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A Year at the County Home
By Hank Hufnagel, March 15, 2016 in the Clarion News
Last week Pam and I drove down toward Sligo to see a huge yellow backhoe busily picking apart the Old County Home. In another week the old brick building will be no more. It’s been pretty much a ruin for many years, but long ago the County Home was a bustling and busy place. Many years ago Arleen Lerch, who worked there in the 1940s, told me all about it. It was April 27, 2004 and here is what she had to say about her adventures:
My parents were Oscar and Bessie Conner, and I was born in their home in East Brady, Pennsylvania on May 30, 1922. They named me Elizabeth Arlene, but I have been called Arlene all my life. We soon moved to Upper Hillville, where my brother Warren was born the next year. There were other children later, but Warren and I were the oldest.
When I was seven we moved to Conneration, where my father was raised, and that's where I grew up, too. Conneration is a small place and the most exciting thing that ever happened there was when John Conner was robbed of $20,000 way back in the 1800s. We lived across the road from the house where that happened.
There were a few other houses in Conneration besides this one, and Mount Hope Church was just down the road. When I was growing up, there was also a one-room school called Conner School just past the church. That's where I went to school.
The things that I remember best about those days are the big picnics at the end of each school year, and the entertainments we gave each Christmas, where we sang holiday songs and did skits from books we had. There were about 30 students in the school, and grades 1 to 8 were all in the one room together. I graduated from eighth grade in 1937, when I was 15.
I didn't go to high school because that was in Rimersburg and too far to walk --- there were no school buses or public transportation back then. Some of the kids from Kissingers Mills, a few miles closer to Rimersburg, did walk, but they didn't really walk… people would pick them up.
By the time I left school our family had grown to include Ruby, Mary Alice, and Max in addition to Warren and myself. Max was just a baby when I graduated 8th grade. After that I helped my mother at home. Four years passed, and I learned to cook. Those were happy times. Years later we sold the homestead in Conneration, and I remember turning the keys over to the new owner and thinking that part of me would never leave.
One summer afternoon in 1942, a couple by the name of Lottie and Jim Laughlin came to our door and asked me if I'd like a job.
About a month earlier a friend of mine had gone up to the County Home and asked the Laughlins for a job. They were the superintendent and matron at the Home and were not hiring just then, but they did take her name and address. Now the Laughlins needed someone, and they had driven down to Conneration to hire this girl, but she had joined the WACS and left --- this was during the War. The Laughlins asked around to find out if anybody knew of someone who might be interested in a job, and they had been sent to talk to me.
We invited the Laughlins in and they sat down and told me that they needed a cook at the County Home. They explained what I would be doing. It sounded exciting and so different from home, and there was no work for me in Conneration, so when they asked if I would like to come and be a helper in the kitchen, I said, "Sure." They talked it over with my parents, and soon it was settled. They would come back later to pick me up.
I started getting ready to go and was very excited about getting out and going to work, but I had no idea what it would be like. I had seen the County Home from the road, but had never been in there. I just knew that they took care of people that had nothing; people who weren't able to take care of themselves and had no money.
I remember well the day they came back to get me. I was wearing a dress because nobody wore slacks back then, and I put my suitcase in the car and got into the back seat, and we drove away. When we got to the Home, it seemed huge, and I was very nervous. The Laughlins were nice to me, though, and I stayed in their living quarters for a week until I got used to the place. They lived in a big brick house just in front of the buildings where the residents stayed. There were two wings for the residents. The men's wing was on the left and the women's was on the right. The two were connected and at the back of this connecting part, on the first floor, was where the kitchen was.
Lottie showed me around the buildings a little, and I could see men working at the barn in back, then we went to the kitchen where I met the cooks… Hazel Randolph and Margie Barger… and started to work. Hazel was in charge and nice. Everyone was nice, really, maybe because I was a young girl and went along with whatever anybody wanted to do.
There were residents who worked in the kitchen and they seemed to be nice old ladies, though some were a little troubled in their minds. These ladies would peel potatoes, clean the vegetables, set the tables, do the serving, and help out any way they could. The cooks and myself were more like supervisors; telling the residents what to do and handling the actual cooking of the meals.
I got along fine, and in a few weeks moved into the women's wing. My first room was on the second floor and seemed very big. It had a bed, a dresser and a nightstand, and a window that looked out on the road. Later on, when one of the cooks left, I moved downstairs to the first floor, closer to the kitchen. There was no water or bathroom in my room. I had to go down the hall for that.
Each day, I would get up at 6 a.m. and start the breakfast ---- made the coffee, cooked the oatmeal, made fried eggs. Breakfast was at 7 a.m. There was no bell or anything, the residents just knew to come at that time. There were two dining rooms, one for the men and one for the women, and lady residents did the serving in both.
