Elsie Wagner Kaste Harford Living Treasure
DW Hello, this is Doug Washburn for the Harford County Public Library. Today is 8 July, 2009 and I'm with the Harford Living Treasure, Elsie Wagner Kaste of Bel Air formally of Aberdeen. How are you today mam?
EK I think I'm o.k.
DW Good. Let's start. Can you tell me what year you were born?
EK I was born December 1, 1927 to Grace Alberta Sandruck Wagner in her parent's [front] room in Miller's Station, Carroll County, Maryland.
DW Carroll County. So what brought your family to Harford County? EK Well let me tell you about my birth.
DW O.k.
EK I understand there was snow and my father, George Lee Wagner, had a car and he brought the doctor to the house November 30th. The doctor spent the night and delivered me early in the morning. And then Daddy took him back to the doctor's home. My father said I was wailing and I have never stopped. [Laughter] I've always been in church and I learned all the songs that we sing in church by going to Epworth League with my father when I was a child. I joined the church when I was ten or twelve years old. I've always been part of elderly people's lives. By the way, where I was born we just had kerosene lamps. There was no electricity and no running water. We had to use the pump to bring water into the house [and went to a backhouse with a Sears catalog for paper]. It was many, many years
before electricity got put into that house. When my folks moved to Aberdeen in the fall of 1940, I attended Aberdeen High School and graduated at sixteen, June 1944. People in Aberdeen did not care for the new comers. Most of the children that had lived there all their lives and they had their little clicks already and so no one seemed to want to befriend me and so I worked in the library with Miss Mayfield Walker, who had taught my father in Hampstead, Maryland when she first got out of college. I was always reading and spent a lot of time in the library with Miss Walker and we [only] had a bible and a dictionary and so it's been hard for me to let books go by for the rest of my life. Miss Margary Reed was the English teacher and she helped write an essay for which I got a five dollar prize and that was put in the Aberdeen Bank. The picture was put in the Groundhog which was the newspaper from the Proving Ground. I took part in plays in high school and especially when it called for an "old maid" part. I remember being Caroline in "Who Killed Aunt Caroline" in the school play. I sang in the choir at the Grace Methodist Church and was there nearly every Sunday and I was active in Youth Fellowship. So that was one of the things that young people could do in Aberdeen. There wasn't too much for them to really do. They used to congregate at the corner of Bonnett's Store and Bonnett's Store sold newspapers and magazines and drugs. And the bus station tickets were sold from there and so if you were going to Baltimore or to New York or something, you got your ticket there. And you waited for the bus and if it was going north, then they would tell you when and you would cross Route 40 and stand on the other corner to be picked up.
DW And what bus line was that? Was that… EK I think it was Greyhound.
DW Greyhound. Even to go to Baltimore, was Greyhound?
EK I think so. I can't remember for sure. Another interesting thing in going to Baltimore especially in the summertime; they didn't have daylight savings time for the train schedules, so that was on regular time. So you got to Baltimore and you had to remember that because you had to be at the B&O Station in Baltimore or at the Pennsy Station in order to get back to Aberdeen in some kind of a decent time. We often would come back on the B&O because that schedule seemed to work better with that daylight savings time and standard time business. When I was in high school I was kind of [a loner]…Like I said before no one particularly wanted to be a part of my life because I was new and so on. But Virginia Norris became my friend and money was still very tight and so whenever she had the nickel or I had the nickel, we would go to Dell's Drug Store that had little tables and chairs in there and we would get two straws and share a phosphate or a coke or something. And that was the beginning of cherry cokes and lemon cokes and chocolate cokes because they would put syrup in whatever thing you wanted to have; they would put the syrup in there instead of getting it out of a bottle like you do now-a-days.
DW Where was Dell's Drug Store located?
EK It was next to the Aberdeen Bank and that's where I deposited that big five dollar prize that I got for writing the essay.
DW And is the bank in the same location?
EK Yes it is. The bank building is still there [but it is not called that now]. Many, many years later Dell's was sold. I think it might still be a drug store but I don't think its called Dell's any more. Ivan's Drug Store was across the street and just up the street from Ivan's was the post office. And the post office, as I understand it, is still not handicapped accessible. I don't know how Aberdeen gets away with that, but they do. I joined Grace Church which was on up a little bit farther on that same side of the street.
DW Where did you live in Aberdeen?
EK Let me say very close to Ivan's, I mean to Bonnett's was the movie theatre. I think it was next to that was the grocery store; I've got that written down here somewhere.
DW Adam's?
