Staff Bio: Christian Bauman
Our Man in Pennsylvania's Pennsylvanian Biography
I was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1970. My maternal grandfather
owned a butcher store near the steel mill in Bethlehem. He was the
son of a hatmaker in the Fishtown district of Philadelphia and found
his meat-cutting calling while an apprentice at Reading Terminal's
center city market. Later he was a sergeant at a POW camp in Virgina
during WWII; after he died a few years ago we found recipes for
sausage written in German in a notebook in his house. I never met
my paternal grandfather. He was a Marine in WWII, and they say he
was at Guadalcanal. He contracted malaria there. He died in his
40s. I've heard he died on a golf course with a drink in his hand.
I don't know if it's true or not, but it's a good story. In pictures
he's a thin-mustcahed slickster in sharp clothes. My maternal grandfather
was a big man with little fashion sense who (usually) delighted
in me and I delighted in him. My maternal side is Philadelphian,
and Ireland and England before that (Morrissey, Shanahan, Young).
My paternal side is northeastern Pennsylvania people; the Lehigh
Valley, Slate Belt, the Poconos. They came from Scotland and Germany
(Macadam, Bauman). My maternal grandmother died when I was a baby.
My paternal grandmother is a long story.
I grew up mostly right across the river in New Jersey in a little
farm town called Quakertown between Clinton and Flemington. I live
again in Pennsylvania now, in Bucks County. George Washington crossed
the Delaware River a few miles from where I live, fucking up the
Hessians in Trenton. Of much more interest to me are the former
homes of Moss Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, James Michener, Pearl Buck,
Leon Redbone (rumor is he's still in the neighborhood). I've lived
in this general area all my life, except for when I was 13 and lived
in India for a year, and the four years I was in the U.S. Army,
when I lived in Newport News, Virginia. I have a sixteen-year-old
daughter who is a very good photographer and a very good writer
and mostly delights me though simply with her conversation. I also
have a five-year-old daughter whose love of drawing pictures is
rapidly approaching the level of her love of insects. My wife and
I used to have two dogs and now have only one. The dog smells and
there seems to be no cure.
Links to Bauman's novels and NPR commentaries can be found here:
http://www.christianbauman.com
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