From the very beginning, school was a mixture of fear and accomplishment for me. I attended a three-room school. There were four grades in two of the rooms and two high school grades in the third room. The building is still standing, now used as an auction center.

Children frequently select other children as scapegoats in their own search for identity. Because our family was poorer than many others in the community, and we belonged to the most fundamental church, we were often the targets of childish persecution. We had been taught to turn the other cheek, and even when the odds were fairly even, we avoided fighting as much as possible. I was always one of those chosen last for the ball team, and frequently not allowed to play at all. I learned to read rather quickly. After that, I spent as much time as possible with a book. There was a small library, perhaps 200 books, and I read them all. Some of them I read several times. One year we got some new books and I was ecstatic. The complete works of Sherlock Holmes, some new Zane Grey titles, and other works that were supposed to be classics. These latter I read but promptly forgot.

We lived slightly more than a mile from the school but because the distance from the end of our half-mile lane was obviously less than a mile, we were not allowed to ride the school bus. Walking was just as fast as riding a horse or mule drawn covered wagon, but the main thing that we lost was the protection from the cold and by the driver from bigger bullying kids. I remember many times trying to slip quietly along without attracting the attention of the bigger boys. Frequently I was unsuccessful, and would have to endure ridicule and roughing up until they tired of it.

As it got colder, the rest of the kids would stay in the bus, so I might have frozen toes but at least nobody was beating on me. One very cold Friday in mid-winter, there was a flu epidemic and I was the only one in the family who went to school that day. I was in third grade at the time. The main road had been plowed, but drifts had built up after the plowing until it was impossible for a car to use the road. The horse drawn school bus still made it, but with a light load. There probably weren’t more than twenty kids in the whole school that day. When evening came, the wind was howling out of the North, snow was blowing in a thick veil across the road, and drifts were piling up as high as my head. I still wasn’t allowed on the bus, but the teachers were concerned about how I would get home. My teacher, Miss Schaeffer, gave me very strict instructions. I was to walk the first quarter mile and stop at the Thompsons’ to get warm. Then I was to walk the next quarter mile and stop at the Schaffners’ to get warm again. Then I had the last half-mile to walk to get home. There was no other place to stop, although I could have gotten out of the wind in the barn for a break before I tackled the last stretch of open field. I probably would have made it because I was used to walking in the cold, but it turned out that I didn’t have to do it alone. When I got to the Thompsons,’ Mrs. Thompson insisted that I stay for a cup of hot cocoa. By the time I finished it, there came a knock at the door and there was my Stepfather. The weather was so bad that he had come to find me. We walked home together in the bitter cold, so I was not alone, although we still had to walk. After I got home I went to my favorite place for most of the rest of the evening. It was in the corner behind the living room coal stove. The temperature there was probably in the high eighties.

Except for reading, school was something to be endured until I got to the seventh grade. Then we got a new teacher who didn’t share the local prejudices. I began to find out that I wasn’t such a dummy and that I could learn. The high point came when the county eighth grade exam was administered near the end of the eighth grade. One couldn’t go on to high school until one passed it. Of the ten or so eighth graders, we lost three or four. Dropping out was almost automatic if the test wasn’t passed. But my score was in the top five in the county. School became a bit more comfortable.

The high school had only two classes and about 15 students. There was only one teacher, Mr. Allshouse. He also was the proprietor of the local general store. His most striking characteristic was a propensity for long angry lectures about politics. We could expect two or three of those a week. Never mind about algebra, general science, or any other subject when he was pontificating. I did learn about equations and the use of x in those years, however, and continued reading everything that I could get my hands on. In my sophomore year the class was down to four. We learned a little plane geometry and some miscellaneous facts about heating and expansion, simple circuits, and that an old fashioned telephone generator would deliver quite a shock. We also conducted some early experiments with nuclear fusion using a current passed through electrodes inside inverted test tubes. When a house fly was released into the oxygen tube after enough had accumulated, he invariably became very active for a while.

For the junior and senior years of high school, I was on my own. The township would pay tuition if it wasn’t too high if one could find a school to attend and could get there. We had no car at that time, nor money for gas if we did get one. I was fortunate that my Aunt Nellie and Uncle Bert were willing to let me stay with them and go to school in Clarion. My cousin Harold and I had a three mile walk to get the bus, but we were used to that. The school year was uneventful, but we had some very interesting times together on the farm. The school principal did talk me out of dropping Algebra II, for which I am grateful.

