Walking through Reading on a recent afternoon, I passed by all the things you can’t see from the pagoda on top of Mt. Penn. There were the bas relief depictions of the town’s railroad past on the stone walls of a building, posters for cheap collect calls to Central America, and the bustling scene and pawn shops of Penn Square not far from a newly opened luxury Double Tree hotel, a nod to downtown revitalization. There was also, unexpectedly, a pair of Trump signs.
I spotted them outside a dingy building attached to Tommy’s Auto Repair, a garage on North 8th Street, and wandered in.
They belonged, according to Tommy Acevedo, 39, to “the old man who owns the building.” Acevedo, originally from the Dominican Republic, owns the autobody business and a grocery store a few blocks away.
Sitting in the garage office, Acevedo and a few customers argued animatedly about the presidential race as soon as the topic of the Trump signs came up, the election being 2016’s one sure conversational accelerant. They talked Trump’s businessman appeal, Clinton’s emails and the threat of terrorism. Ultimately, though, Acevedo said, “I’m definitely trying to get Hillary in there.”
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