When Mr. Downey suggested that I should write an article for this publication, 
perhaps using the title "Then & Now", I said that I would.  However, the "Then" in my life is as far removed from most of your lives, so that the events therein would seem incredible, but then I thought perhaps in comparison not more so than the "Now" sometimes seems to me!

I was born in Holmes Co., Ohio near Mt. Hope on my grandfather Drushel's farm.  We had a large orchard full of all kinds of fruit trees -- heavily laden each year and all without the use of any spray.  In the fall we not only made apple butter in the big copper kettle but quite often peach or pear.  At the back of the farm were walnut, hickory, butternut, and chestnut trees -- the good old-fashioned kind!

In the spring we picked morels by the peck.  There was a large cave in the side of a hill where fruit and vegetables were stored.  We had a large glass "hot bed" for raising young plants.  Then we had a large garden and truck patch.  My mother always had at least two hundred jars of fruit, jams and jellies on her pantry shelves.  We had an "out-door" bake oven built in the side of a hill which was fired-up once or twice a week for baking bread, pies, and cookies.  Who ate all this food?  Most people had large families and there was a lot of visiting back and forth and no farm people ever ate "out."

One year grandfather decided to build a straw shed on to his barn.  He went to Trail and bought a very large load of sandstone.  My father and his brothers would drive two horses pulling a "sledge" to Trail.  There they chiseled off a load of stone for the walls of the new shed.  The carpenters "lived in" so in the evening my grandfather played the "fiddle" and my aunt "chorded" on the piano -- They all had a good time!

At harvest time when they hauled the grain to Millersburg, the shortest way was through Fryburg.  That meant going up a very steep hill, and that required a third horse to be hitched in front of the other two.  At the top of the hill, he was unhitched, turned around, and told to go home and he always did!

My father's hobby was photography.  We had a spring of sparkling, ice-cold water close to the house.  He used that for developing the pictures.   He used glass negatives.

We lived in Iowa for five years.  I remember that going out on the train, the conductor woke everyone to tell us that we were crossing the Mississippi River.  We lived on a farm in Madison County.  Yes, the one made famous by the best selling novel,  "The Bridges of Madison County." Of course when we were there, the bridges were used to span the rivers and not for "trysting places"!

Our farm was very flat and fertile, we had no close neighbors and the nearest small town was seven miles away.  We lived two miles from school.  My older brother walked but when my sister and I were ready for school, my father bought a pony and cart.  My father built a small stable in the school yard.  This school was small, never more than twelve pupils.  We did not have grades, but we were divided into reading classes -- chart, primer, first, etc.  One year our teacher was "exceptional".  She taught us music and "drawing" and made us read and memorize many poems.

In 1910 we saw Halley's Comet.  I really can't describe what a glorious sight that was as it stretched across the western sky.  The next time that I saw it in Ohio, it seemed only a "shadow" of its former self.  The other big event was the sinking of the Titanic.  I remember the two-inch black headlines in our daily paper - TITANIC SINKS - ALL ARE SAVED.   Of course that wasn't true as we found, to our sorrow, the next day.  It was said that tragedy shook two continents and marked the end of an era.

When we came back to Ohio, my father bought the farm on the Back Orrville Road where Elvin Mast now lives.  We went to No. 10 School.  The first day I said that I was in the fourth Reader, which meant the fourth grade here.  Instead of two in my class, there were six!  I got along very well in reading,  spelling, and grammar, but arithmetic! I met my Waterloo!  They were doing long division and I had not had that, but I did know all of the multiplication tables.  The teacher's verdict was "You go back to the third grade tomorrow."  I was crushed!  When I went home and told my mother, she was furious.  But having been a school teacher, she knew exactly what to do.  That evening after supper, we sat at the kitchen table and burned the midnight oil, yes oil, until I mastered long division.  The next day I was sent to the black board to "prove" that I could do long division.  I think the teacher gave me the longest, hardest problem in the book, but I "did" it without any mistakes so he grudgingly retracted his former verdict.  Now I could go into fourth grade.

I remember one year when we had a lot of snow with a hard icy crust, we kids could start at our place and go on our sled the whole length of the large field which is now Ruble Drive.  One year my brother drove to high school in the sleigh for six weeks - no salt of snow plows then!  some of you may be old enough to remember coasting down the "iced" hill at the old high school building (across from Duke Oil station).  A few got up too much speed and landed in the creek -- no problem!  They were allowed to dry out in the furnace room.  At one such session one upper classman came by and found the janitor's key ring in the door.  He promptly locked the door and threw the key away.  I don't remember how the "kids" got out or how the janitor was "reprimanded", but the culprit was tracked down and expelled from school for a week. 

My sister and I drove a horse and buggy to high school.  We "stabled" the horse in a barn across from the lumber mill on S. Summit St.  When the horse needed to be shod, Mr. Mertz would walk up, lead the horse down to his shop and fit the "shoes" and take the horse back.  Service à la 1921!

Our class of 1923 was the first to graduate in the new high school building, now Smithville Elementary.  I went to the College of Wooster for two years for $1000 which included tuition, board and fees.  Parents, read this and weep!

The year that I was ready to teach, 1925, No. 5 School was reopened as a two room school.  I taught the upper grades for three years.  There were mostly girls -- only three boys.  Howard Vilas and Billy, Margaret Burkey, and Elta Fetter were among others in my eighth grade.  The last day of school, we had a picnic and a May Pole dance.

I was married that autumn and of course would not be allowed to teach any longer -- but I hadn't planned to.  I was a busy farmer's wife!  After our girls were in college, I went to Ashland College for a degree in Elementary Education and taught for twenty-five years in the Green Local School District.  I fondly remember my teaching days because I had such bright, enthusiastic, exceptional children whose parents (for the most part) were interested and cared about what their children were doing. 

When I began to have pupils who were grandchildren of my No. 5 pupils, I thought that it was time to retire -- and I believe this is a good place to stop.

Osie