Chapter 4

AT JACOBY'S PLACE - Part a:

 

Since, in this narrative, I am devoting a chapter to each place of residence of my life, this will be one of the longest chapters. It will cover a period of twelve years; from four to past sixteen years of age.

 

In late summer of 1913 my parents bought a property of one and one-half acres either from or through a Mr. Jacoby. So in later years they usually referred to that home as Jacoby's Place.

 

The home is in Ephrata Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It is on the north side of what is now called Bethany Road, a few hundred yards east of the intersection of what is now Farmersville Road. The borough of Akron is on a hill about one and one-half miles to the west and Ephrata Borough is two miles to the north.

 

The property lies in a shallow valley of open farm land and has a gentle slope from the road northward to a dry run on it's northern border. It is a perfect rectangle with the frontage being about one-half of the depth. With the buildings near the center of the frontage, there was room for a small orchard, at a slightly lower level, on the west side. East of the house was a lawn with a large garden inserted along the road.

 

The remainder of the land, less than an acre, my father kept in alfalfa excepting the rear of the lot which was meadow and more marshy. That was always is timothy grass.

NEST on Bethany Road Ephrata Twp.

In addition to the house there were two other buildings; a shop and a barn. The shop was a former cigar factory. It's southwest corner and door were a few steps from the rear porch of the house. I would judge the building to have been about twenty-two feet by thirty feet. It had a basement and a floored attic with the stairs, one over the other, on the west side. The shorter or gable end was toward the road.

 

The barn was an ordinary two-story (not a bank barn) stable and carriage house. The three-stall stable was at the west end and the carriage house, later to be a garage and carpenter shop, was at the east end. The upper floor was haymow. Later my father adapted the southwestern section of that loft for housing chickens.

 

Attached to the southwestern corner of the barn was a two-story pig pen and chicken house; chickens above and pigs below. The entire front of the barn was sheltered by what we called the "overshoot;" a sloped roof held up by three iron rods, with turnbuckles, anchored in the roof plate. From the corner of the projecting pigpen to the edge of the overshoot, a board wall served as a windbreak. Attached to the southern end of that windbreak and flush with it, facing east, was the privy, which was a favorite place of mine for studying the wonders in the Montgomery Ward Catalog.

 

Amos H. Sauder, J. Landis Weaver, and Daniel E. Sauder

Our closest neighbors were the Amos Sauder family. They owned and farmed a small farm directly across the road from us. The buildings of that farm are at the intersection of the Farmersville Road and Bethany Road. There were seven children in the family; the oldest a girl about the age of my sister Mabel and the youngest a boy who was born after we moved there. Shortly after the birth of the baby, Mrs. Sauder died and Mr. Sauder remarried a few years later. Amos's sister Lizzy kept house for him during Mrs. Sauder's illness, and before he married again.

 

Since the Sauder family lived so close to us, their children were our only playmates excepting visiting cousins. We attended the same church, the Metzler Mennonite Church, and became very close friends.

 

As I indicated, we moved to Ephrata Township at the time of my fourth birthday. I will try to recall some pre-school events. My father, being a carpenter, made some immediate renovations.

 

The house was the usual small two-story house with two front doors. There were two small rooms at one end and one longer room at the other end with the stairway in the center taken from the larger room. To the rear was the kitchen ell with what I would call a half attic above; i.e. a high wall with windows to the West and a steep sloping roof to the wall plate to the East. That roof was the first change. He raised that roof to almost level position and with full height walls to the north and He made a nice large bedroom. The stairs were relocated to a lateral position at the rear of the larger or western room of the first floor. That room became our parlor. The dividing wall between the two small eastern rooms came out and that enlarged room was our "sitting" or living room.

 

Because of the relocated attic stair, a flat roof dormer window was needed. That window opened on to the newly raised flat roof of the large bedroom over the kitchen. The repainting of that flat seam tin roof became one of my chores through the years. It also served as a family grandstand for watching the annual Fourth-of-July fireworks display held at Ephrata two miles to the north. I, of course, found it necessary to be underfoot in all those changes and so had my first taste of carpentering.

