THE FLOW
OF INTERESTING THINGS
In My Schultz Lineage And In My Own Life
In The Upper Perkiomen Valley
By Forrest Wayne Schultz
PART TWO -- MY LIFE IN THE UPPER PERKIOMEN VALLEY
The Palm Schwenkfelder Church
For quite a while after they settled in Pennsylvania the Schwenkfelders did not refer to themselves as a "church" because of the pejorative connotations that term had acquired in Europe. Instead they called themselves the Society of Schwenkfelders. The got the idea from the Quakers, whose name is the Society of Friends. And the buildings in which they held their worship services were called "Meeting Houses", not "Churches". Finally, though, after living a long time in Pennsylvania, the term "church" had acquired its good, American connotation of voluntary membership in a context of religious freedom, so that a century ago when the "Upper District" Schwenkfelders built in Palm a beautiful modern edifice to replace their meeting houses, they called it The Palm Schwenkfelder Church, which was completed in the year 1911. In celebration of the centennial anniversary in 2011, a book titled The History of the Building of Palm Schwenkfelder Church was published by the Schwenkfelder Library and Heritage Center, which, by the way, is the new name of our library, which now houses historical artifacts as well as books and other written materials. My grandfather Levi G. Schultz apparently was not one of the members who was on any of the committees involved in the construction of the church, but on page 9 is shown a photograph for two receipts for moneys he donated to the building fund. There was a lot of involvement of the members in the hauling of the stones to the site and in some of the construction and clean up work, so as to reduce greatly the expenses. I applaud that plus the fact that they paid all the bills off shortly after the construction was completed, which is a model which should be followed by today's church, who, instead resort to such devices as loans and mortgages and bond sales.
This is the church of my childhood, where I went to Sunday School and worship services and which I joined as a young teen along with the other members of our catechetical class. I remember one Sunday School teacher, whom I and everyone else adored, and that was Susan, who taught those of a very young age -- I guess it was around 5 or 6, and she was so renowned that some people from other churches sent their young children to our church for her class.
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I don't remember the names of any of the other Sunday School teachers I had except for the two I had around the age of 15 - 17. These were Bill Schultz -- no close relation -- who also was my Scoutmaster of our Boy Scout Troup, and Edwin Fox, who was an avid Phillies fan. I remember that sometimes some of the kids in the class, if they were getting bored with the lesson, would ask Mr. Fox something about the Phillies and then he would talk about that for a while! Bill Schultz was a good teacher and was the first teacher I ever had who taught us the historical context of the Biblical events, which, before that, I had looked at as kind of like a book of stories -- you read one, then another, with no relation among them. There is one remark which was made once in another class which I vividly recall although I have forgotten the name of the teacher, but I do remember exactly where the class was, and I remember that we were of junior high school age. He told us, doing so with a very slow cadence that made it sound very impressive, that women try to expose as much of their body as they think they can get away with! This, by the way, was all the way back in the early 1950s, which were tame compared to now!!
I remember the hymns we sang in church, and I remember once a magnificent solo sung of the Lord's Prayer put to music. My favorite hymns were "In The Garden", "This Is My Father's World", "I Would Be True", and "He Leadeth Me, O Blessed Thought", the last of which I liked to sing as I was driving the tractor around the fields and pastures. Unfortunately, though, the sermons were boring and I remember nothing about them. We did, though, occasionally have a good guest speaker, one of the most memorable being Dr. Johnson, who by then was retired and quite old but a great speaker. This was Dr. E. E. S. Johnson, the one who started the Corpus project and ran it until it was taken over by my Aunt Selina. I also remember one time we teens were discussing who was the best example we knew of an exemplary Christian, and Dr. Johnson was one of those mentioned.
The most impressive thing the Sunday School did was to run a library. It was very simple and easy to use. After Sunday School you would check out books that would be returned the following Sunday. (There was a good bit of time in between Sunday School and Church, so there was ample opportunity to do this.) They had all kinds of books, just like an ordinary library. My favorite books when I was a boy were the Tom Swift adventure books, cowboy books, and books about a boy and his dog, a boy and his horse. I checked out a lot of books in this Sunday School library -- it is such a good idea, I do not know why no one else does it!
When the church was built most of the people still traveled by horse and buggy, so it is not surprising that behind the church were several rows of sheds in which to park a horse and buggy. And each spot was assigned. They finally tore it down and replaced it with a modern parking lot, but it was still there when I was a little boy. It was kind of fun. Each stall had at the end a large sign with the name of the person to whom it was assigned. The one we parked our car in was assigned to my grandfather, Levi G. Schultz.
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A very important organization in our church was the Ladies Aid Society, which was well known for its many members having excellent cooking and baking skills. Each year many people would come from all over to our church's Fall Festival to buy the canned goods and baked goods on sale there produced by these hard working and skillful women. Some of them even stayed up all night prior to the Festival in order to produce enough cakes and pies and buns and bread to meet the great demand. The money raised by this Fall Festival amounted to over half of the church's annual budget. Unfortunately, though, another interesting thing about this Ladies Aid Society was, according to my mother, the gossiping which went on at the quilting parties, for which reason she dropped out. As I am writing this it suddenly stuck me that this is the stereotype of old fashioned rural women -- good cooks and gossips!
I did not get to know the pastor or any of the other church leaders until I was in college when the church did an interesting thing -- they installed two co-pastors, husband and wife, Howard and Martha Kriebel, with whom I became close friends and had many delightful and meaningful conversations, which was easy to do: they were only slightly older than I was: they had just graduated from seminary. Unfortunately, this did not last long, because most of the people did not like Howard because he was a quiet person, in sharp contrast to the bubbly, exciting Martha, so he resigned and got a job teaching at the high school (which I shall discuss below), and Martha was then the sole pastor. But there were also some people, including my father, who did not like the idea of a woman pastor. Actually, I was dubious myself about the idea but I suppressed it because I enjoyed so much talking with Martha and Howard about all kinds of things. One thing he told me which shocked me was how crude and disgusting some of the male seminary students were at the seminary he had graduated from in Lancaster. As time rolled by I became ever more involved in my life in Philadelphia so that my visits to home became less and less frequent, and then, finally Martha and Howard left and I never saw them again and never got to know the pastors that succeeded them, and, as far as I can remember, the last time I went to Palm Schwenkfelder Church was for my father's funeral in December 1973.
