Interview with W. Miles Hanna

              Interview with Miles Hanna, Harford County Library Living Treasure Oral History, Whiteford, Maryland, by Michael Dante, June 30, 1986.
MD: Mr. Hanna, can you just tell us what it was like
growing up in the Whiteford area? Such as your schools and your family.
MM: Well, as you probably noticed, I really grew up in the White Hall area, which is a little bit further away. I was born in 1910 on a cold winter night, and I don't know how I survived, but on December 24, 1910 on a farm, a medium sized farm. General farming is sort of the way we spoke of it, almost subsistence farming. Not much cash was handled, but you had plenty of food and plenty of everything you needed. All the work on the farm was done by horse-drawn equipment. We plowed the fields with a single bottom plow and two horses, and prepared the ground with horses; raked the hay and bunched it and put it on the wagon with forks. Everybody had a few COWS. At that time, in my early memory, the cream was sold. It was all skimmed off and sold to the creameries. There was creameries in most every big neighborhood. And the skim milk was fed to the hogs. Our principle source of meat was hogs, too, and they when the weather got cold enough to take care of the meat, they were rendered up in the can. Some of it was salted and cured. That was the principle source of meat. There wasn't much fresh
 
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meat to be had. As I say, we walked to school about a mile cross country to a one-room school where I started my training. Later I went to Jarrettsville High School. You've probably heard of that. I finished there in 1928. My major was baseball. That was my favorite extracurricular activity. I don't know. There's lots of other things that took place on the farm in those days. Every neighbor helped each other. No hired help hardly. The family boys did the work and when it came time to thrash, why, the neighbors all came together and thrashed. No combining at that time. It hadn't been heard of. We had a binder which bound the sheaves up with strings. They were hauled to a thresher. And what else would you like to know?
MD: Oh, just what it was like growing up. Maybe some experiences you had in your free time. Like in the winter after the most of the farming was done. Or maybe some of your chores on the farm, the type of work you did there.
MU: Milking cows was one of the chores everybody took part in because it was hand done. You learned very early how to milk a cow. Feed the horses and feed the chickens. We had all the eggs we needed from the eggs we had and in the spring, of course, the new fryers came along. That's about the only time we had fried chicken, was when they became ready.
 
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But wintertime we'd enjoy the snow, you know. It seems like the more I tell about it the deeper the snow got, you know, the longer it is. But we did have deep snows in those early years of my memory. Lots of ice storms and we'd walk to school even if it was snowing or not, over this mile across country. Sometimes you'd hit a part of a road, but it was all dirt road, of course. By the way, there was no improved roads except scraping by the county and the state. There was no hard surface roads in the neighborhood. Of course, when it got a little rainy, why, you had pretty deep ruts. Of course, when it came along to get cars in the teens, why, they had a little trouble getting through the ruts. What else would you like to hear?
MD: Maybe what was your home like. Maybe your brothers and sisters and parents.
ME: Oh, yes. I would say I was probably a
disappointment to my mother because she already had two boys, but they never let me know it, anyway. They treated me as well as the others. I had two brothers and we were one-third of the baseball team. Of course, we played together. Every waking hour we'd be playing baseball. We'd shorten our lunch hour at schools to play. We were fortunate enough to become County champions in Jarrettsville three years in a row, consecutively, '26, '27, '28.
 
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From there, of course, I went on to the University of Maryland and completed my Bachelor's Degree there in '32 and a Master's Degree in '33. That was at the depth of the Depression at that time. There wasn't any jobs to be had hardly so I took advantage of that and went back for another year. To get back on the farm--you were thinking about--it was pretty
--	We didn't know we were having a hard time. We 
all liked what we were doing, you know. Everybody
kept busy enough to be	We didn't know we were 
poor because everybody else was the same way. But we were never too poor not to have plenty of everything we need, including food. This one-room school was an interesting thing. We'd play there at lunch hour, way down through the woods, you know, at lunch hour, playing fox and geese and whatever have you. It was very rural. Everybody knew everyone. I don't know. Better put that off a while. I should have had notes to tell you all the things that happened in those years, I guess. Do you have any other questions?
MD: About your schooling, anyway, what were some of the courses they had in the one-room school and what was that like?
MB: The one-room school, you for seven years	Excuse 
me. Seven years. You heard all the classes, of course. As one went in the front of the school
 
