Interview with Katharine J. Reese

              Interview with Katharine Reese for the Harford County Library Living Treasure Collection, by Michael Dante, August 26, 1986.
DANTE: Mrs. Reese, would you like to tell us about your childhood before you moved to Harford County?
REESE: Well, I was born in New Haven, Connecticut, so I'm an old Connecticut Yankee. I was one of eight children and I am a twin. I was born at home, of course. One was born at home in that age, and we lived on Cold Spring Street. On our right were the Winchester Bennets from the famous Winchester Repeating Arms Company and on our left were the Spocks, the family of the Dr. Spock.
When I was born down there, I was the sixth and my twin was the seventh of our family. We were born at home and so when they found out that there were trains, the trained nurse ran to the window and yelled across, "Mrs. Spock, Mrs. Spock, we have twin girls, and the Dr. Spock of writing the baby books, nudged his mother and he said, "Come on, mother, let's have another and beat them."
After we were born, we moved up to the house that my family built up on Prospect Street and then we had one more child, our younger brother, Bill. We were a very close family. We used to go to school, of course, in the winter term in New Haven, but we went down to Amagansit, a little village in the South Shore of Long Island every summer.
The telephone operators could never get the phones down to Amagansit. They always went to Naragansett, Rhode Island until, in World War II, the famous landing of the Germans was at Amagansit and our little railroad master, of course, met them at the station when they bought tickets to go up the island. And he was very proud of that fact. When the FBI finally caught them up the island because he had given word. At that time the telegraph was all run from the railroad station, so when he discovered that their clothes that they had removed and found out that they had come in from the ocean, and gotten these tickets to go up town, he telegraphed ahead and warned them up there. So the FBI was ready to catch them, and then his picture was taken for the little local paper standing outside under the Amagansit sign holding a broom. He was so proud of it.
But after that everybody knew what Amagansit was when you asked for Amagansit on the phone. Of course, in those days, also, we didn't have the dial tones direct. You still had to go through an operator for your long distance calls.
Well, I was the last of the eight children to get married. We were all married, after I got married in 1948. So I lived at home for 30 years, which today would be unthinkable, but it was a great advantage because I worked downtown. I worked during the war at the District Warning Center where I had to fill the shifts for the volunteers, nine to one and one to five every day seven days a week to receive the calls from the army of these. They had the yellow, red and blue calls that would first alert you and then give more of a warning. A red was supposed to be a real alert, and we had to get that word out to the seventeen districts around New Haven where they had people manning their boxes year round.
Then, of course, one couldn't use the ham radios during the war, except in this War Emergency Radio Service. We had the headquarter set at WJLH1 in New Haven, and we had about 45 units, many of them mobile units because these ham operators had their radios in their cars. So we had a very, very good system there, which was utilizing these amateurs, really. You know, an amateur radio ham, his aim is to make contact with 100 countries and belong to the Century Club, and every night they would feel out and try to make these other contacts. Then when you make a contact, you send them a postcard and they send you a postcard. You make up your postcards with your call letters and you collect 100 cards to show the proof that you've made your 100 contacts. All these people really loved their one night of being able to operate
legally and officially on the air, but they had to limit it to the War Defense work.
But we did a lot of relaying for the Red Cross, relay all the way back about different service men that were coming home on leave or trying to reach parents for an illness or something. They would send it through this system. It's very short wave, of course, so you had to relay and relay and relay and relay. So we had to learn all about receiving from the next area and pushing it on to an adjoining area. We practiced these relays and we practiced working with our own mobile groups for different defense tactics. So that was quite busy.
Then I also worked at the War Finance Office, where we put on the War Bond Drives. I was secretary for the retail stores, the Chamber of Commerce in New Haven, and also for the Women's Division. We put on a great contest to try to see which store could get the most War Bonds sold, and I kept all the records for them. We gave them all these prizes of War Bonds at the end. We had one big promotion where we brought a great big blimp down onto the New Haven Green and let people autograph the blimp if they bought a War Bond from US. I've got some pictures of that.
After that, when war was over, I worked as executive vice chairman of the Connecticut Cancer Society for their campaign. So I started with nine chairmen for the town of New Haven in 1946 and when I left Connecticut in 1950, we had 169 chairmen with 169 towns in the state of Connecticut. Of course, we raised more each year, but at that time cancer was very new and, of course, we were shocked to have to report that one in eight would be affected by it. Now they're talking one in three, so you really wonder with all the work we've put into it why we don't seem to make more progress in that line.
So then when I got married my husband was working in Waterbury, Connecticut with Coca-Cola Company. He had been in Coca-Cola export before the war which, of course, after he came back from the navy had kind of folded up. You couldn't do much export during the war. So he had the job of managing the Waterbury plant. We decided that we wanted to get out into the country. I was raised in the city and he was raised in Atlanta, Georgia. So we took a little tour around this country, and we took my little 1940 Chevrolet and we drove down to Florida, across Florida, back up around into Texas, down into Mexico City, back up from there and around through Phoenix and on up the West Coast and all the way up to Seattle. We crossed over into Montana and came down through Yellowstone Park and came back across the mid part of the country, Kansas, and crossed the country.
We didn't on that trip really make up our minds where we wanted to be, except that we did decide that we wanted the East Coast and the four seasons. We didn't want the great south and we didn't want the great west. We thought that the general East Coast was where we wanted to be. So we went out to Phoenix for the winter. This was in 1949, and just stayed in a little apartment there. My brother was out there working with newspapers, and we got the ads from the New York Times for all these farms for sale in the east, and we made contact with a few of the people, one of them being Baldwin Stuart, Baltimore.
So while we were out there, my husband volunteered his time at some of the local dairies so we could learn something about farming because we were both from the city. So he worked at the farms there and one day he came back with a little bull calf that he'd gotten for two dollars because they don't want to save the bull calves. They save the heifers for replacement cows, but the bulls they want the milk for the people, so they sold this little calf to him.
So he took it to my brother, who had a little bit of land a couple of grapefruit trees around his house and they made a cage for it and raised this thing, and they called him Bingo. Actually, it turned out to be the beginning of ranching for my brother. They raised this thing. They finally put it into a feedlot and then they had it slaughtered and made into hamburgers. The first time they had hamburgers, their little then five year old said to all the guests, "These aren't hamburgers. These are Bingo burgers," and then nobody could really enjoy them very much.
However, after that, he got six more steers, put them in a feedlot and the next thing he knew, he was buying a ranch at Vale, outside of Tuscon, and he still has that. It's the X-9 Ranch, and it borders the Sorro National Park. So he went completely into, of course, not dairy but just beef cattle on the range.
So we made all these contacts and we got some pictures from Baldwin Stuart of this Fox place that we're in now, but they were terrible photographs. They were sort of taken looking up towards the sky and gave the impression that there wasn't a leaf or a tree around them. It just looked like houses sitting out on a range. So we wrote back that we weren't very happy with that one, but to keep on looking.
When we came back, we made contact with several of these real estate people that had sent us their little supplies and we mapped out a trip that started up in Doylestown, which we thought was going to be good farming land, but which really is a rather artificial country life. Mostly actors and actresses and people like that, and not really what I call just "dirt" farmers. So we moved on down. We went into the Princetown area and then we went into the area outside of Wilmington there around Unionville where it was nice farming, but still there it was very horsey. Everybody was riding into the hunt and hounds and whatnot, and it really wasn't still just beef cattle.
So we came on down and we met Baldwin Stuart down at the inn right by the Susquehanna Bridge on Route 40, and he led the way in his car. We cane up what I now know to be Route 161, the Darlington Road, and as we went down that dip and came up, I could see some black angus cattle on the pasture, and I said, "Oh, look! He's tuning in there." So we followed him in and we came into this great, big stone house and we thought, "Well, this really is nice."