Towns And Farms
As far as I can recall, the church was the only thing in Palm that we ever went to. The town of greatest overall importance to us was East Greenville, which was where almost everything was -- our doctor, dentist, bank, post office, hardware store, barber, grocery store, pharmacy, photographer, and elementary school and high school. Our mailing address was East Greenville R.D. (R. D. stands for Rural Delivery). And whenever I climbed up one of the tall pine trees in the windbreak behind our house and barn, I could look down into East Greenville.
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The town immediately to the south of East Greenville is Pennsburg and immediately to the south of Pennsburg is Red Hill: the technical term was that they are three "contiguous municipalities". You could not tell where one stopped and the next began except by looking at a sign on the road. Pennsburg is where the Schwenkfelder Library and the Perkiomen School is, and there were a few grocery stores there which we also went to as well as a frozen food locker we rented. Pennsburg was also where our local community weekly newspaper was located -- "Town and Country" -- and there was also another bank there, and its square was at the intersection of Route 29 (which ran north and south) and Route 663 (which ran east and west). In Red Hill was a savings and loan company at which I had a savings account when I was a boy. Red Hill also had an excellent band called The Red Hill Band. There was a nice park called the Goshenhoppen Park next to East Greenville, where we had our church picnics and where we found our beloved dog Spike when he was a puppy. When I was a small boy they still had passenger service on the Railroad that went through East Greenville, and I remember one time when I went with my mother to pick someone up at the train station. But. alas, like almost everywhere else they discontinued the train service shortly after that so that you had to go all the way down to Norristown or Lansdale if you wanted to get a train! Perhaps the most interesting thing about these towns is the rivalry between East Greenville and Pennsburg. Each one thought it was much better than the other, and it was really funny to listen to them arguing about it, because it was so silly.
Our farm was surrounded by woods and by other farms and erstwhile farms. Directly south of our farm was the farm of Claude Bieler. The steep winding hill that went from the bridge over the Perkiomen River up to his and then our farm was called "Bieler's Hill". Claude and my father got along very well and frequently helped one another. Claude's son, Richard, who was about 10 years older than I, helped him run their farm. Richard was a good football player in high school, and was especially good at running with the ball. I vividly recall my father and I watching a game at which all the spectators stood to watch Richard running down the field, pulling ahead of everyone else, and then scoring a touchdown. I also remember the hair-raising experience of our ride to the game in the car of our milk-tester who drove very recklessly and a very high speed and would not listen to my father to slow down. Afterward, my father said he would never ride in his car again!!
Claude was a good farmer and was also a member of the Lehigh Valley Co-operative Farmers, but he did not seem to have the drive to excel, like my father did. On the other hand, he was more active in the community than my father was. For example, he was a member of the School Board.
At the farmers meetings I attended with my father there was a lot of stress put upon safety because of the potential dangers posed by the equipment farmers use. Well, one day we had this point dramatically brought home in an accident Richard had with the manure spreader. The handles from the manure spreader behind the tractor rammed Richard in the back when he drove into a ditch and then up a steep hill, pinning him there so he could not extricate himself. The spinal damage done was severe and he was in a semi-paralyzed condition for a while, but he did recuperate and was soon back to normal.
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Claude's mother lived to an advanced age and was still alive when I was a boy. She believed in a lot of the old Pennsylvania Dutch superstitions and insisted that Claude follow them in his farming, even though he himself did not believe in them. One humorous thing concerning this I remember. One of these superstitions is that you should not begin a work project on Wednesday since it is the middle of the week. (The German word for Wednesday is Mittwoch, which means mid-week.) So, any time Claude wanted to start doing something on a Wednesday, such as plowing a field, he would go out to the field late Tuesday afternoon and plow one round and then stop; then he would finish the work on Wednesday. One of the funniest things I ever heard of!! My father told us a whole slew of these superstitions and we kids had a good laugh over them!
Adjacent to our farm to the west was the farm of a very lazy farmer, whose name I shall not mention because my purpose here is not to derogate the man but rather to show that not all farmers are industrious. Also not all farmers are honest, which I learned from what happened on the farm two farms south of ours, the name of whose farmer I also shall not mention. After the milk tester had collected the samples of the milk of his cows, this man would sneak out at night to the milk house with a medicine dropper with cream which he used to add to the samples of his cows milk so that they would test high in percent butterfat. When the milk testing agency found out, they devised a way of showing he was cheating, after which they expelled him from the Dairy Herd Improvement Association, and he was also expelled from the Lehigh Valley Co-op. That is not the end of the story, because, believe it or not, the guy got back in to both by means of the ruse of putting the herd into his wife's name!! I swear I am not making this up!! The final chapter in this tale is the sale of his cows when he retired. The bulletin about the sale had everyone chuckling because it announced the sale of the herd of Mrs. (!!!) ...... . THAT actually happened, and is one of the most interesting things that happened in the Upper Perkiomen Valley when I was growing up there.
Directly to the north of our farm was a woods and above this atop a hill lived an elderly couple, Mr. & Mrs. Adams, who had been farmers, but had retired and now only had a garden, and some of the land they sold off. One sale they regretted was the land they sold to the Rod and Gun Club, which established a shooting range, and they had to listen to all the noise from that. The people around there pronounced the name of this organization very fast so that when I was a little boy I thought they were saying "Rotten Gun Club".