Two or three highlights of the year centered around our activities on and around the farm. Uncle Bert had a sawmill, a blacksmith shop, a coal mine, and was the local fire warden. He had a Fordson tractor with a “model T” coil for each sparkplug, an International Mogul one cylinder (eight inch diameter) kerosene tractor, an old two-cylinder Avery that no one had been able to start for years, and a Pennsylvania Special Threshing Machine. One day Harold and I took the Fordson to the sawmill to haul back a wagon load of slabs for firewood. The Fordson wasn’t running too well and it started to get dark before we got home. We followed the road all right, because it was pretty well worn down into the dirt, but we had to run the Fordson in low gear to keep it moving. That meant traveling at a slow walk. It got really dark before we got back. The exhaust manifold was glowing bright red. They could hear the tractor roaring from the house, so they knew that we were coming, but finally Uncle Bert came out to see what was taking us so long. He wasn’t able to speed the tractor up very much either, but assured us that the red manifold was fairly normal. About ten-thirty that night we finally got things home and the chores done.

Uncle Bert’s family also owned the farm next door, just up the hill from the house. It had belonged to the Vossbergs. They were German immigrants who were wine makers. The winery was gone, but several varieties of grapes were still growing profusely. On our way home from school or after the chores were done, we would frequently spend what seemed like hours gorging grapes. Constipation was not a problem that fall.

The sawmill provided an abundance of boards for projects, and one of them was a flatbottomed, straight sided skiff. It wasn’t over eight feet long, the sides were one board wide, giving about eight inches of freeboard. Piney Creek rushed down into the Clarion river gorge over rocks and logs. But three teenage boys didn’t know enough to be cautious. Besides, the water was seldom as much as three feet deep. One Friday after Thanksgiving we set out to “run the creek.” There were ice platelets along the rock pools close to shore. It was definitely winter. After about a mile, including sliding over rocks and shipping water over and over, we were thoroughly soaked. We beached the boat finally in a place that we thought would be safe for winter and hiked home. No one had told us about hypothermia, so we survived. The boat was gone when Spring came.

One final high point of that year. One Saturday evening about supper time, someone came knocking at the door. It was raining and the unpaved roads past the farm were wet and slippery. We had heard a loud crash sometime earlier, but it was too far away to identify. The caller informed us that his car had slipped into the ditch at the bottom of the hill. Could we harness the team and pull him out? On the way down he told us that there had been a train wreck in the railroad tunnel below the farm. We pulled him out and got him up the hill. That used up an hour or more. Then it was back to the barn to clean up the horses, milk the cows, bed everything down, and finally, supper. The next afternoon three boys just had to see that train wreck. Over the hill we went, and down to the tunnel. Several freight cars were jammed crisscross in the tunnel. We asked the section hands if any one was hurt. “No, da engineer and fireman are in da engine, da brakemans in da caboose, an’ dees all happen in da meedle.” We crawled back underneath the freight cars, suspended by their ends against the inward sloping tunnel walls to see what else was of interest, but there a yard bull spotted us and chased us out. We didn’t argue, because we knew that we were definitely out of bounds.

There was another change of schooling the next year. The township where we lived finally decided to provide bus service to Brookville for high school students. I had to walk about a half mile to Schaffners’ to get Dick’s shuttle bus which took us to Egypt, where we got on the regular bus. This went to Sugar Hill, turned around and went to Hazen, and then on to Brookville. The round trip was something over 44 miles. There was no time for extra curricular activities. Academically, it was a good year, except for solid geometry. Trigonometry and Physics were my favorite subjects. My Physics teacher called me into his office to talk to me about career aspirations. He very strongly encouraged college. World War II intervened, but that encouragement and my test scores made up my mind. From then on I planned to go to college. The GI Bill made it possible. I have paid back the cost of the Bill’s investment in me many times over in higher earnings and higher income taxes. Although my experience in schooling through high school had many rough places, it was on the whole a very valuable and enriching experience.

December 23, 1997