The real Moon Run, on beyond the Twin Hi-Way

It had been a while since I had driven to the road of my childhood home, so I decided to take the long way to visit my cousins earlier this week.

We all grew up on Aiken Road in Robinson Township, before the place got overrun by every conceivable retail and commercial outlet known to man. Our particular portion of the township had its own name — Moon Run. An unincorporated community, it shared that priceless name with some early 1900s coal mines. When I was a kid growing up there, Moon Run’s borders were vague. But if you were from Moon Run you knew exactly how far it stretched.

You knew where the real Moon Run was.

On this particular night, I steered off the interstate and onto the Moon Run exit. But instead of taking the shortcut to Aiken Road, I opted for the scenic route. So I continued along Steubenville Pike, past Somma Funeral Home, Burkett Elementary School and the sprawling township athletic complex that once housed a single Little League field, where Sonny Matyaz and his mighty right arm reigned supreme in 1967.

Just past there, near where Butya’s Tavern once stood, I noticed a chain link fence surrounding a piece of property I was once intimately familiar with. It housed the Twin HiWay Drive-In Theatre. I did a double take and immediately slowed. Even though the sun had long since set, it was easy to see that the giant edifice was gone.

Like many others, I spent many a fun night there — and that’s not even counting the movies that I saw. But for me, the Twin Hi-Way represented something more than just a place to park and watch a movie. And maybe get lucky. It was a larger-thanlife anchor of stability in an often confusing and moving target of a childhood.

It was also part of a larger classic 1960s entertainment complex that provided everything a pre-teen could possibly want.

This complex spanned both sides of Steubenville Pike and extended up and down the road for a short stretch. Immediately adjacent to the Twin Hi-Way stood the Petrilena property, which included the world’s greatest front porch, a tree whose cherries were ripened personally by God and what the Petrilenas called a “garden.” It looked more like a farm to me.

I was well acquainted with the Petrilena place; I was related to them, and I spent dozens of summer days hanging around there with my cousins and their cousins. On warm summer nights, we would retreat toward the back of the property and wait for the right time to slip between the hedges and onto the Twin Hi-Way property. And there, larger than life, John Wayne or Debbie Reynolds would stare down at you from what seemed like 200 feet in the air. Movie stars never looked so magnificent.

But as fun as those nocturnal adventures were, the daylight hours were even better. I would find my way to the Petrilena place just about every summer morning and there, my cousins were conscripted to do manual labor. They took their orders from my Uncle Jim — the World’s Strongest Man — and his father, the family patriarch, Amelio. My goal, virtually every day, was the same: avoid manual labor and spring my cousins to go play baseball down at the Little League field. A few times, though, I wound up with a hoe in my hand and orders to weed the corn. It stretched out in long rows, seemingly all the way to the moon. Or at least Moon Township.

Eventually, though, the kids would get sprung, and we would high-tail it across Steubenville Pike, past the Boffs and the Groznicks and down to the meticulously manicured Little League field. There, we would play pickup baseball for hours, praying all the while that we wouldn’t get kicked off William Pintar’s immaculate diamond. I wrecked my poor excuse for an arm one summer on that field and had to throw virtually underhand from second base in the “official” Little League games. My arm was never the same.

Just about every day following our marathon baseball games, four or five of us would walk back up to Steubenville Pike and head to what was the equivalent of heaven on earth for a 12-year-old. It was a store that sold day-old Banana Flips and Devil’s Delights for 5 cents and had a machine that dispensed ice-cold bottles of pop. You could live like a king on a quarter a day.

I flashed on some of this as I drove past what used to be the Twin Hi-Way Drive-In and on into the morass of development that has swallowed up much of Steubenville Pike. I made it to the Petrilenas’ house on Aiken Road, and after visiting a while, I set off for home. My cousin Jimmy asked me to drop him off at a friend’s house to pick up his truck, so we headed toward the heart of Moon Run.

“Pull in here,” Jimmy instructed. He wanted to show me something.

I turned off into a construction site and couldn’t believe my eyes. There, next to the slag dumps from the Moon Run Mines that we played on as a kid, stood a fancy brick sign that read “Arbor Trail.” Just beyond the sign loomed big, new townhomes — some completed, others in progress. “More of them are coming,” Jimmy said.

I shook my head, turned around and drove off.

I no longer know where the real Moon Run is.