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My mother was a good friend of Mrs. Adams, so we visited there a lot. There was quite a contrast between Mr. and Mrs. Adams with respect to their verbal output. Mrs. Adams was a real chatterbox; Mr. Adams could sit there for hours listening to them talking and not utter a word himself! Mrs. Adams knew my grandparents and several times she talked about them but I cannot recall what she said about them.
Mr. and Mrs. Adams had a son Arnold, who paid them frequent visits, so that sometimes we saw him while we were there visiting. This happened during my last visit, which took place while my wife and I were visiting my mother, who said she wanted to visit Mrs. Adams, so I told her we would go along with her. And while we were there Arnold came also. That is the last time I ever saw Arnold or Mrs. Adams.
Mr. Adams may have been a distant relative of Mr. Frank Adam, who owned a General Store about a mile from our farm where the road running past our farm deadended onto another road, which, I believe, was the one which went to Perkiomen Heights where it intersected Route 663. The peak of this hill was the western boundary of the Upper Perkiomen Valley because from there Route 663 went down the other side of the hill and headed toward Pottstown. As afar as I can recall, Frank Adam's General Store was the only one still in existence in the Upper Perkiomen Valley, and it did not last much longer because few people shopped there any more. I know my mother never went there -- it was gloomy in there and they had some very old merchandise, including the very old fashioned boxes of Quaker Oats, each of which had inside a china dinner plate. I used to stop in there sometimes when I was on my walks or bike rides to buy a bottle of root beer, which was my favorite soda when I was a boy.
To the east of our farm was one of those erstwhile farms to which I referred. It kept on changing hands and little farming was done any more after the real farmer, Mr. Herman Roebuck, sold it and left farming to move into East Greenville and got a job as an autoworker in Allentown. His wife was a good friend of my mother's and she continued her friendship with her, so that we would often stop in to visit her when my mother was in town shopping. She was about the age of my grandmother and I related to her in the same way I did to my grandma.
Another one of my mother's close friends was Mrs. Schuler, whose husband had a farm several miles from ours. He liked our visits to Mrs. Schuler and often left his farm work to come into the house to join us for a cup of coffee and a chat. Mrs. Schuler was the only one of my mother's friends who was a Roman Catholic. There were not many Catholics in the area but enough to have a church there which was called St. Philip Neri. The Schulers had a daughter the same age as my sister Sharon and they were friends. They also had a son who was several years older than I was, and for a while, when he was in barbers college, after he graduated from high school, I would get my hair cut by him during our visits on a barber chair set up in a building that had once been a wash house.
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Another one of my mother's friends was Mrs. Klemmer, but I cannot remember where she lived, but it was near by. I believe she was my mother's best friend because it was to Mrs. Klemmer that she turned for solace one day when she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and was in such bad shape she could not even dial the phone or talk on the phone. I dialed the number and Sharon talked with Mrs. Klemmer, who asked her to come over, which she did and stayed with the whole day. This is what people there did for each other back then. It is sad that there seems to be so little of this kind of friendship today.
In East Greenville lived a very elderly lady whom I got to know and with whom I had some interesting conversations. She was a retired school teacher who had received her education at Kutztown State Teachers College, not long after it had been established, and so long ago that back then they imposed super-strict rules upon their students, which were even stricter than those at Bob Jones University. I had a lot of fun with that! Most of my Christian friends thought that BJU was way too strict, so I enjoyed telling them that I knew an old lady who went to an even stricter college, and it was not even a Christian school!! (It was run by Pennsylvania’s Department of Education.)
The conversation with her that I vividly remember was the one in which she told the sad story of her son, who was called to the Gospel ministry but made the egregious mistake of marrying a money-hungry woman, who led him away from his calling into a high-paying career, which allowed him to keep his wife happy but grieved his heart because of his failure to follow God’s call to the pastorate.
Another person who was both a friend of my mother as well as my friend was my second cousin, Ralph Schultz, who was the son of Adam Schultz, a cousin of my father, and a good farmer. Their farm made the best apple cider I have ever had and we bought a lot of it when I was a boy. Ralph was very shy but also very friendly and we had many many enjoyable conversations. The only one I can specifically recall is the one which was by far the most vivid and most interesting, which was something he witnessed in Europe as a soldier right after the end of World War II. He was standing in a rural area on the border between Germany and France. Over in France the French farmers were working in their fields, and over in Germany the German farmers were working in their fields. Then it started to drizzle, and all the French farmers stopped working but all the German farmers kept on working!! That is perhaps the most interesting and most meaningful anecdotes I have ever heard. I have told it to a number of people over the years but this is the first time I am committing it to print. It was the ideal social science experiment – all factors (time, place, occupation, activity) were constant except for ethnicity, which was the only variable – and it cost no money and happened spontaneously so it did not need to be arranged. The conclusion is that the “work ethic” was still alive and well in 1945 among German Germans as it was among Pennsylvania Germans!!
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Another thing I remember about Ralph Schultz is how my mother did some matchmaking – she tried to fix him up with her sister, Edna, who was about the same age, but nothing ever came of it. Edna did not marry until she was in her forties, and I do not think Ralph ever did get married, due to his shyness.
At the extreme northern end of the Upper Perkiomen Valley is a town called Hereford about which I remember little except for its achieving notoriety by building a round school! I shall discuss the importance for me of a town called Green Lane in the next section on the schools I attended. For now, though, let me conclude this section with a whopper about Green Lane. They had a really funny cop there named Arthur D. Simon, nicknamed “Simey”, who got into the news one day when he gave himself a ticket for going through a red light!!
School Days
One of my earliest memories is what happened when I went into town with my mother for the first day of school in First Grade at the East Greenville Elementary School on the Wednesday after Labor Day in September 1945, which was right after World War II had ended. After she parked the car and we walked up the street (Third Street) toward the school, we heard all the people on the sidewalk talking about the War being over.
