Read an Excerpt
A Coal Miner's Family at Mooseheart
By Ernest L. Rhodes
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2010 Ernest L. Rhodes
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4520-0950-6
Chapter One
ARRIVING AT MOOSEHEART
When our father died on March 9, 1925 he left very little to support our mother and their family except his membership in the Moose fraternity. It allowed mother to apply for admission to Mooseheart, the Orphans' home-school that the Moose established in Illinois in 1913 to care for the families of members who died. With the assistance of the Richwood Moose lodge, mother applied for admission to Mooseheart and our family was accepted.
My sister Dorothy Guinn and I are the two Rhodes children still alive. I was 11 years old and she was 8 when we entered Mooseheart on July 26, 1926. She says that we left Richwood on July 23, which marked the end of our life together as a family under a single roof. But that fact mattered very little because we were leaving Carrie Thomas Meyers, our mother's birth mother, and Daddy George Meyers, with whom we had been living after our father died. To this day, Dorothy and I agree they were an unpleasant pair who didn't understand us or like us and who made our life miserable. Later our move to a new world would matter even more as we began to realize that we were becoming a part of a large nurturing family in many warm rooms under solid roofs.
An article in the Richwood newspaper, I believe it was called the Nicholas County Republican, gathers the essential facts about our prospects:
Mrs. Blanche Rhodes and children, Ernest, Clifford, Dorothy and Clyde left Sunday morning for Mooseheart, Ill., accompanied by G.P. White of the Richwood Lodge Loyal Order of Moose.
These children will receive a high school education and a trade there, before going out in life for them-selves, while the mother will be employed in the service department of this great institution with compensation
At the present time this great Mooseheart Home is educating and training fourteen hundred boys and girls of departed members of the Moose fraternity.
We are proud to learn that they are fortunate in securing this valuable privilege of Mooseheart service. They made the trip by automobile.
The article in the Richwood paper was accompanied by a picture of our family with mother dressed in black (Photo 1)
The three day drive from Richwood to Mooseheart has left a few spots of time in my memory. We drove through Huntington, West Virginia, where the city blocks seemed regular and endless. We crossed a bridge into Ironton, Ohio. There our mother suffered another heart attack and was hospitalized. We traveled on with Mr. White, hoping she could join us in a few days. Vaguely, I recall that we spent the night in Portsmouth, Ohio. I remember vividly the rolling land of Ohio, so different from the choppy hills of my West Virginia. More monotonous city blocks and slow going characterized Indianapolis. Long after, when Eisenhower's Interstate Highway system by-passed the city, I thought back to our tedious hours there.
For Terre Haute I recall only the sign on the road; it puzzled me until I studied Latin in college. Paris, a tiny town just over the Ohio line into Illinois, drew my attention because I had heard of Paris in France. We spent the night in Danville, Illinois, where it was dark and starless, but not unpleasant or frightening.
We reached Mooseheart the next afternoon. Mr. White, who had driven us to Mooseheart from the Richwood Moose Lodge, turned us over to Mrs. York in the Campanile.
As we would learn, Mrs. York was the grandmother of two Mooseheart girls, Dorothy and Elizabeth York. A handsome white-headed motherly woman, Mrs. York was the official greeter of visitors for many years-a beloved person and a fixture in our lives as long as we were at Mooseheart. For a time, one of Blanche Rhodes' jobs was to help her and fill in for her on her days off
In retrospect, we could not then foresee the wondrous change Mooseheart would make in our family's life. What a contrast it offered: we crawled out of a grim pit at 16 Riverside Drive, Richwood, WV, to be dazzled by the vistas of widespread acres on the Illinois prairie that reached toward tomorrow.
James J. Davis, once an immigrant Welsh steelworker, gathered colleagues to found Mooseheart in 1913. During the rest of the 20th Century it would become the home for more than 11,000 children like us who had lost one or both parents.
Mooseheart children always bristled at the term "Orphans Home," to describe this remarkable place. We were not orphans. Mooseheart was our school and our home-for a time. We were not orphans! We had a family-our fathers' brothers-thousands of them nationwide who supported us with a portion of their meager wages. Their wages were meager because they were, most of them, like our natural fathers, low-paid workers in steel mills, sewers, coal mines, salesrooms, on farms and in other places where men are regularly underpaid for their skills and sweat. Our fathers' brothers called themselves Moose.