After breakfast the residents who could would go to work. The County Home had a big farm up on top of the hill at the back, and the men would help with that. There were also lots of cows to be looked after, and the men did the milking. The ladies would keep the place clean and neat, and work in the kitchen. After breakfast we would start on lunch. This was the big meal of the day. We would cut a ham in two and cook that, or take beef from big half-gallon cans and cook that. There were also potatoes and vegetables canned from the farm to be prepared. We made bread twice a week. All the kneading was done by hand and we baked in big gas ovens --- the home had its own gas well, like so many places did back then. For deserts we would have fruit or jello. We also baked cookies, but never any pies that I can remember.
The cooked meal of the day was at noon, and after that we would get ready for the smaller evening meal and clean the kitchen. Our equipment was very old, but we kept it very clean.
Quitting time was about 6 o'clock and I would spend the evenings listening to a radio I had in my room and writing letters to my cousins in the service. Every other weekend my father would come up and get me in his 1941 Chevy.
After I got used to it, I enjoyed working at the County Home. Some people say it must have been like working in a prison, but it was not that way at all. The staff was not large. There was just the cooks, the matron and supervisor, Evelyn McCall who kept the books and some men who supervised the farm. The residents did a lot of the work and they weren't sad --- everyone was pretty happy.
The residents had their own rooms, and ate in the dining rooms, but they didn't stay there between meals. There was no public lounge or activity center like you find at places like Clarview today. If one of the old people died and they had no family, they were buried in a small cemetery up the hill, but I don't remember that happening while I was there.
After a few months Hazel, the chief cook, got married and left, so I became second cook and a new girl, Mary Glinkerman, came to be helper. Mary was from a big family and was a good worker. That is when I moved down to the first floor to be closer to the kitchen.
Mary and I were about the same age, and since we spent so much time together, we quickly became friends. Sometimes Evelyn McCall would join us and the three of us would walk the mile to Sligo after work and go to a movie. The first show was at 7 p.m. and cost 25 cents. We would walk home after the movie about 9:30 or 10 o'clock and never see a car on the road the whole time. It was during the war, and because of the rationing, people didn't travel unless they had to.
After I had been working for about six months, Margie, the other older cook, left to be with her husband who was in the service, and so I became chief cook at the County Home. I was about 20 years old. The next time I was home I told Audrey Terwilliger, a friend of mine from Kissingers Mills who I went to church with, that there was a job available. The next thing I knew there we were, three girls in charge of the cooking, and we did it --- I don't know how we did it, us young girls, but we did.
Mary Glinkerman was a local girl, from Curllsville, and she had a boyfriend. One time she got me a blind date with Francis Lerch, who had a car, and the four of us went to a movie in Clarion. I remember that the car was a 1940 Plymouth, this was in 1942. I had never met Francis before, and it was just four friends going to a movie in town --- Francis and I were in front.
We went to the Garby, and there weren't that many people out because it was war time, but Francis and I had a good time and got along fine. He was a serious young man. He drove coal truck, and helped with his parents’ farm. Francis didn't pass for the service because of some stomach trouble. I had a good time that night, and after that he would stop to see me at the Home and take me to Clarion to more movies. Sometimes we would drive to Conneration, and my parents liked him. Francis was always a good at talking to people.
About a year after I started at the County Home, my father got sick and had cancer surgery, and I thought I should quit and be home to help my mother. Frances kept visiting, and in 1943 we decided to get married and drove to Maryland. I didn't run away, but maybe Francis did, since my parents knew we were going and his didn't. Lots of people went to Cumberland, MD to get married back then because you didn't have to wait. We went early in the morning, got married, then we drove around for our honeymoon and came home.
We lived at Francis's parents at Five Point for a while, then moved to a house nearby and lived there for three weeks. The house we had just moved to was sold though, and so we had to move again. We moved to Reidsburg and never left.
My dad died at age 49, but my mother lived to be 79. Frances drove truck for a few years, then they put him on a dragline. He oiled for a while, worked with the operator and oiled all those fixtures. Then he became an operator. He retired in 1985.
I kept house, and I was never lonely. I had my family for company. Our first child was born down at Conneration in 1944, and we named her Betty Jane. In 1949 we had a son. He was born in Reidsburg, and we called him Eugene.
Francis had a stroke in 1999 and has been at Clarview since then, and I go to see him nearly every day. Sometimes as I am walking through the parking lot, I notice the old brick buildings up on the hill. Today they are empty, but I can remember when they were full of life. That was the only place I ever worked, and it seems so long ago now, and I smile when I think about myself as a young girl stepping into the position of head cook up there on the hill at the County Home.
Francis Lerch died in 2005. Arleen died just last year, on September 28, 2015 at the age of 93. She and her husband are buried in the Mount Hope Cemetery in Conneration.
Old News of Clarion County