Another American Adventure: The Western PA Soap Box Derby

Saturday, June 2, 2012

The Western PA Soap Box Derby

While we were in Ambridge we found ourselves right on the street of a Soap Box Derby! John had never been to one of these (neither had I), only seen them on TV. Quite exciting, watching the little kids in the carts come rolling down the hill.

Check out the bumpers on the sides of the street.

2 comments:

BarbaraJune 2, 2012 at 8:21 PM
What propels them -- gravity or foot power?
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beth cioffolettiJune 3, 2012 at 7:48 AM
Gravity. THere are little levers inside that they use to guide the cart, and John says that they can't give them a push. They are at the top of the hill with a little block holding the cart in place; when they remove the block they start rolling.

We were wondering if one side of the street might have an advantage, or if there were techniques for how one guided the cart down the hill that would give it an advantage.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.