For me almost all of my elementary school is a blur and I can only remember the names of two of my teachers, and only one of these was memorable and that was Mrs. Rapp, my Fifth Grade teacher. Mrs. Rapp was super-strict and a super-good teacher and super-outspoken in denouncing evils. For instance, if something wrong was being done in the schools she would march right into the Principal’s Office and tell him what was what – and she got away with it – he would do what she said!! Mrs. Rapp knew how to get the kids excited about things she was teaching and she was very good at telling stories and at bringing in great speakers, my favorite of which was policemen from the Pennsylvania State Police. And she taught us great songs from all around the country and all around the world. I still remember some of these, and one of them, the song about the Boll Weevil, came back to me when I was talking with a lady from Zebulon, GA (not far from where they have the Cotton Pickin’ Fair) about a Boll Weevil Hop they had just had. I started singing the Boll Weevil Song and was shocked that she did not know it!! “What!!” I exclaimed, “I grew up in PA and we learned that song in fifth grade!”
Mrs. Rapp was also compassionate, which I learned one day when she allowed me to bring in to the classroom my beloved dog Spike which had run away and suddenly showed up on the school ground during recess. She also let me use the school phone to call my mother so she could come and get him.
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One day, when I was home from college, I ran into Mrs. Rapp on the sidewalk on Third Street and we renewed our acquaintance, and I was pleased to learn that she was also very interesting as a conversationalist at the adult level! We talked about many different things and she had intelligent comments to make on all of them, and we shared many of the same ideas.
I do not remember the name of our sixth grade teacher but I do remember that he was the only male elementary school teacher I had and that a very humorous thing happened in his class one day. This guy was too lazy to teach us music, so all he did was play records. (Of course, that is all there was back then – there were no cassette tapes, no CDs, DVDs, i Pods, etc.) One day he made a very serious mistake – he played The William Tell Overture, which is the theme song of The Lone Ranger, which was one of the most popular shows at that time. Suddenly everyone in the class began shouting, “Hi Yo, Silver! The Lone Ranger Rides Again!!”
My best friend during elementary school was Bill Hover. After eighth grade our friendship was weakened and then broken when he began rebelling and acting indecently, so that we no longer had anything in common. But while it lasted it was a good friendship. We discussed many different things in which we were both interested, we both liked playing the same games, and we both enjoyed taking long walks in the woods. At that time I was very shy and Bill was one of the few people I would open up with. He also lived in the country but his father was not a farmer but rather the owner of a small business called the Red Hill Grinding Wheel Mfg. Co., even though it was located in Pennsburg, not Red Hill. (He liked the name “Red Hill” better than the name “Pennsburg”.) Later, when I was in high school, he and his family moved to California, where he had gotten a job as a business consultant, so Bill then was no longer around. Bill, though, was not a native Pennsylvanian. He lived in Massachusetts before he moved to PA, which, I think was when he was in first grade. Anyway, we had fun with that – we called him “The Massachusetts Kid!”. Several years ago he came to visit me, and he now is decent again but he had a very rough life for some time, including being involved in the notorious student riots at Berkeley and then, as a hippie going over to India to see a swami, etc.
Another resident of our community had lived in Massachusetts and that was our public librarian who ran the library out of her living room! She was a close friend of my mother who would visit with her while I was getting books to check out. Her husband ran a nearby grocery store where my mother also shopped. At that time there was a popular song about Charlie riding on the MTA – this lady is the only one I knew who had ridden on the MTA and she told me about it. That was so exciting – talking with someone who had ridden on the MTA. I really liked that song!
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The year I began eighth grade was the first year of the Upper Perkiomen High School (UPHS), which was a result of a joining of what were previously separate town-based school districts into a joint school district for the whole Upper Perkiomen Valley. Under the new system the seventh and eighth grades were held in what had been the Pennsburg High School building; and ninth through twelfth grades were held in what had been the East Greenville High School building. I was in the exact class that got caught in the middle of this change. I had already spent seventh grade in the East Greenville High School, then, in eighth grade I went to what had been the Pennsburg High School, then for ninth through twelfth grades I returned to the East Greenville building!! My class was the Class of 1957, which, I am happy to say, was one of the best around that time. And we had some good teachers and some not so good, but who were interesting in certain ways.
The most outstanding teacher I had in high school was Mr. Louis C. Pirnik. I had him for world history and first and second year German. His favorite period of history was of ancient Rome. It was from him that I first learned that the Roman Empire fell due to moral decadence from within. And he solemnly warned us of similar decadence in contemporary America. He was not only a teacher; he was also a preacher!! Just as a preacher would pound the pulpit when making important points, so he would pound his desk, warning us that unless America repented of its decadence, it would fall too!!! He was not a Christian but he did have an intense moral concern and was extremely outspoken in expressing it in a bellicose evangelistic style.
Mr. Pirnik was also the one from whom I first heard about the alarming fact that there is no money in the Social Security fund! This was all the way back in 1955 – long, long before it was brought to light by the Patriot movement in the late seventies and early eighties. When the Pastor of the church I then attended announced this fact to our congregation, I told him that I already knew it. He was astonished to hear that I had learned it in a public school! (He loathed public schools!) I told him that this teacher was quite different!
A really funny thing happened the following year in PAD class. The teacher, Mr. Nace, was one of those men who liked to bring in a lot of outside speakers to address his class. One day he brought in as a speaker a man from the local Social Security office. Well, you can guess what happened then! When one of the students asked him if it was true that there was no money in the Social Security fun, he got all flustered and red in the face and sputtered, “Whaddya mean? Of course, the money is there!” I cherish the memory of this humorous event, and I applaud Mr. Pirnik for informing of this and other not well known historical facts. I also enjoyed how he taught us certain events by acting them out. Lots of fun that was!
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Mr. Pirnik was also an excellent German teacher. He loved the language and he loved to sing German songs. I can still remember on several occasions after one of his German classes how he would walk briskly down the hall singing, “Du, Du, liegst mir im Herzen”, which is a song I also love.