Well, we were met at the door by this General Fox who was very short and who had been, of course, in the service all his life, so he bellowed. He opened the door and he had a terrible cold, so I sort of nudged my husband. I was by that time six
months pregnant with our oldest daughter. So I said, "Oh, my. We don't want to stay here too
long. I couldn't afford to catch his cold." But he invited us in and he introduced us to his little wife, who was a nice, sweet, quiet little woman. He said, "Well, if you're going to be living in this place, you ought to see what it's like. So you just go look around and we'll wait for you here." I've never had anybody take me through a house like that before. They usually want to guard you from all the closets and they want to stay with you all the way.
So we took a look around and thought, "Well, this isn't too bad." We looked all over the house and then we came back down and he said, "Now I'll show you around the farm." So we walked all the way around the farm, down across the stream, up through the woods. Now, this was February and I was walking across streams on logs and doing all kinds of things. We spent the whole day here and finally we left him about five o'clock and we had gone up to Darlington for lunch with poor Baldwin Stuart, who hadn't gotten any further than the first house with US. He had a whole list of them and this was the first one we had started with. So we had a sandwich with him up there and came back here and finally at five o'clock we all left and said we'd check with him in the morning.
We went to a motel and we were so afraid that somebody else would buy it before we got back, we came up here about six thirty in the morning, rode up and down. This was just a dirt road coming in here from 161 and there was just a farm across the way, the Night's farm across the way. There were no houses there. So we rode the little road all the way down to the river and back and we kept going up and down when we thought we saw signs of life there. Then we went in and apparently they had been sort of looking up all of our references and things and my father was editor and publisher of the New Haven Register up in New Haven. So they were able to look up in Who's Who and have some idea who we were.
I'm sure that they had had lots of people who were just curiosity seekers coming to see this house, and they were getting a little discouraged about trying to sell it because people would come and look around, but they really had no intentions of buying. So we got together and we had a willing buyer and a willing seller and it turned out to be rather good, I think, for both of us. So we said, "Well, now when can we move in?" and he said, "Yesterday."
So on the 29th of March, 1950, we moved in here. Well, when we got here, of course, we didn't get too involved for the first couple of years. We've never had any live in help here and I did a lot more with the cattle in those early days, outside work. But by the time our second daughter was about--well, by the time the first daughter was ready for some kind of kindergarten, and there was no kindergarten here, I joined up with Grace Meriting, who lives over in Glenville, and we started one of the first little kindergartens here over in the Hopewell Church, right here outside of Level. We had about fifteen or twenty children and we had Mrs. Grass for a teacher, and the mothers had to take turns being mother's helper to the teacher and it was very successful. So the next year we moved to Harmony Church and we had two teachers, one for the age of her daughter and my daughter that were in real kindergarten, and one for the younger children that were in prekindergarten. Mrs. Grass did the prekindergarten and we got another teacher to take the older ones, and it was really quite a good kindergarten. We had a teacher that was quite talented in dramatics and in art and so it was very good.
Then when both of our older girls went to the Churchville School under Tom Hackett, when they were in first grade with Mrs. Hackett, none of the other mothers wanted to carry on the kindergarten and we were putting our efforts in Churchville, so it folded up in rather a hurry. But now, of course, they have the kindergartens in the public schools and the Harford Day School now has prekindergarten. So I believe the public schools are moving towards prekindergarten right now.
Anyway, that's where I first started getting involved in education. I was mother's helper of the first grade and I was vice chairman of PTA when she was in second grade, and I was president of PTA when she was in third grade. So I got thoroughly involved with the schools. That was back in Dr. Willis' day. Then the new Meadowvale School was built in Havre de Grace and they drew a line more or less down through level, which put both of us on the Havre de Grace side, and so we were told we had to move to Meadowvale. That was very disappointing because I'd had such good success at Churchville and Mr. Hackett was a tremendous head.
In those days the whole county wasn't tied up with their food problems and their milk problems. mean each school looked after their own, and he was able to get so much good, fresh food from farmers because we were in a good farming area, and he was able to give breakfast to a lot of the poor kids. These other schools just didn't do that. Nowadays if you don't have the government rushing in to give breakfast to the poor, they don't get it. Every school has to use it and the county may use it and it's all done on a very impersonal basis.
Anyway, I had to go to Meadowvale, even though I'd been the president of the PTA over at Churchville. So when we had our elections for our first PTA chairman down there, we had three of us, I think, that volunteered and I was voted PTA chairman there. So I had those two years to really get to know the Harford County System.
I had at that time one child with Mrs. Cox, I think had 38 children in it. The other had Miss Simmons and she had 40 in her class. That was the only really discouraging part about being in the public schools at that time. These poor teachers were fresh out of teacher's college and really, it was almost impossible to even thoroughly know the names by Christmas when you had that many children and you were a first time teacher.
I had gotten involved already with starting the Harford Day School in 1957 with my second daughter, who was in first grade there, but that was when I had the first child in Churchville and I was so involved there. We were building that school up. We started with three grades and a kindergarten and added a grade a year. Well, my oldest daughter would have been in the top class, and when it was rather experimental, it was a little risky to have her stop going through a formal education and jump into something that, supposing we weren't able to survive financially or it collapsed, then she would have been left out in the cold. So I put the younger child in first grade there. Then I moved her back the next year when we had to go to Meadow-vale because it was too hard to do the transportation all the way over to Bel Air with one and all the way down to Havre de Grace with the other.
Well, after this experience with being in those large classes, we moved them both over to ilarford Day School and then I put all my energies over there and I was on that board for some 25 years. I also worked at the desk two days, and when our children got ready to go away to school, we ended up having one daughter at Garrison Forest, one daughter at St. Paul's for Girls, and one son at Gilman. Well, Garrison was the only one that had boarders, anyway, and we had the three children to go to school in Baltimore. So we took an apartment at 4011 Roland, which was a brand new apartment at that time, and my husband took the children into school on Monday mornings and delivered them one, two, three to the three schools. Then I worked my day at Harford Day School and drove into Baltimore after school and went to the little chapel food store at the Cross Keys and shopped for supper. Then went to the apartment. The girls came back in a bus. I had to go pick Billy up at Gilman. So I would put them through supper and homework and the night, and come back to Baltimore on Tuesdays because Tuesday was our Garden Club day. Then my husband would go in Tuesday night and he'd stay and play tennis at the Cross Keys that evening and he'd do Wednesday and come home. So Thursday I would repeat and go to Harford Day School, work there all day, go on in and go to the Cross Keys and get the food. Then go and see them through Thursday and Friday I had to clean house while they were all at school and then go collect from all three schools and hit the beltway and 95 right with the commuters all the way back on every Friday night. So it ended up that if we ever did anything for the weekend, like go visit Granny up in New Haven, that I could go through two weeks when I wasn't spending more than two nights in the same area at a time. I'd be one in town and two at home, and one in town and one in New Haven, and one back here and the next one in town. It was really something. We did that for four years.
Then when the girls graduated from St. Paul's and Garrison, then Billy boarded with a Mr. Reese, who was not related to us, but was a teacher at Gilman and lived in one of the faculty houses. So we had Bill boarding there. But I also continued to get involved with the educational end of it, and Mrs. Fragans and I were the first two women to go on the all male Gilman board in a school that had been going for about 75 years. So that was quite a challenge, too.
When my son was a senior there and he was president of his class, that automatically made the mother chairman of the Cake Sale Day, which was a circus. They called it a circus. So I was kept quite busy and also, as a member of the board, I was on the long range planning committee for lower school. We met once a week with faculty members and other people in school and then once a week we took a field trip to another school. So it was a wonderful opportunity to get all these varying views and take them back to Harford Day School, where I still had my major interest, and it worked visa-versa because the things that we experimented with, the new math we had gotten into and a few other things, we could then use to advantage in our committee work with the lower school at Gilman.
So I continued on with Harford Day and by that time our son went up to Yale and one daughter went to Arizona State and the oldest daughter got married three weeks after St. Paul's and went out west to raise Welsh Ponies. She's still doing that. She's been divorced, however, and is on her own, and she is on the national board of the Welsh Pony Society and lives in Arkansas. She makes about two or three trips to Wales each year and gets into all the sales over there, knows all the farms over there. She takes lots of pictures of the new foals and then she brings them back and mails them to her clients around here. She knows all the bloodlines. She's worked on the stud books for them for many years. So she goes over and bids for clients at sales when these foals that she's seen in the fall then go up to the big, major sales. She gets them and makes arrangements to have them flown back here and put through quarantine and delivered all the way. Sometimes to California even or Texas. So she's very much in the Welsh Pony business.
