Yesterday about 100 people, most if not all of them evangelical Christians, walked to protest the possibility of a casino on the South Side. One participant said she thought Bethlehem was a nice place to live and work, and she and her associates want to keep it that way.
Bethlehem has always been a nice place to live, compared to other options available at any given time. But the woman making this comment clearly does not have any sense of the city's history. For the fact is that its attractiveness as a community has nothing to do with the amount of crime and vice here.
I have no doubt that crime was very low in the founding decades of the town, Probably, under the direct influence of the founding Moravians, crime was non-existent, or at least as non-existent as it is possible to get in human society.
But the settlement grew and diversified, and became more "average." This had nothing to do (as was whispered and often expressed) with the new kinds of people who arrived in the community to live and work. To take a short cut in explaining, it had to do with criminals. People who did not live here, but who ran mobs; and who came here only sporadically. They saw Bethlehem and certain other small cities (Pottsville, PA, for example) as relatively safe places for their criminal activities. And so it was.
But lots of good and decent people continued to live here--sometimes, out of economic need, caught up in the fringes of illegal activity; but by and large living normal lives, sending their kids to school and college, and so on.
The fact is, there was plenty of vice. There still is vice; and for an amusing look at it, try reading the "Bubbles" detective stories by Sarah Strohmeyer, daughter of famed former newspaper editor John Strohmeyer. (Strohmeyer's paper was, of course, the "Globe-Times.")
And in between periods of criminal "normality," there were the 20s and 30s, when it is likely that more people came to Bethlehem annually to sample the prostitution, numbers, and illicit liquour than now visit for Christmas.
Saturday's walkers have a perfect right to oppose the coming of a casino, although I disagree with them. But they should at least begin by understanding the city and knowing what they are talking about.

The question has been raised by more than one person I know: How can slots be tolerated at historic places, such as Bethlehem and Gettysburg? Beyond that, how can one person (this writer, for example) be for a slots parlor in one of these precious places and not in the other?
My answer to that is that I believe a slots parlor will destroy the nature of one place, but may save the other.
To put it bluntly, I'd as soon put a slots parlor in Arlington National Cemetery as at Gettysburg. The idea of even putting such a thing there, where so many thousands suffered and died for their disparate visions of the American future, strikes me as obscene. Not only that--it is hard to avoid the impression that the would-be Gettysburg developers chose that town, rather than some other pleasant central Pennsylvania town, because they KNEW the proposition of building such a thing there was obscene. Their proposal is, perhaps, a measure of how far America's spirit and values have fallen. It deserves to be fought tooth and nail.
Why should I feel so differently about the Bethlehem area, where I have lived for so many years? It is because a casino would play a different role here. Bethlehem began as a City In The Wilderness, a center of spiritual development and mission work. It has retained much of its spirituality, but its role relative to the society of which it is part has changed.
No longer is the city a settlement of one church; its people trace their origins to many nations, and belong to many churches and religions. So that, instead of a limited palette, we have rich multiple hues. I submit that many colors are in this case better than one, or only a few.
But we are at the point at which many of the things that have made Bethlehem individual and special are in danger. Many of those things have to do with the giant industry that, far more than the Moravian settlement, made the city famous. When people from our city have traveled around the world, it has been Bethlehem Steel, far more than anything else, that they have been asked about.
The Steel site is likely the only site of its kind left in the world. I understand that the steel mills of Germany are far different from our blast furnaces. The blast furnaces and the buildings that surround them are a kind of industrial Stonehenge, a monument to a vanished way of life that, for all its limitations and the genuine horrors it perpetrated, also did many magnificent things.
I believe that, without the casino, Bethlehem as we have known it, in all its ethnic and cultural richness,is doomed. And this great world-class monument, so unmistakable a symbol of the city's special greatness, will be doomed first of all.
So far, nobody has offered a better prospect of preserving at least a memory of the essence of this small, remarkable place than have the BethWorks people. And that is why, unless someone has a better idea very soon, I am for a slots parlor on the banks of the Lehigh. Right here at Bethlehem.

(Please Note: Henceforth I will be posting here every Sunday. I'd have started this schedule next week, except that the news of Senator Jeannette Reibman's passing pushed the matter to the front of my agenda.)

It is always too bad to lose someone of Senator Reibman's caliber, especially since they seem to be making relatively few of them any more. I remember being in high school when an interesting thing happened in neighboring Northampton County--that is, a woman was elected to serve in the state legislature, where in fact she became the first woman speaker of the house. I found my attention drawn to her sporadically through the years, as she became the first woman elected to serve a full term in the state senate, and challenged unsuccessfully for the United States Senate and the House of Representatives.
She championed all the "women's issues," by which I mean issues that deal particularly with the survival of civilization as we have known it--things like education and the arts. Because of her political adroitness, she was enormously successful in promoting her causes, which also included the cause of working people.
I had the luck to make her personal acquaintance when I served briefly as a member of the Bethlehem and Northampton County Democratic Committees. Little as I ever knew her, and unimportant as I was, I found her friendly and outgoing, with a special charisma that accounted for her high standing with voters. I imagine she was not as friendly toward those who opposed her political purposes; she reminded me, because of her achievements, of the old phrase "iron fist in velvet glove." (Although, come to think of it, I doubt if she ever made an actual fist. She came across as a lady.)
I last saw her in the mid-fall of 2004,when she, her late husband Nathan Reibman, a friend of mine and I happened to be in Southside Bethlehem's Bridgeworks Restaurant at the same time. At that point she had been retired for 10 years; yet to my astonishment she looked as well and seemed as mentally alert as she had ever been.
And that's the way she will stay in my mind.