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to have its lesson heard, you would hear all those classes. Of course, when you were in first grade it didn't mean much to you, but when you got a little further along you heard some of the stuff repeated several times, you know. Of course, when you got to it, you'd get it, too. I don't know whether I was fortunate or what have you, but we had spelling bees, you know, and that was very interesting. The whole school would line up on either side of the room and spell until they missed one, and the last one that remained would be the winner. I was fortunate enough to be winner there one time that I recall. The word I'll never forget. And incidently, they saw fit to pass me by the thitd grade. I didn't have to go to the third grade. I went from second to fourth so that shortened up my school days a little bit. So we had seven grades in all those little room schools. There was about fifty some of them in the county, I guess, at the time. Seven grades, then you went onto high school if you were so inclined. Only a small portion went onto high school.
MD: How about high school? The one that you attended in Jarrettsville, how was that different from the elementary school, and what was that like?
MET: Well, in high school, of course, we had a teacher for each different subject and we'd move about in
 
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the building from one room to another. Of course, we had the usual courses like math and English, geography. When I was there I took agricultural courses, also. And physical ed wasn't in the program at all. Everybody played plenty without having it. And, of course, we had French. No other foreign language at that time. So we went from one grade to another until we got through eleven. Only eleven grades at that time. Eight to eleven on the high school side. A few of us were fortunate enough to graduate. Nine was a large class. I often say it was the largest class up until that time with so many people held back and just happened to finish in that year. Well, sir?
ND: Can you tell us what parents were like, how they
raised you, and maybe some of their attitudes or personality?
Well, my parents were very strong to keep me--us, I should say--in school every day we possibly could make. One of the strong points they knew was arithmetic. They were sure that we learned arithmetic. Of course, our grade teacher made a point of our learning arithmetic, too. She was very long on long division. [She] made desk work and things for kids when they weren't busy with something else. You can make a long division problem quite lengthy, you know, and occupy a lot of
 
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desk time. They did encourage us to go to elementary school and all the time and all through high school. I think college much determined, I'd made up my mind on that perhaps. They didn't push me to do it. But, yes, they were very close to the little school. Had socials there occasionally, too. All the parent were acquainted with the teacher and the teacher let them know how they were doing. So it was a pretty close-knit circle. The parents knew as well as anyone how we were doing, whether we told them the facts or not, you know. We didn't call it PTA, but they did have meetings occasionally and social events in the little one-room school. Of course, walking to the school would occupy a good bit of our time. Along the way we'd walk with other people, other kids who were going the same direction. So that was always a social event just to go and come. So I don't know what to say about that early farm life, but it was all hand work and horse power. I don't know what else you'd like to hear.
MD: How about your college, what was that like? Some of the courses and the different changes you saw there.
Fill: Well, we had to form better study habits to keep up. Of course, when we started off in the freshman year, chemistry was one thing that killed off a lot of them the very first year, and so did English.
 
