Growing Up Years in a Small Town
|
|
10th and Broad St.
|
When I was in the third grade, my family moved to a small borough that had fewer than 1,000 residents. The town of Akron where we lived is in Lancaster County, PA. He built us a Cape Cod style house on N. 11th St. We lived there for one year and On August 1, 1942 my family moved to a new house at 10th and Broad Sts. This house was exactly like the house we had just left. I guess the big difference is that the trolley tracks now were beside our house rather than down back.
When Daddy bought the lot for this new house, it was already planted in grass. One of my chores that summer was to mow the lawn at the house where we were still living as well as the lot where Daddy was building the new house. Of course this was long before power mowers. I mowed them with an old style reel mower. I must have done a pretty good job because my Aunt Anna offered to pay me thirty-five cents a week to mow her yard. So, each week I would mow three yards. Our new house was about three blocks from where we were living. Aunt Anna's house was also about three blocks away in another direction. I would turn the mower upside down and push it from one house to another.
I was now an entrepreneur and that made me very happy. I spent my money very sparingly, and so I opened a savings account at the Akron National Bank and watched the account "grow" at one-percent interest. As a little boy, I had occasionally received gifts of money. My dad used the money but kept a record of what was given me. Now that I had my own savings account, he gave me that money to invest. As I recall that mowing job only lasted one summer. I am not sure why it ended, but from that time on, I only had one yard to mow and no more earnings.
So that winter my sister Arvilla and I began selling White Cloverine salve to earn some money. We went from door to door selling the stuff for a quarter a can. I hated selling, but it was a way of earning a little cash. We earned enough money that winter to buy a sled. Daddy took us to Oberholtzer's grocery store and we picked out the biggest one we could get for the money. The sled was called a Lightning Guider. I always wanted a Flexible Flyer but I never got one. By the time I could have afforded another sled, I had lost interest in coasting. We were never allowed to sled on the streets, but there was a steep hill in a field on the opposite side of Broad St. We spent many hours coasting down that hill the next winter.
In the summer time we flew kites from that same hill. Since it sloped to the south, we often had a north or northwest breeze to lift our kite to great heights. My second cousin, Charlie Sensenig who lived down the street had a box with a winch built in it that he would use to pull in the kite. I envied him for that box, since I only had a stick to wind my string on. Charlie was about three years older than me. He had a sister Elaine who was Arvilla's age. We played with them quite often. I remember they had a swing in their basement that had two seats at opposite ends. It was suspended by a rope from the ceiling.
They also had a monopoly game. We played monopoly for many hours at their place. Eventually they let us borrow it, and we often played at home as a family. That's about the only game I recall my dad ever playing with us.
We also had a neighbor girl who was quite a bit older than us. She had a collection of comic books and Big Little Books. She allowed me to borrow them. I read incessantly in those days. I also recall reading a lot of books from our classroom library. This was during the height of World War II, and I developed an interest in reading the newspaper. I would read about the happenings in that war. I remember there was a little map on the front page of the paper entitled, "The Road to Berlin." It would show the line where the front was being fought. I watched the progress of our troops for many months during that war.
Before World War II ended, we moved two more times. In fact, both moves occurred while I was in the sixth grade. That winter I attended the Akron Elementary School, Franklin Street School in Ephrata and Bergstrasse Elementary School in Ephrata Twp. However, I managed to get some pretty good grades that year in spite of the disruptions in my education.
Return to Archives Index