My son is in the rare book business in New Haven. He's in the William S. Reese Company and doing extremely well. He had a booth at the International Book Fair in London two years ago and he's had booths in the book fairs out west and in New York City. So he's been quite successful in his field.
And the second daughter is married. She's now Barbara Curry and her husband was from -- [end of side 1, tape 1]
KR: Well, Hurrara, Zimbouia, which used to be Rhodesia, this son-in-law has a birth certificate from Salsibury, Rhodesia and even the name of the hospital's been changed. So he's sitting with a birth certificate that doesn't have one name on it that applies today. His father was Rhodesian. His mother is British and he has four siblings, two brothers and two sisters, and the two brothers are still working down in Hurrara. One sister is married to an Englishmen, but he is working on one of Mogabee's forest farms in Zimbouia. The other sister is married to an Englishman. She's now Mrs. Charles Crosswaithe Bire; couldn't be more English. He was with Tait-Lysle that did lots of working in getting rid of the white fly in the greenhouses and growing places. He's been over here. I took him to our Beltsville Unit here where they have an experimental station, and now he has a branch of their firm in Wilmington. So he has made contact in the states. However, I think they're not with Tate and Lysle anymore. I think the unit he was in has been bought out, but he's just outside of London and he still has the contact in the states.
At the moment my daughter and her husband and the two children are in Hurrara where they're going
to spend a year. It has a very nice climate and higher altitude and her oldest daughter, our first grandchild, has had a lot of asthma. She's been over there now since May and she's not on any medicines except occasional help for a bit of a cold or something. But it's been a great help to her, so they're going to stay over there for a year. They won't get back till September of '87, which seems a long time to be away, but you know, I can dial direct without even an operator and she'll pick up as though she was in Connecticut.
She started out in Houston and then moved up to Wilton, Connecticut and now over there. You really can't tell on the phone that she's not in the States. Quite amazing because they're not only around the world, but they're the other side, below the equator. So it's really quite a way away, which I guess you couldn't have done before these satellites. The old connections that were under cables under water were not so good.
Well, what I'm doing is now is that I've been out of the schools--well, I've been involved in Garden Club since 1952 and in the good old days the three Garden Clubs of Harford County used to get together for a wonderful flower march in Bel Air and they stopped all the traffic. You could do that then. You could stop all the traffic from Richardson's Drug Store all the way up the other end to what is now the Equitable Building and just close it up to pedestrians. We set up these wonderful, colorful booths and sold all kinds of flowers and plants and seeds and everything. We had it once a year and it was a beautiful tradition. We kept all the old parts to the booths up in the Archer's attic and a committee of us ladies would go and put them up, sometimes repaint them. It was all, of course, just volunteer work and we all had a beautiful time and it was a very colorful day in town. ut now it's all one-way traffic and the cars are moving so much, you couldn't possibly cut off the traffic.
Then we always had a booth at the Fiesta. They're still doing that, though our club has not participated as much in that, except to give them financial assistance. Because we're members of both the Garden Club of America and the Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland, and it's very difficult to take care of all the events that both groups are putting on. I mean they each have a big zone meeting and for Garden of America that's a two-day event. We've just put it on. We've just been hostess to the Garden Clubs of our zone, which is 9 clubs in the Baltimore area and 4 down in the Washington area, 13 clubs. We had a big flower show the first day put on by the Amateur Garden Club, which was cohostessing with us. They had a show at Mount Clair, which is run by the Colonial Dames and is a historic house. Then they had a big dinner that night and the next day they came out here and we had Rick Darrick from Longwood Gardens give a beautiful talk on the wildflowers of the Susquehanna Flats. We held it in our little volunteer fire department, which has a beautiful hall here now, Level Hall. Then we had them all down to Rock Run to the mansion and had a tent outside with tables for the luncheon, and we had a tour of the Rock Run house.
Now, our Garden Club has furnished--actually, a lot of it was furnished by Gilman Paul when he was the one that started that park down there. A lot of it was furnished, but we have since added a lot and refurbished it and done all the landscaping around the outside and made a little resting park down by the stream, the little Rock Run Stream that comes through there. So we have held several events there. We have an open show for Christmas, to which the whole public has been invited and we'll have it again this Christmas. We've had spring shows and then had maybe a benefit cocktail party or something afterwards. We've been very involved in that.
Then with the Federated, they have their annual dinners and their zone dinners and various other projects, and they get out their little magazine of events. So it's very hard to really be tremendously active in every little thing, but now we have seven clubs in Harford County and there are still what we call the three old ones: the Evergreen Garden Club, the Country Garden Club and the Garden Club of Harford County. The Evergreen and the Country were never GCA. They're just Federated, but we did a lot together in the good old days. We had a daffodil show every spring. We had the daffodil show every other year, and we all worked on the pilgrimage, the house tours, the pilgrimages on the alternate year. Some of that has slowed down a little bit.
I'm afraid that people are reluctant to open their houses now to the general public because you just don't know who's going to come in and see too much and know too much. It's sad, but the times just do change when the population has grown so. I'm not quite sure what the circulation is of the Aegis now, but I think it has grown tremendously. It was somewhere between six and nine thousand, I think, when we came here in 1950 and it must be up around twenty thousand or so now.
Now, the other thing I've been involved with lately, of course, is the Stepping Stone Museum, which is a farm museum that was started by Mr. Bull, Edmond Bull, up in his house on Mackton Road. It was really his private collection of farm tools. He loved collecting them and finally wanted to share them with friends and neighbors. They set it up as - a museum right in his house.
After he died, it was really impossible for his wife to carry it on as a museum and so the people that had been active and the volunteers that had been taking the tours, they formed a committee and Hap Carroll was one of the main ones. He recently died here this summer. He made contact with us at the Park. Now, I'm also on the Governor's Advisory Board for the Susquehanna Park. I've been on that for, I guess, maybe 20 years now. They came to us to see if they could move the museum down to the park. Of course, the way it finally worked out was that we were able to rent the old Gilman Paul House, rent free from the park, but everything inside there is our responsibility and we charge for the visitors and run the museum independently. But the park takes care of all the grounds, the outside, and the security.
It's a very good combination, really, because the park itself, where the mansion is in the middle, they're open every weekend all summer, also. Now a tourist coming from some distance can come to the Stepping Stone Museum and see all the old farm house equipment and all the old tools. We've got a beautiful collection of tools. We've had a man out from the Smithsonian to look at those tools and he says we've got one of the finest collections that he's seen. He was even interested in seeing some of our surplus and perhaps making some exchanges because we had some old tools that they didn't have. It is a very fine collection and it's been beautifully displayed in the big ban.
Then on the other side we have an old country store and we have a room showing lots of old weaving and spinning materials. We have six display cases that we change around. Right now we have some school room equipment in one and some telephone and radio and other communications things in another. We change those around a bit so that they'll be something new to see if you come back and come back.
Then everything at the house. We have the kitchen done with the old ice box and the old wood stove. We have tours there for children from the schools. We'll take a whole bus load of children and they'll spend four or five hours out there. They come in the morning and they help make the bread and make the butter, and make a stew, fix the vegetables and make a stew. They all learn about the old fashioned ways to make a meal and then they go out and play out in the yard and have a little rest time. Then they come in and eat the meal and take a tour of the rest of the museum. It's really very educational. We run those tours mid week so that they're not there when the masses come. We open to the public Saturday and Sunday.
In order to try and support the museum, we add special events on different Sundays. This coming Sunday we're going to have a reenactment of a battle in the Civil War. These groups, they work all over the state and up in Pennsylvania. They go to Gettysburg and Manassas and places like that and they're coming and setting up an encampment with the tents and everything. They're spending the night and having their food cooked in our pit there and spending the night. Then in the middle of the afternoon out in the big field, they'll have their Civil War enactment. So anybody that comes on Sunday can see all the museum first. We'll be open from twelve till five, and then everybody can watch this battle going on in the afternoon. Of course, there will be lots of food and things. On days that we have a big promotion like that, we just have an outside person come in to handle the food because people do want refreshments if they're going to stay there for a long period.