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Composition and Rhetoric they called it in freshman class. That was a pretty severe course. I may have repeated one course, but I managed to make most of them the first year. If you got by the first year it seemed like you had a pretty good chance. That killed off a lot. We learned how to study and what to study. So through the four years I had a whole gamut of courses: economics, chemistry and physics, and all kinds of biology and botany, and bacteriology. I was sort of a major in science so I had a lot of science courses. And the time finally arrived in '32 that I got my cap and that little pigskin. Lambskin I guess they call them, the diploma. They used to be all made of lambskin-so they called them lambskins. That's what I've heard them called.
MD: What type of things did they make you learn in the courses? So your botany or the agriculture ones, what techniques were they using?
NH: Well, principally lecture and discussion. Every professor lectured and you took notes on his lectures. If you didn't take notes, why, you would be sorry. Of course, you had a textbook. All the courses had a textbook, at least one, and lots of references other than that. So you followed a text in most courses. But he would lecture on many things that were not in the textbook. That was the
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general theme of the college courses at that time. Very little board work or anything like that, that we were used to in the lower grades. That was new to me, too, this lecturing and keeping notes and referring to them for your tests. That was entirely different.
ND: In college did you learn any new agricultural techniques about growing different corns or hybrids?
NH: We learned about them, yes. Hybrids were just coming in about them. Of course, we learned more of the scientific background of growing things. Like nutrition, plant nutrition and control of insects and diseases and things, and then, of course, fertilization. That's principally the things we dwelt on. Proper fertilization and tillage. Of course, there's a lot been added to knowledge since then. We didn't have very many sprays and insecticides and pesticides in those days. We had very few. So then I might say that when I finished in '33 with my Master's there were still no vacancies for teaching. I prepared for teaching, see. But finally, in the second semester of the first year I was out a man broke his leg and I filled in for him. From there the next year I had a full-time job in Worcester County. The first county was Montgomery County. Then I taught in Worcester County two years. Then I came to Dublin High School
 
in 1936. I was principal of the school at twenty-five years old, which I thought was pretty good. Twenty-five. Around here I've been interested in a lot of different things, you know. I'm talking about later years now. Lions Club. Over forty years in the Lions Club. I was director of the Harford Memorial Hospital for a period. Tri-State Packers Association. Oh, I can't begin to think of what else. Director of the Savings and Loan Association. Adviser of a bank. Besides my duties at the packing company to try to make ends meet there. That's not easy. It depends on lots of elements to make a profit in the packing business. My son's running that now, since I retired in I75 I remained Chairman of the Board for a number of years. But that part's already known. You're more interested in the old things, aren't you?
MD: Well, we're interested in everything, really. Old as well as new.
MIT: I belong to the [unclear] Presbyterian Church. I'm an elder there. I belong to the Masonic order. I'm a member of the Shrine. That's the tag you saw on there, on that car, which indicates the Shrine number. Right now we have a little organization going at [unclear]. We have a community association. They're fixing an old high school up there to serve many needs, and I'm very much
 
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involved in that. We're going to have a post office in there and then the senior citizens, library, and kindergarten. Not kindergarten but nursery school. So all those different things are going to be in that area, which the county didn't need the building for anything. They wanted to get rid of it, get it off their expenses. So our association is taking that project over and making a very nice use of that old building, two buildings there. So I'm involved in that and involved in Harford National Bank in Bel Air. That's about my activities now. I used to have a nice, green yard here when it rains, you know. That occupied me a good bit. We've had the driest summer on record this year, you know, so crops are pretty bad around here. But we're not as bad as some places down south, I guess. That about winds me down to what I think you want.
MD: Oh, as you were principal of Dublin, what were some of your duties and problems that you had at that school at that time?
MM: All the problems of the school were my problems, you know. Incidently, being principal was only one title. I was teaching every hour of the day. Back in those days you didn't just be principal; you were also a teacher. In a school that size, anyway. Most of the schools, the principal had some
classes. Of course, today they don't. The
 