A really funny thing happened in 12th Grade. Mr. Pirnik taught first year German in 11th Grade and second year German in 12th Grade. He was a tough teacher and if you wanted to get an A or B you really had to work hard. Consequently, in order to avoid having Mr. Pirnik for second year German, the whole bottom half of the class dropped the course for 12th Grade, so that that year our German class had only the best students. Well, a real shocker occurred when after the first quarter, Mr. Pirnik suddenly quit teaching – no one knew why – and the teacher they hurriedly hired to replace him was so unintelligent and so unknowledgeable of German that the students knew far more than he did! We all got A’s on all tests because he did not know enough to make up a hard test! It was hilarious, AND those who had dropped the course were now full of regrets because if they had stayed they would have had the easiest teacher in the school! I am not making this up – this really happened!! Another of the many cases were truth is stranger than fiction and more interesting than fiction. This event is a mighty contributor to the Flow of Interesting Things I was very privileged to witness in my life in the Upper Perkiomen Valley!!
The next most outstanding teacher we had, who was a close friend of Mr. Pirnik, was Mr. Warren C. Schlegel, who taught us 1st and 2nd year Latin in 9th and 10th Grades. He also loved his subject and was also quite knowledgeable about ancient Rome. Another thing I liked about both the German and Latin courses were the excellent textbooks we used, which had in them some really great stories – we liked translating these stories because they were so interesting! My favorite story from the German textbook was the one about Beethoven, who was such a shabby dresser that he was often mistaken for a bum, which he was once when he arrived late to conduct an orchestra after the stage door had already closed. My favorite story in the Latin book was of Jason and The Golden Fleece. I also liked Caesar’s terse report to the Senate of his conquest of a city: Veni, Vidi, Vici – I Came; I Saw; I Conquered.
Mr. Schlegel also liked grammar, which he stressed, and he and the English teachers used to get into discussions and arguments about tricky grammatical points in complicated sentences.
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I do not remember the names of our 9th through 12th Grade English teachers but I remember that they were good, which they had to be to make up for the really bad English teachers we had in 7th and 8th Grade.
One of the most enjoyable and interesting things we did in 12th Grade was our PAD Class conducting a mock court trial. The teacher appointed a committee of students who then picked out the cast of characters. I was selected as the Judge! To learn how to do it I spent some time with Judge Knight, who had been on the bench for a long time and was one of the most highly respected persons in the Upper Perkiomen Valley. It was lots of fun learning from him and then sitting in the Judge’s chair, which was the chair of the school Librarian, and the trial was held in the school Library, and parents and friends were allowed to attend as spectators, just as people would do in an actual court trial. I do not remember many of the other details but it took about a week, and, by the way, I did not know (nor did anyone else except the committee know) whether the defendant was guilty or not guilty of the “murder”. The “victim” was one of the teachers! I thought it was quite bold of the committee to do that! It was so long ago that the only specific detail I can remember is that, when asked by one of the attorneys, I had forgotten the technical juridical terminology of the reason for a decision I made so that I blurted out, “That’s The Way It Is”! I never lived that down. For all the rest of my senior year, the other students kept on saying to me, “That’s The Way It Is!”. And my being the Judge in this trial was noted by almost all of the students who signed my Yearbook.
The oldest teacher in our school was Miss Roeder, our algebra and geometry teacher. She was so dedicated to her vocation that, like the proverbial mailman, “neither snow, nor rain nor sleet” could keep her from her instructional duties. I vividly remember one time in the dead of winter watching her climb the snow covered steps up to the building with her leg in a cast!! YESS!!! Her goal was to teach for fifty years, which she accomplished several years later and then she retired. Her dedication was commendable and was typical of many people her age. Sad to say, there are not many like her anymore!
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Another noteworthy teacher was Mr. Albert Neiman, who taught us general math in seventh grade and trigonometry in twelfth grade. He was nicknamed “Trixie” by the students but you did not dare call him that to his face because that would enrage him, and he not only was a strict disciplinarian but even seemed to delight in punishing students! This was back in the days when paddling was still permitted in public schools, and Mr. Neiman used it quite freely, although very few other teachers used it at all. Whenever a student aroused his ire he would give said student a choice of being punished by paddling or by writing a 500 word essay. The boys always chose the paddling, and the girls always chose the essay. Well, one day in seventh grade a girl did something wrong and when presented with the choice of punishment, she chose, as usual, the essay. Then Bill Hover (who was still there at that time), who was sitting in the very front of the class, blurted out, “I bet you don’t have the nerve to paddle a girl!!”. This enraged Mr. Neiman, who proceeded to give Bill the hardest paddling ever!! Later, when he had him for trig, we used to utter this saying (of course, not in the hearing of Mr. Neiman): “We have tricky Trixie for tricky trigonometry!”.
Well, trig wasn’t all that tricky to me: I never had any problem with it. In fact, I vividly remember finishing the final exam in a very short time, and then asked Mr. Neiman if I could be free to leave. My father was making hay and I promised him I would get home as soon as I could in order to help him. Well, at first Mr. Neiman did not want to let me go, but he did finally consent after making some snide remarks about hay-making!
The physics teacher we had in our senior year was interesting mainly because he had been a civil engineer, who did not like his work, and decided to switch to teaching science in high school. He was a good teacher and a really friendly guy. For instance, he invited his physics class to his house once for a barbecue.