EK Adam's, yes thank you. Adam's grocery store and when we were having Home Ec classes at the high school sometimes we would go there and learn about cuts of meat and so on. He would like to surprise us and make the girls yell because he would take a hand full of blood which you wouldn't do now-a-days any more, but he would take a hand full of blood and just drink that blood. And of course we didn't particularly care for that. [Laughter] I lived on Post Road near Roosevelt Avenue and even though I went to church at Grace, if I was really late because I walked everywhere at that time, Grove Presbyterian Church was between my home and Grace. And so if I was really late, I would just run in and do Presbyterian for that day. We didn't have a cafeteria in the high school at that time so you either went home for lunch or you brought your lunch in a pail or a
bag. And then Mrs. Prichert started a little lunch room behind the high school so that if you had a few pennies you could go and get a sandwich from her. She lived, I think across the street on Route 40. She was our cook at that time. [Laughter]
DW Now you said you lived on the old Post Road. Did that area have a name?
EK I don't remember that. That particular area was built at the time of World War I for housing at that time. And then during World War II they built that other area.
DW Baldwin Manor?
EK No, Baldwin Manor was at the end of Roosevelt Avenue. So that was behind where I lived.
DW Oh, o.k.
EK But down between Grove [Presbyterian] Church and on down that toward the Proving Ground; that area was built during World War II [Swan Meadows]. I did finally get some friends I used to visit down there. After I graduated from Aberdeen, then I went to Towson State Teachers [College] and was there for two and a half years. When I came back to Aberdeen I went to work at A.W. Sisk & Son. Charles Jacobs and Clarence Mitchell and Audrey Simmons (she is now Audrey Hawks) and Fredna Norman Waught; they all were employees there. We were all teenagers pretty much at that time. {Irene Harward was secretary to the boss, B. Harward, who she later married.]
DW What did the business do?
EK That was a broker for canned goods. They sent out every week a list of what they had to sell and it was our job to do the circular. And this was all hand run
mimeograph and we finally had a letter folder but sometimes you couldn't fold the paper to fit the envelopes with that mechanism. We used to set type there to do some of these addressing things and so on. So we had a good time; it was much later that they got (let's see, I forget what they called it) teletype, I believe. Just before I left to get married we could use that teletype. And they [AW Sisk & Son] had another place in Preston, Maryland and so we corresponded back and forth by teletype for that.
DW So did the local growers bring things there to be canned and then they would sell to a grocery store?
EK We didn't actually have the things [products] there. They managed to sell it to…I mean they sent out the circulars and so on and then these people I guess would contact like Mitchell's Canning Factory and so on to get the things that they needed. I don't think I kept one of those sheets telling what they had. I don't know if they have anything at the Historical Society. I know they do have canning labels there but I don't really know if they've got any of those old papers like that. And then I married Orrin Charles Kaste who was from [Alma] Wisconsin. He had come to Aberdeen as an enlistee. He had enlisted in [1946]…I should say too in that depression time before World War II we had moved like twelve times in six years, I think. My father would take whatever job he could find and sometimes a house went with that as you would have that. So that's why we moved. Well then finally he went to Strayer's Business College in Baltimore and that's how he was able to get a Social Security job and how come we moved to Aberdeen. That was his first really permanent job and he was Property Manager there.
DW Was that actually on the Proving Ground? EK Mm hmm.
DW O.k. So that's how your name wound up in the Ground Hog paper because your dad worked there.
EK I don't think so; I think that was just news. I don't even know who took the picture. I know that in the Aberdeen room they do have some copies of the Ground Hog and believe that issue might even be in the Aberdeen room. Another thing that they have in the Aberdeen room is a picture of the B&O station, railroad station in Aberdeen. I had asked John (he did all the train stations around). He had note paper and so on. Anyway since the B&O Railroad was where we would come back from Baltimore, it meant more to my husband than the Pennsy really did. And so I had John do a painting; he was an artist. He did the B&O train station. Even though this was done quite a few years ago, that John did this, the railroad station was already falling apart. There were no windows in it and it did not have the Aberdeen sign on the side of it. But John painted on all the windows and he said he could not get a good view from the street, from Bel Air Avenue. So his daughter suggested that he do it from the Baltimore side and so that picture without the Aberdeen label because he didn't think I guess to write in or paint in Aberdeen on there. But that picture, I figured my children my children would not be particularly interested in it; so I gave it to the Aberdeen room because I thought it belonged in Aberdeen. Kendal; John Kendal is who I was trying to think of.