 

The early changes in the barn were rather minor. The stable and entry were at the west end and back-set so as to allow a service door into the carriage house which was to the East. Papa joined the two large hinged doors of the carriage shed into one and put it on a track. As usual in such barns the carriage shed floor was made of wooden planks.

 

This floor was in poor condition and it was decided that it should be torn out and replaced by a concrete floor. When such small barns were built and the stone foundation walls, with a dividing wall between the ends, were finished it was necessary to back-fill the stable part flush with the foundation. This fill was often taken from the other side leaving a dish-shaped crawl space under the wagon-shed floor.

 

Now this pit had to be back-filled before concreting. The former tenants had left much rubbish around the place, so all the metal junk and ash piles went into "the hole."

 

Mabel, John H., J. Landis, and Lena Weaver

While this work was being done, Papa had butchered a pig. One day Mamma was boiling the pan pudding made with pork scraps and for some reason had burned the whole batch to a crisp. Now it seemed to me that my mother always lived on the verge of hysteria, but I never saw her cry like she did that day, She brought the stinking, smoking, charred kettle down to the barn where Papa was working and cried, "Look John, I burned all the puddings!" It didn't help her feelings very much when he barked, "Well throw the whole mess, kettle and all, into 'the hole' and forget it".

 

When I was small I slept in a cot in my parent's bedroom. As with many children I was a deep sleeper. One morning, during those pre-school years, as Mamma was dressing she exclaimed, "Look John, that bad little boy 'peed' in my shoe last night!" After that she didn't keep her shoes under the bed beside the potty.

 

One Sunday the Reuben W. Horst family was invited for dinner after Church Service. Among their children was a pair of twin girls, two years younger than I. After dinner we were all playing house in our parlor and one of the twins was my wife. I surely hope that it was Ada and not Katy! Years later Ada did become my "one-and-only best wife" for forty-seven and one-half years.

 

I started school in September of my sixth year. The schoolhouse was a one-room, stone building which is now a residence on the corner of the junction of Diamond Street and Main Street in Akron. It was a little over a mile from our house. The road, which is now part of Main Street, Akron, was then unpaved and in wet weather was deep with red mud; we called it the "little red road".

 

My teacher for the first two terms was a Mr. Sam Myers; not too professional, and a poor disciplinarian. He wore a leather belt and also suspenders for insurance; he could whip off his belt in one quick motion to lash the "bad boys" but rarely caught one. He was a very heavy man.

 

The first part of the assembly program each morning was for all the children to march around the perimeter of the room singing "Brighten the corner where you are."

 

I remember with pleasure my, first cedar-wood pencil box. It had a tongue-and-groove sliding cover. It held a few round eraser-less cedar lead pencils; a penholder with a few loose nibs and a long square eraser beveled at each end. The cedar smelled good!

 

Since I was a chubby, timid little "cry baby," my first school years, into the fourth grade, became one long persecution at the hands of some of the, as I thought at the time, "big bad boys and girls." Since I am a man I have done business with some of the Stroll’s and Weidman’s and know that they are fine people. Because Henry Hassler was also chubby, he and I often played together on the ash pile at the corner of the schoolyard. Job couldn't hold a candle to me for martyrdom!

 

One of the last memories of East Akron School, before Mabel and I transferred to the Ephrata Public School, was eleven o'clock, November the eleventh, 1918. Until then we had been singing of the terrible things that should happen to the "Kaiser", but what joy that day when all the bells began to ring and we were dismissed for the day. THE WAR WAS OVER! (I trust that my readers will take my hyperbolic expressions with good grace.)

 

As I have indicated the scholastic qualities of the East Akron School left much to be desired. About the middle of my fourth term Papa made inquiries about transferring Mabel and me to the Ephrata Borough School. He of course had to pay a tuition fee, to which he agreed. After the eighth grade there was no fee since the Ephrata High School served Ephrata Township.

