Another Time, Another Place: Memories of a Small-Town Boyhood

By Larry L. Harshbarger

It was a time of extreme peril. The Great Depression was winding down and World War ll was starting. The author witnessed the Greatest Generation first hand as he saw many young men--including his older brother--leave town and go off to war. On the home front, there developed a closeness and support of family, friends and neighbors, not seen before or since. Through good and bad times, the towns young boys hiked, fished, hunted and trapped in the streams, fields, forests and mountains surrounding their homes. It was truly an era that will never be again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 11, 2004
• ISBN: 9781469111544

Larry L. Harshbarger

Larry Harshbarger was born and reared in Yeagertown, a small town in central Pennsylvania. A Penn State graduate, he is now retired after 35 years with the Steel Industry in Quality Control Management. For 64 years, he has hunted wild turkey on the mountains and ridges of central Pennsylvania. Larry has been published in many outdoor magazines, and has previously written and published a book about his boyhood years growing up in Yeagertown. His love of the outdoors and writing has led him to pen this book and share with others his lifetime pursuit of Pennsylvania’s wild turkey.

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Copyright © 2004 by Larry L. Harshbarger.

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Contents

1

THE EARLY YEARS

2

EXPANDING HORIZONS

3

THE GREAT DEPRESSION ENDS

4

BIRTH OF AN OUTDOORSMAN

5

WORLD WAR II BEGINS

6

THE FUN OF SUMMER

7

MENTORS AND HEALERS

8

GERMANY AND JAPAN SURRENDER

9

THE FIRST TEACHERS’ STRIKE

10

GETTING WHEELS

11

FAMILY CARS AND OUT ON THE FARM

12

THE LAST HURRAH

1

THE EARLY YEARS

It was the summer of 1945. The war with Japan had ended;

I was fourteen. On a sweltering, late August day, I had just completed an afternoon swim in the public pool at Kishacoquillas Park and was hitchhiking home.

The third car I thumbed slowed and pulled to the side of the road. As I ran to get in, I saw that the driver, the only occupant, was a sailor in uniform. It turned out to be Jerry Goss, a good friend to my older brother Jim. Like so many others, Jerry had quit high school at seventeen and joined the service.

Wher’re you headed? he asked.

Yeagertown, I answered.

Well, I was going to turn at McKim, but I’ll run you on home.

As he shifted into gear and started out, he glanced at me while asking, Where’s Jim these days?

He’s in the army, I answered, stationed in the Philippines.

Tell him I said hello the next time you write, and that I made it home all in one piece.

I’ll do that, I said as we sped through the intersection at McKim.

Soon, we entered my hometown of Yeagertown (named for Jacob Yeager and his eight sons). Jerry slowed the car to a snail’s pace and began reeling off the names of the old landmarks. As he named each one, he said, I never thought I would see it again. I realized that what he was saying had something to do with his active duty in the Pacific. I was told later that his ship had been sunk, and he spent considerable time floating around at sea until he was rescued.

Nowadays, when you travel Yeagertown’s Main Street you find that those same landmarks which Jerry Goss was so thrilled to see don’t exist anymore. Gone forever is the Tydol Garage and Pool Hall. It’s now the Post Office. The Hershey Parlor is nothing but a vacant lot, and the old stone hotel which stood beside it was torn down years ago to make room for a modern-type building now used for storage. The H. B. Hutchison Hardware Store is now a home, and the three grocery stores and two candy/ice-cream stores have all become housing. And, gone forever is the small-town life style of the ’30’s and ’40’s that we kids lived to the fullest and have savored for the rest of our lives.

I was six years old when our family moved to Yeagertown, Pennsylvania. From my birth until then, we had lived in Lewistown—just three miles away. Lewistown, the county seat for Mifflin County, was much larger than Yeagertown with a population of around 10,000 people, and it featured a downtown with lots of stores. The reason we moved was because my dad got sick and tired of moving around and renting houses in Lewistown.

Every spring, Mom and her mother—our live-in grandmother whom we called Me Ma—got after Dad to find and rent a better house in Lewistown. It always had to be Lewistown, never another area or town. Apparently, Dad got tired of it, so he borrowed money and bought the house in Yeagertown. Neither Mom nor Me Ma wanted to move, and they argued their case before Dad for days. I can still hear them saying: We don’t want to go back to the sticks of old Yeagertown. (Ironically, it was where both of them had grown up.) Although they fussed and fumed right up to the end, Dad prevailed, and we made the move in early August, right after my sixth birthday.