I had several friends in high school, the closest of whom were Clare Reihman and Gerald (“Jerry”) Butterweck. Jerry was a great model airplane fan. Sometimes I helped him build them but mostly I helped him fly them. It requires two people. After the engine is started, one person, the launcher, holds the airplane in his hand and runs forward with it and pitches it forward. The other person, the flyer, holds a handle in his hand which is attached to wires which are connected to the plane. He stands in the center of a circle and keeps pivoting around, pulling the place in a circle around him, using the control wires to guide the plane up or down, and he continues doing so until the plane runs out of gas, and then tries to land it without crashing it, which is not easy to do. The plane is powered by a tiny gasoline engine with just enough fuel for a few minutes of flight. We also used to throw a football around, and, if we could find a few others, we would have a game of touch football. We also watched baseball games on TV, and, believe it or not, we watched the game on his TV where Willie Mays made his famous catch – one of the most shocking and exciting things I ever saw on TV. He lived in Pennsburg and his father owned a grocery store in Pennsburg.
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My favorite activities with Clare were board games and personal conversations about the many topics in which we were both interested. One memorable time at his house we got so enthralled by our conversation that we lost all track of time and ended up spending almost the whole night in our gabfest. We also liked riding around in his black 1949 Plymouth with its hood ornament of a shiny metal bird with bright red plastic wings. He made a careful study of the characteristics of the different makes and models around that time and decided that the 1949 Plymouth was about the best deal. Clare has lived all of his life in Green Lane on the farm where he grew up.
And the reason I know this is that Clare married my sister Sharon; and Jerry married my sister Janet. So, my two best friends in high school ended up becoming my brothers-in-law.
Sharon is three years younger than I am. Clare married her right after her high school graduation and right after he finished his junior year at Kutztown State Teachers College. Clare’s father gave him a field on which he built his house by himself with help from Sharon and from friends, including me when I was home from college. He did this under the direction of his maternal grandfather, who was retired and was a jack of all trades, literally! He knew carpentry and roofing and plumbing and electrical wiring and stone masonry and how to build a foundation: in short, all the skills needed to build a house! The only expense for Clare and Sharon was the purchase of the building materials. They lived in a trailer next to the house while building it. It was not long before they moved into the house, and finished building it while in it, and then they rented out the trailer, and my mother finally moved into it after she retired. After Clare graduated from Kutztown the following year he became a science teacher at the Pennridge High School, which was his life long career from which he retired a few years ago. They raised four children, one of whom, Charlyn, lives on the same road they do, Reihman Road, and the others live at different places. When she had finished raising her brood, Sharon went to nursing school and became a registered nurse, working at the same hospital in which we were born, namely Grand View Hospital in Sellersville. Sharon has always been the one with the great interest in relatives, so that I always ask her when I want to know who is still living and where and etc. Well, anyway, now you know the great importance of Green Lane for me!!
Sharon has spent some time doing volunteer work in the Schwenkfelder Library, so it is she who has kept me up to date with what they are doing, and I also send her (first by snail mail, now by email), all my genealogical updates, i.e. the particulars on each new grandchild, so she can go there and get it put into the genealogical record in their computer.
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Jerry joined the Navy after he graduated from high school. He married Janet shortly after his term in the Navy was completed, after which he began working at a local factory, C& D Battery, where he worked his way up to Plant Manager. I did not keep in touch with him and Janet as I did with Clare and Sharon, so I have little more to say here except that I know he died some time during the 1990s after which Janet received some kind of training for a job she now has.
I had several other friends in high school who are worthy of note. One of these was Wilford Weber. In eighth grade I helped him in his campaign to become class president. One of his campaign signs was impressive both as an artwork and also as a means of communicating his slogan: Win With Weber. On the left side of this sign was a large W, which covered the entire left half of the sign from top to bottom, and which was the first letter of each of the three words in this slogan, which were arranged in a descending vertical column on the right side. Another sign, with an identical layout, said "Weber Will Win". But he didn't. Larry Moyer was elected.
But, in the next several years, beginning in the ninth grade, Weber and I became the winning team in the ping pong doubles matches that became fairly popular when UPHS bought several ping pong tables, which were placed in the Auditorium for the students to use before and after school and during the lunch hour. After a while doubles matches were not as popular any more, and singles matches then became the thing. Then Weber and I played against each other, with him winning most of our matches at first, and finally me winning most of them and also winning most of the matches against other students, until, finally, by my senior year I was able to beat all the other students in the school.
Another thing I liked during high school was tape recorders. Jack Bauman shared my interest and we spent a lot of time playing around with them, especially recording something we said, and then playing it back to listen to it. Jack was also a good conversationalist and we spent a lot of time chatting as well.
This reminds me of an interesting genealogical matter with respect to the Bauman family in East Greenville, to whom Jack belonged. Although I was told a number of times who was who in this Bauman family, I never could remember it even back then, so I will not say any more now except for the interesting fact that my mother chose the name “Forrest” for me because she liked hearing the sound of it while Forrest Bauman was spoken to by his fellow painters while they were painting our house while she was pregnant with me.
Another interesting thing is that one of the members of this family, Dave Bauman, whom I did not know during high school because he was so much younger, I got to know in Philly when he became a student at Drexel while I was there.
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Dave and I became close friends in Philly and liked to talk about important matters but never seemed to have enough time to do so. Well, the Upper Perkiomen Valley came to the rescue! One time when we were both back home for a holiday, we spent an entire day chatting as we walked all around the Valley!
The most unusual high school classmate I ever had as a friend had a really wild English name -- Malden Whipple! I am NOT kidding -- that really was his name! And it was ideal for him living in our 99.9% Pennsylvania Dutch community because he delighted in being different and in doing and saying weird things. I deeply regret that I cannot recall what any of them were but I DO remember being fascinated by them, and I believe now, in retrospect, that this perhaps was one of the reasons he liked having me as a friend! He only lived in our community for a short time and then, alas, I saw him no more because his family moved away.
Another person in our class who only sojourned with us for a short while was a very Southern Belle, whose name I do not recall, and whom I did not get to know well. When she first arrived and was enrolled in our class, she used to stand up whenever a teacher called upon her, because this was the Southern way for a student to show respect for the teacher. After a while the teachers got tired of it, and told her she did not have to stand any more. She received a lot of good-natured kidding about her deep Southern accent and her sweet disposition. I liked her but she also soon left, I know not why and I know not whither.