DW You said you got married to a gentleman from Wisconsin, but you set up house in Harford County?
EK Not then. He had already registered at the University of Wisconsin since he was from Wisconsin in Madison before he enlisted in the Army. So after we were married then we went back and he did his degrees from the University of Wisconsin. Our oldest son was born out there. And I was active in the, what they call "Wisconsin Dames" which was an organization that they had for wives of students and so I was second vice president in that organization. Then we moved to, after he graduated with his Master's in Electrical Engineering, we moved to Baltimore because he took a job with Martin Company, Glen L. Martin. And of course we had the ties here too with my grandparents in Carroll County and my parents in Aberdeen, so we lived in Baltimore for a while. And then my daughter was born in Havre de Grace Hospital and Doctor Hatem was the doctor. He's a surprise too because many, many years later after my daughter had graduated from college and was working nights, I saw him one day; this is Frederick. I said I don't think you remember delivering my daughter but I told him that she was now a dentist and so on and he said yes and your husband was Orrin. And I just could not believe that with all the people that he sees that he would remember that.
DW One thing I notice that you said when you were talking about the railroad, you called it the Pennsy. Now was that the Ma & Pa or was that an earlier name?
EK You mean the B&O?
DW No, that would be the Baltimore and Ohio. EK Yes.
DW And you talked about the Pennsy Railroad. EK Pennsylvania.
DW Yes, but was that…
EK That was on the other end of town, the Pennsylvania Railroad.
DW But did that eventually become the Ma & Pa, or had it been the Ma & Pa? EK No, it's still Pennsylvania.
DW Still Pennsylvania; o.k. That's something totally different.
EK Talking about that; see I lived on the other side of that. Route 40 goes right up through between B&O Railroad track and the Pennsylvania Railroad track. So in order to go to high school which was on Route 40 at that time and by the way the elementary school was on one end of that building. And even though my sister was in elementary school, I very rarely ever saw her because she was end of the building and I was on the other end of the building. They built an underpass under the Pennsylvania Railroad track and that was supposed to eliminate those people who were crossing the Pennsy track which was manually, there were gates there, but it was done manually. When ever a train came, the fellow came out of the little house and let the gates up and down. But people being people did not always use things as they're supposed to, so that became a pretty dirty place underneath the underpass. And it wasn't until many, many years later that they built this overpass for the cars and for walking over. And I understand that they have that little house that the man stood in or sat in. I think that might be at the Aberdeen ramp now. It's history.
DW Right.
EK So it takes…My husband and I walked that new overpass thing and it took us four minutes to walk that overpass. [Laughter]
DW So you said your husband was an electrical engineer. EK Correct.
DW And worked at the Proving Ground? EK Yes, after he left Martin's.
DW Oh, o.k.
EK He left Martin's after they were laying off a lot of engineers and so we moved to here in '64. My daughter as I said was born in Havre de Grace and then we had another son, Robert. I don't believe I listed my daughter's name; she's Linda. And my second son was born down on Meis Drive in Baltimore County, in the Overlea area. We lived there for quite a while when Orrin was working at Martin's. And then when they started laying off the engineers then he unbeknown to me came up and got a job at the Proving Ground. He worked there until he died in January of 1984.
DW Do you remember any other stores in the Aberdeen area? Where did you go food shopping?
EK Well, going back to when I was sixteen; I was twelve when we moved to Aberdeen. When I was sixteen I worked at the A&P Store. I worked thirteen hours and got five dollars.
DW Wow!
EK And the A&P Store at that time was…I'm not sure, but I think it was next to the post office. That building has changed hands, those stores many, many times
since I was there. I can't remember whether there was an Acme Store there. I know that when we moved here the A&P Store in Bel Air was on Thomas Street.
DW The parking lot of the Mary Risteau Building. EK Yes. [Laughter] You remember that too.
DW Oh, yes. Poland's.
EK Yes, Poland's was the… DW Five and Ten.
EK Yes.
DW C-Mart started there many years later.
EK Let's see I guess the Acme Store is where Kleins was and now is Shop-Rite. DW Right.
EK It was such a nice change really when they built the new A&P in Bel Air. The old one, they probably wouldn't appreciate it, but it really smelled in there. I don't know just what the reason was but it… With today's checking I don't think they would have allowed it. And then in Aberdeen they built…It seems to me that when they Bel Air Avenue, the A&P moved down to… You know when you come to the bypass and you come down… Is that Law Street or which street is that? You know it's an intersection; you can go over to Route 40 or you can go a little further and go past the Methodist Church and the police station and all that. Or you can go further up and go past what is now the fire department in Aberdeen now.