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principal doesn't have classes. The vice principal doesn't have any classes either. But I taught vo-ag and the whole gamut: math, and physics, and chemistry, and whatever else we didn't have a teacher I could handle. But that was a nice little school there, community school. It didn't reach out too far, you know. We had a nice sports program and a nice PTA, what have you, there. I have fond memories of that.
MD: After that, during, I guess, the Second World War, what type of work were you doing with the government?
NH: That's the interesting thing about World War II. As I said, I was principal during that period. Lwas the only man in school and Mr. Wright, the superintendent, kept asking for a deferment for me. Each six months, or whenever it came around, I would be deferred again. However, one time I thought they were getting pretty close to needing me, so I went down to volunteer for the Navy, expecting to get a commission. Anybody with a degree would get a commission in those days, see. So I was about three pounds underweight and they wouldn't take me. So I thought, "Well, if they don't need me worse than that, they don't need me at all," so I didn't go back. Anyway, during the war I was running schools for the repair of farm machinery and canning
 
vegetables. Schools in different sections of the county at night time. They were all done at night. I had a siren on my car for air raid warnings. We went around the country and saw that everybody was blacked out at certain times. Of course, we had people who were watching airplane, airplane spotters. All this was in case anything did happen we were under readiness. Those were the kind of things I did during the war, and I think I was busier than the soldiers were. It wasn't as dangerous, I guess, but it was pretty busy. Besides having regular class work during the say, regular responsibilities at school. So the women worked pretty furiously putting up vegetables from the gardens, you know, and preparing for a shortage of foods. A lot of our food was going overseas at that time. I think there was a little shortage of food for sale, so we were training those people to can, training the farmers to repair the machinery instead of buying new. So that was a couple years experience like that, three. So I did my bit for the service, I think, there.
MD: One thing. During the war, since you did have to do all that traveling, how did the stamps affect you? The stamp rationings?
MH: Well, you got gasoline ration stamps in accordance with your duties. If you had some traveling duties
 
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you would be allotted more stamps. And food stamps, of course, would depend on how many people in the family, you know. But we lived with them and nobody suffered too much. There was some misuse of them. We saw that once in a while. And they were being stolen, and they were being traded and everything, the stamps. Particularly the gasoline stamps. But we learned a lot from Britain. Some of the British were over here telling us what to look for because they had the experience close at hand. We had several British women who lived in this country, went over there to train to tell us what to look for. Yet, we had a big ocean apart, but ships would
get there.	- 
MD: What type of things did you have to look for that they were telling you about?
NH: Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is the shapes of different airplanes that the enemy had, and how to black out the cities from the air. Now, they didn't have too many planes that would fly across that ocean, but there were some, I guess. You had to be prepared for the worst, you know. That's principally what they were pointing out. And how to make use of the clothing they had and food, different ways to handle food. That's principally what they brought back to us. World War I I remember, too. You won't believe this. I was about
 
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seven or eight years old when my uncle went to World War I. I can remember just as well as yesterday when he left. And I remember when he came back after Armistice. Armistice Day we called it. Now it's Veterans Day because the Armistice never turned out to be the end of all wars like we thought it would. Yes, I remember both wars, both big wars, and many little ones. None of them were very small.
MD: On the home front, since you do remember World War I, what were some of the differences on the home front between the wars? Like during World War II they had the stamps, where World War I they hadn't. Maybe some other things that you saw that were
different.	-
NH: Well, at home the biggest difference was communication. We knew what was going on, where they were, in World War II pretty well, except at secret parts. World War I, we didn't know where our boys were hardly. Communication through mail was very slow if at all. In fact, I remember my uncle, you weren't even supposed to tell when you left the States to go over. This particular uncle of mine, he wrote under the postage stamp the day he was leaving and put the postage stamp over it. That's where they looked to try and find it, the day he left the mainland here. Of course, they went over in big carrier boats, you know, ships. They were
 
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very vulnerable with submarines and what not. That was the main difference, I think, in the two that I knew. World War II was more technical. It was mostly trench fighting in World War I.
MD: After the First World War, what was life like in the p205 because at least our textbooks say there was kind of like a depression for the farmer, anyway, that started? Or did you ever see anything?
NH: Yes, there was a lull there in business. The war
spending had ceased, you know, and that took a lot of the buying power away so it made things a little more plentiful and the prices a little lower for farm goods. Didn't have that war demand anymore. But everything, of course, in that time was pretty much done by hand and horse power still. Even the highways were readied with horse power, with scoops and drags. There wasn't much [unclear] done then. They were just gravel roads, graded so the water would run off a little bit.
[end of side 11
MD: What type of things were happening then with the New Deal and Roosevelt coming in during the Depression?
What type of things did he do for the farmers?
MM: Well, rural electrification was the biggest thing, I think, to hit the farm community area. Rural electrification. Of course, part of that was the bank failures and the bank holiday he declared so
 