High school students who excel in athletics are not unusual but it IS unusual for one student to excel in all of them. We had such a student in my class -- Barry Fetterman, who excelled and was the BEST student on all three of the athletic teams in our high school -- football and basketball and baseball!!! AND he was a nice guy, not at all like the "jocks" who are derogated today for looking down on the other students. He was not a friend but we liked and respected each other. I was saddened several years ago when I heard that he had died of cancer.
I mentioned above two unusual students who were only with us a short time. We also had an unusual student who was there all the time. This was Jimmy Haines, who was half-Indian. (His mother was a full-blooded Indian.) Jimmy was very quiet and never raised his hand unless it was to say something about the Indians, about which he was quite knowledgeable, so that his comments were intelligent.
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OK, now let's turn to an interesting thing of a different sort. I have decided to include this because it may help shed some light on the debates and discussions that have taken place during the past several decades in regard to the removal from public schools of the practice of Bible reading and prayer. I went to school before this practice was abolished, and I remember very well what it was like. From what many people -- on both sides of this issue -- have said, it is clear that most of them have no idea what it was like to have attended school when Bible reading and prayer began the school day.
First of all, the Bible reading and the prayer were done in a perfunctory manner and were totally unrelated to what happened in the classes. God was mentioned in the Bible reading and in the prayer, but never mentioned in the teaching of the various subjects. And, nobody paid any attention to what was read in the Bible in our school except for one time when the student who was reading the Bible that day chose one of the "juicy" passages from the Song of Solomon!! THAT was one time when the students DID listen!!
OK, now a few more goodies from high school before I sign off. One was the only time I remember being punished for anything in high school, which was getting into a snowball fight with another student in front of the school. The Principal, Mr. Barney Roth, was a strict disciplinarian so I was really scared about what my punishment would be. Well, it turned into a pleasant surprise, because it was just an hour's detention during most of the time of which he chatted with me about my father with whom he had played baseball when they had town teams back in the day. He said my father was a good hitter!
We were reminded that we were in a rural community when we looked out the windows in the back of our school, where we could see farmers out working in their fields, and, on a clear day I could see all the way up Bieler’s Hill to the edge of our farm!
And we were reminded of the power of Mother Nature when, while we were in school, the first hurricane ever in the whole history of Pennsylvania arrived – Hurricane Hazel!! Absolutely unforgettable!! Well, now, back then, in the Dark Ages, we had no Storm Trackers or Wizometers like we have now, but they did the best they could, which was a couple of hours of advance notice, whereupon the school day was immediately ended, and we were sent home before Hazel arrived in full force. Another unforgettable thing was that our last class on that shortened day was Phys Ed, and while we were drying off from our shower in the locker room, one of the guys suddenly wrapped his towel around himself and shrieked, “HAZEL !!!”. Boy was that funny!!
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And, when we got home and looked out at those fierce winds, such as we had never had in PA – now there you are talking about something interesting!! And then the next day, we drove all around and saw the huge number of felled trees – totally unprecedented in PA!! Well, we had hurricanes after that, but none knocked down nearly as many trees because all the weak ones had already been knocked down by Hazel!!
Well, I guess I shall have to say a few words about our graduation, which can be summarized like this – I LOVED the great song “Pomp and Circumstance” which was played while we marched in our caps and gowns to the Commencement Ceremony but the Valedictorian’s speech was no good. It just now hit me – I said the same about Palm Schwenkfelder church while I was there during that time – great music but boring sermons. Later on I learned that this was typical of modern times – no concern for public speaking, as there was in days of yore, when rhetoric was a term used for laudatory rather than condemnatory purposes!
Now, let me conclude this section on schools with the most profound thing uttered in our high school, which was spoken not by a teacher but by one of the students, Sylvia Reitnauer, at the end of our very last class (in which our teacher allowed us to chat for most of the period) when there was a lull in the conversation which she filled with these poignant words, which rendered us all speechless: “THIS IS THE LAST TIME WE WILL EVER BE TOGETHER LIKE THIS!!!!!!!!!”.
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The Upper Perkiomen Valley -- Bidding Adieu
For me, graduating from high school was the first step in a long process by which I gradually bid adieu to the Upper Perkiomen Valley. I did NOT leave the Upper Perkiomen Valley because of something about it which I disliked, but because it did not have the educational and career opportunities I wanted.
I liked what the Upper Perkiomen Valley had. I have read accounts of people who have lived in poverty in shacks on farms and in rural towns. This was not the case with me. Our house was well-built with thick stone walls and had plenty of space, more than we needed, in fact.
Our kitchen and dining room were each so large that we ate our meals at our kitchen table, and only used the dining room when we had company. At other times we used the dining room table for writing, studying, and playing games.
The living room was also large: there were miscellaneous cabinets and bookcases, a piano, a large davenport, several chairs, and a large coat closet, which also contained a large can of pretzels!
There were books in other rooms also, including our huge attic (which had some very old books), which was ideal for us kids to play in and to rummage around in the huge wooden storage bins with lots of old stuff, my favorite being a genuine stovepipe hat from the 19th century.
My bedroom was also large, bigger than most with plenty of room. It had two large windows – one facing west into one of our side yards with its huge maple tree with its two large swings, with views also of our cow pasture and the back lane. The other one facing north gave me a view of, in this order, a small back yard with its weeping willow tree, the bake oven used in days of yore, a second back yard with a dogwood tree, and behind that our windbreak.