So that has kept me very busy. I've been on that board since, I think, 1979 or '80. We try to improve the collection and change the exhibits. Mostly the job of the board is to try and keep it solvent. It's not easy to run a museum these days. I understand many of the museums have been closing up up in Pennsylvania. It's just very difficult to keep them going. They were all so popular during the Bicentennial and then it sort of waved off. But this year has been good again because with all the troubles abroad, and all the problems, so many people are spending their vacation in the States this summer and driving around in a van seems to be very popular. I've never seen the highways with more vans and wagons and whatnots.
So it has been a good year and we're going to have a big Fall Harvest Festival, the last Sunday of September, and that's always a very popular event. I mean we'll get as many as eighteen hundred visitors over the two days on those big events. They make apple butter right out there and sell it, and people just love it. They have all sorts of old time things, candle making and things like that. These young families just love to bring their kids and show them how life used to be.
I think actually we have many more senior citizens on that board than we have young people because, you see, it's the era we were used to. We had a coal stove up in Connecticut and we had a coal furnace. We'd get a shuttle full, scuttle full of the coal and bring it up beside the stove every morning. It was used in both places, downstairs in the furnace and upstairs in the stove.
So that's about where we are now. Of course, we've been raising the black angus cattle here on the farm all these years. In fact, there again, in the early days when we came down here and we were young and enthusiastic and perhaps a little naive, we were in the registered angus business and I had to keep all the records. Every cow had to have a four generation back pedigree and she had to have all the records of every vaccination, the bangs vaccinations, and of course, you had to have the date of every calf and keep all the records. Then you had to build up the record for that calf back four generations. It was a big job just keeping that going.
And the way you sold these animals was to take them to the official registered cattle sales. You know, that was not easy if you were green and not that experienced in the business because the big firms, Ankany Farms and Sunbeam that Arm and Hammer had, and some of those, they would have a very expensive bull. This Arm and Hammer had the Prince Something of Sunbeam and they made him expensive because they can buy from each other for very large sums, and if I buy a hundred thousand dollar bull from you and you buy a seventy-five thousand dollar heifer from me, you see, not too much money has to change hands.
So then with a very expensive bull he would go around and make himself popular with all the little newcomers by buying some of their heifers for four or five hundred dollars, and he would breed those to his hundred thousand dollar bull and then have his big annual sale. When you came to get things from him, these things were running from five thousand, ten thousand because they were bred to this very great bull. They would run through a bunch of ordinary heifers and have one of these great, beautiful ones with a particularly good pedigree bought by one of their friends for some large, Large amount, and pretty soon the little newcomers began to feel that they were getting a bargain if they could get one for a thousand dollars or for two thousand dollars. They thought that was a bargain because you could then supposedly take it back to your farm and this calf would arrive with this beautiful pedigree and maybe you'd have a big, expensive one.
But you see, the trick was that it was all based on the pedigrees. Everybody had to have a black cat Bessy, so you'd wait around for some black cat Bessy. Didn't matter what she looked like as long as she was a black cat Bessy with a good pedigree, and you would pay thousands to get her.
By the next year, they found some other, Georgina maybe was the popular one. So nobody would want your black cat Bessy by the time you got the calf raised, which of course, took some time to get it old enough for you to be selling. It pretty much, we discovered, turned out to be a hobby like stamp collecting and I'm sure probably a very great tax saving event for the big farms. They had plenty of money to pay all these herdsmen, whereas, we had to struggle with our own.
So we finally went right into the ordinary cattle business and we sell them at weaning. We still have good registered stock for our basic herd, and we know that they're only worth what they'll bring for beef. We work a lot with advertising through the Lancaster papers. We sell them to the Amish people who, because they work ten and twelve hours a day and really care for the land, they raise a lot of corn and a lot of feed and we do raise a very good quality calf, if I do say so myself. We leave them on the mothers for six months but feed them, too, so that they're in very good health when they leave here. We sell them right off the place. They'll come down with a truck, weigh it on the way down and weigh it on the way back and you get the weight slips and make the deal and it's sold right off the farm. That's probably the most practical
way to be in the business. You get quality beef that way.
We really can't raise a lot of grains and corn because we're too hilly here and if you plow, all our land will end up in the Susquehanna by way of Elbow Branch. So we keep mostly in some good alfalfa for the high protein and some regular, ordinary pastures with orchard grass, and timothy, and clover, and all that. Then shift them around from pasture to pasture.
We do try to get--in fact, we always have had good registered bulls to divide the cows up and have them with several different bulls. So we're in the business of quality animals, but they're going where they should go, to the meat markets and they're not being played around with as collector's items. And we're still in it. Now we've been in it for 36 years and we're getting on. I'm going to be 69 this next month and he's going to have his 75th in January, but we haven't thought about retirement. As long as we're having such a good time here, we're going to just keep it up.
So that brings us up to just about where we are today.
MD: Would you like to tell us about your work with the
school system, as in the PTA or the Harford Day School?
KR: Well, at Churchville, as I say, the schools were much better, I think, when they could be autonomous because they got a lot more personal attention from the principles. And you could get the parents more involved. We had a wonderful May Day every spring, and maybe they still have some of those things now, but everything has been commercialized today. In those days it was all still amateur, but was all such a friendly, small thing that you could handle it.
I got some great movies of one May Day there when Mr. Hackett was in I think his forty something year at the school. We had them from six months from to in their nineties coming to our May Day programs. The PTAs could do a lot of the things that, as I say, have now been sort of put into the hands of government grants and whatnot. If we had to raise money, we would have some little event and raise some money, have a little cake sale or do something. You know, just get together and raise the money for the needs, but it just doesn't work that way anymore.
I mean when we first started Harford Day School, we just brought oranges in the morning and cut them all up and gave them to the kids at recess. We brought the milk. We had Mount Arrowat deliver it to us after awhile and finally, we got the MBC man to deliver our cookies to us there. But then the milk got onto these government programs and you wouldn't believe the red tape that you have to go through. You have to fill out seven copies of everything and account for this and account for that and account for the other. It's an almost impossible task to do the book work.
And the same way at the library. We would get people to donate books. I know the first year that we moved into the school over there, Polly Forbes and I took over starting a library. We hadn't had a library at the little Hayes Street building. We sent away for the official pockets that had our name on them, Harford Day School, in the back and we just sat down and covered books and put the little pocket on. I'm afraid we didn't have the Dewey Decimal System at that time. We had a Reese-Forbes System of recording the books because we had comparatively few, for one thing, and it just wasn't enough to get into some official system. But they have since, naturally with the size that it is now, they have it all under the Dewey Decimal System.
Anyway, we got everything done by volunteers. The mothers actually came and helped with the recess. That wasn't always easy because these kids would be under the teacher all morning till they were just bursting with energy and ready to go, and then they'd flood out there and you'd have the whole school out at once. You'd be one mother trying to keep the peace and it was a little chaotic, even when there were only 35 or 40 in the school.
When we moved over to the new school and we got Gladys Erwin there--I believe she's been there for 25 years now--then recesses were staggered with different classes. She was able to do organized things with them and then at the end of the year we have the Field Day where each class has certain competitions between the blue and the green.
We started that in a small way. We had the school divided into blues and greens. We had just the three grades and the kindergarten, so we did things on a whole school basis. We'd get things like a tug-of-war and have all the blues on one side and all the greens on the other and usually ended in some sort of a disaster where the big ones pulled so hard from the front that they all fell backwards onto the little ones at the back. But everybody really enjoyed the thing.
We had our bizarre and I remember that one of the early bazaars, Ann Green had a dress made with pockets all over the skirt and I wore it a couple of years and was the Pocket Lady. We put little, small prizes in them and the children could--it was really nothing more than a grab bag, but just a new way of doing it. You would walk around as the Pocket Lady and the kids could come up and give you a dime or a quarter and reach into the various pockets and get their prize.
