stories (over fifty) swamped the original design. Some stories didn’t make the cut and were not transferred. Haven’t yet decided on their fate. I know there’s a link to a supposed book. They’ll eventually be two, just as there are two main sections of the new site. Obviously, the stories are all done, I just haven’t signed up with Amazon to compile and publish them. Soon, but not yet.

I do urge you to take a look at the blog posts. There are a lot of them, and they’re presented in reverse chronological order with the latest at the top of the list. I recommend them for anyone who’s contemplating writing about their own life.

Have questions or comments? Contact me below.