REAL ESTATE: Towns for Sale

Public Sale. . . . If you have ever had the desire to own a town and be the Postmaster, Mayor, School Board, Chief of Police, High Constable, Nightclub Host, Sunday-School Teacher, Fire Chief, Theatrical Director, Athletic Coach, Gas-Station Attendant, Promoter of Beauty Contests, and operate the General Store . . . please wake up and sing for there’s some one knocking at your Side Door.

. . . Sale under the direction of F. S.

Moran.

Frank Slicker Moran is a hearty, massive, melodious-voiced realestate broker who auctions whole villages—the little towns of western Pennsylvania that have been left to wither by the bankrupt or transient industries that built them. A former International League baseball umpire, Realtor Moran got his idea nine years ago while recuperating from an internal hemorrhage. “I think,” says he, “that I’ve sold more towns than anybody else in the U. S.” Last week he sold his eighth: Pattontown, Pa., a scraggly Westmoreland County hamlet of seven farms, 28 houses, a mercantile building.

Among 300-odd miners, farmers and hunters who gathered before the auction block were many on WPA or relief, some who had come to buy the homes in which they lived. Mrs. Mary Zuzak, hefty, straggly-haired wife of a man who had worked in the Pattontown mines (closed in 1938), planked down $350 in cash for a house she had lived in since the town was built (1919). Others found themselves dispossessed. Including the Mercantile Building, which brought $1,600, parceled Pattontown was sold for about $25,000.

Townseller Moran owns none of the property he sells, works on a commission basis under contract to banks and companies that do. Prosperous, soft-tongued, he convinces purchasers his towns are not so decadent as they seem. Believing that prosperity will bring some new company to Pattontown, he advertised “this is not a ghost town—mine operations will resume at an early date.” Since Defense Commissioner Sidney Hillman has his eye on ghost towns, has begun investigating “shutdown areas” with a view to their use in defense, Frank Moran’s optimism may make sense.