Some of us had mothers-so all of us had mothers: Mooseheart Mothers who shared their affection-their devotion with all of the children. (Photo 2) And we had each other: To this day former Mooseheart Kids are bound by ties similar those of blood brothers and sisters fortunate enough to have lived together in security and affection in a regular home.
After Mr. White turned us over to Mrs. York, she sent our sister Dorothy to Detention in Pine Cottage on the Girls Campus and assigned Clifford, Clyde and me to Detention in Walnut Cottage, near the Mooseheart Lake. All newly arrived kids were isolated, to prevent them from bringing in diseases and unwanted critters like nits and lice which could have caused serious problems for the general population. Mooseheart did its best to protect us from such things.
Mother had been released from the hospital in Ohio and reached Mooseheart on August 2. She spent several hours on her second day there going through the hair of one of the new kids with a fine tooth comb-picking out head lice. It wasn't one of her kids. She had checked us thoroughly before we left Richwood.
We lived with Mrs. McLucas and seven other new guys in Walnut Cottage for two weeks of Detention. She had three boys and two girls of her own, but she was never assigned to take care of her own children. Instead her job was to take care of other Mooseheart Kids-including many who had no father or mother. Like most Mooseheart Mothers, she was a "nifty" or a "darby" person. In the language of the "Kids" at Mooseheart, she was a good person. If we had not liked her, we could have described her as a "lousy" or a "snotty" person.
Severe injury and death were rare at Mooseheart. I know of only four kids who died at Mooseheart. One of them, James Kuhn, died from an infection or blood poisoning before we were admitted. Two were drowned at different times while swimming without supervision-one in Mooseheart Lake and the other in the Fox River. The only student that I actually knew, George Duffield, died of pneumonia.
Dr. Johnny Nichols saw that we received almost every shot available for typhoid fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, and chicken pox. Of course, we were vaccinated for smallpox.
We were subjected to tests designed to measure intelligence and to label our temperament and aptitudes. These tests were administered by the staff of Dr. Martin Luther Reymert, a psychologist, who directed the Child Research Laboratory, housed in a building funded by Moose Lodges of Ohio. We called the place "The Bug House."
While I was working as a Gofer in the Reference Room of the West Virginia University Library in 1935, I was asked to get an issue of a periodical, School and Society. In one issue I noticed an article by Dr. Reymert about the effect of movies on the attitudes of children concerning war and crime. I am sorry to reveal the study may have been flawed. I was part of the Control Group that was NOT permitted to see All Quiet on Western Front, Journey's End, and The Big House. Even so, I sneaked into the movies with a forged ticket-and those films made a lasting impression upon my ideas about war and crime. I sometimes have a sense of guilt about messing up the good doctor's study. After all, he was the first published scholar I ever knew.
Dr. Reymert was a wonderful human as were Mooseheart Mothers, most of our teachers and some of the administrators. The only people I remember as being generally disliked were some male proctors who served with their wives in large halls as substitutes for parents. Most of us disliked the night watchmen: Snake Pearson, Unk Williams, Max Operman, and a creature named Harris. And I despised old "Peanut Head" Burns who directed the Special Labor Gang to which I was sometimes assigned for using profanity-words that this coal miner's son had picked up along the motor tracks at Spruce Knob.
The most respected and beloved of all the people at Mooseheart were the Mooseheart Mothers. Mrs. York, "Maw" Jones, Mrs. Herbert, Mrs. Van Sickle, Mrs. Davidge, Mrs. McLucas and our mother Mrs. Rhodes. Dorothy's Album includes a picture from the cover of the Moose Magazine for November l938 showing Blanche Rhodes seated in a chair at work on a piece of cloth while a small child recites evening prayers at her knee. The picture presents Blanche as the Iconic Mooseheart Mother-a secular icon: in a circle of warmth and nurture. (Photo 2)
Early in August 1926 we were released from Detention at Walnut Cottage into the City of Children. (Photo 3) We became a part of a community of thirteen hundred children. We joined what was perhaps the largest family of well behaved children with the most enlightened parents living between 1913, when Mooseheart was founded, and 1939 when Blanche Rhodes's youngest son, Clyde, graduated.