Moving day came and went, and we settled into our new home. It was a large, two-story, wooden frame house with front, side and back porches. It sat on a corner lot bordered by Mann Avenue in the front, and an unnamed street at the side. At the back of the lot ran an alley which provided access to a one-car garage. The front yard was small with a sidewalk and two trees. In the back was a much larger yard with terraced grass, space for a garden and a cement walk running its entire length. Compared to what we had just left, this new place was huge.

Inside, our new home had three large bedrooms and a bath upstairs. Downstairs on the first floor were two large living rooms, a large dining room and a small kitchen. In addition, the big house had a large attic and a small, musty cellar. My older brother Jim and I slept in the back bedroom, Me Ma and little sister Janice slept in the next room and Mom and Dad slept in their room next to the bathroom. Since none of the bedrooms were heated, cold winter mornings necessitated a dash to the bathroom, clothes in hand, to get dressed. Usually, the bathroom was warm and cozy thanks to heat from a register beside the bathtub.

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Old Yeagertown Home—Side Porch

Within days of our moving, I was allowed a freedom to roam that didn’t exist at our Lewistown home. There, I had been confined to the tiny front porch or the small backyard, and I never had a friend or a playmate. Now, I roamed two whole blocks of Mann Avenue, including the back alleys. While doing so, I made some friends.

Right up the street I met and played with the Fisher brothers—Max and Dick. Max was a year older than I; Dick was a year younger. Directly across the street from our house lived Ember Edison Yohn who was also a year younger than I. Two doors from him lived Stanley Miller who was two years older. Up the street from Max and Dick lived Billy Orren, and he was the same age as me. Billy would be a friend for several years only, then he would move away. All the rest of us, however, would remain friends throughout our school days.

Since moving to Yeagertown, I was having fun. Also, Brother Jim, being five years older, was all over town making new friends. On the other hand, Mom and Me Ma weren’t doing so well. They both hated Yeagertown and griped continuously about the fact that Dad had made them move from their beloved Lewistown. In addition, Mom cried a lot.

One day, when I came home from having a great time playing cars with the Fisher brothers, I caught Mom crying. It was too much for me; it stopped me in my tracks. I looked up at her and said, Why don’t you like it here in Yeagertown? Jim and I love it. It must have had a profound effect upon Mom, for I never heard her or Me Ma complain again. In fact, both of them came to love Yeagertown as much as we kids did.

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Me Ma and Mom In Front of Yeagertown Home

By the time summer ended and school began, Jim and I had made many friends. He was in the sixth grade and I started first. The grade school we attended was on Main Street, just a block and a half away. Since it was well within walking distance, we didn’t carry lunches but instead came home at noon to eat. Three things stand out from my first grade experience.

First of all, I made two more friends. Both were my age and lived along Main Street where I wasn’t allowed to go. Their names were Bill Davis and Tom Britt. Secondly, I met a girl I liked a lot. Her name was Ilene Taylor and she had long curly, blond hair. One day during recess I hit her in the face with a handful of dirt. While wiping her eyes, she complained bitterly. Showing little remorse, I responded by saying, You’re supposed to eat a pound of dirt a year.

Not all at one time, you idiot, she shot back and then disappeared into the crowd of kids. Needless to say, our friendship went south from that point on.

Another thing happened in first grade that was quite hurtful and embarrassing to me. Neither my family nor I knew it, but I was color blind. At some point in time, the teacher suspected it and gave me a test. She called me to the front of the room while breaking a brown crayon behind her back. As I faced her with my back to the class, she held out three broken pieces and asked me to name the colors. Proudly I answered, Brown green and red. She laughed out loud as did the entire class. Humiliated, I returned to my seat. This was a social scar that I would carry the rest of my life. I’ve refused to shop for clothes by myself, and to this day, my wife picks out clothes for me to wear and helps me select the few that I buy.

In spite of my color blindness, I made it through first grade and got promoted to second. Brother Jim also passed and would be attending Yeagertown High School the following year as a seventh grader. In the meantime, however, we had the summer of 1938 to enjoy. For Jim, it meant running with friends, swimming, fishing, caddying at the golf course and playing his trumpet. For me, it was playing with friends and discovering the outer limits of Yeagertown.