We did lots of innovative things like that and designed simple little games. We'd take one of the sand boxes and hide a few presents --
[end of side 2, tape 11
KR: -- stick so many pegs in the ground. Then if it struck one of the presents, then that was yours. So you were just taking a wild chance. But they really enjoyed that type of thing. It was just little made up games.
The schools today, of course, are dealing with a lot of things. Number one--that I've already mentioned--was the government regulations for this, that and the other. The other is just the growing population. It's just impossible to have everything quite as personal as we were able to do when these schools were starting.
I guess that I've always been a pioneer. I've always liked starting things and really trying to be innovative and get something going. Way back in the early days in New Haven, I mean, we were the first ones in the country to start these District Warning Centers. We got the models from what was going on in England under those terrible London bombings and we just had to start our own system and we were actually operating in the spring of '41. Before Pearl Harbor we were actually operating with that District Warning Center and kept it going then till after the war.
The same way with the Cancer Society. You see, I didn't have anything to start with, but I enjoyed the building up. And it was the same way with the schools. I had nothing to start with, virtually, until we built it up. We've been accredited since the first year at Harford Day School and we've had some very dedicated teachers because they had the freedom to teach their own way.
It was under all these regulations, again. They didn't have to map out every course exactly the way that they'd been mapped out the year before, and the year before, and the year before, and the year before. Each teacher could map out her own
courses. Of course, they had teachers' meetings where they kept the overall standards and things that they wanted. They had much better sort of transition between classes because teachers would work together. This one would bring them up to a certain point and then the next grade would carry them on in that system, and then the next grade would carry them on. You can do that if you get a small school where the teachers are all very close and they're all doing their own thing, as it were, and working together.
We were one of the first to start the new math, but we discovered very soon that the pendulum was swinging too far the other way, that they were Losing too much of the basics to jump into the new math in the very low grades. I think the same thing has happened with the so-called "open" classroom. When I was with the Gilman Board and we visited some of these other schools, I mean, you wouldn't believe the way some of these schools were being run in the open classroom. They had what I call "canned" lessons at these different stations. The students would come in and they were supposed to go from station to station and do the assignment and have it corrected by the teacher before they could move to the next station.
Well, for one thing, there was no student to teacher conversation and there was sort of no interaction between students. To me that was losing everything that a school was for. I mean, why not have a correspondence course? The teachers didn't really like it, either, because the ones that needed help really weren't getting it. They would be struggling with the first or second station when the bright ones had passed through the top one. It just wasn't easy to keep a class going.
But then they figured that out by not putting you in any particular class, everybody just moved at their own speed. Then we asked them what they did with children that got behind and they said, "Oh, well, we have special sessions for them." We take them into a small classroom, maybe ten or so at a time, and work with them." I said to myself, "I mean, really, doesn't that indicate that if you had everybody in small classes that you would be better off, and forget the other? If you have to improve them by going back to the classroom, why don't you stay in the classroom?"
So that's what we did at Gilman. We decided we would not go into that open class. They tried experimentally a slight version of open class in middle school, but I don't think it lasted very long as an open class. I think that was very hard on the kids that went through that period, and probably accounts very much for the seniors that couldn't read and the things you read about in the public schools. These were public schools that were doing this.
I don't think there's any way that you can just
troop children in and let them go at their own
pace. Then, if you're taking a grammar course, for
instance, supposing you do learn all about the adjective at station number one and all about the noun at station two, and you've done it correctly, and you've been signed off by the teacher, can you go home and say, "Well, now I know all about adjectives and all about nouns. That takes care of that"? That doesn't put the thing to use anywhere.
I'm pretty sure that most of the public schools
must be coming back around to the classroom again. I mean even a large classroom is certainly better than this wandering from station to station. I don't know who ever dreamed that one up. I guess every school has to go through some trial and error if they're going to progress. Now the big thing is, how much should you put these computers into the classroom? You can't ignore the computer because, Lord knows, the world is going to be run by them in a very short time.
It's being run by them now. You go to your
check out counter and your food goes, "zit, zit, zit" over a light and you don't have a chance to learn the numbers or how anything was added up. It's just all done electronically. I believe they've got the computers even in the kindergartens now because for them perhaps it's a way that they can master something that's really beyond
themselves.
They are learning to read by computers, but basically I think that we've got to think of a good deal of the good, old-fashioned foundation because if you don't know why the computer is doing this or how the computer is doing that, then what are you going to do when you don't have one? Even when you're trying to do your homework and a storm knocks your electricity out, what are you going to do, just quit your homework? I mean you've got to know how to carry on in your head on math and really in writing and in English.
The thing I'm afraid of especially is if the children are going to get all these condensed versions of books by computer, they're not going to get out the old book and sit down in a corner and read it page by page. They're just not going to do it. They can pass the test by getting a quick resume of the basic questions that would be answered and learn the answers to it, but where is that going to get them, really, if they don't get the form and the language and the flavor of each different author. If you're just going to grab facts and go out as a factory on machines, it's --
I think, as a matter of fact, this multiple testing, multiple question testing, I think was a great mistake. I mean back when I was taking college boards, we had a little blue book and it had nothing in it. It was an empty book and you were given a test that said to "write an essay on this," and you sat and wrote an essay in it. Now, of course, who corrected them, I don't know.
That's the problem today, there are so many of them that they just haven't got the people who can say, "That's good form; and that's bad form; and I've changed this sentence." I mean they just can't do that. But we really had a test that was a test and you sat and wrote an essay in it. Now, of course, who corrected them, I don't know.
That's the problem today, there are so many of them that they just haven't got the people who can say, "That's good form; and that's bad form; and I've changed this sentence." I mean they just can't do that. But we really had a test that was a test of what we knew. In math and everything else, we had to do our whole problem right out, the whole thing. You couldn't miss a step. You had to go through the whole motion of every problem that you were given. Now you get a question with four or five answers to check the right one, and maybe your common sense might tell you the general vicinity of where you should be and you could take a wild guess, or if you don't know, you could take a chance. What have you got to lose?
But I don't see how it could possibly be a true test of what that child knows because it's pretty much hit and miss and law of averages. You can know nothing and come up with something. You can't be all wrong.
But there again, we do have to go on with the times. I know, for instance, the WBAL radio, which is the one I guess most people listen to, in the old days when I first came here, it was nothing but Dan Fram for all the news, and Molly Martin told us about everything that you could get at Lexington Market. There wasn't too much else. Now these radios, they are just so involved with the public that it's unbelievable.
They have a morning talk show, and an afternoon talk show, and an evening talk show and a middle of the night talk show now. It starts at midnight and goes till five in the morning. That way the people do get more involved and they decided--on the evening ones, anyway--I think on most of them they decide what subject they're going to hit upon. So then it makes people think a lot more if they listen to somebody and they don't agree with them at all, then of course, they have to call up and give their version. It's making people discriminate a little bit more on issues because they hear something other than what they decided was right.
I think maybe it's a good thing to get them more involved. They've got many more people running the show. You don't just get the news handed out to you in the same, familiar voice of Dan Fram every hour of the day. You know, he was really something in his day, but this is not the day for that, where it's just one person's view, one person's tone of voice, one person's delivery of every little piece of news. It just doesn't give you the same thing as having some very different personalities taking it up with the public and getting the public's reaction.
So I think we're moving along. Of course, I think Baltimore has changed. Lots of people will question whether that's for the good, but there again, certainly Harbor Place has done something for the city, even if lots of people feel it's only helped the more fortunate or the rich. It certainly has brought the visitors in and the visitors are going to help everybody because they're going to stay at the hotels and go to the restaurants and spend some time in Baltimore. I think they've done a very good job of it.
I think the schools, too, have come a long way because just the fact that they've gotten the kindergarten and now the prekindergarten, I think is a great help because children today have to grow up so fast that if a child has just been sheltered as an only child at home for five years and then gets thrown into a bunch of 20 kids, they don't know how to approach them. They don't know how to get along, they're at a loss. So if you can give them a couple of years of prekindergarten, even, even if they're just playing games and things and they don't have to compete on a mental basis, it's learning to get along and that's a very basic part of life.
