

## THE WAY IT WAS

A MEMOIR

BY

### JACK DUNN

### OTHER BOOKS BY JACK DUNN

HOME AND AWAY - 2012

MEMORIAL DAY - 2012

DEDICATED

TO

THE MEMBERS

OF

MY IMMEDIATE FAMILY

REED J. DUNN

MAJORIE DUNN

DANIEL DUNN

Table of Contents

PREFACE

EARLY YEARS

DUNNS STATION

THE FARM

THE FARMSTEAD

ELEMENTARY SCHOOLING

ON THE HOMEFRONT

EAST WASHINGTON HIGH SCHOOL

FAMILY & RELATIVES

OTHER CHILDHOOD AND TEEN RECOLLECTIONS

BASEBALL

COMING OF AGE

UPS AND DOWNS IN THE FIRST DECADE

MATURITY - SEVENTIES & EIGHTIES

WINDING DOWN - THE NINETIES

RETIREMENT

REFLECTIONS

# PREFACE

This is my memoir. It is the life story of a "Depression Baby" born into a lower middle-income family in rural southwestern Pennsylvania. My childhood and teen years were the tail end of the Great Depression, the years of World War II and the balance of the Forty's. Those of us born during the 1930's are sometimes referred to as the Quiet Generation. I've often thought of us as the Forgotten Generation in much the same way as "our" war, the Korean War, seems forgotten. There weren't a lot of us as birth rates plummeted during that time. But we made our mark in the technology advances of the Sixties, the Seventies and beyond.

The home setting of my childhood and formative years was physically comfortable and sheltered. Life was simple and consisted of farm work, school, church and occasional social events. The people that I had contact with were almost exclusively White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants (WASP's) and in my thirty's I had little framework of reference to fully understand cultural changes such as civil rights and anti-war issues.

I have little idea of the standards, if any, that exist for a memoir but I am going to write it in a conversational format, as if I were telling a story.

In this writing I'll make reference to the members of my immediate family.

Dad. Reed Jackson Dunn (1903 -1961)

Mom. Marjorie Anna [Debolt] Dunn (1904 – 1967)

Dan. My Brother, Daniel Lincoln Dunn (1930 )

Jack. Reed Jackson Dunn, Jr. (1934 )

So in my Eightieth year, here goes.

Jack Dunn 2014

# EARLY YEARS

A little background. My Mom and Dad were married in 1929 in June before the Stock Market crash and the beginning of the great Depression. They had both been teachers at what is now Trinity High School in Washington, PA. The name Trinity came from the original building of its predecessor the Trinity Hall Military Academy. That structure, first built as a residence in the 1850's, exists today.

In the 1920's, for reasons unknown to me, married women were not allowed to be teachers. So after they married, Mom was out of a job. At some point they moved to a place far south in West Virginia called Ronceverte, where Dad coached athletics and taught. That didn't last too long. When things got really tough in the depression, if you weren't a local person you lost your job. In the meantime, things were difficult on the farm and my Grandfather was having a hard time so they moved back home.

"Back home" meant the farm in the immediate vicinity of the village of Dunns Station in south western Pennsylvania. It had been in Dunn family ownership since the mid-1800's. The farm acreage included two residences, the largest of which was a two story, twelve room structure. About one-eighth of a mile to the east across the bottom land was a smaller one-story residence which was always referred to as the "little house", not to be confused with that same terminology sometimes applied to privies in rural areas.

For the first few years we lived in the "little house". The little house contained a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, a fairly large bedroom, a small bedroom and a bathroom. The small bedroom was where Dan and I slept. It was very narrow and we in slept in twin bunk beds. I had the bottom bed and I have some sense that Dan didn't like having to sleep in the top bunk. I guess he had to climb up and down a ladder and it was probably hot up there in the summer. That was before home air conditioning. There was a small front porch with an entrance into the living room. I think that there was a little back porch that may have included some kind of an outdoor pantry or storage area. I don't know who occupied the little house before we did, when it was built or what its origin was. After we no longer lived there, it was a rental property for a few years. The last time I saw it, it looked abandoned and beyond rehabilitation.

Dan was born in 1930 and I came along in 1934. I was born at Washington Hospital. I remember Mom telling me when I was an adult that she had a difficult time with my delivery. I was premature. That was before the time of widespread use of infant incubators, at least in the Washington Hospital. She said that they had me wrapped with narrow strips of cotton in the nursery. Dan had been named for ancestors on Dad's side of the family. The original plan had been to name me for one of Mom's ancestors; Stephen Maple, a Revolutionary War veteran. She said when they came around with the papers at the Hospital, she was feeling pretty tough and the idea of going through another pregnancy and childbirth didn't have much appeal. She said maybe she should give Dad some credit while she had the chance. So that's how I was named Reed Jackson Dunn, Jr.

There's a little anecdote about how I've always been called Jack. The story is that when I came on the scene, Dad had been reading my brother, four years old at the time, the story of Peter Rabbit. When Dan saw me for the first time, he announced that I looked "just like Peter Rabbit." Consequently for the first two or three months, I was known as Pete. Mom brought that to an end since there was a relative in the community also known as Pete who was best known for his ability to consume large quantities of alcoholic beverages. I gather there was a family conference of some sort. Junior was unappealing and the idea of two family members with same name seemed awkward. So Jack was the compromise and came from my middle name, Jackson.

It was sometime in the late 30's that we moved over to the big house. I have very few memories or recollections about living in the little house. I remember that "someone" came to that house and brought me an ice cream cone. Turned out it was butter pecan and up to that point I guess the only kind of ice cream that I'd seen was vanilla and chocolate. Dumb kid that I was I thought those little pieces of nut were dirt and I went around to the side of the house and threw the cone into the bushes. But somebody discovered it later in the day and I was found out.

The other recollection is when we moved over to the big house. It must have been in the winter, because I remember riding on a farm sled which Dad was pulling either with horses or a tractor. As a footnote I have just a vague recollection of having horses. But I do remember riding on that sled, sitting beside that big green box that Dad had built with pigeon holes to keep his "papers". That's about it although I do have pictures in my mind of what the rooms of the little house looked like. Funny thing is that I don't have any mind pictures of Mom, Dad and Dan in that setting.

Below is a picture of Dad and Dan and myself. I'm the one in the middle. I would guess that it's probably the summer of 1935 and I'm reasonably sure that it was taken somewhere over by the little house.

# DUNNS STATION

I mentioned earlier that "back home" was Dunns Station. It was several things. It was a dot on the map along State Route 221 where it intersects with a local road named Conger Road. It was a U.S. Post Office whose rural delivery area included much of Morris Township, Washington County. It was a railroad station in bygone times. I guess that you could call the collection of homes in the general area a village. I'll describe it as I recall from my childhood in the 1940's, making reference to the sketch map showing homes, the school, property lines, streams and the railroad.

The focal point of the village was, of course, the structure that we called the "station". The railroad, originally the Waynesburg and Washington and known locally as the "Waynie" and the W & W, became part of the Penn Central System in its later years. The rail line which initially was a narrow gauge generally was located on the east side of the stream that had its origin at the ridge line at West Union and continued on north where it emptied into Ten Mile Creek at Plumsock. I remember at some point during World War II that the rail line was widened out to standard gauge. A wooden trestle in the center of the village enabled the railroad to maintain an acceptable grade and to cross over a smaller stream. The building that housed the railroad .station, post office and general store was located just beyond the trestle. As of this writing (2014) all vestiges of the rail line, station and accompanying warehouse are gone.

It's probably an overstatement to say that the station was the center of community life. There was activity in the morning with the rural route mail carriers sorting the mail. There might be a few store customers, mostly women that lived within walking distance. Jim Fulton was the store owner and the postmaster. His sometime helper was "Cap" Yoders. It's my recollection that the evenings after supper were a time of increased activity. Customers would come by for gasoline or groceries or maybe to sit around and talk. It was pretty much a male dominated group. At various times of the day there would be a small group of men just sitting around. Mom always referred to them as the "loafers".

The Dunns Station School was the only other non-residential structure in the community. I'll examine that in some detail later on in this writing. The property immediately adjacent to the "station" contained a residence and another structure that in earlier times was a blacksmith shop. Both have long since been gone.

# THE FARM

The Dunn farm was about 200 acres in size. The original property was over three hundred acres but over the years plots were sold off. The farm was located in the southern most portion of Morris Township in Washington County. The southern property line was along the top of the ridge that Dad always referred to as the dividing ridge. It was the County line between Washington and Greene counties and I believe was also the ridge line that divided the north and south branches of the Ten Mile Creek.

The terrain was varied and much of it was very hilly. I would guess that something on the order of one-third of the land was level enough for hay and crop production. The crops were primarily grain, corn, wheat and oats. During the 1930's the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) came into being at the Federal level in response to the Dust Bowl environmental disaster. There was no loss of top soil being wind borne in our area but one hundred and fifty years of cultivating the land from hill top to valley bottom for corn production had resulted in great soil loss by erosion. The SCS and the County Agricultural Agents approached Dad about doing some survey work in order to lay out contour strips for crop production. It's my impression that ours was the first farm in the area that was laid out that way.

Dad put a lot of effort into trying to improve the productivity of the farm. Evergreen seedlings were supplied by the conservation agencies and planted in areas to stop soil erosion. I seem to recall where soy beans were planted in an area and simply plowed under in an effort to enrich the soil as a good source of nitrogen. There was natural limestone in the area especially along the steams and Dad built a field kiln which baked the stone and broke it down to produce lime which was used to fertilize the fields. This seems like such a simple statement but it required a great deal of hard physical labor.

That having been said, this might be a good place to talk about farming as it was practiced on the Dunn farm and probably most other farms in the area. A lot of back-breaking labor was involved. During the depression years, labor saving farm equipment was not produced in large quantities and few could afford it. During the years of World War II the only equipment of any kind produced was for the war effort. Given my sense of what liquid assets the family possessed, I can't imagine where the money came from to buy the Allis Chalmers tractor that Dad acquired in the late 30's. Prior to that Dad had purchased a tractor kit from Sears that used the motor and chassis of a Model A Ford. Everything else in the way of equipment was either makeshift or leftovers from earlier times. I remember a mowing machine and a grain binder that were quite old and originally designed to be horse drawn. Dad modified them to be tractor drawn. We had an old dump rake that we used a lot and a hay tedder that was never used. Dad made a wagon from the frame and rear axle of a Model A Ford. He built a rack for it to haul hay and wheat sheaves. Everything else was pretty much hand tools. We did have a manure spreader that was jointly purchased and used by Dad and a nearby farmer.

Hay was not baled as is the case today. Rather it was a several step process ending in hay stacks in the field or hay stored in the mows in the barn. I can't remember the name of the man who came around with a threshing machine to process the wheat and oats. But it was a very big deal! Extra help was needed. Lots of excitement for a kid. We traded help with Allison Hufford in making hay, which meant that we spent a few days over at his place. Dan and I liked it since it was a change of pace, and I think Allison paid us something. For riding a sweaty work horse all day and hauling hay shocks to the stacks as an eight year old, I was paid at the rate of twenty-five cents per stack.

Allison's housekeeper made homemade bread, which was a real treat. Dad wasn't too keen on eating there as he didn't think she was all that clean in her cooking. Maybe so. The housekeeper's name was Granny Yeager. Granny smoked a pipe. We would come in from the field for the midday meal and sit out in the yard under a shade tree. Granny would come out on the porch and announce that the meal was ready in this manner:

"Come and get it damn yee or I'll throw it to the dogs!"

The water supply over at Allison's place was a hand dug well. A small shed was built over it with a windlass inside and a bucket attached to a rope. To get water, one would drop the bucket and then crank the windlass to retrieve it. Always seemed like a big deal to me. On more than one occasion I remember Allison saying, "Be sure and get it from the north corner of the well. It's cooler there."

