Mr. Warren Harding…..that is our eighth grade teacher’s name. The assignment he gives for our next day is to write a story of our most embarrassing moment, then stand before the class and recite it.
One really stands out for me far above all the others. Besides it happened just this summer before this school year of 1935 started and I am thirteen years old.
From Sweet Little Baby…….
It was late summer of the year 1936. I was about to start my freshman year in York Center High School. Living with me in the house beside my dad’s stone quarry were my brother Bee, ten years older than me, and my younger brother Bugs (Howard). My sister Bobbie (she gave herself this nickname, because she didn’t like her given name Hazel) declared she was coming to live with us and finish her senior year. This gave my sister Fannie the courage to come home to finish junior and senior years. Our father had made all of his children quit school, so this was much against his wishes.
That’s me over there on the left
It was always a big deal when they put off a so called “shot” which was a dynamite blast from the deep holes drilled down through the rock at my father’s York Center stone quarry. Two of my dad’s working men would stand at each end of the road to stop traffic. The other working men and some of my family would stand in the yard by the house. Sam Manley, who worked as my dad’s foreman for his men, would press down on a lever on top of a wooden box causing the dynamite deep down in the holes to explode. Broken rocks flew high in the air then settled down in the pit amidst a cloud of lime dust.
When my father was teaching me to drive a car he told me that he was born into the poorest family in the poorest community. I didn’t say that was true, I only said that is what my father told me.
When he was 19 years old my father borrowed money from the Mt Victory, Ohio bank through the bank president Henry Dickerson for his first little business venture. After making that venture profitable he went on to larger and larger enterprises until he contracted to build “horse and buggy” dirt roads into crushed stone roads for the first cars that were being built.