 

I was admitted into the third grade and Mabel to the seventh. Since I had already started my fourth year in school, I lost one year. It is only since I prepared the chronology for this work that I realized that I went to school thirteen years and not twelve as would be normal. The improved education that we got through the transfer was to me worth the extra year. I can recall no occasion in which I was "put-down" or ridiculed in any of my ten years at the Ephrata School even though I was a "country boy".

 

The first few years we went to school on the trolley car; the car stop was about one-quarter of a mile west on the "Little Red Road". We could leave the trolley car right in front of the Washington Avenue School Building.

 

I went to the Washington Avenue School for grades three and four. Grades five and six were taught in the West Franklin Street Building. Then it was back again to Washington Avenue until my last or senior year of high school. Our class, the class of '28, was the first to graduate from the, then new, Highland Avenue School Building. That building is now used for a Primary School.

 

I'm not sure how many terms I used the trolley to go to school, possibly three. When I was older I had a bicycle. By road the distance was about two and one-half miles. There were many times that I walked to school, going almost due north over the hill to the rear of our home. That was a walk through fields along fence lines until I got to Akron Road at Good's Crossing. From there I took either the trolley car right-of-way or East Fulton Street. In good weather I could walk to school in twenty minutes. As will appear in a later chapter of this story, for my junior year of high school, I drove a 1919 Model T Ford to school from the Welsh Mountain Mission. During my senior year we lived on East Main Street and I walked to the Highland School.

 

My school years at Ephrata were very tranquil and I enjoyed school. Until my last year I carried my lunch and ate it at school. That was before the time of school cafeterias. I was often alone during the hour and a-half of lunch period, so there was no "nook or corner" of either building that I did not explore. If it wasn't locked, I went in! Oh the marvels of laboratory equipment!

 

Because Mabel was more than four years older than I, I spent most of my boy-hood playing alone. We did play with our neighbor children, but only with permission; neither they nor we had the practice of running in and out of each other's houses.

 

Papa was a carpenter and, except for bad weather, spent his working time away from home. He did however, most of the time we lived at Jacoby's, have a few dozen laying hens. He often kept a few pigs for butchering and the first years we lived there he would buy a little steer at the Lancaster Stock Yards and after he was fattened have him butchered for beef. Before he got his first car in 1919, he also owned a driving horse.

 

A teen-age farm boy, Noah Stoner, who lived on a farm east of us was raising rabbits for sale. One day Papa said to him, "Noah, I'll buy two rabbits from you." He thought breeding rabbits would be interesting for him and me. After a few weeks there were still no little rabbits. One Sunday when his brother-in-law, my Uncle Mike, was visiting, Papa said, "Mike, I can't understand why these rabbits don't breed". Uncle Mike picked them up and examined them and laughing said,  "John, you'll never get little bunnies from these; they are both bucks." W hen Papa asked young Noah Stoner why he sold him two bucks Noah said, "You didn't ask for a pair of rabbits. You said you would like to buy two rabbits".

 

Well I spent much of my time playing in and around the barn. I remember "fishing for chickens." I tied a string to a stick and with a kernel of corn tied on for bait, I would sit on the "overshoot” roof and fish. It was easy to get up; a climb up the cleated chicken walk to the roof of the privy; then one big step up to the roof and I was ready to fish. Of course the hens would try to swallow the corn, but I could never get them more than a few inches from the ground before the kernel would slip out. Chickens can look surprised!

 

My father had a workbench and many extra tools in the garage end of the barn. He kept a supply of boards and lumber under the workbench. When I was old enough I was permitted to use those odds and ends and some of the tools. I learned to make a lot of things for myself, carts, wagons, birdhouses, a sundial and many other things. One thing I made was a set of harness and a two-wheeled cart to fit my pussycat. The harness was made with strips of cloth and the cart had shafts. The pussy didn't mind being hitched up until I let her walk. When she felt the cart behind her, she took off like a streak of lightening. As she rounded a fence post the cart was smashed to pieces. That was the end of the cat-cart.

 

I remember also of learning to read "Pennsylvania Dutch." A weekly newspaper , the Ephrata Reporter, for a number of years, printed serialized stories in the dialect. One was called, if I can write it correctly, "Em Schpoook im Cassle". It was scary!