K-Town

Kennedy Township is a suburb to the west of Pittsburgh, although many of its residents couldn’t tell you exactly how close it is to the city (20 minutes) because many have never actually been there. The general consensus is pragmatic: “Why bother leaving when everything we need is right here?”

Kennedy Township is a deceptively gritty little bubble, signs of decline moving in as inconspicuously as the grime that attacks the once-glowing letters on the Shop-n-Save. It has one of the oldest populations in the state. Few people leave, but fewer people enter. There are no Mexican Restaurants in Kennedy Township. There is one Chinese Take-out, in the parking lot of the Shop-n-Save, which occupies one of the two Asian families known to reside in the area. There are at least three pizza joints. There is no Indian food. 98.64% of Kennedy Township is white, composed of stalwart Irishmen and Italians and Poles who’ve been holding down the territory since they immigrated in the 1900’s. In David E. Williams Middle School lingo, if a thing is bad, it is either “Gay” or “Jewish.” If there are any gay or Jewish kids in K-Town, they generally don’t speak up about it.

Kennedy Township holds row by row of practical split-level homes where the style of mailbox and color of vinyl siding are all that differ. Roads twist and turn through miles of evenly spaced boxes and unannounced cul-de-sacs, giving visitors the strange sensation of driving through a video game with a repeating background. Residents are born at Ohio Valley General Hospital, or occasionally McGee Woman’s. They start school at Forest Grove Elementary, where they learn to speak with Pittsburgh accents from their English teachers. The school district pretends to be one of the area’s best, believes deep down that it is solidly mediocre, and is actually, according to test scores, just under par. The teachers at Montour High School spend the first day of school taking attendance with glee – “Oh, Mancini! Panizzi! Kulik! Pastin!” – “What’s your brother doing?” “Are you related to a Sarah?” “I taught your mother!” “Your daddy and I had a fling once.” When it comes to hiring, nepotism runs rampant. The school board finds intellectual incest comforting.

After graduation, Kennedy-ites go to a university within three hours from home – Pitt or Penn State if they’re smart, Point Park, or Duquesne if they’re average, and CCAC or Robert Morris if they’d rather commute from home than deal with the possibility of living with new people in new places. Salmon swim further to spawn than most Montour kids travel for college. After college, they move home, or else they move to a house very close to home. They marry their childhood sweethearts, find work building things or demolishing things or driving things, and the process begins again.

In general, life is simple. Stay-at-home moms drive the stereotypical minivans to the stereotypical soccer games at the stereotypical park. No one walks anywhere except for shady characters with dangerously low pants going early to the Pine Hollow Inn and leaving late. There are no sidewalks. The first day of Deer Hunting Season, the Monday after thanksgiving, is a state holiday, and most good fathers take their sons and sometimes daughters out to shoot things every once in a while. During football seasons, entire extended families go to the Montour games, which are so horrendously bad that ESPN once enlisted the aid of celebrity coach Dick Butkus to bring the team from rags to riches. The season, which finished 1-8, outlasted Butkus, who threw up his hands and fled the neighborhood after 1-6. Kennedy Township can sometimes be difficult for outsiders to understand.