Proud To Be Ambler

Original song and watercolors by Eddie Flotte about growing up in Ambler, PA...

Well I was born way way back in 1956,
in a long row of houses that was made of bricks
by the Keasbey and Mattison factory 5 stories high
along the tracks with its smoke stacks and mountains of white.

Off the clock up the block in the Wyndham Hotel
in its dimly lit tap room were its clientele.
Where your father sat alongside of his father and mine
on a break they had to take from the assembly line.

In our white shirts and neck ties all us Catholics went
up the street to the Catholic schools where we were sent.
While all the public kids went piling up and filing into class
at the public school... no neckties and no Catholic Mass.

At the corner store up by your grandma's house
we could trade in all the soda bottles that she threw out,
for baseball cards, tasty cakes, caps for the gun,
comic books, wooden airplanes, or bubble gum.

Before there was a K-mart and before the mall,
a seven eleven or urban sprawl,
uptown is where you found all the things you wanted and more
at the shoe repair, the Sun Ray, or the hardware store.

There was a countryside just on the outskirts of town
where corn fields and wide open spaces abound,
with chicken coops and rabbit pens and old wooden screen doors
produce stands, and dairy cows, and general stores.

Now these streets that I walk and I once called home,
still call out the names of all the people I've known
and the castle that still stands way up there on the hill
like a ghost it stands watching out and over us still.

And as I walk down these streets of this life I lived
and as I sail down the stream of all the things I did,
that Wissahickon Creek there still faithfully flows,
on its way downstream to where everything goes...