Events circa 1917-1919.
Unfinished draft written [date unknown].
The events that happened during the last two years of World War I affected my family
???, so they were burned in my memory. We were living in Berea, Ky., dominated by
Berea College. All four of us were engaged in some college-managed activity — my
father was the editor of The Citizen, the college and town weekly newspaper.
My mother taught in The Foundation School, an elementary school in which the eight grades were taught to students 16 years old and older who had not had the opportunity to go to school back in the mountains. My little brother Carl was a third grader in The Training School — a sort of lab to train teachers seeking a teaching certificate, but it was also an excellent school for faculty children.
I was a senior in the Academy, the college prep school which had the most excellent teachers I have had in my whole life. Prof. Peck had a master’s degree in math. He made algebra, geometry, plane and solid, so reasonable and lucid that we slid through his courses with flying colors. His wife, Mrs. Peck, had a master’s degree in history and was the most fascinating teacher of American, English, and ancient history. Her lectures were gems, which we anticipated daily.
Even so, my senior year was very hard, partly because I had had a series of severe illnesses in the second semester of my junior year. Because of this, I had to make up the lost junior semester in my senior year.
I had contracted diphtheria, for which there was no known cure up to that time. Mother summoned the college physician, an 1898 graduate of Western Reserve Medical School. He had lived in our house before we moved to Berea and had lost a daughter to diphtheria in the very room where I lay sick. I shall never forget the tears in his eyes after he looked into my throat and exclaimed, “My God, this girl has diphtheria too!”
He asked my mother’s permission to give us a brand new vaccine for the dread disease, saying it was still in the experimental stage but that it had had some success. He gave [it] to Carl and me. Carl didn’t get diphtheria, and I got well even though the side effects from the horse serum were pretty painful for a few days.
Meantime, my father was caught up in the wave of patriotism and anger at Germany’s behavior. He and Mr. William Taylor, who was the college bursar and our church organist, tried to enlist as volunteers. They were too old to go in the Army, so the YMCA sent [them] to the leave area at Nice, France.
In those days transporting troops to the front was dangerous, costly, and too slow to send the battle-weary men home to rest and recuperate. It would have taken too long and was too expensive, so they were kept relatively nearby in a safe, beautiful place to rest before serving again. Mr. Taylor, Homer Rodehaver, Billy Sunday’s French horn player, and my father conducted sing-alongs almost every night.
In 1919 the worst influenza epidemic in medical history hit the land. My mother became a victim. She lay in the College Hospital for weeks hovering between life and death. Carl and I were terrified and wished our father home to help us and comfort us.
Mother’s recuperation was slow. When she finally came home, she was too weak to do anything, and I had to care for her. I wrote to my Grandma in Wadsworth, Ohio, who then sent Aunt Alice, my mother’s older sister, to Berea. She came as fast as the old Erie and L&N trains could bring her. Aunt Alice then took mother home to Ohio to rest and be nursed back to health.
We had to cope alone. The whole world about us was a shambles — our troops were being lost at sea in the sinister submarine war. No one had ever seen such carnage as on the battlefields in Europe. It seemed almost as bad in our private lives. I never had had so much responsibility crushing me before.
Our father, provider, companion, hiking pal, and mother who kept house, cooked, and laundered, in the short time out of the classroom were gone, and I felt sick??? The neighbors were friends, and they did all they could to lighten my load. They invited us to meals, did our laundry along with their own, and were so solicitous.
But it was not enough. I was so desperate. I turned to God. I still remember the day I fell on my knees and prayed fervently that father be brought home safely, and that mother would be well again so we could be our happy family circle again. That prayer was not answered immediately.
My workload of stuches??? increased, Carl ran a low-grade fever and developed a limp — another worry. He went to school bravely. My senior class activities began to take place. In all this, there was a saving diversion from all my cares — I had my first beaux. That’s what we called our “boyfriends” then.
He took me to all the senior affairs — the class picnic, the walking party, the hayride, and the chapel service where we impersonated the faculty. These were happy diversions, which he cleverly depicted in cartoons and presented to me in a priceless folder at the end of the year. His caricatures of the faculty were true and amusing and depicted funny incidents that had happened.
He was more serious about me than I was about him. When it came time to part he wanted to kiss me goodbye, and we had a real fracas when I tried to prevent him. He won and kissed me on the neck. I slapped him hard. He then went to the drug store and ordered a big box of chocolates for me, which I enjoyed when my little brother and I went north to Ohio by train to join mother at grandma’s house.
Grandma’s was always a safe haven in times of stress. By September 1919, my father had come home, and my mother could resume her teaching and housekeeping duties. Carl was a fourth grader, and I was a freshman in college. We were all a busy, united family again. My prayer was answered.
There were three other people whose helpful, loving friendship gave me strength and courage. One was Mary Hatfield, with whom I had gone through the Academy. Her mother and father, practically penniless, had brought their family of three bright children to Berea for an education. Bottled up in the mountains for generations, they had retained the best qualities of their Scotch-Irish heritage. They had integrity, zeal for work, independence, a hunger for learning, and self-respect that ignored their poverty.
I was shocked when I first went home with Mary after class. We walked down Scaffold Cane Pike for a mile, crossed Silver Creek, and there at the edge of the town was a small cottage, her home. Inside, the house was papered with newspapers to keep out the cold. The only heat was from a wood-burning cook stove in the middle of the room. A crude table and a few homemade chairs furnished the main room. I wondered how they could all excel in school under these conditions. No wonder they were always in the library.
Mary had a wonderful mind. She was tops in Latin and tutored me through Virgil to cover the semester I had lost in my junior year. It raised my spirits to know she did this for friendship’s sake.
The second person who helped me bear my unaccustomed load was Mary Steenrod, a beautiful, buxom Ohio farm girl. She was tall, had brown hair, and blue eyes the color of cornflowers. Her complexion was flawless — real rosy cheeks and ruby red lips that never needed cosmetic help. She stood out among the mountain girls as “Out of Territory”, which, of course, she was.
She got into the college program by coming down from Ohio to live with her older sister, who taught in the Foundation School, so she rated as a “town girl” and got in. She was exactly my age — we shared September 22, 1901, but she was born in the fall — I in the spring. We liked to baffle people with that simple riddle.
She too was a serious student with an excellent sense of humor, so it was no wonder that the most outstanding mountain boy in the class, the winner of the Tri-State Oratorical Contest, should fall in love with her. She confided in me “I’m not going to marry McCoy Franklin and go back into the mountains and raise a lot of little hillbillies.” Later she did, and was never sorry.
In Berea, she lived across a small courtyard from us with her widowed sister and helped look after her two small children — a boy and a girl. The boy was Carl’s age and a compatible companion. She helped look after Carl along with her nephew ???
She also helped me with many meals. Her sister was the hostess in a model mountain home domestic science project that had to be maintained without gas or electricity. It used only oil lamps and wood-burning stoves for cooking and heating. The home, thought necessary at the time, was a domestic science project for teaching mountain girls to live better and more comfortably.
Mary’s compassion made her see my plight and what it was doing to me. She determined she would take Carl and me and her sister’s children with her to their farm home near Sidney, Ohio, to rest and recuperate. At that time, I was so thin I had to stand in the same place twice to make a shadow.
Mary W. Dial
Transcribed by CED. Transcription date unknown.
Posted Dec 14, 1989 at 00:34.
Revised Jan 23, 2023 at 19:54. EDT.
Retrieved Jun 1, 2026 at 22:09.
Go to top of page
