Growing Up by a Reservoir Shaped My Life and Outlook

The Reservoir gave me identity and became a focal point for our family’s life.

We rarely called the man-made body of water the Latrobe Reservoir, yet the atmosphere it created and its lure made it as much a proper noun, like a family member.

Flooding the Old Road

Water hurries from behind a barn and past a herd of cows, cutting through their pasture, crashing into rocks and veiled by thick trees before spilling into the Reservoir and feeding this one mile long and half-mile wide body of water. Near the barn, the water is narrow enough to be a stream but as it winds through the trees and careens over rocks it deserves an upgrade to being called a creek.

And then it quiets and settles as it dissipates — part of it spreading into a swampy marsh and the rest flowing beneath the bridge of a private driveway that’s no more than fifteen feet wide as it flows into the Reservoir.

The stream once cut through a valley until a dam was built in 1919 and the Army Corps of Engineers expanded it in 1959, flooding a road that connected one side with another. Water gradually spread to an embankment with a drain that seeps into the field below my Dad’s house. The Reservoir was meant to supply the residents and industrial might of Latrobe, the town of eight-thousand people that produced two iconic Americans, Arnold Palmer the Golfer and children’s television…