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God Bless Ed
By Hank Hufnagel in the Clarion News
It was sad to read of Ed Reighard's passing in the July 1, 2008 issue of the Clarion
News, but I was at least pleased at his obituary's length and completeness. (Obit)
Ed was a marvelous man who viewed the world with his eyes wide open and who took the time to write down what he saw. My favorite among his 14 books is Leaning Toward Fisher, which preserves the history of Millcreek Township and the country town of Fisher. Ed had a great love for the place and could tell a hundred tales, most especially of the years 1915 to 1926 when he was growing up along what is now Iron Bridge Road, on what was then the Rieghard farm.
In 2004, when he was 90, I met Ed out at the Day City truck stop where I80 meets Rt 322, climbed into his Jeep and spent most of a late spring day listening to him reminisce as we bumped along over the back roads of his youth.
Ed Reighard began his formal education a year early, when he was only 5 years old. Every school day when he was in first and second grade, he walked down the road a quarter of a mile to the McCanna one-room school, called McCan by all the children. He had about 20 classmates ranging in age from six to fifteen who were divided into eight grades, all in the one room. The entire education of many children in Millcreek Township at that time consisted of eight years spent at just such a place, under the guidance of a single competent or overwhelmed adult who surely taught reading, writing and 'rithmatic, but also served as art teacher, music teacher, janitor, fire builder, principal, truant officer and school nurse.
Classes began at 9 o'clock and continued until 10:30, when there was a brief 15-minute recess. The lunch hour began at noon, and once the kids had gobbled their lunches, they would play for the rest of the hour. In the spring and fall, their favorite games were scrub ball and prisoners base. In the winter, when there was snow on the ground, they turned to building snow forts and playing fox and geese. After lunch, there were more lessons until another brief recess at 2:30. Along about 4 o'clock Ed's school day ended, and he would make the short walk back home to start on his chores. Little Ed thought he, like the children before him, would spend all his early school years at McCan School, but that was not to be.
One day in late May, 1921, during Ed's summer vacation between 2nd and 3rd grade, men came and began dismantling the McCan school, carefully loading the boards and beams, the windows and doors, the stove, even the bell, into wagons and hauling them away. A great change was in the wind, and all that summer Ed wondered what the future held in store. His parents explained what was happening and took him to see the work in progress. All over Millcreek Township, the one-room schools were being dismantled and their materials moved to Fisher to become part of a new building, the Millcreek Township Consolidated School, the first such school in Clarion County. The new place was to have three classrooms-grades 1 through 4 in one room, grades 5 through 8 in another, and a 2-year high school in a third. And, marvel of marvels, the new place was being fitted out with two indoor toilets, the first such toilets in all of Millcreek Township! The new school sat on a 10-acre patch of land in the middle of town, which was to become the largest playground in the world as far as Ed was concerned, and he, like every other school-aged child in the area, was nervous but also excited at the prospect of attending classes at this huge new place.
Finally there came a frosty October morning when Ed walked out to the road and for the first time clambered up into the school bus that would transport him to the new school. The inside of the bus was like a small wooden room with windows and benches along its sides. This was built on top of a standard wagon body and was pulled along by horses. There was no heat, and when it was cold, horse blankets were provided for warmth. If it was really cold, there were lanterns you could light and put between your feet under your blanket. The lanterns surely did not smell like roses, but for Ed anyway, the ride was only a mile-and-a-half long, and the building he entered at the end of that ride quickly established itself as a wondrous place in his mind.
For starters, the teachers were excellent and had much more time to concentrate on the education of their pupils than in the old one-room schools. One teacher, Mrs. Marie Heeter would read to her class every day, and she had a trick that greatly impressed young Ed. Suppose she was reading The Bears of Blue River to the children, and she came to the part where some children are at the end of a big log sticking out into a river, and a bear has just stepped onto the log and is starting toward the children. Well, that's just where Mrs. Heeter would stop reading for the day! Oh, it was maddening for Ed and some of the others, and they wanted to read ahead to see what happened next, but Mrs. Heeter kept the book locked in her desk, and the kids were stuck, and they had to wait… had to behave if the story was to continue the next day. And, if you missed a day of school, well you just missed out on part of the story. That was all there was to it!
Mrs. Heeter was a great teacher, but she wouldn't put up with any foolishness. One time there was a boy who was not doing his homework or trying in class, and she gave him quite a tongue lashing. The very next day, in came the boy's father, a man of over six feet in height, who promptly started to tell off Mrs. Heeter, who didn't even come up to his chin. Well, that didn't last 30 seconds. She lit into him, mad as a wet hen, saying it was his own fault his son was not doing his school work, and anyway, who was he to be telling her how to teach school? She had gone to college to be trained, had several years of successful teaching, and he had not even attended high school. He had a lot of nerve to try to tell her how to do her job! She ended the stern lecture by ordering him out of the classroom and telling him never to return. And he never did.
Outside there was just as much excitement as in the classroom. The kids played the old games on the new playground, but now the teams were bigger, adding to the fun. There were fights that resulted in bloody noses. A kid broke his arm on the seesaw one time. Ed took it all in. Sure he was a young scholar, but he never missed out on any of the fun if he could help it. During those years he fished all the length of McCanna Run and learned to swim at Dean Dam. After school, he played a trumpet in the band. One Arbor Day, he and the other students planted pine trees all along the boundary of the school lot. The old school is gone now, but Ed's trees still live and thrive.
Maybe the most exciting thing that ever happened while he was at school in Fisher was the day they heard yelling and screaming, and rushed to the windows to see what was happening. It was the young woman who lived in the house across the road. She had married a man from Clarion, but when their marriage failed, she had moved back to Fisher with her infant child, and here she was running up the road after a man who had her baby in his arms. It was her estranged husband, come to kidnap the child away! Immediately the high school students ran out the door in pursuit, followed closely by every soul in the school. They had to head the man off before he reached his car some ways up the road, or he would escape with the baby. Those high school kids were very good runners, and they did beat him to his car, so that when the would-be kidnapper arrived he found a wall of students just inching to beat him up. When the distraught mother arrived, huffing and puffing, the only thing the ex-husband could do was the sensible thing-he handed the baby back to its mother.
Ed attended the consolidated school for six years, but halfway through eighth grade, his mother was in the midst of a difficult pregnancy, and his parents decided they must move to a new place, to be closer to a doctor in case of complications. And so, the family moved to a new farm just outside Strattanville, where Ed continued his education by walking 6 1/2 miles each way to high school in Corsica. After two years of that came two more at Clarion State Teacher College to earn a certificate to teach in one-room schools. And now Ed was a teacher himself. He began at the Maple Grove one-room school in Clarion Township. In 1939, at the age of 25, he married Kathryn Bell and they set up housekeeping in Curlsville where Ed taught at another one-room school. He took evening courses at Clarion to continue his education, and thus began his gradual rise to eventually become the first executive director of the Central Intermediate Unit, which was responsible for assisting all the educational institutions of Clinton, Centre and Clearfield counties.
It was only after Ed's retirement in 1978 that he really began a new career as a writer. If you might like to learn more about Boston Buck, the famous Clarion County outlaw; or about life in rural Clarion County during the 1920s and 30s; or if you might want to know more about the one-room school system, or perhaps read the most complete history of Millcreek Township ever likely to be published, then you should get yourself to the library or the historical society and page through the writings of Edward B. Reighard.
Ed was a good old guy. One of the best. I'll miss him.
Old News of Clarion County