On the Moraine, Part XXI

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

The weekend was spent unpacking and getting everything arranged in the Beaver House. I’ll explain more about it later.  

Monday morning Dad left for work at Hobart Brothers in Troy about 4:30 am. This will deserve more explanation, too, but there are other things I need to cover first.

Monday morning, Mother got John and me ready for school and walked us down the lane to meet the bus. It was a new 1962 IH bus. John and I had never ridden a school bus before. Floyd Tira was the driver.  

Already on the bus were Beverly Shoemaker, Patsy and Bobby Kelley, Mary Lou Cummings and a couple of others. When we got to the Marshall School, the high school kids got on Newt Cluff’s bus to Hillsboro, the rest of us stayed in Marshall. This was right at the time the local high schools were being closed, and Marshall Township had made a deal to go to Hillsboro. The Marshall High School was already history.

I shoved my brother in a classroom and found my own classroom. There are many ways I treated my little brother poorly over the years, and this was one of them. I am embarrassed about all of them and now that he is deceased, I can no longer ask him for forgiveness.

If you remember a few episodes back, I talked about my seventh-grade class in Troy being about 250 pre-teens. At Marshall, there were two grades to a room. First and second was taught by Mrs. Eubanks. Third and fourth, by Mrs. Lucas. Mr. Robinson, the principal, taught fifth and sixth. Finally, Mr. Wisecup taught seventh and eighth. 

Being lost in a class of 250 that I left the Friday before, this Monday I joined Mike Yochum, Irving Pollock, June Rhodes, Patsy Kelley, Zena Webster, Debbie Hull, David Smith, Marvel Waulk and Ellen Wilson.

To say it was a jolt to go from one seventh grade to the other in a span of about 60 hours would be an understatement.  John was in the second grade, and I am sure experienced a similar transition, although the grade school he was in in Troy only had about 40 pupils in each class. It wasn’t until you got to the seventh grade there that the schools were consolidated.

With my parents, especially my dad, there was no need to discuss these matters and how you might feel about them. This is the new reality, accept it.

Dad continued working at Hobarts in Troy for another three years or so. He would work there Monday and Tuesday, take Wednesday off, and then go back Thursday and Friday. We did not have a second vehicle, so when Dad was gone, we had no transportation.  

For protection on those days and nights when he was gone, we had Buttons and Pete (a German shepard we got as a pup) and guns. Buttons had been a very protective dog for the family, and he taught Pete to be the same way. If anyone came to the farm, we had to calm down the dogs for them to get out of their car.  

More than one person was bitten. We were kind of insular.

Note: Geologically, Ohio is roughly two states divided by a line that runs from Cincinnati to Cleveland. Sometimes, this line is thought to roughly follow the old “3C” highway or I-71. It veers quite widely from this line, particularly in Highland County. North and west of this line, the state is fairly flat and smooth, the result of the last glacier of the Ice Age. South and east of this line are the Appalachian foothills, undisturbed by glaciers. In most textbooks, this line is called the Terminal Moraine. Starting in the 1950s, my family acquired two farms. The first one, known as the McNary Farm, is located at the junction of Highland, Ross and Pike counties. The McNary Farm is clearly on the southeast side of the Terminal Moraine. The other farm, known as the Beaver Farm, is located on the north side of state Route 506 at the intersection of that highway and Franklin Branch, a creek which is clearly marked on the Highland County engineer’s map of today. The Beaver Farm is definitely on the northwest side of the Terminal Moraine.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.

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