In this column, Susan Kovach Nemith Hinkle, a former excellent student of this writer, “remembers” her father, Charles Nemith, a Nazareth High School athlete, U.S. Army Air Corps veteran and Penn Dixie Cement Company employee. He served the nation and was a dedicated cement worker.

Charles Nemith was born in 1924 to Rudolph and Mary Nemith in Penn Allen, Pa. He was the fourth child of 11, born to Austrian immigrants who moved to Penn Allen to work at Penn Dixie Plant 5. The family lived in what had been the original Penn Dixie office in Penn Allen.

Besides father Rudolph, several other sons worked for Penn Dixie. Charles was eventually hired to work in Plant 6 and worked his way up to kiln burner.

Charles attended Michaels School with all the other Penn Dixie children who lived in company-built homes in Penn Allen. He went to Nazareth High School, where he played baseball and was captain of the football team in 11th grade.

He played baseball for the Blue Mountain League for a short time.

At 19, he bought his first car, a 1939 Studebaker. Charles and his friend Slim Reinert (son of Dr. Reinert, veterinarian in Penn Allen) drove the Studebaker to the Grand Ole Opry in Tennessee. Hillbilly music was a great love of theirs.

Charles loved music as a child. He wanted a guitar badly enough to sell salve to get the money to purchase one. No one had much money back then, so his mother bought most of his stock.

He was able to buy a Martin guitar, which he used to entertain his mother, father and siblings. Later he would serenade his future wife and her parents. His two daughters also benefited from his musical renderings, although the hillbilly music was not as interesting to them as Elvis or the Beatles. The guitar is still in the family to this day.

Near the end of World War II, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps at the age of 21. He was sent to Texas and Arizona. He was part of Squadron H in Sheppard Field, Texas. He became an ordinance technician for the air corps.

Because of his baseball talent, he was also sent by the air corps to pitch for their baseball team. He was never sent overseas since the war was near an end.

He told of the time he and a fellow enlistee were given a cooler with steaks to cook and were taken to a desert location. Their task was to pick up metal scrap in the area. They were never told what the scrap was from, but they suspected it could have been from A-bomb testing. His daughters later told him it could have been Area 51 and flying saucer pieces. He was never sure exactly where the site was located.

After his service to the air corps, Charles came back to Penn Allen and worked at Penn Dixie Plant 6.

He married Ethel Kovach and moved to Northampton.

He was on shift rotation, so the main meal of the day was scheduled around him.

He learned a strong work ethic from his Austrian parents and would get to work even in the most severe snow storms. His wife and daughters would help to shovel out the car, the snow during one year being as high as the car.

He carpooled with fellow workers from Catasauqua. They never missed a day of work.

During the late 1950s, cement mills would shut down for the winter, and the men would be laid off. They had to collect unemployment during that time to feed their families.

A memory from Ethel’s niece, living in the Bronx, New York City:

Uncle Charles made me a celebrity in my school during fouth grade. We had a project about our country’s natural resources and industries to work on. Uncle Charles wrote and explained in great detail the process of making cement – how the limestone was quarried and about the huge kilns and pulverizing machines. He sent me a set of beautifully labeled glass jars filled with samples of the various components at each stage of production. I was the only kid in the whole Bronx who could talk like an expert on the cement industry and who knew what ‘clinker’ meant. I was very proud to say my uncle played a vital role in this important industrial work.

Once, when the kilns were down for repair, Charles took his daughters to see where he worked. They were allowed to walk the length inside the kiln. They were amazed that it kept getting smaller and smaller as they reached the other end.

Charles and Ethel moved from Main Street in Northampton to Washington Avenue near the post office to live with Ethel’s father after her mother died. The basement of the two-and-one-half-story home had a dirt floor. The heat was a wood and coal stove in the kitchen and a coal parlor stove between the dining room and living room. There were vents in the ceilings, so heat would rise to the second floor.

Charles decided to have central heat installed but first had to cement the basement floor. He dug the dirt floor deeper since it only was about a five-foot ceiling.

The cement mill allowed the men to take a given amount of cement home for personal use. Charles would load down his 1962 Chevy Biscayne trunk with bags of cement, making the rear end of the car almost drag on the road. He borrowed a cement mixer and, with help from his father-in-law, daughters and neighborhood teenagers, mixed and poured enough cement to cover the whole basement.

Later he would do the same to make a foundation and flooring for a garage he bought for $100 from a Penn Allen site. He and his brothers dismantled the garage and rebuilt it at the Washington Avenue home. A rectangular pit was left in the flooring to allow Charles to work on the family car, changing the oil, replacing brake pads and general lube and maintenance of the underside.

Charles and his five brothers loved baseball. They, along with brothers-in-law and some friends, formed a softball team and played in the legion league. They would be sponsored by one business or another in Bath. Their families would gather to watch them play. Charles pitched (he pitched lefty and batted righty) or played first base. His fellow players called him “Gruffty” because of the grunting noises he made when throwing a pitch. Eventually, age and injuries convinced the brothers they were no longer young baseball players and the team disbanded, but not until they were in their mid-50s.

Eventually, Penn Dixie plants closed, one by one. Charles was three months short of getting a pension from Penn Dixie. He was able to still find work as a kiln burner in a cement mill and went to work for the Giant in Egypt, Pa. When that shut down, he worked for A&B Meats (now the America on Wheels Museum) in Allentown, overseeing orders going out on trucks up and down the East Coast. He decided people will always have to eat, and A&B should be around for some time. Guess what – they eventually shut down, too.

After A&B, Charles did some part-time work until he could take an early retirement.

Cement mills in the area sustained immigrants from Europe and helped them build their families. The families prospered and grew.

The fourth generation of Austrian immigrants Rudolph and Mary Nemith is now being born. There are currently about 60 extended family members. They gathered in September of 2015 for a reunion to celebrate their immigrant heritage and pass down the Nemith family history to all generations.

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In two weeks, we go to Rockville, a suburb of Danielsville, to discuss living on a small farm and supplementing income by working at the Atlas Cement Plant.