If it’s the day before Easter, Linda Blackmore will be at Riverview Memorial Park in Tarentum.
It’s been that way for 71 years — ever since her parents, Alfred and Shirley Perroz, began organizing the borough’s annual egg hunt.
“My parents were part of the (now defunct) Tarentum Moose, and they helped come up with the idea,” Blackmore said. “They wanted something for the kids to do.”
The Moose is a fraternal organization with a mission of helping children and senior citizens.
It was the early 1950s when the egg hunt was born. Members would solicit cash from borough businesses to stuff inside colorful plastic eggs and then hide them in the park along First Avenue. The women of the Moose cooked breakfast for the police, firemen and borough employees who helped with the event.
Blackmore said children at that time also searched for real eggs — local Scouts would volunteer to dye 40 dozen hard-boiled eggs to scatter in the lawn.
“When I took over in 2008, we stopped doing real eggs,” said Blackmore, a phlebotomist at Allegheny Health Network.
“The kids knew the plastic eggs had all the good stuff.”
Besides, she added, “you couldn’t do that with today’s eggs prices! Could you imagine?”
Blackmore, 71, spent her early childhood in Tarentum, growing up in a home with her six siblings off East 10th Avenue.
When the family house caught fire, they moved to Freeport. Blackmore graduated from Freeport Area High School in 1971. She now lives in East Deer at the top of Murray Hill.
Through it all, she has kept her Tarentum roots close.
“My parents wanted this tradition, and as long as I can take care of it, I’ll never stop,” she said.
It is still supported by the Moose, which after closing in 2008, operated as an independent chapter until 2020. It then merged with New Kensington.
Blackmore credited community volunteers with helping to shoulder the workload, which begins while snow is still on the ground. About 25 friends, along with the Tarentum Recreation Board, start planning and soliciting donations in winter.
About a month before the event, the group gets together to plant signs around town and stuff more than 5,000 eggs with cash and candy.
“When the kids collect all their eggs, they sit by the stage and open them,” Blackmore said. “Some of them have a lucky number inside, meaning they’ve won a special gift.”
The Recreation Board last year donated four bikes as prizes for each age group. They’ll do the same this year, President Carrie Fox said.
“The board helps them any way they need us, from manpower to donating yard signs,” Fox said. “Linda, her family and friends do a tremendous amount of work to make this event a success.”
Aside from Blackmore’s steady presence, children can always count on the day and time for Tarentum’s Easter tradition. It is always the day before, rain or shine, at 9 a.m. sharp.
Fire whistles blow to let the children know they can take off running to collect the goodies.
“We always say, ‘Don’t be late, it’s over in a few minutes,’” Fox said. “The kids have a blast opening their eggs and seeing the prizes.”
Blackmore laughs when she talks about the clean-up job provided by the children. One minute the lawn is speckled with plastic eggs and the next, it’s completely barren.
“It’s so wonderful to watch them,” she said.
More than 200 participants turn out each year to hunt for eggs stretched from the park’s amphitheater down to the Army tank some blocks away.
Afterward, children line up down the street to sit with the Easter bunny on stage for pictures.
“The kids always come up and thank us,” Blackmore said. “Everyone appreciates it.
“I especially love when I have adults tell me that they came to the hunt when they were kids and now they’re bringing their own.”