Ghost Riders of Saucon (Part 4): The School Friend

There are some people I like from the get-go, and Andrew Danyluk is one.

I’ve known him for a few years from political canvassing, and I’ve thought of him as a cool and unexpectedly well-informed Hellertonian. I never would have imagined that Andrew would play a critical part in helping me to piece together the strange, shocking, intertwining sagas of Wayne Eisenhart and Barry Lee Lesher.

Hellertown often erects a slate-colored stone wall between its recent history and nosey writers like me. Insularity, a natural suspiciousness of outsiders, snobbery, emotional pain, shame, ignorance, disrespect for the media, and a desire to forget awkward facts—all these things, in different degrees, sometimes make it hard to learn about what happened in Hellertown. But some stories are just too interesting to let go.

I say “unexpectedly” above because Andrew lives in a lovely but slightly mysterious—remember, I’m an outsider, so everything in Hellertown is always a little “mysterious” to me—gingerbread house on the corner of Main and Walnut.

The Hellertown “gingerbread house” home of Andrew Danyluk, who went to school with Wayne Eisenhart and knew Barry Lee Lesher. (Image from Google Streetview)

Some of the stateliest white pines in the Lehigh Valley occupy the front yard, and robust hedges insulate it from the sidewalk. The house was built in 1916, and revamped in the late 1960s. It’s a little glimpse of Tyrolian Austria or, well, the Ukraine, where Danyluk’s ancestry lies. It looks identical to my grandfather’s old house in Ohio.

Son of the Steel

So, the house can feel a little inaccessible as there’s no street parking beside the house, and you need to park elsewhere then hike back to the house if you’re canvassing it. (And I’m done with canvassing in this century unless I’m somehow dumb enough to run for office again.)

While trees, hedges, and wide eaves give the house a secluded feel, Andrew blows all that mystery away like smoke on the water. He’s whipsmart, up on the latest news, and clearly someone who thinks about things.

His father, also Andrew, worked at the Steel for 35 before his death in 1973 at the relatively young age of 61. He’d won a Lehigh Valley-wide contest for Christmas decor in 1969 for their old house on 1st Avenue in Hellertown. Like many sons of the Steel, Andrew also worked there eventually.

Andrew Danyluk in his 1969 Hellertown-Lower Saucon graduation photograph. (Photo: Ancestry.com)

Bethlehem Steel was a double-edged steel sword for young Saucon Valley men in the late 1960s and early 70s. To echo the old poem, first it gives you wings to fly, and then it takes away the sky. The Steel, as Lehigh Valley residents call it, helped build America and win two world wars, fueled an incalculable expansion of the middle-class, and lured thousands of young Saucon Valley men with the promise of great wages and solid benefits in exchange for honest, hard work. You didn’t need college. You didn’t need to learn Latin or trigonometry. You didn’t need much imagination either.

But there was a steep cost. There always is, isn’t there? A strong disincentive to pursue higher education for working-class kids; the psychological drubbing and physical danger that factory and steelworks labor can mete out; and most concretely of all, how you and your family’s fortunes remain anchored to a company and its bedroom communities such as Hellertown—all these things cost, some more than other. The Boss puts it better than I ever could in his 1978 song “Factory”:

“Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain
I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain
Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life
The working, the working, just the working life” — “Factory,” by Bruce Springsteen

I myself don’t need lessons in working-class angst. Thanks but no thanks. My daddy worked for three decades in factories, in good UAW jobs, too. Let me put it delicately: It helped fuck up his soul. Drugs were rife, alcoholism ubiquitous, and families twisted like molten steel bars. I don’t want to hear about good ole American values built in factories. That’s the kind of hokum educated classes and foremen come up with, and a few dimwits are dumb enough to believe them. Yes, we need factories. But save the patriotic factory claptrap for someone even stupider than me.

But I get ahead of myself.

In 1967, Andrew Danyluk and his sophomore classmate at Hellertown-Lower Saucon High sat for annual school photos, with Andrew right in front of Wayne. The old high school was on Main Street where Saucon Manor nursing home is today. All the boys in the photo sport dark, thin neckties and suit jackets. They look dapper, in a retro Mad Men kind of way, but a bit rigid, too.

Andrew is lean and bright, with a touch of that look many kids in school group photos wear, a sort of “let’s get this over with” expression. His classmate and friend, Wayne, seems slightly slouchy and sly and restless. He’s reminiscent of a young Marlon Brando, and possesses a set of features many other Eisenharts in Saucon Valley seem to have, I’ve noticed — wide, sleepy eyes, an open face, a strong chin.

Andrew Danyluk, first row, left, with Wayne Eisenhart right behind him in sophomore Home Room 217 in the 1967 Reflector. The girl in the upper right of this detail is Bonnie Ganssle, who would perform in the senior play with Wayne a couple years later. (Photo: Ancestry.com)

“He was a nice kid,” says Andrew. “A smart kid.” Both boys were intellectually capable if not especially focused on academics; Andrew even had a prize offer to attend the Naval Academy, one he says he regrets declining to this day. He knew Wayne as an “easygoing” classmate who had socialized with the school jocks earlier in high school, but then got more into 1960s youth, which meant going to see local “groups” (that was Sixties parlance for pop-rock bands), hanging around Dimmick Park and, of all places, New York Avenue. The area around St. George’s Church was a bit of a “spot” where teens gathered. Wayne especially loved Iron Butterfly’s early heavy metal 1968 song, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (Iron Butterfly, 1968) was one of Wayne Eisenhart’s favorite songs, back at Hellertown-Lower Saucon High.

Andrew remembers a bloody incident in shop class where Wayne accidentally struck a hammer that sent a wood shard into Andrew’s artery. He was OK, but Wayne was as freaked out as any normal kid would be, Andrew recalls.

Sometime around this era, Wayne’s parents in Bingen bought him a motorcycle. We’re not sure if it was a Harley, but probably not, at least not the larger cc Harley he ended up with. His sister-in-law, Lois Eisenhart, who lives in Oklahoma today, and was married to Wayne’s late brother, Ronald, speaks of Wayne’s first motorcycle purchase as a turning point of sorts, and emblematic of a kid who was doted upon. “He was loved,” Lois says. “He was the youngest boy,” and perhaps a bit “spoiled,” she says.

So, Wayne … was … beloved. But as we will find out in the next installament of this story, love wasn’t enough to save Wayne.