DW Oh, o.k.
EK The fire department used to be across from Grace Methodist Church. If you were having a service and everything was volunteer of course. So they had to ring the…
DW O.k., so we were talking about the stores and Aberdeen. How about the diner on Route 40?
EK Well I was saying we moved to Bel Air, Orrin and Richard and Linda and Bob and myself, on September 4, 1964 to East Ring Factory Road. It was dead end street; it was promised that yes it was on the books but it probably would never get cut through. Ha Ha. [Laughter]
DW It goes all the way around to McPhail now.
EK For a while I was getting mail addressed to the speed-way on East Ring Factory Road. [Laughs] Because even with it being a small road and at that time; well we still don't have sidewalks which is fine with me. The kids could…They put a like a volley ball court up in the middle of the road out here because it was a dead end street and so they could play out there. And believe it or not, the paint that they used to put on the road; it lasted until they changed the road out here. I think that the highway department could benefit by using some paint like that, that you can see when it's raining and so on and so forth. But the kid's paint worked. Let's see Barbara Kramer was on the county council at that time. She was also one of my daughter's teachers at the high school in Bel Air. Well about that same time they were deciding about building a mall out here in Bel Air. And there was a big tree on that race track area and so they were trying to decide whether they should leave that tree and build the mall around it. But the way things are;
that's too much trouble so they took that down. There was the toll booth on Route 1 there on the corner of Route 1 and Tollgate Road. During the riots and things, that got blown up. I think they were going to have that put on the historical list but I forget his name. With the riots and everything that was going on at that time, anyway that got demolished. So that was that. They discussed for a long time about bringing department stores out to Harford County and it did happen for a long time because they didn't think that Bel Air was going to be able to support a store. Would they ever be surprised now?
DW Yes. [Laughter]
EK With all the malls and everything that has been built up around here. DW Well what was Main Street, Bel Air like when you moved here?
EK When we moved here, I only remember two restaurants. One was the diner on Route 1.
DW The Greek diner now?
EK Yes, which is the Greek diner now. And Rueben's which was out toward, on your way to Hickory.
DW Moores Mill and Hickory Ave.
EK Yes. Of course we didn't have a whole lot of money and three kids so we didn't do a whole lot of eating out anyway. Bel Air still has missed the boat as far as hotels or motels go. It's only the county seat of Harford County, and we have no place really in town to put people if they come to visit here.
DW The closest place is really down at Route 7 and Route 24.
EK That' correct. When we came here the cows were watching the traffic go by on Route 1.
DW Elsie?
EK That's where I thought; nobody asked me, but I thought that's where they should have put a motel or hotel for Harford County, there. But they moved the cows out and built another strip mall.
DW For our listeners, Elsie the cow resided there just about where the Kinko's is in the parking lot of that strip mall.
EK Lots of the banks and so on had changed hands many, many times since '64.
Sometimes Bel Air has been inundated with gas stations and banks. Now I think its drug stores. [Laughter]
DW Yes.
EK The Ideal Diner in Aberdeen is still there and that's where we used to go after Youth Fellowship way back in the 40's; that's where we went. When we moved to Bel Air, the Methodist Church was on Main Street. I think it was; I forget just what year it was, '68 or so was it? When they had built the new Bel Air, it was Methodist Church; it wasn't united at that point yet. And we had a parade from the old church down to the new church. We sang a hymn up at the old church; came outside, locked the doors; everybody carried something. Orrin and I and the kids used to sit about the third or fourth row so we brought candlesticks as I remember. But everybody brought a hymnal or something; carried it down Main Street to the new church which had no pews at that time. So we sang the final hymn with our hymn books in hand there. [Laughter] That was quite a day.
DW That's where the old church is where the library started, isn't it, Bel Air Library?
EK No, I don't think so. There was another Methodist Church; you know at one point a Methodist Church was in three parts. There were the Southern Methodist and the Methodist Episcopal and the Methodist Protestant, I think. And too the brick church was where we went and then the other church had been kind of caddy cornered across the street, and it burned at one point and they redid it. That's I think where the library was for a while. The parsonage for the church, the brick church, was on Main Street and that still exists, I'm told, but they built around it so you have to know on Main Street where it is in order to find it behind. I guess maybe rent an airplane. [Laughter] Let's see, Richardson's Drug Store used to have a lunch counter in there and you could go in and get something to drink.
Drug stores did that at that time; a lot of them did.