We always raised a good bit of corn. Just like the hay and other grains, it was a multi-step process of hand labor to harvest the finished product. We had several dairy cows and milking was also a hand process. We never had milking machines. Dad had a small herd of Hereford beef cattle and we also raised hogs and chickens. Extra help was needed when we butchered hogs.

We had some fruit trees and, of course, harvesting the yield was hand labor. Every year we had a large garden as well as a truck patch for growing vegetables such as tomatoes and potatoes in quantities. Mom had her share of work and maybe more. I can remember seeing many canning jars in the cellar containing green beans and apple sauce. During the war years, with sugar rationing, she boxed fruit items such as strawberries and peaches destined for our frozen food locker in Washington. Beef and pork from our butchering was stored there. At that time families didn't have home freezers.

I'll conclude this discussion of the farm by reiterating that the enterprise involved a lot of hard physical labor, of the sort that we're told in contemporary society nobody will undertake. We didn't have any choice and I think it took its toll. Sometimes when I look at pictures of my Mom and Dad in the old family album, I think that they could have been right out of the "Grapes of Wrath."

Having said all this, I'd be less than honest if I didn't admit that most of the hard farm work was done by Dad and Dan. I was the youngest in the family and functioned physically at a much lower level. There weren't many of the common childhood diseases that I failed to acquire. I do recall one or two times that my illness resulted in a house call by the elderly country doctor located in Amity several miles away. The severely broken arm and associated infection pretty much took me out of the picture for eight months in 1945 and 1946. Being the baby in the family, I think Mom sheltered me a lot.

I have only vague memories of the last part of the Depression and how people dealt with the hardships that resulted. But I do remember Mom and Dad talking about a young man by the name of Frank Levanduski who stayed with us for a period of time. I think he had been "on the bum" as many others were at that time and had stopped by to see if he could do some work for a meal. One thing led to another and Dad told him he had no money to pay him but he could work for room and board. So that arrangement was agreed to. I don't know how long he stayed. It may have been several months or a couple of years. Frank was probably in the service during World War II and settled in the area. Years later I remember he came to Dad's viewing.

# THE FARMSTEAD

I'm using this terminology to describe the center of our family activity, that being our home, the barn and the other out buildings. Our home was a two story structure. I remembering my Dad saying that he thought the original portion of the main and principal residence was built about 1820. There were additions over the years. In those times you didn't go to Lowes and buy windows framed and glazed. Everything was built onsite. I remember Dad saying that of the twenty-six windows in the house, no two were the same size. Interesting that the four windows in the living and dining rooms have old, antique glass in them with the bubbles which is much sought after by folks doing restorations. Lacking storm windows or insulated glass panes, it was not unusual on very cold days to have ice formed on the inside of the glass especially in the kitchen.

The house was large and on the first floor contained a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, a parlor, a lavatory, a bedroom, an office area and a utility room which we called "the junk room". The second floor contained a bath and five bedrooms.

The picture below shows the view from the porch looking east. The baseball field is beyond the yard fence. To the far right one can see the back stop and the logs where the team members sat. The railroad trestle is beyond as are some of the buildings. Beyond the trestle and in line with the back stop is the peak of an evergreen which I think sat in the yard by the "little house".

This might be a good place to note the existence of a painting by well- renowned, regional artist Malcolm Parcell titled "W and W Railroad – Dunns Station". It captured the view from home, looking towards the railroad station, trestle and surrounding countryside as it might have appeared in the early Twentieth Century.

Electricity didn't find its way to our area until about 1940 and energy was supplied by the natural gas well on the farm. I can recall the gas mantels that provided lighting prior to that. We never had central heating and the house was warmed by small gas fired radiant stoves. I remember seeing snow on the floor of the bedroom that my brother and I shared. The snow had seeped in from around the window.

There were several outbuildings for livestock, storing grain and equipment. The Barn was of course the biggest structure. The lower level was used primarily for livestock. The portion that was used for milking the dairy cows had a low ceiling and was really dark and dank. The cats would always gather when we were milking, in the expectation that Dan or I would squirt milk towards their open mouths. Usually our aim wasn't that good but the cats would lick it off their bodies. The cows were secured by wooden stanchions and would eat hay or grain while being milked.

The upper part of the barn was used for storing hay.. The hay was brought in to the area on the wagon and then a hay fork and metal track across the barn ceiling was used to lift the hay up and into the mows. It was hot work.

There were items of bygone times stored in the upper level of the barn. I recall a surrey, two sleighs that would have been horse drawn and another strange device that would have been used to blow chaff out of wheat or oats in the times when threshing was a hand operation.

The final thing that I remember about the barn had to do with its design and construction. The superstructure consisted of massive hand hewn oak beams. Clearly there was a plan because the beams were marked by ax cut roman numerals.

The last time I was in the area the barn was in poor shape, some of the stone walls were falling apart and the whole structure was leaning over. I suspect its days are numbered.

# ELEMENTARY SCHOOLING

Most of what I can recall probably starts with when I entered elementary school in the fall of 1940. That was the last year that school was only eight months long. The Dunns Station school house was located about a quarter of a mile from home. I have no idea when it was built, but its last year of use was the 1943-1944 school year when I was in fourth grade. I don't know when it was demolished, probably in the late Forties or early Fifties, but it's been gone a long time.

The school site itself consisted of a triangular piece of land bounded on two sides by roads. At the rear of the property were the two privies and a crude structure where coal was stored. There was an open area in the front of the building that couldn't be called a playground, but I can remember playing marbles there in good weather. The area across the unimproved road and sloping up to the railroad tracks served as a play area for some of us. There was no playground equipment.

I'll describe the school building from memory. It was a one-room school and accommodated grades one through six. There was a covered porch along the full front of the building, with a knee wall along two sides and steps up from the ground on one end. In the middle of the porch and in front was a hand pump and sink that was the drinking water supply. From the porch there was a single door in the middle that led into the cloakroom. From the cloakroom, which wasn't very deep, doors on either side led into the classroom. I think there were closets on either side for supplies and that backed into the cloakroom. The main part of the room consisted of parallel rows of desks where you sat with a writing area in front that lifted up with storage area for books underneath. At the top there was a hole drilled to hold the bottle of ink.

At the far end of the room there was a raised stage about eight inches high. There was an overhead wire at the front and some type of cheap curtain for performances. The far wall at the back of the stage was covered with slate blackboards for arithmetic and other exercises. There was a piano in front of the stage to the right. The teacher's desk was in the front.

The room was somewhat dominated by the traditional pot belly stove in the center of the room. It was not a terribly efficient heating system. When it got really cold, if your desk was at the side of the room, one side of you was comfortable and the other side was freezing. I remember one or two times when it was extremely cold that the teacher let us push the desks towards the center of the room. When it got really warm in those situations sometimes the odor of skunk came out of some of the boy's outer clothing, a product of their wildlife trapping activities. Usually one of the older boys had the job of coming a bit early and building the fire. There was kindling wood to start and coal and a bottle of crude oil to get things going. I remember one instance on a cold morning the fire was having trouble to get started and the kids were gathered around while Kenny Gray was trying speed it up. He took the bottle of crude oil and gave it a good shot. Bad move! There was a minor explosion and the stuff exhausted out the front and some kids got some minor burns, nothing serious. Nobody got sued.

Discipline was usually pretty tough and quick. But I guess with six grades and forty kids the teacher had to be at the top of her game and there was no place for democracy. The teacher's name was Florence Earnest. Everybody called her Flossie, not to her face of course. Corporal punishment was the procedure and in the Dunns Station school it was meted out with a double sided hard leather strap. It was about 15 to 18 inches long and probably 2 to 3 inches wide. The smaller kids had it applied to their butt and the older ones to their back. Girls were not very often whipped.

A few random school memories. There were big high windows in the school, maybe three or four on each side. When it was warm in the fall and spring, ventilation was provided by opening the windows. To keep any wind from blowing papers around, there was an angled board on the inside of the window sill that would divert it upward. There was a hive of honey bees that nested in the attic above one of the windows and each fall when school started, the area between the window and that board would be filled with dead bees and had to be cleaned out. I recall being at the school one evening after the war started when it was filled with people and everybody was getting signed up for food and gasoline rationing stamps. That would probably have been in 1942.

I'll try and describe how the educational process was carried out. In first grade we learned to read through a process using flash cards. Very simple words were printed on cards that were probably three by six inches in size. Each student was given a certain number of these cards each day and homework consisted of memorizing them by what they looked like. At some point when we had learned enough words, we got a small book that put the words together in some simple story. This was the Dick and Jane story and that's how we learned to read. I don't recall how far into the school year we used the flash cards but we never learned the alphabet until late in first grade.

I can't remember much else about the process. It seems to me that the kids in the younger grades were called to the front of the room to recite when it was time to read or spell. I recall that a lot of the arithmetic exercises were done at the blackboard. We went to the blackboard to diagram sentences and learn grammar. Penmanship was also an important subject. I think I'm correct that at the end of eighth grade you got a writing certificate if your writing was up to standard. I don't think they spend much, if any, time on those subjects today.

I have other specific memories about school mates. One of my buddies and I during good weather at lunch hour would go outside and eat our lunch somewhere away from the school. I came to notice that he always had the same thing in his lunch box. It consisted of a sandwich made of two slices of homemade bread with nothing but a spread of mustard in between. Sometimes he would have an orange. He said they got the oranges from "relief" which didn't really mean anything to me at the time. Obviously, it was a family in tough financial straits.

Each school day started with a short program including reading the Bible, reciting the Lord's Prayer, singing the National Anthem, and the pledge to the Flag. I also recall that on some mornings that there was a short program. I think that was something that happened just once a week and students took turns making up the program which usually consisted of others reciting a poem or singing.

There was usually a Christmas Program. It's hard to remember what was included but for sure some seasonal music and poems and maybe something contemporary. I think it was the year that I was in third grade that I was ambushed by the teacher and my Mom who had the idea that I should render my soprano version of _Paper Doll_ , made a hit that year by the Mills Brothers. I was terrified but was unable to talk my way out of it. I guess that it wasn't too bad. The program always ended with a "treat" being passed out to all the students. My recollection is that it consisted of an orange and some candy and maybe a popcorn ball in a paper bag. Thinking back, I guess that's the only Christmas some of those kids got.

The fall that I was in fourth grade, the autumn colors were especially bright. My Mom got the idea that we should gather some really pretty leaves and make some type of a collage that I could hang on the wall by my desk. I was horrified at the idea. I thought it was a "girly" thing and I would be teased by the guys. I remember walking to school carrying my books in one arm with this "thing" dangling from the other as if it was a dead skunk. As it turned out the teacher, of course, thought it was wonderful and nobody gave me the business.

I only attended the Dunns Station School for my first four years. At that time the Township School Board decided to make a fundamental change in our schools. Dad was on the school board at the time and I believe he was the instigator. Up to that time the system consisted of several one room elementary schools. A separate and more substantial building in the village of Prosperity was the five room township high school. So the change involved doing away with the one room elementary schools, sending the high school students into Washington to any of three high schools on a tuition basis, and using the former township high school building as a consolidated grade school. Most of the kids in the township chose to attend Trinity High School which offered Vocational Agriculture. Dan and I attended East Washington High School.

I'll digress a bit and tell you about Prosperity. It was the largest village in the Township. It consisted of several structures close together along a single road. My guess is that there were about two dozen residences and three commercial buildings, a general store, a smaller retail outlet and an auto repair facility. The Upper Ten Mile Presbyterian Church was located just beyond the village proper to the south. I can recall our family going to Grange meetings at Prosperity. I think they were held in the church basement. The official name of the Grange is the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry. Formed right after the Civil War, its purpose was to be a social and fraternal organization for its members and to be an advocate for agricultural interests. Sounds like a lobbying organization which it still is. All I remember as a kid were these boring meetings. I think there were always refreshments. I do remember Dad always falling asleep at the meetings and there was some woman that would get semi-hysterical watching his head wobble and jerk. In retrospect, I realize now the poor guy was tired. Up at five in the morning, milk the cows, get ready for work, teach all day, come home and milk again and then go to a meeting would be enough to tire anybody out.

