On another hot and humid afternoon in June, I walk down Main Street in the direction of the Hellertown Pool. With school letting out and summer officially beginning, Hellertonians such as myself are looking for ways to keep themselves occupied and free from the heat wave’s malaise. A never-ending fleet of cars, trucks and semis rumbles down Main Street before I activate the crosswalk lights and traffic slows to a halt.
In the past, residents of Lower Saucon found more creative ways to pass their time than simply taking a walk in Dimmick Park or spending a day at the pool. While checking for the fourth time that I didn’t forget my pool pass, I remember the great hullabaloo that rattled the town during the summer of 2021, when the iconic clown trashcan head was stolen from the Hellertown Pool. Though the colorful trashcan toppers may not be noteworthy to the untrained eye, the lions and clown heads have adorned the pool since the 60’s and are a beloved staple. So when the clown head lid was taken that Saturday evening in June of 2021, residents and town officials were in uproar searching for the missing topper. Mayor David Heintzelman had strong words for the thief, demanding that they “Return this now or pay the consequences!” But for all the excitement stirred up over the filching, the story culminated in a puzzling and anticlimactic conclusion. Three days after its disappearance, the clown head was found perched in a tree along Depot Street, where it was then returned to the pool by EMS. Who committed the burglary and why is still a mystery to this day.
Just a stone’s throw from Depot Street is a summer getaway for the less aquatically inclined—Lost River Caverns, which has attracted its own share of idle mischief. In the years before 1930, when Lost River Caverns had not yet opened as a tourist spot, the cave’s tenebrous and mazy nature made it an alluring location for curious students from Lehigh University. Present-day visitors walking through the cave will find a faint star painted by Lehigh students on a rock inside the “Breakdown Room”—so named for a rock bridge that collapsed during the room’s development. Lehigh’s fraternities used the Breakdown Room for their hazing rituals, leading new members into the cave and requiring them to complete challenges. Typically, those challenges involved meeting at the star to perform recitations or pledges in the total darkness of the cave. If the recitation was done successfully, the new member would depart the cave with the rest of the fraternity. If not, he would have to find his own way out in the dark.
Known as Rentzheimer’s Cave before its commercial use, Lost River Caverns was for a brief time one of the stops along Hellertown’s trolley route. Like the pool and caverns, the trolley would, back in its day, become caught up in the occasional kerfuffle. Hellertown’s trolley line began running in 1897, after much vocalized interest from the populace in using the line to create greater accessibility between Hellertown and South Bethlehem. On opening day, Hellertown was awash with festivities. According to the defunct journal the Allentown Leader, residents even put up decorations to celebrate the trolley’s arrival. “The formal opening of this line was the greatest event in Hellertown for many years and the town was gaily decorated,” it stated. The current Burgess, George B. Deemer, rode on the trolley’s inaugural journey from Magnolia and Main streets down to Union Station in South Bethlehem.
Though the trolley was viewed as a promising step forward and a novel way of putting Hellertown “on the map,” local sentiment soon soured. Residents of South Bethlehem were proving to be rowdy company. Though the offenses were not recorded, they caused enough of a stir for an 1897 copy of The Morning Call to dub Hellertown “the Mecca of a gang of South Bethlehem hoodlums.” One can only imagine what the “hoodlums” were doing that so disgruntled the Hellertown riders, but The Morning Call was not lacking in colorful description of their attempts “to run the town on the Wild West plan.” Matters eventually grew serious enough for Hellertown to appoint three police officers to trolley duty in an attempt to preserve the peace. Hellertown’s trolley was shut down decades later in 1952, bringing an end to any hoodlums’ streetcar shenanigans…