12 Things Ex-Pennsylvanians Say They Miss Most After Moving Away

A former Pittsburgher stands at an ice cream counter in Charlotte, North Carolina, and asks for jimmies on her scoop.

The teenager behind the counter tilts her head. “The what?”

Nobody in North Carolina calls sprinkles by that name, and three years later, she still forgets to translate her order.

These are the things Pennsylvania transplants say they miss most after they move away.

1. Chipped Ham

Ask a former Pittsburgher what they miss from the deli counter, and chipped ham comes up before anything else.

Butchers there press a ham loaf and slice it almost fluffy thin, then pile it on a roll with barbecue sauce or mustard.

A young Isaly’s clerk figured out the trick back in the 1930s, slicing the ham so thin it stretched further and cost less.

Isaly’s stores are mostly gone now, but Giant Eagle still keeps chipped ham behind nearly every deli counter in western Pennsylvania.

Ask for it anywhere outside the region, and the person behind the counter just blinks.

They’ve never heard the term.

2. Pennsylvania Words

Pennsylvania transplants lose more than food when they move. The words disappear too.

Tell a kid in Pittsburgh to clean his room, and his mom says redd up instead.

A nosy neighbor there gets called nebby, and a group of friends becomes yinz.

Cross to Philadelphia, and sprinkles on an ice cream cone turn into jimmies, a word local newspapers were already printing back in 1925.

Move to Ohio or Florida, and every one of those words needs a translation.

Every time.

3. Water Ice

Order “Italian ice” in most states, and Pennsylvania transplants have to catch themselves.

Back home, it’s water ice, or wooder ice if the accent runs thick enough.

A former Philadelphia firefighter named Bob Tumolo started making it fresh in Bensalem in 1984, naming the shop Rita’s after his wife.

That single stand grew into 600 stores across 30 states, yet the lemon or mango flavor never tastes quite the same out of a plastic tub in a grocery store freezer.

A Pennsylvania transplant standing in a Texas grocery aisle in July, staring at a freezer case with no water ice in sight, feels that loss all over again.

4. Hoagies

A Pennsylvania transplant hears “sub” at a sandwich counter in another state and winces before they can stop themselves.

The sandwich is a hoagie, a word that traces back to shipyard workers on Philadelphia’s Hog Island, who packed thick Italian sandwiches for lunch during World War I.

Wawa turns the whole thing into a spring tradition with Hoagiefest, discounting its made-to-order hoagies for weeks every year.

A Pennsylvania transplant walks into a gas station a thousand miles away expecting the same deal and finds a rack of plastic-wrapped sandwiches instead.

Disappointing.

Ask for a “sub” back home, and a local still knows exactly what a transplant means, but the word never sounds right coming out of their own mouth anymore.

5. Soft Pretzels

The soft pretzel Pennsylvania transplants grew up on came from a working bakery, not a mall kiosk.

Julius Sturgis opened the country’s first pretzel bakery in Lititz back in 1861, after a stranger traded him a recipe for a meal.

The ovens there still turn out the same twisted dough more than 160 years later.

Grocery stores in other states sell something that resembles a pretzel, doughy in the middle, with a shine that never quite browns right.

Something’s missing.

6. Whoopie Pies

Pennsylvania Dutch kitchens in Lancaster County claim the whoopie pie as their own, two soft chocolate cakes with cream stuffed between them.

Amish farmwives baked them from leftover cake batter for their husbands’ lunch pails, and legend says the name comes from the shout that followed finding a whoopie pie inside the lunch pail.

Massachusetts and Maine cookbooks print whoopie pie recipes as far back as the 1920s, decades before Pennsylvania’s own recipes hit paper, so Pennsylvania’s tourism board launched a campaign called Save Our Whoopie to defend Lancaster County’s claim anyway.

A transplant who moves south or west can drive to three different bakeries looking for a whoopie pie that tastes like Lancaster County’s own.

It falls flat every time.

7. Yuengling

Pennsylvania transplants grow up thinking every state has a hometown beer this old.

Yuengling has run out of Pottsville since 1829, making it America’s oldest brewery, and the Yuengling family has owned it the whole time.

Order a Yuengling at a bar in Arizona or Colorado, and the bartender might not even stock it.

Some stores out west carry it now, but it took decades to cross the Mississippi.

A six-pack from home used to mean something.

Now it’s just a shipping charge.

8. Groundhog Day

Every February 2, cameras from across the country point at a groundhog in Punxsutawney, and Pennsylvania transplants still set an alarm out of habit.

The Punxsutawney Groundhog Club has run the tradition since 1887, when a local newspaper editor talked a group of hunters into hiking to Gobbler's Knob before dawn.

Phil's shadow supposedly means six more weeks of winter, and no shadow means an early spring.

Nobody in a warmer state marks the morning on a calendar.

Just another Tuesday.

9. Free State Parks

Pennsylvania runs 121 state parks, and not one of them charges an entrance fee.

Pack a cooler, find a trailhead, and walk in for nothing.

Move to a state that charges ten or twenty dollars just to park at a trailhead, and the habit of a free Saturday hike stops making sense.

That adds up over a summer of weekend trips.

A Pennsylvania transplant does the math once and feels it.

Every single time.

10. The Pike

Every Pennsylvania transplant remembers the Pennsylvania Turnpike by its nickname, the Pike, long before they remember an exit number.

It opened in 1940 as the country's first superhighway, stretching from Carlisle to Irwin through mountains other roads simply went around.

Toll booths, tunnels blasted straight through ridgelines, and a service plaza every so many miles became the rhythm of any long drive.

Highways out west run flat and straight for hundreds of miles with nothing to break them up.

Nothing like the Pike.

11. Mummers Parade

Every New Year's Day, Philadelphia shuts down Broad Street for feathered costumes, string bands, and grown men doing a shuffling dance called the Mummers Strut.

The city made the tradition official on January 1, 1901, and the Mummers Parade has run every year since as the country's longest continuously running folk parade.

Neighborhood clubs spend months building the costumes, then march the route belting out "Oh, Dem Golden Slippers" before spilling onto Two Street for an afterparty outsiders can't get near.

A Pennsylvania transplant who moves away loses the one morning a year an entire street turns into feathers and banjos, and a new neighbor a thousand miles off has no idea what they're describing.

Nobody else has Two Street.

12. Sunday Football

Steelers black and gold owns one half of the state, Eagles green owns the other, and Pennsylvania splits its football loyalty right down the middle.

Broadcaster Myron Cope invented the Terrible Towel in 1975, asking Steelers fans to wave a gold dish towel at a playoff game, and the stadium turned into a sea of gold before that night ended.

Every stranger in a Pennsylvania grocery store on a Sunday somehow already knows the score.

Move to a state without a hometown team, and Sunday just becomes another day.

Silent, for once.