My remaining three years in grade school were at the Prosperity school. I skipped a grade and thus only spent seven years in grade school. There were two classrooms on the first floor for the first and second grades. The principal's office was also on the first floor. There were two rooms on the second floor, one for the fifth and sixth grade and the other for the seventh grade. The single classroom in the basement level was occupied by the eighth grade. There were moveable doors between the two rooms on the second floor that when open would create one large room. The only time that I can ever recall that being used was for a community entertainment by a small country music group.

The first and second grade classes were a self-contained. I have no idea how the process was conducted. With the other grades, we changed classes during the school day and we had different subjects from each of the three teachers. That broke up the day somewhat. I have few recollections about the process. My sense is that it was somewhat more relaxed than what we had experienced at the Duns Station School. Certainly it was much less stressful for the teachers. The parcel of land on which the school was situated extended to the rear of the building to a depth of a couple of hundred feet. I guess that you could say it was a playground, but there was no equipment and it was pretty barren and stony. At recess times the kids would go out there and wander around. On one or both sides of the building there was a concrete walkway where I remember some of the girls skipping rope or playing hopscotch.

I remember one playground incident that was pretty ugly. A boy who was in my grade and was a bit on the slow side secretly brought a BB gun to school. I have no idea how he managed that feat. So, on the morning recess he was out on the playground with his BB gun acting like a big shot. Someone went in the school and told the teachers. Mrs. Thompson, the head teacher, came out immediately in a vengeful mood. She grabbed the BB gun out of his hands by the barrel and proceeded to beat him with it, savagely and repeatedly. Even by standards of the time, this was a brutal event. The boy spent the rest of the day with his head down on the desk and moaning. He didn't return to school for two or three days and then moved like an elderly man. Imagine how that would be received in today's world! There were no repercussions but nobody else ever brought a BB gun to school after that.

Here's another anecdote from my time at the Prosperity School. In those days there were no field trips or school related excursions. However, at least one year there was a trip to Pittsburgh to the Zoo and some other attractions and it was school sanctioned. It was put on by a private entity, I think. In order to participate you had to sell so many units of "something". My guess it was rosebud salve. I had apparently qualified to go on the trip but I believe it was the year of my broken arm and other health issues. It was touch and go as to whether Mom and Dad would let me go but they did. It was dark when they drove me to Prosperity to catch the bus and it was dark when we got back. I don't remember much about what we saw and where we had lunch but it was a big deal.

There was also a Minstrel Show that was in some way connected to the school because we made posters to publicize it. The entertainers were in blackface and would be politically incorrect now.

I completed my elementary schooling in 1947. I received the American Legion award and got my picture in the Washington Observer along with kids from other schools in the County similarly honored.

Pictured below is a photograph of me and my classmates, a few of which are still with us. I believe the picture is from the previous year when we were in seventh grade. That's me on the far right.

# ON THE HOMEFRONT

My elementary school years coincided with our country's activities during World War II. I had several older cousins that were in the service and we were very patriotic. I was so proud of the soldier uniform I received as a Christmas present. In my fantasy world I was sure the secret hiding places on the farm that I had identified would serve me well in repelling hordes of invading foreign troops.

December 7, 1941 was Pearl Harbor Day, the day that the United States entered into World War. It was also the day that I came down with the mumps. I was confined to the guest bedroom. Neither Dan nor Dad had ever had the mumps and they weren't anxious to get infected, particularly Dad.

Of a practical nature were the various activities in which young people were engaged relating to the war effort. I remember the weekly ritual in our one room school when our Teacher directed the selling of saving stamps that we pasted in the books to buy war bonds. It was rare that anyone had more than the quarter that was the price of one stamp. Seventy-five Quarters or $18.75 bought a bond that would mature in ten years for $25.

On a few occasions we were given an afternoon off from school to scour the countryside for newspapers and tin cans. They were stored in one end of the cloakroom until a truck appeared one day to take them away. Somewhat out of the ordinary was the collection of milkweed pods. We were told that they were to be used in life preservers to replace the usual material, kapok, that was no longer readily available. We were given a supply of the large mesh onion sacks for the project and paid twenty-five cents per bag. I spent most of a Saturday walking over our 200 acre farm to collect two bags full.

I have a vague recollection of the evening event at the school when families signed up for their gasoline rationing stickers and food rationing stamps. More memorable are the many times my mother would send me to the general store with a grocery list and the book of ration stamps. I often had the task of mixing the powder with the margarine to achieve the color of butter which was in short supply.

My brother and I were Junior Commandoes. This entity was a morale booster and was sponsored by one of the Pittsburgh newspapers and through the Sunday school classes in our

Church. The purpose was to enlist young people in identifying sources of scrap metal and other needed war materials. We felt really special in our overseas caps and junior commando sweatshirts. How about those knickers?

My parents were both smokers and cigarettes were one of the commodities in limited supply. You could, however, buy the loose tobacco and the papers. I recall the regular evening activity of my Dad sitting at the kitchen table and using the little machine to roll out the next day's supply of smokes for the two of them.

Housewives were encouraged to make laundry lye soap using grease from animal fat and Mom got into that. She liked its effectiveness on work clothes and continued making and using it long after the War. No big celebration in Dunns Station at the war's end.

One of our older cousins, Reed Hufford spent time with us the summer of 1945 after he got out of the POW camp and VE Day.

The picture is of Reed and Dan in out front yard from that time.

By contemporary standards, our life style on the home front during the war years would seem almost primitive. I suppose there were people that complained about shortages and the rationing of food and gasoline. However, I don't recall ever hearing about that.

# EAST WASHINGTON HIGH SCHOOL

I entered high school as a freshman in the fall of 1947. I don't recall any anxiety or apprehension about making that move. I always liked school and looked forward to its start every year. Dan had graduated from there the preceding spring and during the previous four years our family had attended athletic and musical events at the school so I was comfortable with it. Dad had taught there for several years but had moved on to teach at Washington High before I was a student at East Washington. East Washington Borough is adjacent to the City of Washington and was incorporated in 1892. I have no idea when the high school came into being. The building's architecture looks to be from the 1920's. There were a lot of high schools built at that time in the state. Its purpose of course was to serve the Borough residents but it also served students from outlying rural areas on a tuition basis. Most of the students from outside the Borough lived to the east from Somerset and the Eighty-Four area. It's worth noting that the borough was and is somewhat more affluent than the City and surrounding areas. It is also adjacent to Washington and Jefferson College, which perhaps added to its prestige.

There were thirty-one of us in my graduation class. Nineteen were from the Borough and the rest from outlying areas. This was my first experience of having contact with others from outside my religious/ethnic/racial group. There were four Jewish, an equal number of Catholics and two black girls. While in general there didn't seem to be any lines drawn, the two black girls stayed pretty much to themselves. Some of the country kids didn't get involved in extra-curricular activities to any great extent. Over half of the class were college bound and took appropriate courses. The rest took general courses and went light on the math and science. A few of the girls who aspired to secretarial or office work would go uptown to Penn Commercial in the afternoon for typing, shorthand, book- keeping and the like.

The emphasis was definitely on academics but there was also interest in athletics, especially on the part of the students. Football, basketball and baseball were the sports in which we competed with other schools of similar size. The year I was a junior we had a pretty good football team and we won six games and lost two. The primary reason for our success was the two senior tackles, Bill Kenny and Roy White. They were big guys by the standards of the time and place, probably somewhere between 180 and 200 pounds. Our offense ran the Single Wing which was a power game. In my senior year we didn't fare so well. I think the record was 4 – 4- and 1.

Basketball was the area where we excelled. For several years we won section championships. I recall going to playoff games but we never got to the WPIAL championship. We were one of the smallest schools in the area and I think one of the reasons that we excelled in basketball was that the Borough elementary school was only a few blocks from the high school. The elementary school students had physical education at the high school and got introduced to basketball at that time. Few of the country kids ever made the team, since most never had a basketball in their hands prior to high school. In my case Dad had rigged up a set up in the barn consisting of a couple of wide boards for a bank board and a bent pipe hoop. The basketball was a cast off from where he taught. It had a pronounced lump on one side but it worked.

We had baseball but I never was involved until my senior year. I guess it was because the games, home and away, were always played right after school got so it was tough if you had to get your ride home. I did play in my senior year and did okay. There was a steep hill in left field and I was the only one who could handle that from my experience with the field at home. I also played first base some. That was about the extent of my athletic activity. The most I ever weighed in High School was about 120 pounds which sort of ruled out football. I was team manager for three years and earned my letter which got me into the Letterman Club.

I played basketball one year but never got beyond the junior varsity. Actually my Mom was concerned with me playing basketball as she thought that at some earlier age I might have had rheumatic fever which could have affected my heart. I don't know where she got that idea . In any event I got bribed to not play basketball. The bribe was a 16 gauge shotgun. It worked and I believe the gun is still with my son. I think that it's interesting that given the time and place my folks thought that having a gun and hunting was less dangerous than playing athletics.

I was involved in some of the school activities. I was the class vice president for my last three years and on the Student Council for a couple of years. The Pilot Yearbook says that I was in the Chorus but I have no memory of that. I was in the senior class play entitled the "Perfect Idiot". My role was as a psychiatrist, I had about two lines and muffed them. I entered an essay contest that somebody sponsored for high school students. I wrote on the topic of "Hire the Handicapped, It's Good Business". I believe I came in second and won $25.

I was in the Stag Club which was sort of like a fraternity and was supposed to be a literary group. There were monthly meetings at the member's homes. A few of the members would review current event topics. The main thing was the food served after the program. No Mom wanted to be outdone so we ate well.

As far as academics were concerned, I was in the top fourth or fifth. Math, chemistry and physics were not strong subjects for me and they pulled my averages down. I think Jean Ward was the top student.

The fact that I had skipped a grade in grade school meant that I was a year younger than most of my classmates, which put me at a disadvantage as far as social life was concerned. I didn't have my driver's license until I was a senior which also limited me. I never had a girlfriend in high school from among my class mates. In my senior year a girl from home, Edith Hickman, and I saw a lot of each other. She went to Trinity High school. I will admit that I was really attracted to one of my classmates, Eleanor Bruno, throughout high school. For a lot of reasons nothing really clicked. I went to the Prom both my Junior and Senior years but I cannot recall who my dates were. They were a year or two behind me.

I don't recall ever getting into trouble in high school. There weren't all that many opportunities. In my senior year I was driving and would drop off Dad at Wash High and then go on over to East Wash. On a few occasions, a couple of friend and I would drive up town at lunch hour and play pool. We came close to getting back late. And there was the incident of somebody putting a dead skunk in the fan room in the basement. This controlled the ventilation for the building. I'm pretty sure this was the handiwork of some of the guys in my class but nobody got caught. The end of the streetcar line was in front of the school. Sometimes after school let out in the afternoon some of the guys would give the motorman a hard time by pulling the arm down that accessed the electricity in the overhead line.

High school was an altogether positive experience. Our class had frequent reunions over the years but so many had passed on that we missed the 60th and I suppose there will be no more.

# FAMILY & RELATIVES

Both of Mom and Dad's families were large and I had a lot of Aunts and Uncles. I had a total of twenty-six first cousin. Among the cousins, I guess that you could say that I was a "tweener" which is to say that I had several cousins older than me and a few younger but hardly any close to my age. The closest to me in age was Jeanette Yearkey who was born in 1932. The heart of the Great Depression was not a really good time to bring infants into the world. Another generality is that we seemed to have more contact with the people on Dad's side of the family than with Mom's siblings and their offspring. This probably was because we lived in the home place where Dad and his siblings grew up and it may have served as a cohesive factor. Also Mom's siblings were somewhat more geographically scattered.

