6. Music Lessons

If only June could have been induced to furnish the climate in northern Indiana all the year round, Papa might have continued indefinitely as pastor of the Monroeville charge; but those long drives through howling blizzards and bottomless mud were getting him down.

During our fourth winter there he was afflicted with bad colds and a tedious attack of influenza (at that time known as “la grippe”), an enervating malady that often persisted until it was equivalent to a pernicious anemia.

So, when it had become apparent that we would have to go someplace where Papa’s work would not involve so much exposure to rough weather, synodical communications were again set up with this end in view; and, early the next autumn, Mama regretfully packed our well-battered household tackle and we moved to an excited town of 2000 population in Ohio.

The reason for the excitement was the current discovery of natural gas, previously unknown in that region. Long an undistinguished, clean and quiet shopping center for a prosperous farming area and a pleasant place for the retirement of Old Folks when the farm was turned over to son Jim, now ugly wooden derricks were everywhere about and drills clattered in their casings all the way round the clock.

The street lamps burned all day because it was cheaper than to pay the old lamplighter to turn them off. Small industries, attracted by the prospect of inexpensive fuel, needled the local merchants to buy stock in their concerns to pay for their migration. The town was, as I have indicated, in what is modernly called a tizzy. This gas boom, incidentally, was of brief duration. It was not long before the City Council was hiring a man to turn off the street lights at dawn, and in a few years the municipality had resumed its former habits and dimensions.

I have not bothered to name this pleasant little city for the reason that some very highly thought-of family may be living there now whose great-grandfather might have been the crusty old Treasurer of Papa’s church and the Chairman of the School Board and Top Man on the Leading Bank’s Totem Pole.

Should you be really frenetic about finding this place, board your automobile at Toledo and you can drive to it in less than an hour. In the past sixty years its population has increased only about fifty per cent, which indicates that it hasn’t changed very much since our brief residence there.

As is customary with towns of that size, our town was over-supplied with Protestant churches, most of them engaged in a struggle for survival which included cannibalism and other predatory practices traditionally frowned upon by the statesmen who write the unwritten laws governing international warfare.

But if there was any one of the eight or ten competitive churches that might be said to be a little more prosperous than the others it was Papa’s. The sanctuary was a handsome brick structure located on a prominent corner, and the membership included many of the Older and Better Families.