I think they've done a very good job getting the schools to take on all these. I think if there was anything wrong with the schools here in 1-larford County, I would say that for awhile they were going much too much into the fancy buildings and building a new school every time you turned around and not doing enough of the basic teaching. I mean you can teach in a barn if you have the good teachers and you've got the enthusiasm and you're giving them a good course. But you can get nowhere with fancy buildings and wonderful equipment everywhere if it's just going to be a thirty to one or a forty to one basis with the teacher and everything is going to be, there again, a little bit canned because every course has to be what's sent down from above.
I think different teachers should get their own personalities, and their own experiences, and their own way of teaching, can do a lot more than being forced into a role of just taking a prescribed course and just going through the motions. I just don't think that there's the same thing at all. I think you've got to have more leeway, stop making it all, as I say, almost like a correspondence course where everything is just the same for everybody.
I mean, how is everybody going to learn to be original, to think of something new, to invent, if everybody is going to have to use exactly the same English sentence that the last people have used for the last ten years, to take this exact same test and go right through the same old motions with the same subjects, year after year, after year. I mean it's got to grow and it's got to change. I know in the private schools they're doing it quite a lot because at the end of every year they assess all their courses and they look for all the new books that the particular publishers are putting out and they get into some of the new, innovative ways and some of them work and some of them don't.
But they teach the children that there is a vast amount out there to learn, and if you learn how to use the libraries, and how to use encyclopedias, and how to use your radios and your TV to seek out information, then you've got an education because then you can go on your own and get what you particularly want. But if you're just prescribed a sort of list of specific things that you have to do to graduate, then you have to do it exactly this way and there's just no chance for creativeness, then I don't think you're going to produce very much at the end of the year.
I think we have enough buildings. I think
we've got to concentrate on what we put in them.
MD: Would you like to tell us about how you started the Harford Day School?
KR: Well, a group of us met with Mrs. Cameron, Sr. in her house and talked it over and had several meetings, and decided first we had to get some, in some cases ex-teachers. In some cases we took people that had been in the public school, but felt that they would like to have a chance to use their own imaginations. They didn't want to be under the rather strict hours and the strict ways of working. So we rounded up enough teachers to take care of three grades, and that gave us enough leeway for most of the close friends that were in the group to include the ages of their children. See, we had to go up to take in the top ones and we had to go on down to the bottom ones of our particular group.
Of course, to start out, the hardest thing for any school that's starting is to stay alive financially. That is a problem from the very beginning. We just absolutely had to start out with a good many scholarship children because the people just couldn't afford to be even what was very
small. I mean it seems to me we had tuitions at fifty or a hundred dollars, something unbelievably low at the time. But we did have to have a lot of scholarship children to get them from public school into the private school.
So a lot of people thought that because they
were a private school, that that meant that they wanted to be superior or that they wanted to be isolated as a favored group, but that wasn't true at all. We were actually, on the economic scale we were certainly at both ends. In every other way we had some very bright ones and some that were more backward. I mean we divided the classes into groups, but some of the time--in fact, I guess a lot of the time--a class was small enough to just work as one class, and the brighter ones could do more on the side and do extra work. But they didn't try to move the group ahead, they just gave the ones that needed something extra something more and tried to bring the lower ones up.
We first got the empty building on Hayes Street from the Department of Education and we were actually accredited by the state our very first year. We were there, let's see, we started the fall of '57. We were there the fall of '58, the fall of '59 and the fall of '60 we had bought the property where the Harford Day School is now and the main house had been burnt down, so there was nothing there. We renovated the stable to be the kindergarten. So my son was in the kindergarten that year, 1960, and they were actually going to school over at the new location, so they saw the workmen working away on the big building. We moved in with the rest of the school at Christmas, Christmas vacation. I think it must have been early '60. Yes, it was '60 because in 1961 he was in first grade in the new building.
But the two girls were still over at Hayes Street, so we sent a car over, or two or three cars over from the school and we gave all our kindergartners lunch boxes with their lunch. The others didn't stay for lunch in the early days. They went until 1:00 and they went home and had lunch, but we let the kindergartners out at twelve and we sent a couple of station wagons over to gather them up and bring them to the big school so that they'd be under supervision. Then they ate their lunch while the other ones were finishing. Then you could take your whole car full home at once at 1:00 and your younger ones had eaten and your older ones had not.
Then when we moved over, they had to bring their own lunch. We've never had a cafeteria there. It's always bring your own lunch. The kitchen just wasn't big enough to even think about having a cafeteria, and I think maybe it's a good thing. There are so many problems with running a cafeteria and keeping with the Health Department and all that. It wasn't as easy on some of us parents. When I was working at the desk, I had to make lunch for three children and myself before we got off to school. I think it's still the best way and it saved us a lot of financial problems.
We did supply the milk. So if they wanted to bring just their box, they could get on the milk list to receive their milk. We always had it from Mount Arrorat in the very beginning and then when Mount Arrorat went out of business, I guess they've had to switch other to the other markets.
Then we just grew like topsy. We had added a grade a year, so we started with third grade as our high one in the fall of '57, and fourth grade in '58, and fifth grade in '59. So we already had six grades when we moved over to the new school. We had six classrooms, but the fifth and sixth were quite small and they were both under Mrs. Brumfield in one classroom, the fifth and sixth grades. Then our seventh grade the next year had to go somewhere, so we moved it into what was at that time supposed to be our teacher's room. So we took our teacher's room from the teachers and gave it to the seventh grade. Then we had Mr. Webster looking after them for a room teacher. He taught English. Then, of course, we kept moving up and we needed an eighth grade. So we took the bottom floor of the kindergarten room, which was built on a hill so that actually you went into kindergarten level in the front, but it was another level below it in the back. So we put the seventh and eighth grades down there in what we call Science Hall because Mrs. Pinespain, who's now Mrs. Cole, she was the science teacher and she was the room teacher for them so we called it Science Hall. We had them down there.
Then that's when Polly Forbes and I had a chance to grab this so-called teacher's room and turn it into a library. So for a couple of years that was the library. Then in 1964 my second child graduated out. No, '64 the first child graduated out. '65 the second child graduated and then we decided to put on the new wing because we were just getting too big and we couldn't keep them all in that small area. So we put on a new wing that had a beautiful, big library, which is the library today. It had an official seventh grade and eighth grade because that's as high as we've ever gone, so that they can go on into the high school in ninth grade. Then we had a room for science and in between the library and the science we had a stairway going down into two basement rooms, which we used for art on one side and we used for storage of all the things like the drama sets and all that sort of thing.
We had a very nice auditorium to start with and we had sliding doors so that we could cut off the front half of it and use for a classroom, but still be able to go through the front hall without disturbing the assembly part of it, and they soon outgrew that. I won't say soon. Let's see, I guess we put that on.
"Pa" Cameron, as he was called, was really our mainstay. He did all the legal work of getting it established and he was president of the board and he worked out all our financial problems. We've had three fund drives now. We had the first fund drive to get the building and then we had the second fund drive to put on the new wing. Then we had a third fund drive to extend this assembly hall so that it goes much further back. We put a music room behind it and connected it with more washrooms across the back and left a beautiful courtyard.
I saw the early plans there because I was on the board at the time, and it seemed to me that it was very nice to have that little courtyard, but that we were wasting a very good opportunity to get a better connector between the assembly hall and the seventh, eighth grade wing. So we nipped off a--oh, I guess it's maybe about a six or seven foot wide room right across the back of the kitchen and the bottom of the courtyard, and it makes a very nice little conference room. It has made a place where the teachers could assemble for lunch off the kitchen and it always makes a thruway for graduation and other things. You can use it as a corridor to go through from one side to the other. The little court room is still quite nice. We've dedicated that to "Pa" Cameron. We planted a
[end of side 1, tape 2]
KR: -- edges and we've got stone down the middle. So that it's quite a beautiful little court room there. I expect, though, that if they ever have to extend anymore that that will be used up for another classroom, but in the meantime, it's very attractive.