During my childhood there was a good deal of interaction with relatives. It was pretty common for Sunday afternoon visits especially among the our family and those of Dad's two age closest siblings, Bud and Kathryn. I recall those kinds of visits with mainly two of Mom's sibling families. One exception to that was Mom's brother Quay (M. S. Quay Debolt). We'll guess that Mom's father was a staunch Republican since Matthew S. Quay was the "boss" of the state Republican Party during the 1880's and the 1890's. Quay who was also known as Mose never married and served in the military during World War I. He was gassed which may have led to his early death in 1940. I remember being with Mom at the graveside military service and they presented her with the folded flag. He had an old buddy who had a car and I recall seeing them drive up the lane on a Sunday afternoons to visit, maybe more than once.

Aunt Lucille was my Dad's youngest sister but several years older than he. She never married and was "the unclaimed treasure". She visited with us a good bit, especially during summer when she wasn't teaching. I remember being in her apartment in Homestead where she taught high school home economics. We didn't visit her too many times but on at least one occasion when we were returning home after dark, we passed an area where they were dumping molten slag from one of the steel mills down the side of the dump. It was an exciting pyrotechnical display and very impressive to a youngster. I have recollections from her visits to home when we would take her into Washington to return by street car to the Pittsburgh area and on to Homestead. On at least one occasion we took her to catch the train at the station at the bottom of Main Street for her return. Pretty exciting with the coal smoke, steam and train whistle. That must have been during the war since train passenger service dried up pretty quick after that. Aunt Lucille was very family oriented. She corresponded regularly with her nephews when they were in the service. She was very protective of her siblings and tough on the in-laws.

Dad's mother was Anna Mary Jackson. She died in 1936. She was the daughter of James A. Jackson, a Civil War veteran. Anna Mary's oldest sibling was Permilia Isadora Jackson, known to people in my generation as Aunt Dorie. She died in 1952 at the age of 97. I recall going with Dad to visit her probably in the late 1940's in Taylorstown beyond Washington. All I can remember is being in this dark room and this wizened up old lady. I think Dad was a favorite of hers and she wanted to see his son that carried the Jackson name. I think it's kind of neat that between us, Aunt Dorie and I, we spanned parts of three centuries.

I guess that I'll conclude this section by giving my observations as to how the four of us in our immediate family interacted with each other. I want to emphasize that this will be my take and Dan might have a different perspective. My recollections are for the most part positive. The only times I can recall tension or arguments between Mom and Dad it was over money. Mom tended to be a worrier and more of a pessimist. Dad on the other hand was somewhat of an optimist. One of his favorite expressions was -"Oh, something will turn up."

There was a strong link between Dan and Dad and my connection was with Mom. Some this had to do with the fact that I was the baby in the family and through the early years I was sick a lot and home with Mom. Dan and Dad were intellectually close, both being strong in academics subjects like math and science. Those subjects were certainly not my cup of tea.

I was more aligned with Mom in such things as literature and history. One of the family jokes was when something was being discussed of a technical nature, Mom would say to Dad in kind of an exasperated way – "Oh, I know, I wouldn't be able to understand that since I never had Solid Geometry." Dad had apparently made that statement sometime in the past and she never allowed him to forget it.

The connection between Dad and Dan was strong. In part it may have been because Dan was first born and from the get-go he followed Dad around as his mentor. That relationship grew over the years and I suppose it wouldn't be accurate to call it spiritual. Maybe physic would be better. I'll relate some things Dan told me that occurred around the time of Dad's death. The last time the family was together was the weekend of November 24-25, 1962. Dan and his family were living in Cincinnati and I was living in Harrisburg. It was a pleasant time and after lunch on Sunday we were saying our _good byes_ and preparing to leave. Dan related that as he spoke to Dad he said – " _Well, I'm glad we were able to spend this time together because_...and at that point he stopped and added some lame phrase, because it was on the tip of his tongue to say _because I'm never going to see you again_." It concerned him so much that when he got home to Cincinnati that evening he called back with the excuse that he just wanted to let them know they had arrived safely. In reality he was concerned about Dad. The following Tuesday, the day Dad passed away, Dan had a business trip to Philadelphia. He was having lunch and when he was paged for a telephone call, he knew what the message was about before he picked up the phone.

I always had a feeling of being safe and secure and I think it's fair to say our immediate family was pretty stable. Bumps in the road did occur, of course, and Dan, being older, may have a broader recollection. I think money issues popped up from time to time. I think I remember some distress over the ability to pay the annual interest on the private mortgage on the farm. And I believe there were occasions when Mom thought Dad was too easily out-bargained when it came to selling farm products. There were some medical events along the way. I recall that Mom had surgery of some sort during the Forty's at Waynesburg Hospital. In the aftermath we had a "hired girl" for a few weeks or months. In the fall of 1945 while returning from a cleanup day at the church cemetery, I fell from the farm wagon and severely fractured my left arm. There ensued several months of misery and poor medical care. But at that time _medical malpractice_ was not part of the lexicon. The major and scary event was when Dan contracted Spinal Meningitis and I think that was in either 1944 or 1945. Fortunately sulfa drugs had come on the scene which enabled the positive outcome.

#  OTHER CHILDHOOD AND TEEN RECOLLECTIONS

Let me tell you about my lifetime fear of the telephone. The instrument we had in our home was called a pedestal telephone. They probably are in museums somewhere. That was not really the problem. The service was provided by the Amity Farmers Telephone Company, which I think was started by my Grandfather. Dan has told me that there was more than one phone in Grand Dad's Office area. It was totally a party line service. There may have been three lines and each line may have had a dozen or so customers. There were no dials or key pads and your number was a combination of long and short rings. To make a call you cranked accordingly. Our number was 2R11, which meant we were on line two and our number was one long ring and one short ring. You had to listen carefully to know if someone was calling you. What made the process even more exciting (or in my case terrifying) when you were on the phone was the fact that other people on the line would pick up their phone either by accident or intentionally and listen to your conversation, If more than one person did this the power on the line would diminish along with the ability to carry on the conversation. There was one lady on our line who regularly listened to many conversations and thought nothing of it. Given all this, imagine if you will a painfully shy thirteen or fourteen year old boy trying to call a girl for a date. Many decades latter this senior citizen will still go at great lengths to avoid using the telephone.

Let me tell you about the water supply on the farm. Sometime in the mid to late thirties it was decided to put in a water supply system. I'm not sure what the previous water source was but perhaps it was the hand dug well by the milk house. Dad said it was polluted and we never used it for anything but to cool the milk cans. So there were a couple of springs up near the ridge at the south end of the farm. They fed into a small brick reservoir not far from the oil well up there at the edge of the woods. From there a metal line ran down to serve the two residences on the farm and two others nearby. Most of the time the system worked pretty well and because of the high elevation of the reservoir the water pressure was terrific. But there were times when leaks developed. Dad said that when they put the line in, they drilled holes to blow dirt out and the wooded plugs they put in rotted out over time. There was at least one time when there was a long winter cold spell and the line got frozen. I think that was a Christmas morning, No water. Because of these situations, we were very conscious of not wasting water, to an extreme. I think it was not until I was married that I learned that not everybody bathed in two inches of water. Usually in the spring we'd go up to check out the reservoir to be assured that it had survived the winter okay. It was not unusual to find one or two dead squirrels floating on top of the water.

You may have never heard of the "juveneers". During my teenage years there were a few of us that hung out together. We would often gather around at the Station in the evenings during good weather. We never did anything disruptive or damaged anything but I suppose we were a little loud at times and perhaps annoyed some of the older men that frequented the place. One of them, Jap Hayden, who wasn't the sharpest tack in the box, seemed particularly bothered by us and our antics. He apparently had come by the term "juvenile delinquent" but his abbreviated and imprecise translation came out as "juveneer". "They're nothing but a bunch of juveneers." Well, we loved it and in a later era would have had T shirts made up. Anyway we found ourselves challenged to play a trick on him. His vehicle was a Model A Ford Coupe. One evening when he was inside the store we lifted the rear end of car up and placed a large block of wood under the rear axle so that the wheels were slightly off the ground. Later he came out to leave, started the engine, engaged the clutch and the car wouldn't move. He made several tries and roared the engine to no avail. Meanwhile we were beside ourselves with merriment. Finally he went back inside the store to seek help. We quickly removed the block of wood and when Jap and some others came back the car moved without a problem. As far as I know none of us ever revealed our part in the incident. The juveneers had their revenge.

We had a lot of fun together for a couple of summers, probably 1949 and 1950. Pete Six was working for Roy Cooper at a farm over by Amity somewhere and he had use of a jeep to go back and forth to work. So he provided transportation for the Juveneers in the evenings and on the weekends. We would go down to Waynesburg where the big attraction was a drive-in restaurant. We would try to position the jeep and ourselves so that a particular girl, car-hop would wait on us. As I recall she was the biggest and I'm not refereeing to weight or height. The car-hop would put a four or five inch cardboard square with a number on your window to keep the orders straight. For some reason we thought it was great fun to drive off with those cards after consuming our food.

We covered a lot of territory in that jeep, around home, throughout Greene County and touched the edges of West Virginia. We seldom started out with any destination in mind and would just drive for two or three hours. I remember one time that we made it to Moundsville, West Virginia that many people would have heard of, but no more exciting that having passed through the villages of Time and Dog Town in Greene County. I recall a couple of Saturday or Sunday afternoons we were out along deserted secondary roads. A couple of us had our 22 rifles along and if we saw a rabbit or groundhog up ahead, we'd blast away. I don't believe we ever hit anything. I suppose that's the closest we ever came to getting in trouble.

Let me tell you about our experience with gun powder and attempts at building a cannon. This again was during the teen age years. We had experimented earlier with trying to make gun powder from charcoal, sulphur and salt peter although I can't recall from where we got the ingredients. Using these concoctions to produce homemade firecrackers resulted in only fizzlers.

The father of one of the guys loaded his own high powered rifle shells and had the "real stuff" in quantity which was much more explosive than black powder. Having given up on making firecrackers we decided to try and make a gun or cannon of some sort. So in Dad's workshop, we cut a two foot length of two inch pipe, threaded the one end and screwed on a cap. Just ahead of the cap we drilled a one-eighth inch fuse hole. Up the hollow back of the barn we chained the contraption in the fork of a tree, loaded it with close to a cup of gun powder and tamped it really hard with shredded newspaper as wadding. We stuck a "barnburner" match head first into the fuse hole, lit the back end of the match and ran to and hunkered down into the dry creek bed several feet away and awaited results. The outcome was a dramatic, unparalleled event in the history of Dunns Station and louder than any of us had imagined. The explosion had snapped the chain in several placed and blown the back out of the cannon. We surveyed the wreckage and headed back to the house, rightly suspecting that someone would be coming out to investigate. That turned out to be Mom. We fessed up and assured her that there would be no repetition of this activity. Later we figured out that the cannon needed to be made stronger and that we had loaded it way too heavy. I won't go into all the details but we proceeded accordingly. We found other remote locations to use the new version and learned to dig a small pit and fire it skyward like a mortar. We would use old flashlight batteries or walnuts as projectiles and marvel at the heights they would achieve. It was great fun.

My grandfather was a businessman and heavily involved in the oil and natural gas industry from the latter part of the Nineteenth Century and into the 1920's. There was drilling on the farm. The last producing oil well was in the south eastern portion of the farm very close to the water reservoir. The well was brought in around 1900 and was a big producer. It was still being pumped when I was a kid around 1940. I can still remember the booming sound of the engine reverberation around the valley when they pumped. There was another oil well that I remember in the northwestern part of the farm no longer producing but the derrick and engine house remained. There were remnants of two other wells on the farm that must have been dry holes. The big producer was a gas well about a quarter of a mile up the hollow back of the barn. I don't know when it was drilled but we had free gas all through my childhood and it was the source of fuel for heating, cooking and refrigeration. It was also our lighting until electricity got to Dunns Station about 1940.