According to a pamphlet commemorating the Silver Anniversary of the founding of Mooseheart, no graduate of Mooseheart had ever been convicted of a felony and sentenced to a penitentiary. Subsequently, I heard of only two kids who lived at Mooseheart and were convicted of felonies. There was a rumor of one other but I did not know the person. We were good Kids.
Three of the boys admitted July 26, 1926, would become classmates and team mates. Orville Merklein, Louis Pastor and I played on the Third Team, moved up to the Second Team and finally earned a place on the Varsity football team. Louie and I became keen rivals and close friends in the classroom and on the football field and running track. He was both a good student and an outstanding athlete. I was his equal in the classroom. But the best I could do in sports was to block for him on the football field and finish second to him on the running track. Louis once admitted that he wished the Mooseheart coaches had "put a clock on" my brother Clyde to measure how fast he could run. Clyde was considered by some who saw him run in a football uniform to be the fastest runner produced at Mooseheart. I saw him play football only once, and I'm inclined to agree with them. Of course, Clyde was my brother.
But Louie could run 100 yards on a cinder running track in spikes in almost ten seconds flat-that was moving in the l930's. And I saw him run, chased him in the 440 dash-more than once. So maybe Louie was faster than Clyde. But then, Louie was also my brother.
On the Second Team Louie and I were often paired in scrimmages to block a Varsity player we called "Tiny Tim" because he was so big. He didn't like us and we were not fond of him. Louie and I fine-tuned the technique of the "high/low" to handle the big guy. I would throw myself at the player's legs, hitting him so his knees would buckle. Louie would hit him above the belt. When we timed it right, we put the bigger player flat on his back. It was really satisfying when Coach Gocher smiled at us, and Coach Seeglitz growled at his Varsity: "Run it again." Once or twice during the season Louie and I put Tiny Tim on his back in successive plays. But on a third try, one or the other of us would probably be creamed. It was worth it.
At Annual Homecomings Louis Pastor and I have at times basked in the memory of those scrimmages against the Varsity and our success in handling Tiny Tim. Louie was seriously wounded in France and awarded the Bronze Cross to go with his Purple Heart. I was in the Pacific. As veterans, we grinned with smug superiority when we heard that Tiny Tim spent the war in a stateside office. We heard a rumor that he had been given a Bronze Cross for "the masterful way in which he wrote his reports."
Chapter Two
ADAPTING
Blanche Rhodes' eldest son learned painfully but quickly to adapt to Mooseheart. I discovered one must adjust to the rules of two groups with seeming conflicting interests and values. Moreover the rules of both groups were seldom set down in writing, and often conflicted with my ideas of right and wrong. Those differing groups were the Mooseheart Kids and the Mooseheart Officials who made the rules and had the power to enforce them.
My first conflict was with the Mooseheart Kids. One's principles are everything-so I was taught. I always tried to obey my mother-it was a matter of principle, a moral obligation. I discovered, however, one cannot always do what mother tells you to do if you are to survive.
Trouble occurred the first day out of Detention, a miserable day. I was assigned to North Hope Hall, one of the ten larger dormitories for boys, filled with about forty noisy brats ranging in age from six to fifteen. I knew no one. I remember that breakfast consisted of oatmeal, buttered toast, milk and an orange, gobbled up by strange ruffians seated in groups of six or seven at round dining tables.
The meal began with a silent period of thanks for our food-referred to as "Saying Grace." Awed by the white table cloth and white cloth napkins-the first I had ever seen. [Not long after we arrived at Mooseheart, we shifted to paper napkins.] I bowed my head like the others and silently repeated the words mother had taught us: "Oh Lord we thank thee for this food, our life and health and every good. May manna to our soul be given-bread of life sent down from Heaven-Amen."
After breakfast I was told to dry the dishes. So far I was in no trouble. I knew what to do. Mother had taught me at Spruce Knob to dry dishes after they were pulled from the steaming water in the rinse pan.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Coal Miner's Family at Mooseheart by Ernest L. Rhodes Copyright © 2010 by Ernest L. Rhodes. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