The school has really progressed. They've been a member of AIMS, the Association of Independent Maryland Schools, oh, I guess for at least fifteen years now. They're sending their students to the very good prep schools. They've sent them to Gilman and St. Paul's and Boys Latin and Roland Park and Bryn Mawr and all the schools of Baltimore. They do send a lot to John Caroll now, Of course, John Caroll is just the only one we have in the county and during the gas shortage it was very difficult to commute all the way to Baltimore with kids, and so we found more and more of our graduates going to John Caroll. But I think they have also come up considerably in the last ten years with their education and also they compete in athletics with some of the Maryland Scholastic Association schools in Baltimore.
So I think it's been a very good thing for Harford County. We still have a wide range of children and they still give a lot of scholarships. It's not an elite school for just a few at all, but it's serving a very great purpose, I think, Harford Day, in Harford County. I think in a way it might give the public schools a little something to compete with and look up to. Not to say, "You're trying to be better than we are, but maybe it gives us a chance to cut our class size and to improve and to take some of your ideas."
I think any kind of competition builds up anything if you've got somebody else in the field and they don't have to go to you. If they just have to go to you, you don't have to produce very much for them. If they can make their choices, you have to shape up a little.
ND: Over the years what changes have you seen throughout the county, either in the school system or just any other area?
KR: Well, the biggest change in the county was that when we cane here, it was a dairy county. There were big farms outside of Bel Air that have turned into all these developments. Really, there are just very few farms left. There are no large farms, but there are very few farms left. Right here where we are, we have twelve houses on Fox Road where we had a ban
before. These woods that belonged to Mr. Daneger that we hoped would be woods forever, now they have Deer Park Court runs through there and, let's see, we have eight houses there now and three more in the process. I think it was designed for thirty lots, but quite a few people have two lots for the one house, so I don't think they'll have thirty houses in there. But it certainly is building up.
The only nice thing about it is that everybody so far has kept every tree they could possibly keep. They have just cut down enough trees to nestle a house in, and you go in there, you don't see the houses as much. You have to walk by them to see them cause they're all still surrounded by beautiful, big trees, which will help them because it will help hold the water in the ground, and it will give them a little oxygen, which you don't get when you have nothing but cars all around you and pavement.
But it's grown in a nice way. We certainly don't really object to it cause we've got a very nice community here. It's a very close community. We all know each other all the way up and down the street. We have a great sunnier community in our pasture because we have a swimming pool and they're all invited down anytime they want to. From ten to six thirty it's open house for the neighbors. We have a beautiful toboggan hill where they can slide in the winter. So it's just a very friendly neighborhood.
Places like that I don't think will hurt a county, but when you really just develop every inch of what used to be farm land and you turn it into so much black top and take down every last tree -- Of course, some of the farms didn't have so many trees because they had just pastures. If they take all that land away and turn it into concrete, we are going to have trouble. Now, with the drought it's bad enough, but if there's nothing to hold what water comes and it's just going to go down storm sewers, we're going to be in a bad way. We've just got to save a lot more of the land around here.
It's always a battle with the developers who, of course, are making their living by putting something bigger and better in every empty pasture. But somehow we've never gotten a really good zoning system in this county. We always have zoning committees and they're always getting out a new booklet that takes three or four years to develop, and then every time you go to a Zoning Hearing they're given a variance. You know what a variance is. That means forget the rules, you do what you want to. And there it goes down the drain.
Unless we get a really good zoning book and go by the zoning book and just refuse to give an inch, we are really going to lose all our land here. I think that's almost more serious than saving the Bay, is saving what's left of our land. If we don't do that, we won't need the Bay.
I don't know whether the Bay is being polluted so much by the farm soil going down the streams and into the Susquehanna and down into the Bay as much as it is probably by a lot of sewers and a few other things going into the Bay, and the stuff from all the boats. I mean, there's so much boating now, and you just can't control the things that get thrown overboard from a lot of pleasure boats and the things that are put into the water. I think they've got to get some controls there before they blame the poor farmer, who's struggling as it is, on all the problems of the Bay.
All these marinas that are getting built around, they just invite more boats than the sea will take and pretty soon we're going to have to establish some way to have traffic lights up there out in the middle of the sea suspended on buoys or something. I guess to some extent now a harbor does have the green lights and the red lights, but so many of these absolutely landlubber families, they decided boating is the thing and you see these little trailers with some kind of a boat on it going down and being launched into the sea and they know absolutely nothing about the rules of the road and the traffic of the sea. 1 think they're going to have to be licensed just about like automobiles pretty soon because they don't know how to keep themselves out of trouble if they don't know the rules of the road.
Boating on the Susquehanna can be very treacherous because, well, right now the water is so low that almost all the rocks are quite visible, but when we get a full river there and the rocks are just covered, they're still causing all those eddies as the water rushes by, and we've had quite a few drownings of fishermen in just little, small boats that go out there and don't realize that there are these underwater hazards. I know at one time they had a fabulous plan that was given to us at the Susquehanna Park Board. They had this plan that it was going to have bowling alleys, ski lifts, a big swimming pool up in the Deer Creek area. Well, everything that you can imagine, and it was also going to include a large marina and have all this boating on the river. Well, I mean, that was absolutely ridiculous, the boating on the river. don't know what we would have done with a ski lift now because we're not getting the winters we used to get. I think we've done very well to turn it into an historic park and keep it that way.
We've got some of the most beautiful trillium on those banks that people come from all over this country to see, and if they ever decide to develop that land into other things, I mean, they're going to lose something that can never be replaced. It's really a beautiful park. They have one campground now, but it's not near the water and some of the people complain about that. That this park isn't near enough for the fishermen, but the whole thing is that we don't want to attract people to entering the park by the water. We want them to enter by the roads. If they want to fish, that's fine, but we don't want to have all those boats coming up into a marina and descending on the park from the river.
So I think now we have it pretty well established as an historic park and I don't think it will change too much. We are trying to get Lapidum into a better landing point for actual fishing boats. Not as a marina for pleasure boats, but as a place for the fishermen to launch their boats and do a little fishing there. It's much better to control it that way than to have them go onto these little back roads and park on the edge of a road that really is impossible for two people to pass, as it is, and then launch the boats themselves off a little branch or some of these other creeks and get into the river that way, which they used to do. I mean you could go down Craigs Corner Road in the olden days and you could hardly get by for the parked cars and the fishermen that were going into Deer Creek off Craigs Corner.
Now we've got that big pumping station there. You see, in 1961 they laid a pipeline that goes all the way from the Susquehanna River to the reservoirs of Baltimore, and the pumping station for that is now right on Craigs Corner Road, right near Deer Creek, where Elbow Branch meets Deer Creek. That pipeline came through out place and our neighbors' places. As I say, we've always been a close neighborhood, but when that thing came through, they took 150 feet swath and went right through the woods. They had to cut down every tree. They needed 150 feet to work with, and they were putting in pipes that were nine feet in diameter inside and ten feet in diameter outside, and they had to sink them at least four feet under the ground. So that they dug a ditch that was fifteen feet deep and fifteen feet wide and came all the way up to the end of our property and then at the Thompson's property right over the line, they tunneled. So we had the entrance for the tunnel for two years with all that went on with those workmen living in trailers
there. Incidently, without the proper plumbing and letting everything go into the little branches that - went into Elbow Branch that went into Deer Creek.
They had to dig all that soil out from the entrance to the tunnel and then it comes out at 95 and they were able to use the 95 right-of-way to take it into Baltimore, which was fine. But, you see, here it was going right across private farms. Then they put the land all back into pasture, but we are not allowed to plant any trees on it because the roots get into pipes and it makes a mess. We are allowed to graze it but, of course, we can't put any buildings on that land.
That took about two years and then the Thompson's had had a dairy farm and they virtually had to close up shop for two years that the tunnel was being dug from over their place, coming in the side road from 161. So after the pipeline left, we rented their pastures and then eventually we bought those back pastures because they gave up dairying. They do have some beef cattle now, but they had to give up dairying.