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that the banks could get back on their feet again.
At that time, of course, they were insured from
there on, federal insured. But --	I forget my 
line of thought there. The rural electrification was a big deal for the country way back farmer. They built these electric lines right across the country and brought electricity to the homes of the country people. Prior to that they used kerosene and a lot of us had what we called gas lamps. You made your own gas in your basement, your cellar, with acetylene. All homes had acetylene lights before electric came in, homes of any size and all. But those that didn't, had kerosene lamps. I remember that rural electrification, REA. Of course, we had WPA and CWA and all the different funds to put people to work. The CCC camps came along there then. Civilian Conservation Corps. That occupied a lot of the youths who needed occupying, too. Not only needed occupying, but needed a little bit of income. They didn't get a whole lot of income from this, but they got taken care of by food and clothing and lots of good training. I think that was a very successful program, the Civilian Conservation Corps. One thing about it, most all the WPAs and CWAs, at least they'd work some for the money. They didn't get much done maybe, but there was some good projects
 
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turned out in those different organizations. Some still in existence, parks and recreation particularly that the WPA developed and completed. Not to compare it with what we have today in parks, understand, but one thing we always gave Roosevelt credit for, he didn't hand money out to people. He gave them a chance to earn it. That's a big difference between today and then. We don't want them to work today. We just give it to them. Of course, we do really want them to work, but there's not enough jobs for all of them, I guess, and some don't want to work. We didn't have that attitude much in those days, people not wanting to work. Everybody wanted a job if they could get them. But that's generally Roosevelt. That's mostly Roosevelt's and, of course, we had him for four terms, almost four. Like the Governor of Maryland. I thought the Governor of Maryland was a lifetime job when Albert Richie was governor. He was in there for sixteen years. He's the first governor I remember well. That's a good, vivid time in history following World War I and the bank failures and the bank holiday. All these working opportunities were produced. That pretty much tells that period of Roosevelt at the beginning there.
MD: Did you ever hear anything, I guess it was the AAA during the '20s? Anything about that? I think it
 
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was the --
MU: Agriculture Adjustment Administration.
MD: Yes.
MU: I can't put my teeth in that, but I remember the letters. Roosevelt was the first one to ever start organizations by lettering them. Now it's very commonplace to hear everything abbreviated by a letter. But your memory gets a little thicker as you get older.
MD: I guess, while you were working your thirty years with the packing company, what were some of your duties and responsibilities there? And what was it like then?
MU: Of course, I came into the packing company in '45. I resigned my job as principal in '45. At that time we were just getting ready to put a freezer in. That freezer was finished in '46 and we've been freezing ever since. It seems like it's outlived a lot of the canning businesses in the county because there's not many canning businesses left in the county, or in the state, for that matter. We're the only corn packer this side of the Bay, I think, on the west side of the shore. But we had trouble, of course, in getting started in the freezing. Not because of the freezing itself, but the mechanical part of the freezer was new to everybody and it's all out of date today when you think about
 
freezing that way now. Preparing the vegetables, though, for that freezing process, was something. That wasn't too good a job done on. We were principally selling our product to Cambell Soup and they were approving what we packed. They weren't as particular as they would be today. They had to reexamine all of the product when they got it to the plant again. Now they want it in there so they don't have to look at it. They want it perfectly clean. We don't sell them as much anymore. We're more independent. We do sell a lot of the big name brands, though, ingredients for their mixture:
peas, beans, corn, carrots, whatnot. Well, we went through a period, during the early part of my tenure there, with a labor problem. We imported a lot of labor from the islands. We had labor camps and whatnot for them. During the war we also had German prisoner and the German prisoners were very happy to be here as prisoner. They could outwork any of the people we've got now. One German prisoner would do as much as two of them. Unless you had somebody who was off his rocker, they were perfectly happy to be here until the war was over. They got paid, too. But they were strong and able-bodied and willing to work. They weren't particularly followers of Hitler, you know. They were just going to express themselves over there. So labor was one of the
 