The reader may be interested to know that the oil and associated natural gas in Pennsylvania is paraffin based, not asphalt based like Oklahoma and Texas and considered to be a specialty lubricant. The natural gas that came into our home was truly natural, right out of the ground and not the kind of processed gas that heats our homes today. In the winter the kitchen was closed up with little ventilation and the oven range and stove along with a floor stove were in almost continuous use. The paraffin in the gas was deposited on the walls which had to be washed down in the spring. Prior to that task one could skim a thin layer of the wax off the wall with your thumb nail.

I mentioned the parlor in our home. During my childhood it was not used on a regular basis. Normally during the winter months the parlor was shut off. There were two exceptions. In the 1930's and 1940's family members that that passed away were usually buried from the home. I know that my grandfather was and perhaps an uncle and two aunts. As a result I usually felt a little uncomfortable in that room. I have a specific memory of Dad taking Dan and me into that room when my grandfather was laid out and he put some of those Marsh Wheeling Stogies that he favored in his inside coat pocket. On the flip side, we always had the Christmas tree in that room and that's where we opened presents. There was one other function served by the parlor. Mom belonged to the Missionary Society at the church. Their big fund raising effort for missions was making and selling quilts. Our parlor was, I guess, the only place large enough for that activity to take place and where the quilting frames were set up. In the evenings three or four ladies would show up and they would work on the quilt for a couple of hours. The stitches of one of the regulars were "not up to standard". Nobody wanted to hurt her feelings so on the next morning after a session, Mom would be in there taking out the offending stitches and replacing them. I have a recollection that at some point there was a spirited discussion about the proposal to raise the price of the finished quilts from $12.00 to $15.00.

I'll elaborate a bit on the brief mention that I made about Christmas. I have fond memories of that holiday season. Gift giving was not emphasized to the degree it is today. In our case, finances precluded excessive spending. During the war years there were items that simply weren't available. I remember being cautioned to use extra care in handling the Christmas tree decorations that had been imports from Austria and Germany many years earlier and were irreplaceable. Rationing seemed to foster a conservative attitude and a willingness to focus on only necessities. I remember that we improvised where possible. We made both hard candy and caramels. You couldn't buy fruitcake but you could buy the candied fruit and make your own. Dad seems to have a particular fondness for the Christmas season. His artistic flair came to the forefront at that time in making of wreaths and other decorations. There were special Christmas programs at the church. Aunt Lucille always joined us for Christmas and in some of the years so did Aunt Gail. Spending the evening of Christmas day at Uncle Bud's was an annual tradition.

# BASEBALL

Baseball was the big, summer excitement in Dunns Station that I remember as a kid and into my teen age years. There was history to it dating back to at least the second decade of the Twentieth Century. I'll include some team pictures and what little I know or can recall about them.

This picture was, I think, the 1918 team. Dan and I think Dad is the second from the right in first full row. These appeared to be top of the line uniforms and my guess is that our grandfather provided the funds for their purchase. Another guess is that the man in the white shirt, front left, is Oscar Miller, who was the farm manager. Have no idea who the other team members are. That's all I know and have no idea if they played in a league or who they played against. The next picture is of the 1922 team.

I don't know a lot about this this team. Of course Dad and Uncle Bud played on the team. I knew some of the others. I knew Sidney Hickman and I played baseball with his son, Bill. Clarence Bristor was a mail carrier. Charles "Chas" Cannon lived in West Union and was always involved with the church. Some of the other names are familiar. Again I know nothing about what teams they played or if they were in a league.

The next pictures are of teams in the 1940's that I was part of as batboy.

First row. Dan Dunn, Bobby Jenkins, (the other) Jack Dunn, Mitch Carvin, unknown, Bud McVay, Rink Phillips, me. Second row. Bob Dunn, next two unknown, Bill Bristor, Mitch Philips. Standing in the rear, Ab Dunn.

I don't know the exact date of this grouping. My guess is that it's 1944 or 1945. I also don't know if the Ten Mile Valley League had come into being at that time.

The baseball field was located in the bottom land between home and the Station. The terrain was pretty flat except for the right field that sloped up towards the Station.

Most of my knowledge has to do with the team in the late Forty's. This team was made up of some of the younger players and augmented by some of the guys that had returned from military service in World War II. The team played in the Ten Mile Valley League and won several championships. My recollection is that the league games were two a week. The other teams in the league that I can remember were Lone Pine, Lippincott, Amity and Lagonda. At some point the team's location was switched to the field at Amity. In addition to the league games there were other exhibition games usually on holidays or Sundays. I can recall a game that we played against "somebody" in the County League at a field in Washington. We played a team in Moundsville, West Virginia inside the State prison there. The team was not made up of inmates, however. One or more years we played home and home, double headers with Claysville on Memorial Day and Fourth of July.

The league games were twilight games and they attracted a crowd by my childhood standards, of course. Cars would be parked around the Station and adjoining roads, including the road past our house. The most exuberant fan was Frankie Bristor whose two sons, Bill and Lonnie, played on the team and an older son, Kenny who was the manager. When an outstanding play was made she would let out a "war whoop" that reverberated around the valley.

On a personal level, I never made much of a contribution to the local baseball prowess. I did play the one or maybe two years that we had a youth church league at that level. By the time I was out of high school where I played I did have an opportunity but was never a regular. I only played outfield. A couple of years later, I had summer jobs that conflicted with the game times. I'd be remiss if I'd fail to mention my earliest contact with baseball. I was probably six of seven years old and was in the spectator's area along the third base line. Whoever was batting swung and the bat slipped out of his grip. So I got hit in the back of the head and knocked unconscious; a couple of inches lower and there could have been real negative consequences. Or maybe there were.

# COMING OF AGE

Early in September 1951 I left home to enroll as a freshman at Penn State. It was a several hour trip by automobile since that was before the Interstate Highways and the Pennsylvania Turnpike was not yet completed. Mom and Dad accompanied me. My room was very nice in the new West Halls. It didn't take long to move my clothing into the facility. My recollection of other items that I had is fuzzy but it probably included a notebook, some other papers, pens and pencils. Oh yes! I had fallen heir to my brother's slide rule. That's an item that long ago gave way to calculators. I smile when I see television coverage of students arriving at college in rental trucks transporting computers, elaborate sound systems, television sets and various other sorts of specialized furniture. Quite a contrast!

So what was I doing at Penn State? I don't recall ever being asked by my parents if I wanted to go to college or what curriculum interested me. I guess it was assumed that I was going to college and Penn State was what the family could afford. We didn't have guidance counselors at my high school. There was a Go To College Club but it was all girls. I had no idea in what I wanted to major. Dan said that his fraternity roommate was taking Geography. Well, okay. I had no idea what I was getting into and was troubled by meeting guys who said, "Oh, I knew in sixth grade that I wanted to be a (doctor, engineer, biologist, etc.). Most of those guys only lasted one semester.

The cost of college education was unbelievably low as compared to the current situation. The tuition and fixed fees for one semester was about $125 and room and board in the dorms was about $300. Add to that another $50 for books and you're a bit under $500 per semester.

The first week was for orientation which included meeting with advisors and dorm counselors and taking English placement tests. It was also a time to meet classmates and make new friends. My roommate was Tom Fur bee with whom I graduated from high school. We got along well but developed our own circle of friends. In addition to freshmen the orientation week also included Forestry majors who had spent their first year at the Mount Alto campus. They stood out from the crowd sporting their Mohawk haircuts, also called a Don Eagle after a professional wrestler with a similar coiffure.

In 1951 freshmen were required to wear green "Dinks", a kind of skull cap, and a small sign that listed their name and hometown. We were also supposed to carry their Student Handbook with them at all times. There was some minimal harassment from upper classmen but nothing serious. Those traditions were discontinued in 1969, I understand.

As a freshman I was introduced to ROTC. As a matter of fact it was required of all male freshman and sophomore students as some sort of an obligation the college had as a Land Grant College to the federal government. We had the option of Army, Air Force or Navy units. I don't know how that worked but I ended up in the Army Unit. I recall that weekly there was a one hour classroom lecture for individual sections of platoon size on some military matter. For instance, I believe we learned all about the M1 rifle, the infantry weapon of choice at that time. The other weekly ROTC event was Common Hour know by the students as Comedy Hour or Rabble in Arms. Dressed in our government issued uniforms we acquired our rifles, thankfully lacking firing pins, at the armory, assembled in some nearby spot in company strength and marched to a designated location in the large lawn area in front of Old Main. Eventually the entire mass was thus assembled and after certain inaudible commands among the officers far to the front, someone bellowed the order, "Pass in Review". And so we did, eventually passing by the officers observing "Eyes Right" and "Rifle Salute". We then returned to the armory to dispose or our rifles and back to the dorm to get out of our uniforms in all haste. Some chose to continue ROTC for their remaining two years and at graduation received a reserve officer's commission as a Second Lieutenant.

I'll talk about academics during my four years as an undergraduate. Geography was in the College of Mineral Industries as an earth science. The first two years were heavy in math and science, such as chemistry and physics, subjects in which I did not excel and in reality barely scrapped by. I did not do well and at the end of my sophomore year was below a 1.0 (equivalent to a C). As I got into my major during the last two years, I did very well and pulled my average up to a 2.0. I was on the Dean's List three semesters. I had a limited opportunity to take elective courses. One choice was archeology and without a doubt was my most favorite subject. A course in sociology and two semesters of Spanish were a waste of time. College professors are not rewarded on their skills as teachers and I found that to be the case. The one exception was my second semester chemistry teacher. He helped me to the point that I didn't flunk.

Penn State was and is co-educational, meaning there were both male and female students. I don't know the actual statistics but it was rumored that there were three or four guys to every coed. In my freshman year there was a girls' dorm across the quadrangle from mine but the coeds came over to our building where the dining facilities were located. Some of us would hang out where we could see the females coming and going. We watched and ogled in a juvenile way. I was shy, a year younger than my contemporaries and I don't think I had a date during the four years as an undergraduate. I never joined a fraternity and those guys seemed to have the inside track with the coeds. I might mention in passing that both Dan and Dad had been fraternity members which made me a legacy. I was invited to a "rush" party in my freshman year. My grades prevented me from being pledged but I was lukewarm to the idea in any event. There was a "panty raid" in May of my freshman year that hit most of the girl's dorms but I was not a participant.

During my freshman year most of the guys than I hung out with were from section of the dorm where I lived. We would go to the football and basketball games and the wrestling matches. Rec Hall and Beaver field was just a short walk from our dorm. Sometimes we would walk down to the other end of the campus to the TUB which stood for Temporary Union Building. I believe this building where students could socialize was part of the surplus government housing that the college acquired after WWII. The HUB, the Hetzel Union Building did not come on the scene until 1953. We would also venture downtown for movies. There were two theaters on the main drag, one of which was the State. There was a small, bedraggled theater called the Nittany on Allen Street that featured foreign films. The students referred to it as the Armpit. On up Allen Street was a small place called Vic's who featured real milkshakes made from ice cream and milk, so thick you had to spoon it. Outstanding!!!

I think college frequently involves an introduction to alcohol and it did in my case. Someone with a car was planning a trip to the state liquor store in Bellefonte and I put my order in for a bottle of cheap wine. I drank it that afternoon and got sick as a dog. I remember that on at least one occasion a carload of us drove out to one of the nearby state parks at night with a few quarts of beer and had a cold outdoor beer party.

Following my freshman year my circle of friends consisted mostly of people that I was in class with in my major. It's true that during my undergraduate days the draft for military service was on going and the Korean War was in play. At some point I obtained a student deferment that kept me at arm's length from the military through undergraduate and graduate school.

My class at Penn State was the Centennial Class (1955) and our commencement speaker was President Dwight Eisenhower. I guess that it probably helped that his brother Milton was the University President at that time. I should mention that in 1953 Penn State evolved from a college to a university.

Towards the end of my senior year, having no immediate employment prospects, I applied for and received a graduate assistantship. This was for two years and paid my tuition as well as a stipend for living expenses. I felt really good about that turn of events since my undergraduate years had been totally financed by my parents.