We had 233 acres when we--I guess it was 220. We had 220 acres when we bought this place and now we have 305. We got 85 more from the Thompsons. So, as fans go in Maryland, I guess we're one of the largest ones. We certainly were not when they had the big Richardson farm and the big Worthington farm outside of Bel Air. But I guess we are one of the larger ones now.
But we still have operated all these years with just one live in farmer, and my husband works full time at the farm. He's never been a country gentleman farmer. He's been a farmer farmer. He and his man work to build fences and repair fences, and feed cattle and look after cattle, and do everything that has to be done. Get the hay in. We used to get hay in in those small bales. They weighed about 40 or 50 pounds a piece, and of course, when we first came here, the bales just dropped onto the ground and you'd get the neighbor's high school kids to come and work with you and follow it with a wagon carried behind a tractor. They would lift these, the poor kids would lift these bales from the ground and put them on the wagon. They'd be taken into a barn and then they had to be unloaded into the shed.
Haying was just something that was a nightmare from May until the end of August. Now we have one of those round bale balers that puts out about 800 pound bales. My husband takes the rake and puts it into wind rows and he's followed by the farmer with the baler and the bales are just dropped where they land, and you can leave them there as long as you want to, but when he gets time from other chores, he moves them all to the edge of the field so that the grass under it can grow again. You don't want to leave them there forever, but it's not like having to get them in before the next thunder cloud, the way we had to with those little bales.
Some days it could be really something trying to fight the weather and get all those little bales safely under the shed where they wouldn't get caught in the rain. So farming from that standpoint, some things have gotten easier, but on the other hand, the market has gotten worse.
Now, this wonderful idea that they had down in Washington of having the dairies sell half of their cows to cut down the milk production so they wouldn't have this surplus, the result is that all these cows, where are they going? They're going to the market. And what is that doing? That's flooding the markets with beef, so that when we come along to sell our beef cows, steers, there's no market for them. We're still caught in all the expensive equipment with the inflation. We're still caught with all the weather problems, like the drought that's knocked out all the corn, and we're not getting anything from the beef. So from that standpoint it's getting rougher.
They baled an eight acre area this May and got
one bale off of it, an eight hundred pound bale. They did the next ten acres and they got three bales off it, and that's the way it's been going this year. So I don't know what's going to happen this winter because we have had to actually feed some of the last of the hay that was left from last year's crop we've already fed to animals that just haven't got enough grass. Then we'll get five-tenths of an inch of rain and we'll look out and the pasture's all green and things begin to look up, but it doesn't come again soon enough. You know, we're back in the same boat. The cows are all mooing. They want to get to the next pasture. It's been rough for everybody.
But still, I don't think we can give up these farms because, otherwise, as I say, we can't be all concrete, blacktop and houses and then try to import our dairy products. Where are you going to import them from if everybody does this? Be getting milk all the way from the Midwest. Be ridiculous.
MD: Are there any other things you might like to add
about changes you've seen in your work with the parks, or different things like that?
KR: Well, the work with the parks, of course, has been very satisfactory for me. First of all, we're line neighbors of the park now. They've bought all the way up to this Danniger land across the road. So we're land neighbors of the park and, secondly, I've been involved through Stepping Stone with one part of the park and through the Garden Club with another part of the park and through the State Advisory Board through other parts of the park. Chris Burleigh and I are really working together on three different areas in the park.
And I think it's grown beautifully. We have been able to, as I say, block all these early, early ideas that were sprouting about developing it for recreation. We've got just enough recreation. We've developed it where they've got picnic grounds and playgrounds up on the Darlington side of it by Deer Creek, and we're keeping the fishing down on the Lapidum side of it. We've got the Stepping Stone Museum, which is now easy to reach, the mansion area, historic area, with this nice new stone bridge that was dedicated under Mr. Barringer, after I fought like crazy over this loss of our little Ropenson Road bridge. The county--I suppose the Public Works Department--wanted to build a hundred foot bridge, thirty-two feet wide over Little Elbow Branch that my dog and I tramp across almost every day on our walk, and was about at the widest maybe thirteen feet and at the narrowest maybe eight feet. It was to come off a road that was literally between twelve and thirteen feet of gravel, and widen out to a thirty-two foot bridge and then narrow back to the little gravel road at the other side.
Now, they have done exactly that on Sandy Hook Road. Sometime if you want to get off US 1 over there. It was just a dirt road, suddenly turned into blacktop. It widens out. I think that's about an eighty-five foot bridge, thirty-two feet wide. It narrows back into the Sandy Road. All of the bridges that were built at that time were on a federal grant. I think there were eleven bridges, and I have visited most of them, and very few really have the kind of traffic that the government had in mind when the government had all these grants for bridges. They had in mind bridges like the one up in Connecticut at Niantus on 95 where tractor trailers were going and the bridges were not safe, and Pittsburgh with its three rivers, with bridges that had all kinds of commercial traffic. They were not safe.
We were lucky to have ten cars a day cross Wilkenson Bridge. It was wooden planks. All we had was wooden planks. I think it was only about six or eight planks wide and about twenty feet long. You just rattled over them and they rattled as you went, and you had to turn quite a sharp curve at the other end. So they wanted to switch the whole thing onto a diagonal. They wanted to carve through--they had to carve through the wall on the other side, which would have undermined the first house and all of that land would have just gone piling into Elbow Branch and plug up the Bay. It would have been washed right out to the Susquehanna and into the Bay.
But we managed to fight that in court, and I told them at the Park Board that really they should get the repair, the other bridge that had also gone out, Quaker Bottom Bridge, because that was the only straight transportation between the building that they were renting to the Stepping Stone Museum and the main building where the headquarters of the park is. They had to go all the way down Lapidum Road and come around by Webster Lapidum Road and come back up Quaker Bottom Road to get to the building where they were responsible for the land and for cutting the fields and the security.
So we finally managed to get them to make a beautiful little stone bridge there and now they can and the public can reach the park and the Stepping Stone from Rock Run Road. So I would say that the Park has definitely improved.
I really am not that much in on the public schools today as to the actual operation of the schools, but there was an encouraging note about the writing test improving in Baltimore. I think Harford County has undoubtedly been a lot higher than the Baltimore City average I'm sure in everything. I think they're probably doing a reasonably good job coping with, first, the increase in population and then the baby boomer's children were all late or something. There was a period there where schools were losing instead of gaining population and that made some problems, too. They closed up the little Darlington school because they didn't have enough people in it. So then they had to transport them all the way down to Havre de Grace. I believe they're still coming down to Havre de Grace from Darlington. As we go along, you see, those children that were arriving to parents in their thirties, instead of parents in their twenties, has left us with the baby boomers and they're crawling back up now. So we've got to start thinking of schools enlarging again.
First we had a teacher surplus and then when everybody jumps out of teaching because they're not paid enough and there are too many of them. Now we're going to have a shortage of teachers if we can't get some interest now back into the teaching field because these classes are going to grow. Also, I guess, as things like these computers get into the schools and all these modern changes, we've got to have teachers that are educated to do that. See, we had teachers at Churchville that really had a teaching career. I mean, I had Mrs. Packett for first grade and she taught there, I'm sure, at least forty years. I had Mary Wright, who is now Mary Wright Barnes, for second grade for both my girls and she taught there, I'm sure, at least forty years. Those teachers were good, dedicated teachers, but I think there's much more turnover in teachers today. They want to move onto bigger and better jobs and some of them just are not getting into education at all because we had that teacher surplus, and they're going into other fields.
It's hard to chose between dedicated and experienced teachers and teachers that can cope with the modern world, which is definitely changing. The systems of teaching math and the systems of teaching a lot of these subjects has changed and so you've got to have some of the younger teachers that are experienced in those things to teach them. But, on the other hand, it's a great thing to have some of these experienced and dedicated and older teachers to continue with the basics in these schools, if you can manage to hold them.
MD: Is there anything else you might like to add before the day kind of runs out?
KR: [chuckles] Well, I can say that Maryland is
certainly the finest state that I know of in the whole union for living and maybe Harford County's the best county in the state. We did look around and covered the whole US before we got here. I think the Aegis had an article to that effect, that we had been covering all the United States and ended up in Harford County.
[End of Interview]