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things that changed. We used to have labor orders there for temporary help. There's no more of that anymore. The help is a little more sophisticated today. We've got mostly local help, year round people to do the operating of the equipment.
ND: In the packing industry what type of equipment did you use to prepare and how would you prepare the vegetables?
MH: Well, I started to say that in those early days there wasn't any equipment made that would do a perfectly good job on a vegetable. As time evolved, why, the machinery evolved to where you can count on the machinery doing a good job of separating the chaff from the wheat, you know, so-to-speak. go today we have equipment that blows and shakes and whatnot and cleans everything out of it. We give it a final inspection by [unclear] to be sure that they didn't miss anything. But in those days the equipment hadn't yet caught up with the business. They still hadn't made good cleaning equipment. We can separate the things heavier than the product and lighter. Those two come very easy. One will settle out to the bottom and the light would be blown off. You can get a good separation that way. And we have many more markets now than we had in those days. We were principally packing for Cambell Soup and they were anxious for it then. Freezing had just come
 
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in. Prior to that, during the war, they were barreling and salting product to preserve it until they were ready to make their canned soups. Then when they saw the chance of freezers being established, why, they jumped at the idea of preserving it by freezing it. Then they wouldn't have to do it twice. Prior to the war you used to cut number ten cans and dump their vegetables. That was canned goods. But Uncle Sam said, "No more." It was wasting that tin during the war. The tin plate was getting scarce so we couldn't waste the tin cans. So they went to different ways, mostly barreling corn and icing it. Barreling it for temporary use and then salting it for long term use. Then they'd have to compensate for that in their mixture. They probably wouldn't have to put any salt in. But times have changed.
MD: When you first opened your cannery, what was the process you used when the vegetables first came in there until they were frozen? What were some of the steps that you went through?
MU: Well, first of all, you washed. It was blown, but we weren't equipped to blow it right. We tried to catch the stones. The stones in peas I'm thinking about. When you harvest peas close to the ground you get little stones, and you had to get that out. It would break people's teeth. We had riffle boards
 
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to catch that. Today we have destoners that they fall in the bottom of and eject them in different ways. Then it was blanched. You had to blanch it all for roughly three minutes at about two-hundred degrees, a hundred-and-ninety-five to two-hundred, around there. That inactivates the enzymes so it will keep good. Then, of course, we had to hand inspect it, but with poor equipment mechanically there was too much hand inspection. So it was too slow. Right now they're running corn. I'm going to go to the --
MD: You were just saying that after they were at the temperature of a hundred-ninety-five to two-hundred degrees they would hand inspect.
ME: It cooled down, though. It was cooled down again with cold water before it went on the inspection table so it wouldn't be too warm for them to handle. Then it goes into a refrigerated water pump and it sends it up to the freezer. The blanch is done about three minutes from a hundred-and-ninety-five to two-hundred, in that area. It varies with the product a little bit. Today there's very little in them to remove. The machinery does practically does all of it. Occasionally you'll see a discolored kernel that maybe they will pick out, but nothing more. Once in a while we run into trouble, like bird damage and
 