I enjoyed the two years of graduate school although I have to admit that by the end I was feeling a little burnt out by the educational process. There were no graduate student dorms so I found a rental room in a small house in town. It was adequate and functioned as a place to sleep since I now had an office on campus in the Mineral Sciences Building that I shared with a Doctoral candidate. My assistantship required me to devote several hours a week doing work for the department head which primarily consisted of collecting data and preparing illustrations for publications he was writing. I carried a course load of ten credits a semester. The toughest courses were called seminars which usually involved a couple of class meetings at the beginning to get a research assignment and class meetings towards the end to present your findings and have your work critiqued by the professor and your fellow students. I had some opportunity for elective courses in Mineral Economics which was my minor.

The disappointment in graduate school was my expectation that I would be mentored by one or more of the faculty as in "sitting at the knee of the philosopher". Didn't happen! I can't remember which year it was but the Department Head had a holiday tea at his home in December for faculty and staff which was a command performance for the graduate students. The Head and his wife did their best to be good hosts but there was an invisable line separating the faculty on one side of the room and the grad students on the otherside. We couldn't wait to get out of there.

Generally the problem with the program was not the course work which most could handle but the inability to get the required thesis completed and approved for graduation. Many would leave with the goal of completing the thesis later off campus but it seldom happened. The group of eight that I started with were encouraged to start early in selecting a topic and prerparing an outline. Only one of us finished on time for the June commencement. I had my thesis finished but not the final typing and the paperwork with the Graduate School. So I had to wait for the August Commencement to get my degree. That required that I be registed for one credit of research for the summer session which cost me six dollars. Compare that to the current cost of a college credit of hundreds of dollars.

One other requirement for a Masters Degree in the Geography Department was an oral exam. These were not as extensive as those to which Doctoral Candidates were subject but never the less were scary. One appeared before the falculty and staff for one hour of questioning on any aspect of the field. After the questioning you left the room while the faculty discussed your performance. Then you were called in for the verdict. I was told that I didn't do brilliantly but well enough to pass. Whew!

My social life during the two years of graduate school was somewhat more varied and enjoyable than in my undergraduate days. I seemed to acquire a varied group of friends and a few of us would from time to time venture to one of bars downtown where fifty cents would buy a nice size pitcher of beer. So a couple of bucks split three or four ways could finance an hour or two of conversation ranging among topics as varied as world news, academic issues and libido. I had more contact with coeds durimg those years but my finances didn't allow much in the way of dinner dates or anything that was very expensive. Having conversation over coffee and cigarettes could be a pleasant interlude.

During the first year of graduate school I met a young woman to whom I was immediately attracted, Naomi Mermel. She was interested in me but the fact that she was Jewish and I was a free lance Christan made me "forbidded fruit". None the less we spent a good bit of time together the last few months of that school year which was her senior year. We had one real date just before I left for the summer break and had dinner in the area at a nice place called the Eutaw House. Our parting was very emotional for me. I heard from her once in the following year but kept her in my mind for the next forty plus years until we reconnected. More about that later.

During the last few months of graduate school, I made some attempts to seek post-graduation employment. Most were uninterested when I told them that my student deferrement terminated at the end of the semester. The only interesting one was described as a federal government agency said that they couldn't tell me what the salary was, where I'd be working or what I'd be doing. When I relayed that experience back at the department, one of the professors told me that it was probably the CIA.

On May 31st , my student deferrment ran out. The next day, I received a notice that I was reclassified to A-1 and ordering me to report to Pittsburgh for my pre-induction physical. As it turned out the butchery performed on my broken arm back in the Forties, rendered me Permanently Discqualified for military service. I subsequently was reclassified as 1-Y. None of my friends had ever heard of that and I said maybe it stood for "after the women and children".

At this point, I was back at Penn State overseeing the typing of my thesis and waiting for commencement. Having no funds coming in with the demise of the assistantship I found a few odd jobs and worked at the cafeteria in the HUB for my meals. I spent some time in the Placement Office seeking companies that might be looking for graduates. In those days the atmosphere in the summer was entirely different than in the regular school year. There were many less undergrads and more graduate students. That year there were a number of NATO air force personnel taking meteorology and related courses. In general it was a relaxed and fun time.

By August of 1957, commencement was over and I was back in Dunns Station with a diploma and no job. But with a stroke of luck, my quasi-retirement soon came to an end. The previous summer I had a job with the engineering firm of Michael Baker, Jr., Inc. located in Rochester, Pennsylvania in their tax mapping unit. At that time I was reunited with a friend, Norman Howenstein, who was working in the company's planning section. I visited with Norman and his wife several times over that summer and he told me about the work they did in his section. I was aware that community planning was one of the possible fields for people with degrees in geography. So out of the blue I got a phone call from Norman telling me that they had a lot of work and were looking for new employees. Long story short, I got in touch with the company, had an interview and was hired on the spot. It's worth noting that my starting salary was $5400 annually which was $600 more than what my father was making as a school teacher wtihe 20 years experience.

So in September 1957 my education was complete, I was gainfully employed and hopefully ready to become a productive member of society.

# UPS AND DOWNS IN THE FIRST DECADE

The first several years of my post-college life were a period of significant change in my personal and professional life. They coincided with significant political and cultural changes that were occuring nationally.

My first place of residence and employment was Beaver County which is centered at the location where the Ohio River after forming at Pittsburgh and flowing west makes a sharp turn to south. I think that it's fair to say that it's a blue collar area or was when I lived there. Steel mills and other heavy industry were dominate, many of which are probably gone now. As I noted before I was employed by an enginering firm in their planning division. In 1961 I resigned from that position and obtained employment with the Bureau of Community Development in the Pennsylvania Department of Commerce and was stationed in Harrisburg, as a Regional Supervisor. I left that situation in 1965 and became the Director of the York County Planning Commission , a position I held until my retirement in 2000.

My work experiences were in the main very satisfying and offered me many opportunities to grow professionally. The first job assignments that I had were not in the area of community planning but rather dealt with industrial facility locations and marketing. These consisted of a series of contracts with the Ward Baking Company that examined several of their marketing areas in eastern United States. The objective was to determine optimum locations for their production and distribution facilities. I felt very comfortable with these work assignments. It was an exciting time for a neophyte in the working world and included my first opportunity for air travel and business trips to New York, Boston and Orlando.

It was in my second year with the firm that I got assigned to some community planning efforts. The projects that I recall were the Borough of Koppel in Beaver County, Upper St. Clair Township in Allegheny County and the City of Corry in Erie County. The firm had a branch office in Charleston, West Virginia and I was involved in contracts with several communities in that State. We had a small office library that contained reports of the sort that we were engaged with and they were something of a guide. In the main though I was engaged in a lot of on the job learning.

When I changed jobs in 1961 I found myself in a different type of work that was almost entirely administrative in nature. Our primary function was to administer and supervise state and federal funds used by local government units for planning, housing and redevelopment activities. My responsibilty included a multi-county area in the central part of the state. The job involved a good deal of travel. As compared to my previous job I had greater opportunity to connect with other professsionals in the field.

In 1965 I assmed the position of Director of the York County Planning Commission. It was a major change from the previous two situations. For the first time I had the responsibility of being in charge of a staff of thirty-people and directing their work efforts. I had no experience in personnel matters and budgeting, as well as associated financial management issues. I found myself guided by a commisssion of nine individuals who functioned much as board of directors would in the private sector. I immediately found myself faced with a number of challenges. The agency had serious financial problems. Foremost was the fact that the agency had spent the bulk of a federal grant on public relations efforts that were not part of the work program at the expense of technical planning efforts that had not been completed. At the same time I discovered that some of our activities in the previous two years had offended major community institutions along with the CountyCommissioners and the City of York. It was clear that financial retreachment was in order and we needed to get engaged in "bridge building" with various community entities. It took the better part of three years to turn the problem areas around where I felt comfortable to undertake some new initiatives.

I'll mention one, somewhat unusual task that we undertook during this early period. This was at the heighth of the Cold War and there were concerns about the possibilty of nuclear attacks. Federal funding was available for the identification of structures as potential community fallout shelters. Our agency along with other entities was engaged in that effort specifically in preparing a public awareness document that included maps showing shelter locations. Of course the shelters never were used or occupied but our planning effort seemed quite relevant at the time.

During this period of time there were a lot of changes in my personal life. In 1958 while I was employed by the engineering firm I met a young woman, Bonnie Dickinson, who was a summer employee in our office. She was a recent high school graduate and scheduled to enter Edinboro State College in the fall of that year. We started dating and seemed compatible. We got married in May 1959, a relationship that was doomed from the start. I suppose my motivation was loneliness and in her case she didn't want to live at home and wasn't really interested in college. The difference in age, six years, was a factor. We separated in December 1960 on reasonbly amicable terms and the divorce was final in September 1961. Her family was close with the family of the company President and her father was in the personell unit. I felt a bit uncomfortable about my employment and started looking for a job change.

Moving to the Harrisburg area, I had about a two year period of bachelorhood. In the summer of 1962 I met another young woman, Almeda Engle, who would become my second wife. In this case also we seemed compatible and Almeda seemed more mature that my first wife. We were married in July 1963 and the first few years of our time together was somewhat problem free. We first lived in an apartment in the Colonial Park area but in the fall of 1963 we moved to a rental house in Hampton Avenue in the West Shore area. With my job change in 1965 we moved to York and lived in a rental house in York Township. By this time we were a family of three with our son Bradly. During Brad's pre-school years we took two after-Christmas vacations to Florida.

At the same time as the foregoing life changes were going on both of my parents passed away. Dad died in 1962 and I suspect it was from a cerebral hemmorage and I was told it was very quick. He was at school and was in a supply room when it happened. He had a heart attack two years earlier but in those days all medical science had was blood thinners. Mom tried to hang on at the farm but it was too much for her. The property was sold to the McMillens in 1966 and Mom moved to Washington in the North Avenue Aprtments. She had a heart attack in December of that year and died in Washington Hospital in January of 1967.

One of the few regrets that I have is that I should have made more effort to visit with my parents in those years after college prior to their passing.

At the same time as I was experiencing changes in my personal and professional life there were significant changes occuring nationally affecting culture, civil rights and political thinking, even music. The assassination of President Kennedy came as a great shock and seemed inconceivable to me. The anti-war movement regarding Vietnam seemed implausible when I compared it to World War II, a so-called "good war"and my framework of reference. I didn't feel unpatriotic for having been the beneficiary of a student deferement. Having had little or no association with minorities at this point in my life, I didn't really understand the civil rights issues and concerns. In my high school years the era of the "big band"music prevailed. A decade later the up tempo rock and roll sounds predominated with a different kind of message. I'll talk more about these changes later.

#  MATURITY - SEVENTIES & EIGHTIES

In most respects the score of years that followed the Sixties was a period of solid growth for me professionally. The first priorities with which I dealt were the financial and institutional problems of the Planning Commission. I stepped back from the public relation activities that had sapped our resources. At the same time staff was reduced through normal attrition. We focused on completing the work activities called for in the federally funded work program. I concentrated on developing positive relations with various community institutions. I attended lots of meetings and did a lot of listening. We facilitated the creation of a Local Government Advisory Committee to coordinate our efforts with the seventy-two municipalities in the county.

There were a number of operational changes that were made. I crafted a personell manual which among other things formalized the organizational structure, dealt with job descriptions and salary ranges. We changed our office location in West York to the York center city which put me within walking distance of York City Hall, the County Court House and other community institutions such as the Chamber of Commerce and the County Industrial Development Authority.

It was helpful that in the late sixties a new Board of County Commissioners took office that was more sympathetic to our mission. Changes in federal funding through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) enabled annual work programs and predictable finances. At the state level environmental concerns resulted in major funding for countywide waste water and solid waste planning efforts. All of this helped the Planning Commission get well on its way to creating a County Comprehnsive Plan. A further change in the relationship with HUD occurred in 1977 with the advent of the Community Development Block Grant Program under which the County was qualfied as urban county grant recipient. The Planning Commission was designated by the County Commissioners to administer the program. A good deal of the funding in this program was allocated to public works projects in the municipalities which helped in continuing to build positive relationships with them. The Block Grant funding also enabled us to establish a housing rehabilitation program primarily focused on low income and elderly families.