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We had a large basement with cement floors on which my sisters liked to go roller skating. The east side of it had a large amount of canned goods both on shelves along the south wall and on a very large rectangular table, which hung from the ceiling. The west side was divided into the northern section, which had several large freezers, and the southern section, where our (coal and wood burning) furnace was located and also a wooden shower stall. The extreme southern portion, which was underneath our front porch, contained our coal bin. There were also two caves in the cellar. Our house was built on the side of a hill so that you could enter the basement directly from the front of the house as well as from the first floor, which was on ground level entered by either the front or the back door to the house. Ditto with the barn, which was a bank barn – the stanchions for the cows (and the pens in which the mules had been stabled when we had mules) were entered from the front directly. The top floor of the barn was devoted to a granary and several hay mows, and could be directly accessed by driving up the hill and entering from behind the barn.
And, by the way, I learned from my father that the reason barns were painted red was because the red paint was the least expensive paint, not because the farmers liked the color. He didn’t, so that, when I was a little boy, he had it repainted green and white, which looked a lot nicer. He also replaced the original roof with an aluminum one, and he replaced the original wooden shingles on the house with slate ones.
Although we were a good distance from Philly (it took two hours to get there when I was a boy, and about an hour and a half when I was in college), we were able, by the standards of that time, to get decent reception on our TV, when we bought one in 1950, one of the first years they had ordinary size TV screen (ours was a 17” screen), for all three of the networks broadcasting from Philly (CBS, NBC,& ABC). My favorite shows were Gene Autrey (my favorite cowboy) and Milton “Uncle Milty” Berle (my favorite comedian) and You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx (favorite game show).
Unfortunately, my sisters and I became TV addicts, so that when our TV broke our parents decided not to get it fixed!! But, the antenna was still there, a good one, so I hooked it up to my huge bedroom radio, which was formerly in our living room, and which had all kinds of bands – short wave, police, airport, etc. – and the reception was so good I could even get foreign radio broadcasts! That was fun. I remember once – this was in during the time when Eisenhower was President – listening to a foreign news broadcast of which I could understand nothing except they kept saying “Eisenhower” so I knew they were talking about him! It really sounded funny!!
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Behind our house was the wash house, which previous generations had used for washing the huge amounts of clothes they washed each Monday. At the far end was a huge fireplace with an enormous pot, which held the water which was heated, and then swung out toward the room for use. Inside the wall adjacent to the fireplace were many hooks on which they hung meat for smoking “back in the day”. So, the fireplace had a double use. When I was in high school and playing a lot of ping pong I bought from the local lumber yard a 4’ x 8’ piece of wood which I used to make a ping pong table in there after I moved the washhouse tables out of the way. It was a great idea, and really improved my game because the standard ping pong tables are 5’ x 9’, so, if I could keep the ball on a table one inch shorter in length and width, it would be easy to do it on a standard table. I played lots of games on it.
One thing which the town of East Greenville had whose value I did not realize until later, was the fact that anyone living there could walk to almost everything. From the house on Third Street in EG, where my mother lived for a while, the elementary school was about a half block away, the post office and our dentist and our doctor were one block away. A block and a half away was Main Street on which right near that intersection were the bank, a grocery store, a hardware store, a pharmacy, and a photography studio. Walking south from the house were a small corner store, a hotel, the train station and then Goschenhoppen Park – just a few blocks walk. Walking thru the alley next to the house and proceeding north was about a four block walk to the high school. And it was a bout a five block walk south to the Perkiomen School and the Schwenkfelder Library. Having everything nearby like this is a much better idea than the current usual set up, where houses at one place, shopping malls at another place, schools at other places, hospitals other places, etc. You have to drive your car to every place you want to go, which is inferior to the set up in East Greenville we had then. (I do not know what it is like now.)
Also the crime rate at that time – I do not know what it is like today – was so low that each town only had one part time cop!
There were, of course, some negative things I remember about East Greenville, one of which I heard when I was home visiting my mother and a friend of hers came to visit who told us that the burgess was the guy who had the lowest weighted average in her high school class !! But, while living on the farm, I do not remember hearing anything about stuff like that.
Returning now to good stuff, back then we had Sears Roebuck mail order catalogs and shipments of the merchandise you ordered was shipped directly to your house! We really liked this: opening those Sears Roebuck packages was almost like Christmas! Oh, and it was also exciting when I learned how to fill out the order form and my mother let me do it!
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Before concluding I want to say a word in regard to snow. I loved sledding and snowballs when a boy, and, when I became a young man living in Philly I loved driving my VW bug thru the snow – it was the best car for driving in snow back then. But I am an old man now and do not see snow in the same way, but I do have fond memories of my life in PA in regard to snow.
Now for the final word here. When I was a freshman in college I went home every weekend because five days in the crowded city of Philly was about all I could take. I liked college but had not yet adapted to the crowded urban environment. Each weekend as soon as I returned home to the farm, I would get my dog Spike and run in blessed relief through the fields and pastures. But I gradually became adapted to Philly and consequently spent less and less time in the Upper Perkiomen Valley, and more and more time in Philly. Also more and more of what I did and people I knew were in Philly and less and less in the UPV. Then, the final break came in 1974, when my wife and I decided to move to the Atlanta area and the following year bought a house in the nearby suburb of Riverdale. I think I only returned home to the Upper Perkiomen Valley one time, which was shortly after that.
My sister Sharon is about the only one in the UPV with whom I have kept in touch. She and Clare came down to visit me twice where I live now, in Grantville, in Coweta County, GA. Their daughter, my niece, Charlynn came to visit me once. And a few years ago I had a visit from Bill Hover. Every time I get a new grandchild I let Sharon know so she can get it to the Schwenkfelder Library to keep the genealogical record up to date. And, occasionally something comes up that we email each other about, such as the new book published by Darlene Schneck discussed in Part One.
Well, I hope this has been interesting to you and now let me leave you with one final one – and this is a whopper. The Perkiomen River is named after the Perkiomen Indians about whom we know only two things – that was their name and they lived there – we know nothing else about them!! How about that? Yeah!! Go, Perkiomen!! Go UPHS!!
Auf wiedersehen!!
June 2013
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