Yeasting.com | Memoirs of G. Emerson Yeasting

Then high school... We had no high school in our district, Rollersville, so we could go wherever we wanted to high school in the state of Ohio. Well, like my Uncle John [John Oliver Yeasting], when he graduated from Rollersville, he elected to go live with his older sister, Cena [Cena Mae Yeasting Stroman], and her family in Fostoria, Ohio, and go to school there. That's where he met Ruth Kisabeth [Ruth Evelyn Kisabeth] who is now my Aunt Ruth. Anyhow, there was bussing. Our school district had buses, and they would bus people from Rollersville to either Bradner or Gibsonburg. Well, Gibsonburg was considered much the better school. It was a bigger town, about two, three times as big - consolidated school district. So I elected to go there as did, well, I'd say most of my class. I think there were twelve in my class, and about four of them went to Bradner. Most of the kids graduated from high school. I think there was a couple that dropped out somewhere along the line because, remember, they were all farm kids, lot of them pretty poor families and they had to work.

I know I never could participate in activities in school, like the games or anything like that, because practice was always after school and we had to catch the bus the minute school was out to go home, the only way we could get home. And, also, as soon as we got home, we had chores to do. Cleaning out the horse stables or mending calf pens – God only knows what – feeding the pigs, chickens, gathering the eggs, working in the garden. And then any homework I had would have to be done by lantern light – well, we had gaslights most of the time – after dinner. So that's the way high school went. So I never participated. I did get my – well, later on, my junior, senior year when I was graduating, be able to go to some of the football games, for example. Basketball games, I went to a couple, but I really wasn't too interested in basketball at the time, although my cousin, Norman Schlea, who is now retired and lives in Florence, Oregon, was a member of the team. And in fact in their senior year, which was my junior year, they were the Class B champions in the state of Ohio and pretty proud of it.

I might talk a little bit about high school in those days in Gibsonburg. My class was sixty-two students of which, as far as I know, fifty-one are still living [As of May 1989, when these reminiscences were dictated]. There may be a couple that have died in the last couple of years that I don't know about. The school was really divided into three groups. You had the college prep; in other words, kids that were going on to college, were smart enough to do it and were pretty sure their families could afford it. They were put into college prep. If you knew you weren't going on to college, no way. They just didn't have the time for you. The other group was more or less general course, and it was primarily for the boys and girls that were going to just go through high school, that was it, and they would become farmers. And then the third group was called commercial, most of the girls in that. They taught bookkeeping, shorthand, typing. In other words, the things that you would need in the business world to be somebody's secretary or steno. You know, work for the local lawyer or bank or that sort of thing. They also had a home ec class for the girls and a shop class for boys. I never took that because I learned enough about shop from my Dad at home building things or helping build things. And besides, I didn't have time for it.

One thing, though – well, there were five of us boys that palled around together. Two of the group are now gone. One died just last summer, Frank Dean. Out of the five of us, David Rodd, then elected not to go to college for some reason. I guess his parents couldn't afford it. His dad had died his senior year, so he stayed on the farm. Well, David died, oh, about eight, ten years ago, I guess. Vincent Immel went on to become the Dean of the Law School of – I think it was Washington University in St. Louis. He had graduated first from Bowling Green and took his law degree summa cum laude at the University of Michigan. Frank Dean, another one of the "fearless five" as we called ourselves, he went on to become a professor of nuclear physics at Johns Hopkins University and worked there until he retired about three years ago, and he died just this last summer. Ben Reineck [Bernard “Ben” Reineck]– I think Ben went to Ohio State, as I recall, and took accounting. He ended up as comptroller of the Coca-Cola Corporation. Their main office was in Atlanta for quite a few years. I saw Ben at our last reunion, and he and his wife have been out here to our place in California [Santa Rosa, California], and we have been down there, too, once. Benny, Frank, Dean, David – yeah, that's the five of us. So kind of interesting to keep track of the old people.