During this time frame the Planning Commission was assigned other tasks. This included supervising the work of the County Traffic Engineer which previously had functioned independently. Finally the Weatherization Program which had previously resided with the local anti-poverty program fell into the hands of the County Commissioners who assigned it to the Planning Commission.

Another out of the ordinary event affected the scope of the Planning Commission's activities. In 1969 urban race riots broke out in the City of York. There were several days of disruption and two people were killed. In the year following these events , the Federal Council for the region that included York County became interested in seeing if their resources could be used to assist in addressing the issues that lead to the riots. One of their initatives was to fund the Planning Commission to establish a new staff division to undertake Human Services Planning.

Some the most valuable work that we did during this period involved what I'll call institution building. In Pennsylvania counties were not really designed originally to be strong units of local government. In the growth in the post World War II years it became clear that certain issues were regional and beyond the ability of the state's over 2000 muncipalities to address individually. The Planning Commission identified solid waste management as one such area and recommended the formation of a County Solid Waste Management Authority. The County Commissioners took that action and an effective program has resulted. The Planning Commission played similar roles in the formation of the County Parks and Recreation program, Historic York and the County Transit Authority.

During these years the planning profession was undergoing some changes and aspiring to be recognised as a responsible player in the broad areas of community and regional development. I followed these issues with interest and was a charter member of both the American Planning Association and the American Institute of Certified Planners. I was active in professional affairs within the state and was elected President of the Pennsyvania Planning Association in 1972 and 1973 after serving a few years on the Board of Directors.

In summarizing my professional life during the period of the Seventies and the Eighties, I think that it's fair to say that I was able to take on the challenges with which I was confronted and deal with them sucessfully. The agency's financial problems were solved and we were able to create a new image that was professional, ethical and an important player in the community.

I'll now talk about our personal life during this period.

During the first few years that we lived in York we occupied a rental property but aspired to be home owners. We built a home in a development called Country Club West in Manchester Township and moved in September of 1970. Without going into details the experience dealing with the builder during the construction phase was very unpleasant. The neighborhood was very nice and the school district had a good reputation. The commute from home to work was only about fifteen minutes one way and I usually came home for lunch. In the early Seventies our spousal relationship seemed stable and we aspired to have additional children. But this was not to be. Almeda suffered two etopic pregnancies after which she could not conceive. Thus our immediate family remained at the three of us and I will first make some observations about us individually.

Brad started to elementary school in September of 1970 at the Roundtown School in Manchester Township. I think that it is fair to say that he had some difficulty making friends at that age. This is partially due to the fact where we lived up to that time there were no children in his age bracket and he had no experience in interacting with his peer group. Throughout the elementary years he did well but was not an outstanding student. In retrospect I think he was not challenged and was able to get along with a minimum of effort and did not develop good study habits. I don't recall any major disciplinary problems at this stage. He expressed some interest in playing the viola and we arranged for the instrument and lessons but it never progressed very far. He didn't practice and at some point it ended.

Although it was not school connected, Brad was involved in youth baseball for two or three years. He was not naturally athletic but did play in the outfield and got some hits.

When he got into his early teens and in to Junior High changes started occuring. His academics did not improve. His reading comprehensive was judged superior. He was in one or more advance placement courses but lack of study habits doomed a positive outcome. He had some discipline problems. I remember being called to the school because of some pornographic material that he had. There was a problem with taking extra food in the cafeteria. In retrospect I suspect pot had already become an issue.

By this time his interest in baseball had vanished. He did go out for football in Junior High and played some. He had started to bulk up and played line positions.

He did help his mother in some of her ceramics and other craft activities.

Things started to fall apart during the High School years in the late Seventies and early Eighties. His academics resulted in mediocer accomplishments. There is no point in detailing the discipline issues that occurred. Thry were significant. Without a doubt Brad was a problem as far as the school was concerned. I was however astounded when three months before the end of his senior school year, the assistant principal suggested that he drop out. As it turned out he failed one course at the end of the year and did not graduate with his class. He went to summer school and got his diploma in July of that year, 1982.

There were issues with the law outside of school and the problems persisted for about three more years. I found out about an organization called Narcotics Anonymous and took him to his first meeting. I guess the timing was right and he has been clean of drugs and alcohol since then. Through a state agency he acquired training in jewelry repair and gem setting at a Technical School in Lancaster which has been the source of his livelihood. Early on he worked for relatively short periods of time as an inhouse repair person at three different retail jewelry stores. It became clear to me that he was not a "nine to five" individual. He focused instead on doing events and craft-type shows in a nithe market involving jewelrywith a medieval flavor. He had some financial success but in this type of activity there are peaks and valleys of income and cash flow becomes a problem.

By the time the Seventies rolled around, Brad was in school and Almeda had time on her hands to pursue interests outside of the home. There was a small ceramics shop near our home and she developed an interest in the craft. She acquired some skills in ceramics and initially made some gifts. As time went on finished products accumulated and we explored retail possibilities in craft shows at shopping malls and community festivals. Her business thrived somewhat and in time she acquired a ceramic kiln and a quantity of molds. We bought the slip in quantity and soon were able to produce products from start to finish. The efforts were marginally sucessful from a financial standpoint and after a few years she transitioned from the ceramics into porcelain jewelry which was somewhat more rewarding. At that point her health was marginally good and she increased the involvement of craft shows in shopping malls. Some were at comsiderable distance from York. She would on those occassions leave home on a Wednesday in a motorhome that she had acquired and travel to those destinations for a Thursday through Sunday show. I would pick up Brad after school on Friday and we would catch up with her that night, traveling back home on Sunday night. One such venture occurred during the last week of March 1979, the time of the Three Mile Island Nucleur Accident. Three Mile Island is less than ten miles from where we lived. Officials tried to minimise the situation but by Friday after the accident it became clear that it was a serious matter. Brad and I left for Akron, Ohio where Almeda was particpating in a craft show at a shopping mall. The accident was news item number one and we spent the weekend wondering if we would be able to return to our home. Well, we did and Monday my office was assigned the task of determining and mapping evacuation routes to the west. Our clerical staff was involved in calling major employers to determine the degree of absenteeism. By Wednesday things had quieted down but is was exciting while it lasted. It was months and really even years until the public found out how serious the accident had been and how close we came to a major disaster.

Almeda's other activities during this period included participating in a women's bible study group . She also got involved with the PTA in the elementary school that Brad attended and was the organization's President the year he was in sixth grade

It was during this period that Almeda lost members of her immediate family. Her mother, Marie passed away in 1974 folowed by her father, Clarence, in 1984. Her oldest sister, Olla, died in 1986. Also during this time, she started to develop health issue. You would have never described Almeda as petite. She gained fifty pounds during her pregnancy with Brad and never lost it and in fact continued to gain over the years. In addition to the surgeries associated with the etopic pregnanciea I mentioned earlier, she had a gall bladder operation in the late sixties. As time passed she developed hypertension and was borderline diabetic. In the mid to late eighties she started to exhibit personality changes which I initially failed to recognise as symtoms of mental health comditions.

Changes continued with Almeda towards the end of the Eighties. Her craft work with the jewelry diminished somewhat. I discovered an ad in the Harrisburg newpaper regarding a possible art business. This involved Sunday sales of inexpensive asian oil paintings and frames. The seller provided the inventory, the list of locations and advertising information. The venture was marginally sucessful but only lasted about two years as Almeda's mental health worsened. She required hospitalization twice. The second time she was over medicated and fell, injuring her knee and hip. She left the hospital with a limp and in a few months regressed to a cane, then a walker and finally a wheel chair.

While my life during this time was dominated by my professional life and family issues, I did have a few other interests. I was invited to join the East York Rotary Club which I found to be very enjoyable. I served as the club's program chairman for two years. Coming up with a program on a weekly basis was a challenge. I left the club in the early nineties when my office location change made is much less convenient. Another rewarding involvement was the group of individuals, mostly men, that met at the Hotel Yorktowne most mornings during the work week for fellowship. We called ourselves the Breakfast Club. It consisted of a few county elected officials, some major players in the business community, an architect, a photographer, and a newsman. In total there were about a dozen of us with myself being the only bureaucrat. I also got involved with the Olde York Street Fair, a major community event held on Mothers Day and served as its President one year in the early seventies.

It was during these years that my brother Dan and I developed a stronger relationship. By this time he was living in California but he was doing a lot of business travel both in the States and overseas. On a couple of occassions he arranged his travel with a layover in Baltimore and we were able to have a visit. In 1977 we took our longest vacation with our furthest destination being southern California and had a nice three or four day visit. We spent one day at Disneyland. We did a lot of sightseeing on the way out through the southwest and returned via San Francisco, Utah, Yellowstone. We covered a lot of ground in three weeks.

In 1986 we made a second trip to California for the wedding of Dan's daughter, Claudia. We traveled by air and had a nice, although short visit. The wedding was nice and the reception that evening was elegant.

I would be remiss if I failed to note that in 1979, I kicked a thirty year cigarette habit.

# WINDING DOWN - THE NINETIES

This period was the twilight of my professional life and involved significant changes in the personal life of my family members. The worsening condition of Almeda's health both physical and mental was a major element of this period. Brad's situation was somewhat improved. Before examining these issues in depth let's look at my situation.

At the beginning of this decade our office was moved from a building it had occupied for about ten years in the County Home complex back into the York downtown. The Planning Commission and several other county offices occupied the rehabilitated Bon Ton Department Store. The offices were very nice and far superior to any of our previous facilities. It was also at this time that we instituted an employee retirement plan which gave credit to previous years of employment. Within the next two or three years several of the older employees retired giving us the opportunity to infuse some new blood into the operation. To me it was interesting that when I came on the scene in 1965, most of the professional staff were imports from other areas but by the Nineties the majority were York County natives. A key personnel change was the retirement of the long time Asssistant Director, Joe Hoheneder. Felicia Dell was promoted from Chief of Transportation Planning to fill that position. She moved up to fill the Directors job upon my retirement.

Several new and exciting activities were undertaken. We ventured into digital mapping and the beginnings of a geographic information system. A computer suddenly appeared on my desk during this time, Although I had never learned to type, by use of the "hunt and peck" method I soon did most of my own corresponence.

Our administration of the County's Community Development Block Grant Program opened some news doors for us . Close relations with the municipalities evolved in selecting eligible projects for funding. A new activity for the staff was the administration of a Housing Relabiltation program focus on low income and elderly residents. We worked that in tandum with the Weatherization Program.

Given, perhaps, from my backgound, preservation of agricultural land was always an interest of mine. We had undertaken studies of this issue and gained some professional recognition for our efforts. I am proud of my role in the small working committee that made up the founding directors of the Farm and Natural Land Trust of York County. This entity working with the state funded Agricultural Preservation Board has assured the protection of several ten's of thousands of farm land for future generations.

We forged ahead in building a data base for I geographic informatiob system for the county. We were able to coordinate our efforts with County Tax assessment office that was engaged in a property reassessment program. By the time I left the planning commission in 2000, the system was on the threshold of being functional on a regular basis.

It was during this time that I was appointed to the County Industrial Development Corporation. It was not a very positive experience. I served on their planning committee but was frustrated by their lack of interest in developing priorities and industrial targets. Their only real interest was in creating a business plan that focused on a positive balance sheet.

While the twilight years of my professional life were generally quite positive there was a brief period when a new commission member became chairman and I had my first experience wirh a lay person trying to micromanage some of the staff activities. Fortunately that individual was not reappointed to a second term.