squirrel damage along the woods and what not. That makes a little brown kernel where they have eaten it away. But mostly our equipment will flush that out, too. The cutters, of course, we have to run the corn through the cutters. We have automatic huskers. The corn is run into huskers and it takes all the husk off and then it runs through the cutter and it takes all the kernels off. That's all you look for is the kernel. But then you have your problem of maturity, various maturities that you have to separate, segregate. Certain markets want one grade and certain markets want another, and you have to know where they are in your storage so you can ship the right thing. If it were easy everybody would be in it. It's not easy. I say if it were an easy living, easy job, everybody would have one. Ours is not the largest freezer, but it's very efficient and it's easy to supervise. It's fixed so you can look right across the whole plant and see what's operating, if it's operating properly. We do a lot of retail trade over there now, walk in
trade. That's become a larger part of the business now. Not a half of it, but it comes close to that. But a year like this, you have to only look at the corn fields and know you're not going to have a crop. We might have to prorate our orders a little bit and give everybody a portion of the market. The
 
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customers, I should say. Instead of a truckload, they might get half a truckload.
MD: Over the years how has the freezing changed? Is it like almost a flash freeze, or is there some process in the freezing itself?
MET: First of all, it's a chain process the way the product moves through. You used put it in trays and push it in a cold room. Then you had to dump the trays and break up the clusters and so-forth. Today it's frozen on air. Most all freezers today is buoyed up by the air pressure underneath in a cold room. It gets shorter all the time. Every person that makes a new quick freezer makes it a shorter quick freeze. The faster they freeze the better, I think, for the quality. A slow freeze is not good, you know. Bird's Eye, when they first started freezing, they failed for a long while before they got it going right. But the idea came from food being left at the North Pole, I hear. They found it quick frozen there and it was kept good. The flavor was still there. That's the story I get, anyway. So they found that quick freezing is much better than a slow freeze.
MD: And this is just over air or is it some type of gaseous mixture?
MH: No, no gasses. Just a trough with holes in the bottom and air moves the product up and just locks
 
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[unclear] in the air. All the peas come out individually frozen, see, that way, not sticking together. All of our product you can pour out after it's frozen. It's frozen before it's packaged. You still have some, like asparagus and a few things like that you can't freeze and then put into the package because it would take up so much room. So they put them in fresh and freeze them. But most of the product in the stores today is loose frozen. A few of the old, the [unclear] may be frozen after they're put in the package.
MD: Just jumping back a little ways. Before you did go in the canning business, what type of work were you
doing with the Agricultural Vocational School?-
MIT: Well, we were teaching high school kids about all the things we learned in college, a lot of them, anyway. Each one of them had projects that we'd go and supervise. They kept records on how much it cost to produce certain things. If they had a calf project, they'd keep records on how much that calf cost them and whatnot. Whatever it might be. Every kid was supposed to have some kind of a living project. That was only part of my time. The other part was in the academic courses. Incidently, I told you I taught in three counties and I was principal. I had several experiences. After I was out at the packing company for a number of years, I
 
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was elected to the Board of Education. Appointed to the Board of Education, I should say, not elected. I served ten years on the Board of Education of Harford County, five of which I was president of the Board. So I've had a wide variety of experiences in my short life time, from the one-room school to the big consolidated high school, to the management of them. Well, those experiences on this tape are going to be mixed up a good bit.
MD: Oh, that's quite alright. That's no real problem. I guess while you were on the Board of Education, what were some of the decisions and duties that you had there?
NH: What the Board of Education should always be reminded of is that they are a policy making Board, not administrative. We'd set policy, but the administrators are supposed to carry out the policies. Follow me? Once in a while we'd get a Board member who thinks he should be directing the job a little bit too much. But that's not the part of a Board of Education. It's a lay Board. They call them a lay Board, that monitors all the activities of the school system, you might say. They have a policy on all different facets of the educational program, standards and behavioral standards, and what have you. Of course, the biggest job we have is selecting the
 