DW Put a cup of booze in there.
EK And Richardson's also had a florist shop which was opposite that corner. It was a white; I think just a wooden building. When we first came here, that was where you got your flower arrangements. And then later on they built down on Route 924 which used to be Route 24.
DW Right.
EK When they built the new road, then they named that Route 24 and called us Route 924 over here. Route 924 divides east and west. Ring Factory and whatever other street goes across. They have never connected McPhail Road because of the school system being on there. Another planning and zoning thing that could have been improved on as well as the beltway around Bel Air, instead of going through
neighborhoods. But evidently they didn't think far enough ahead to know that Bel Air would some day going to be a not just a little farming town, but pretty much a city. And I feel like if you can drive in Bel Air; you can drive almost anywhere.
DW Absolutely.
EK Because we have so many short blocks and if you don't know where you're going, you're in the wrong place to do what you want to do. The movie theatre was here when we moved here. Now that was there when I was in high school, too. And we would come from Aberdeen up, turn right, go to the movies, come out, get in the car, and go back to Aberdeen. So I really never knew when I was in high school, never knew Bel Air because it was just…That's the only reason we came. We got into very little trouble, really. [Laughs] And the boys in the class; I graduated in '44, and so after we were out fifty years then we get together for lunch once a month on the third Wednesday. We talk about some of these old time things and how kids now use their pen knives and things to kill people where at that time they did fist fights and carved their initials in the desk, maybe with their pen knives. But almost every boy had a pen knife back in the forties and fifties.
DW Right. You used to be able to take them to school. EK That's right.
DW Because they had a little common sense. [Laughs]
EK Yes, yes. Most of those stores along Main Street have all changed hands. When we came here, The Hub was there. You could get most anything you wanted there. It was February the 2nd; I can't remember exactly what year when the sirens
blew like crazy. My husband and I and the kids hadn't gotten up from bed yet. The sirens were blowing up in Bel Air like crazy and that' when that whole area burned down. It was Ground Hog's Day. I remember that year. That wiped out what was a bowling alley, I think. I think the bowling alley was underneath of the…What was the name of that restaurant? Now it has changed hands.
DW Are you talking about where the Red Fox was? It was under old Preston's Stationary. Is that what you are talking about?
EK Well Preston's Stationary burned that day too. But this…Was it called the Red Fox way back then?
DW Oh, no, no, no; not back then. But eventually…
EK I'm trying to think what the name of the restaurant was that was there. DW Well, it was a hotel and the name escapes me.
EK O.k.
DW Yes, the old Preston's Stationary had previously been a hotel.
EK Is that right? Because I remember it as being kind of on a corner and the steps went up into the corner of the store instead of straight in.
DW Like four or five steps? EK Yes.
DW You came from the alley side and from the Main Street side. EK Right.
DW Yes, I remember that.
EK And I had a neighbor down here whose parents had the Greek restaurant that was on, I think Office Street, was it called?
DW Well Office is next to the courthouse.
EK Yes. And it was on the, as you were going into Bel Air you would go past the courthouse and turn left. And I understand that the Greek restaurant was in there.
DW I don't remember that.
EK But like I say we didn't frequent those kinds of places because we didn't have that kind of money at that time. You ate at home or you ate with relatives.
DW Yes. [Laughs]
EK Well the life of the church has always been great in my life. I joined a church when I was ten or twelve years old and we moved from Owings Mills to Reisterstown and around, in those twelve moves, all around. When we came to Bel Air then we joined the church here and they had just previously, I don't know how many years before, had built the extension on the back of that church on Main Street. And that's where they had Sunday school and so on there. And I understand the grave yard used to be right there and when they extended that building then they had to move as many of those graves as they could find. That's another thing we really don't have except for down at the Mount Zion. That's a Methodist…You don't have to be Methodist to be buried there but it's connected with the Methodist church there. The Methodist churches in Bel Air do not have a graveyard. And then of course you know that at one point here the Methodist church united with the United Brethren and that's what made us United Methodist when that happened. But I've been to conferences and so on and represented the church in Russia in 2001 and so a lot of things have happened. I think right now they're seeing how much of Bel Air they can tear down and change. I have done a
lot of visitation and I go past all these places where I used to visit people and either their houses are completely gone and there is just a parking lot now or they've built condos or something or made; I know a few of the houses that were really quite nice have been made into office buildings. So Bel Air is certainly changing. You can go out today and see something and the landmark is gone tomorrow. [Laughs] It was really great when the post office, well I guess the county gave the old post office on Main Street to the Historical Society and that was the first time the Historical Society really had a home; keeps us stepping.