Early in the summer, I played a lot of cars with the Fisher brothers. There was this neat place between their house and the neighbor’s where grass never grew, and because of our ingenuity, the barren ground became an ever-changing system of roads and highways. Although I only had a few toy cars and trucks, Max and Dick seemed to have an endless supply of them. Their father, Ed Fisher, was the head mechanic at the large KaVee Milk and Ice Cream plant in Belleville, and I’m sure his profession influenced their interest in cars and trucks.

Although I enjoyed playing cars from time to time, I couldn’t get into it as seriously as Max and Dick did. Time would show that both Fisher brothers had it in them to become auto mechanics just like their dad. Later on in life, they would be in the garage business with him, and after that, the two of them would own and operate Fisher Brothers, Inc. a large school bus enterprise. On the other hand, my dad and I would have all of our auto servicing and repairs done at their garage until it closed. Neither Dad nor I had their abilities. We didn’t even change the oil.

As the summer moved on, I expanded my horizons. Big Brother Jim hardly ever wanted me tagging along, but occasionally, while running errands for either Me Ma or Mom, he would take me with him. Usually, this meant going to Main Street where I wasn’t allowed on my own. It was during these infrequent trips that I learned first hand about the heavy traffic of buses, cars and trucks on our town’s Main Street. Main Street also happened to be U.S. Route 322 the primary artery of travel south to Lewistown and north to Reedsville, Milroy and State College where Penn State was located. Jim always took my hand when crossing the street. It was the only time we touched except for when he pounded me around.

Once across Main Street, we went to either the A&P grocery store or the Hershey Parlor. The Hershey was a wonderful place. Inside, toward the front of the store, was a large candy counter. Then, running the full length of the room to the small kitchen was a soda/ice cream bar with stools. In the back room was a jukebox and a large dance floor with booths around its perimeter. The Hershey Parlor sold hamburgers, cheeseburgers, hot dogs and fries, and specialized in all sorts of ice cream sundaes, sodas, banana splits and shakes. It was where the older kids hung out.

Once in awhile, when Jim had money, we stopped at Pappy Keller’s candy store on the way home and bought home-made ice cream sandwiches. It was the one thing the Hershey didn’t have. Basically, it was a hand-sliced block of ice cream about an inch thick placed between two waffled wafers of the same size. Although it wasn’t fancy looking like one of the Hershey’s sundaes, it still hit the spot on a hot summer day.

Even after my seventh birthday, I still wasn’t allowed to go to Main Street. Every time I went out the door either Mom or Me Ma shouted at me, Don’t you go near Main Street. I won’t, I’d yell back and then slam the door behind me. Since that was my only restriction, I started branching out in all other directions. With the exception of Lower Mann Avenue, which we considered to be a foreign country—we called it Little Italy—I roamed and discovered the rest of town.

What really made Yeagertown special for us kids were its neat surroundings. When you went up the street beside our home, you came to solid woods leading to Jacks Mountain. If you then turned left onto Clover Avenue and went toward the high school, there was nothing but open fields on both sides. On the left were open fields all the way to Locke Avenue. On the right, were open fields and scattered woods as far as you could see. Continuing on south past the high school you soon came to the Willows Golf Course, and if you skirted it to the right and crossed an open field you arrived at Buck Run—a small meandering stream containing suckers and chubs. In reality, Yeagertown’s borders consisted of the following: to the west were open fields and scattered woods; to the east was Kishacoquillas Creek which held an abundance of native trout; to the north was Jacks Mountain which harbored all kinds of wild animals and to the south was the Willows Golf Course and Buck Run.

Along with our town’s streets, back alleys and vacant lots these were the places which became our paradises for imaginative escapes and creative play. What we couldn’t appreciate at times, however, were the pitfalls lurking in their midst and carrying with them the potential for tragic results.

As the summer of 1938 wound down, I still had three memorable experiences to go—two enjoyable, the other scary.

The first occurred one Saturday in early August when Jim and I went to a picture show at Lewistown. Instead of traveling the usual way—on a public transportation bus—we took the old K.V. railroad train which ran between Belleville and Lewistown once a day. Although I had heard other kids talk about the K.V., I had never seen it. It ran on rails located between the Standard Steel Works and Kishacoquillas Creek, which, here again, was on the other side of Main Street where I wasn’t allowed to go.

As Jim and I waited at the intersection of the rails and Mill Road (there wasn’t a station or a platform), I literally shook in my shoes with excitement. There were a bunch of other kids along with a few adults lined up to board, and Jim and I were right up front. Suddenly, we heard the train’s whistle. "Must be crossing the bridge below Deep