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superintendent. That's entirely the Board's responsibility. Once you select your superintendent, why, he hires his helpers, appoints them. Then we hear from all them what their problems are and we act accordingly. Well, it goes all the way from construction of school buildings to naming them and all those kinds of things, some of those problems. Every school has to have a name. At one time they all had numbers. These little room schools had numbers, too. Numbers and district. I used to write on these things. Everybody had a slate in elementary school. That's the school I attended from one to seven.
MD: That's fascinating. I haven't seen one of thee.
NB: Just wash it off the slate and start again. We could do long division or math problems on the slate or any other desk work, and take a wet cloth and erase it. Didn't have all this paper furnished and everything, you see. There was a slate on the desk and also a slate in the front of the room. That's the one I attended.
MD: What type of tours did you give to the students? I guess it would be more recent for field trips around the county. What were some of the things that you would show them?
NH: From the local schools you mean?
MD: Yes, when you gave the tours throughout the county
 
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what would you - -
MH: Oh, I see what you're referring to. That's the tours of our plant. That was for the school, any classes that wanted to come and witness the process we would make an appointment with them. So they'd bring them in by bus and tour the process. We explained to them what we were doing in each station. That's what that refer to. We have a number of them. Mostly the elementary grades come. Each class has the privilege of having at least a certain number of tours. Field trips is the word. I'm running out.
MD: Do you remember any childhood experiences or adult experiences you had with your family or while You were growing up? Like stories or anything else you'd like to share.
MEL: Well, I failed to tell you that I was married in 1939. I have two children, a boy and a girl. My son's running the freezer plant at the present time. He's president of that. My daughter's married to a Naval officer. They're presently living in Virginia Beach. He's a Commander in the Navy now. So that takes care of my family life. They both have children and, of course, we have grandchildren. We started off in 1939 renting an apartment in Eel Air, then onto renting a house, and then buying a fan here. We bought this little farm
 
in 1941. We later built, in 1954, we built this house. So everything evolves from nothing to a little something, you know.
ND: During your free time, I guess while you were growing up and while you were young, what type of things did you do there for dances or music?
NH: About the only social thing like that was different families would have little parties for their friends and classmates. House parties going to each person's house. Then, of course, as time went on we'd have little dances at the school or at the Lodge Hall or something. I recall when the Knights of Pithius--you probably never heard of them--they used to have hall at most every crossroads, a - lodge. That was always the center for people to have assemblies in. I remember up at Shawsville. There was one in Jarrettsville. When I was graduated from high school we received our diplomas at the Knights of Pithius Hall in the town there, see. There wasn't any auditorium in the school at that time. No big enough room for it. So that's the kind of things that we did for entertainment. And, of course, baseball games. We'd work a whole day's work in a half a day to go play baseball in the afternoon. Of course, in high school we played soccer and very little basketball because we didn't have a court. But soccer and baseball were the
 
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principle things. One's a fall and one's a spring sport. But pretty rough ground for baseball, too. They didn't bounce truly. So we had a little social life. Didn't take so much to entertain us in those days.
MD: Over the years what are some the changes you've seen? Such as in farming, farm equipment, as well as the packing industry.
Fill: Bigger and bigger is the main word I'd describe it as. One farmer right now is farming the ground it used to maybe take eight or ten to farm, eight or ten families maybe. We have some big crop growers in Harford County now, renting ground that used to be operated by the family. So the farms are getting fewer and larger. And the same thing is taking place in the freezer business and all kinds of businesses: fewer of them and larger. It's survival of the fittest in business, you know. If they don't make it they drop out and then the big ones become bigger. That's principally what you see. It's still pretty much family oriented, however, only the equipment is larger. They can do more. One person can do more. Where we'd run two pickers it used to take four to run, see, to get sweet corn. Of course, prior to that I should mention, when I first came aboard the packing company all the corn was pulled by hand and brought
 
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in with little trucks or horses, maybe. Now we've got mechanical pickers that go out and you wouldn't believe you can pick sweet corn off a stock without hurting it any, but you can. We've got these big mammoth four-row pickers with air conditioned cabs and --
 
End of Interview