They actually moved the post office one summer when we were on vacation and when we came back we couldn't find the post office. [Laughter] They didn't even have a sign telling you where it was.
DW They've hidden that well behind the mall. EK That's right.
DW I know you were also a charter member of the Genealogical Society. EK No, but of the Historical Society.
DW Oh, o.k.
EK And I belong to Stepping Stone [Museum], too. I think I need to renew my membership right now. But Jerusalem Mills; I joined. I am a life member down there, too. I think earlier you had mentioned something about the Garden Club. I belong to the Perennial Gardeners. This is a little group that had been started before I got here in '64. Some of the neighbors invited me to come and join and we've watched people come and go there by death or moving into the area. We're not federated; we just have fun. But that group for I think it's about sixteen or
seventeen years decorated Stepping Stone Museum. And we also used to decorate, put flower arrangements in Ladew Mansion, too. We didn't plant the islands; some other garden club did that.
DW Well any other topics that come to mind?
EK Well the United Methodist women from our church have been very active in that for a long, long time. Of course we've been in the same building now for a long time, the United Methodist Church. Lots of changes have been made there, too. I had been on the district for the United Methodist women for a while. I've done visitation like I said for years and years and years and years. Let's see I used to walk when I was a teenager from my house on Post Road up to Anna and Ruth Duguid and their parents who lived up on Bel Air Ave. not too far from the mall that's up there. What do they call that street? Starts with a "B", I think. Not too far from the Golden Arches.
DW Oh, o.k., Beards Hill. EK Beards Hill, yes.
DW You were way off. [Laughs]
EK Yes. Ruth was in my class in high school. She loved animals and she had a fox which she kept in a box in the back yard. [Laughs] I remember she rode a bike but she rode a boy's bike and she tried to teach me and I've never ridden a bike or tricycle or anything like that at all. Every time I threw my leg over the boys bar I would skin up my ankle and I'd say no more. [Laughter] Anyway, it's been quite a journey.
DW Well, I'm either going to need to change tapes or say thank you. It's up to you.
EK Well, what ever. [Laughs]
DW Well, I think we've done a fairly good job of covering the…
EK I guess the only other thing you could talk about at all is Father Martin's place which was Tydings Place over there between Aberdeen and Havre de Grace. You know about that, don't you?
DW No I don't, but let me change tapes and we can talk.
EK Because see that's Alcohol Anonymous place. AA? And Father Martin just died. DW O.k. we have a few more minutes on this tape. Let's try it and if we run out, then
I'll change it.
EK O.k.
DW So this is back in Aberdeen?
EK Well it's between. If you come up Post Road and swing over to Route 40 as you are going to Havre de Grace. Then if you turn right there instead of left to go to Route 40, then you go to the Tydings, Senator Tydings place. After he died; I don't know just what year it was given or bought by the AA Society and Father Martin had it. It's really a hospital for alcoholics and drug addiction people and so on. And it's beautiful. It's over there on the Bush River, Susquehanna I guess. It's worth the drive sometimes to go. They've got a beautiful chapel there. It's just a nice, serene place and it's nice that Harford County has such a place for ill people. And of course they have enlarged the hospital at Harford Memorial; that's much, much bigger than when my daughter was born there. And we have Citizen's nursing facility there. When my aunt needed a place to go when she got out of the
hospital in '66 there was no place in Harford County to take her. I had to go back to the Baltimore area.
DW I can think of at least four.
EK Citizen's I think is still one of the better ones around. I've visited there for years and years and I've seen people that you would not expect to be here next week that have lived many more years there with the tender loving care that they got. Then we had Fallston Hospital and that once had a place for people to stay after they were out of the hospital, but then they closed that off.
DW Now its houses. [Laughs]
EK Well that was later. Then they built Upper Chesapeake and thought they had done a good job but it was too small almost from the start. And now Fallston has been; like you said it now sprung up with houses. Some of the people I used to visit down that road are also gone now. I have a book of dead people. [Laughs]
DW O.k. we are approaching the end of this tape so if you don't object, I think I will say that you very much for your time and I enjoyed. Aberdeen is not a subject that I've heard a lot about in my travels so I very much appreciate that.
EK Well we even missed Cal Ripken Stadium and all that which is still up there and my father had watched Cal's play ball and had actually written that they should come and scout him and I guess they did. [Tape ended]
Harford County Living Treasures - Harford County Public Library