During the last year as Director, we clebrated the Fortieth Anniversity of the forming of the Planning Commission. A very nice dinner gala was held at the Expo Center and the guest speaker was James M. Seif, who at the time was the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

Finally, about a week and half prior to my last day of work, I was honored at a retirement dinner at the Hotel Yorktowne at which time I was "roasted" by several of my friends and professional collegues. It was great fun and the big surprise was the attendance of my brother Dan.

My last day of work was April 5, 2000. The Monday preceeding we had an in-house covered dish lunch at which time the staff presented me with a an excellent Civil War painting and the County Commissioners gave me a plaque recognising my years of service.

It was at about the middle of this decade that I felt the need for some physical activity on a regular basis. I tried the idea of a morning walk before work aound the developments near home. I soon found that traversing the same route every day was only a recipe for boredom. The next effort was purchasing a used bicycle and trying that. I had to learn the sport all over again as the machines were totally different from those of my childhood. I affiliated with the Hanover Cyclers which opened some doors for me and I found out about multi -day bike tours. The first summer months in 1992 were a learning process and getting my body in shape. The second year I felt strong enough to ride the cross state inaugural Pedal Pennsylvania tour from Pittsburgh to Philadelpia with three other club members. Including our ride to Pittsburgh where the tour began and our return to York after the completion in Philadelphia, it was 850 mile odyssey in twelve days. The following year I went on two multi-day tours, Bike Virginia and the Moose Tour in Maine and New Hampshire.

During the early part of the Nineties, Brad's business flourished. He affiliated with the Society for Creative Anacronism an entity that espouses an interest in Medieval times through various events and festivals. This provided several opportunities to market his jewelry and related goods. He was not a good money manager. A lot of his profits were destined to be spent on collectibles including old books, antique papers and Halloween materials. As time passed he fell behind in paying his suppliers and at some point we took out a home equity loan so he could get caught up. The understanding was that he would pay off the loan.

Almeda's health continued to decline. By the early Nineties, her mobility was very limited and she was on medication for hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, incontinence and mental health issues. For all practical purposes she was an invalid. We had the house equipted with stair climbers so that she could move between floors. We had a wheelchair that would fold up to be transported in the car trunk. Our travel was primatily limited to the Shopping Mall and other places where she could look for clothing. Option were limited in that regard since by that time her weight had approached three hundred pounds. Occassionally we would visit her sister in Carlilse or a nephew in Fulton County. We were able to secure some part time help in the mornings so that I was able to maintain my work schedule requirements. The relationship between Almeda and myself during that time and until her death was that of patient and care giver.

# RETIREMENT

I entered the phase of retirement from employment and work force with a positive feeling. At the risk of seeming paternalistic, I felt that I had left the Planning Commission in a good state with an excellent staff and Director and state of the art working facilities. I was comfortable in my decision to leave with the feeling that a change in leadership was needed. Any misgivings that I had dealt with the fact that I felt my health was good and that I had several solid working years left. Early on, I made a couple of efforts to secure some part time work in my field but nothing materialized. I did maintain my interest in professional affairs and worked on some committees as a volunteer. I did receive two post employment awards. The County Board of Parks and Recreation in 2003 recognized me with their Distinguished Achievement Award for my agency's assistance in their formative years and grantsmanship. The Pennsylvania Planning Association honored me with their Distinguished Service Award in 2004.

I continued my interest in biking and the first summer went on my last multi-day tour. In was a two day ride from Columbus, Ohio to Portsmith and back. One hundred miles each ways seems a lot but the terrain was not hilly.

My work activities and my role as caregiver during the Nineties had resulted in a great deal of deferred maintenance on our home and I had developed an impressive list of projects that needed to be addressed. The work was not too demanding from a physical standpoint and I soon discovered that retirement alowed for an after lunch nap. Some major work was also undertaken by contractors. I had chosen the option of taking out in lump sum my retirement contributions which decreased my monthly benefit by only an insighnificant amout. Those funds enabled me to replace the heating system and add airconditioning, put on a new roof and replacement windows and add new gutters and some weathered siding. It was a good investment.

A couple of negatives, early on, involved replacing a hot water tank that had finally given up the ghost and taking our seventeen year old cocker spaniel on a one-way trip to the vet.

In the year prior to my retirement, a new farmers-type market opened up a few miles west of York and I engaged a vendor's space with the idea of selling the not insignificant inventory of oil painting and frames stored in the garage. It was a Saturday market which didn't consume a lot of time and was a fun break from the daily routine. We sold a few items but it soon became clear that it was not a money-making proposition and we concluded it at about the end of 2000.

I had always been interested in writing and in the first year of my retirement decided to try my hand at a novel. The Civil War had always interested me and I knew my college had its origin in that time period. I little research revealed that the institution had suspened classes in June 1963 due to the southern invasion that culminated with the battle of Gettyburg. So I conceived of a student that left school at that time to return to his home in south central Pennsylvania. I started writing with no outline or conclusion in mind. It took about six years to complete and I had started a second novel of historical fiction in the mean time. As a rank amateur I had no idea how competitive the writing field is and how difficult it is to secure an agent. I eventually found an agent who took advantage of my naivete and a couple thousand dollars later had accomplished nothing. Later to bring the effort to a conclusion, I self published the two novels which is a costly proposition. I continue to write and have completed a third novel and am working on a fourth. I'm still lookong for an honest and interested agent. I continue to enjoy writing although my inability to publish is not good for one's ego.

Brad's itinerate jewelry enterprise continues but has not been robust. The period of the "great recession" has resulted in people curtailing the purchase of luxury items. A couple of instances of poor judgement resulted in him being expelled from two of his better multi-day events. The recapitalization of his business through the home equity loan and later mortgages on the home property proved to be only minimally helpful and his abilty to make payments declined. I have had to step in to keep the mortgages current. The future does not look bright.

Almeda's health continued to decline. In addition to the general practicioner that she had seen for years, she was also now seeing an endocrinologist for the diabetis. The medications increased in number. She experienced chest pains from time to time and nitro pills seemed to help that. She had two brief stays in nursing homes primarily for physical theraphy to help her mobility. A routine blood test the spring of 2008 revealed that she had some form of leukemia. Chemotherapy seemed to put it into remission. The last conversation that we had was of a positive nature. It seemed that she had been making real progress with the physical thearaphy and I assured her that the next day I would make arrangements with the nursing home administration for her release and return home at the end of the week. I recall that she was very pleased with that prospect.

However, that night she had what they described as an "event" and was rushed to the hospital. It had been congestive heart failure and it was more than thirty minutes before they got a heart beat. Brain damage was severe and complete. I was with her in the ICU when she passed away the following evening, July 28.

Over the years, I had received invitations to join the Penn State Alumna Association which I had ignored. One such invitation arrived during the first year of my retirement pointing out that as a senior citizen, I could become a life member at half price. It also noted that as such, I could access the Alumnae Directory and look up old friends and classmates. It seemed like a good deal and I applied. In a few days the membership came through and I started perusing the Alumnae Directory. First on my list was the woman I met while in graduate school, Naomi Mermel and I found her. Her married name was Meyer, she lived in Kingston and worked at Temple Israel in Wilkes Barre in northeastern Pennsylvania. Being discrete, I wrote to her at her place of employment, briefly described my situation, expressed interest in hearing from her and included my email address. She responded by email in a couple of days. We communicated back and forth for the next few days and I found that she had a good life and three adult children. Her husband had a sucessful dental practice but had been ill for several years and was now confined to a nursing home. Soon I called her in the evening and we chatted for quite a while.

Abandoning my usual conservative ways, I then suggested that I'd like to drive to her area for a lunch date and she agreed. It was a very pleasant get-to-gather and after a bit of early nervousness, we were very comfortable with each other. After lunch we went to her home for a nice couple of hours and the whole day was most pleasant. It was the beginning of a renewal of a friendship and more.

We both had obligations and responsibilities with regard to our respective spouses that we were not going to abandon. However, we did manage to see each other from time to time in the coming month and years. We did tell our respective families of this turn of events and they were entirely supportive, as were a number of friends in which Naomi confided. Naomi's husband, David, passed away in 2005 and Almeda passed away in 2008. Later that year I moved to northeastern Pennsylvania to live with Naomi.

As of this writing we have been together for over five years and enjoying our twilight years together. We have been able to experience some trips. We had a nice tour of Ireland and then a Carribean cruise. Her friends have been very welcoming to me. We live in Wesly Village which is a church supported senior living facility. It's very nice and every thing is taken care of by the administration. No shoveling snow or mowing grass. There is a residents association that has various events and trips.

While my retirement years have generally been positive I have had a few bumps in the road from a medical standpoint. In 2000 and actually three months prior to the end of my employment, I suffered a mini-stroke. I was hospitalised for a few days. The stroke symtoms disappeared on their own in about thirty hours. However I had a lot of tests and I started a regimen of prescriptions that continues today. I had some reoccuring bouts of bronchitis dating from a lengthy and improperly medicated attack in the nineties. As a result my breathing is impaired and I use inhailrers. There have been skin cancer issues. The most interesting affliction was a bone abcess in my left arm in 2005 apparently from residual bacteria from when it was broken in the Forties. Gee, this all sounds terrible but it didn't happen all at once and for a 80 year old guy I think that I'm in pretty good shape. I have had to curtail my biking and I miss that greatly.

# REFLECTIONS

This exercise of writing my memoir has caused me to think about my life style and experiences over the years. It's difficult to be objective and unbiased when thinking about one's self but I'm going to try and make some observations.

* * *

It came almost as a shock in this writing when I realized how sheltered and isolated my formative years had been. Until I entered high school I had never associated with anyone outside of my religious or ethnic group. The only black person I was acquainted with was the barber to which I sometimes but not always went. When I went to high school I had classmates that were Jewish and catholic and two black girls but I only thought of them as students and classmates. I should add that the black girls pretty much stayed to themselves. Even when I went on to college my interactions were limited. It seemed that the blacks were limited in number and I don't recall social events where they were present.

Given that background, when the civil rights issues came to the fore in the Sixties it was something of a shock to me. I had no reference or understanding of the lack of economic opportunity, schooling and housing faced by blacks and the discrimination that they faced in these and other areas.

Later on when the anti-war movement pursuant to Viet Nam came in to being, I was again puzzled. My reference was to World War II, "a good war" and if our leaders had ordered a military action it must have a moral basis. Obviously many people, with good reason, disagreed with that.

And then there was the Nixon/Watergate issue. That whole matter drug on for so many months and when the climax came with the resignation of the President, I had a hard time digesting it. What's going on, I wondered? This had never happened before in the history of the country. Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower seemed to be honorable and respected. Then it all seemed to fall apart with Kennedy's assassination, Johnson exit in semi-disgrace over Viet Nam and now this. At this point I had been a public servant for fifteen years and felt that what I was doing was important and honorable. Now it seemed that everyone in the public sector was categorically assumed to be corrupt and dishonest and that attitude seems to remain today.

So I had a significant learning curve in coming to grips with those contemporary issues.

* * *

I wish that my parenting skills had had been better with the result that my son might have been better prepared to function as a mature adult and become financially secure.

* * *

Things that I don't understand include tattoos, body piercing and hip hop. Why higher education is so costly is truly baffling. I have seen the effects of marijuana first hand and the prospects of its legalization are frightening. Advocates compare it to alcohol but two wrongs don't make a right. I am concerned about the many contemporary issues that seem to be a source of disunion. While I understand the value of appreciating diversity we seem to be losing the idea of unity and the importance it played in the our nation.

* * *

I feel very fortunate that a major portion of my life has been during the only time in the nation's history that a vibrant middle class was in existence. The economic upturn in the post-World War II era certainly boosted by the GI Bill and, for that time, the reasonable cost of higher education yielded a skilled and motivated work force. For about three decades the "American Dream" existed as a reality. My parents financed my undergraduate college education, a circumstance that today would be impossible by middle income families. The modest inheritance from my parents became a down payment that enabled my home ownership. I fear that another era and way of life is "gone with the wind".

