Doc

Jane asked me to write down memories from John’s (Doc’s) and my experiences at The Ohio State University for his 70th birthday. These memories are more than 50 years old so they are likely not accurate or complete. When I was younger, I thought 70 years was really old; now, I don’t think it is old at all.

John (Doc) was my roommate and best friend at OSU for two years, starting in fall 1965. Doc was an extrovert, a leader, normally jovial and laughing, never boastful, and a loyal friend. We had lower middle class upbringings in similar small towns in SE Ohio Appalachia and had learned early to appreciate the value of work.

In our freshman year, we were roommates on the ground floor at the Scott House dormitory on North campus. There were four of us living in a suite of three small rooms – a bedroom, a bathroom, and a sitting room jammed with four desks and two stuffed chairs; there were about 30 suites on the floor. Scott House was a freshman dorm where all the residents were away from home for the first time, and the floor hallway was always a noisy bedlam. Students from the floor yelled or talked loudly on their way through; many doors were open with loud music playing from within; there were water fights with hoses from chemistry class; and the RA, who was supposed to keep order, stayed in his room with his door locked. I often had to go the study room in the dorm basement, or the nearby University High School, or the OSU Library to find a quiet place to study. Men and women were housed in separate dormitories. All the North Campus dormitories ate together in the large Royer Commons cafeteria.

I brought everything to college in a single suitcase; and I’m sure Doc was the same way. Back then, there were no PC’s, word processors, Internet, World Wide Web search engines, email, Xboxes, or cell phones; they would not be invented for another 10 to 40 more years. There were only two telephones in the lobby for the whole dormitory. We wrote reports in longhand and did research using printed books in the library. I don’t remember anyone who had a TV in their room so you had to go somewhere special to watch TV; but we were so busy we hardly ever bothered. By contrast, I had to load up an entire SUV to take my kids to college 20-some years later, and now 50-years later, many young people can hardly go five minutes without working their cell phones.

As many freshmen bumpkins did that year, I brought all white socks to college, just after the campus fashion had changed to dark colored socks. Some upper class “fashion police” wrote letters to the campus newspaper “Lantern” condemning us freshmen who were committing this fashion faux pas. About the same time, Lantern staffers wrote an editorial decrying student “apathy” citing the “white socks controversy” as one example. I remember this because I wrote a 500-word essay for my freshman English class saying that the fashion police weren’t “apathetic” because they were passionate about something, but what they were passionate about was stupid and arrogant. The instructor liked my essay so much he read it to the class.

In our sophomore year, Doc and I were roommates at the Delta Sigma Phi fraternity house. I think there were five in our pledge class that went through Hell Week together in fall 1966. We all had nicknames; John was “Doc”; I was “Satch”; Paul was “Lucky Chicken”, Roger was “Mung”, and Steve was “Gaper”. Two incidents have stuck out in my mind. As I was painting the baseboard in the basement of the fraternity house, Bob came to me and said severely “You’re painting too slow”, so I hurried up. About a half hour later, he came again and pointed at something and said severely “You missed a spot”, so I slowed down and tried to be more careful. As we repeated this pattern more times, I became more apprehensive. Much later, I realized Bob didn’t really care how I was painting but was heartily laughing about this subtle torment with his buddies. At night, we were exhausted and I thought they were going to finally let us go to bed on mattresses laid out on the floor of a room with a narrow door, but first we took showers. When we came back, the mattresses were stuffed in the doorway and several brothers were behind them blocking us out. I was discouraged, but Doc immediately led us on a charge of the mattresses, and we finally fought our way back into the room. At the next Hell Week, after I was a brother, I was tough on the new pledges until I finally realized that I had to curb my enthusiasm.

The fraternity house was actually two buildings on Iuka Avenue; one building had the individual rooms and the common living room; the other building had the kitchen and dining room. We had maybe 30 people living in the fraternity house; it was more civilized than the dorm with enforced quiet hours for study; and we had to put on a coat and tie and to socialize before dinner. We played a lot of sports, especially football, basketball, and softball. There was a pool table in the basement and a ping pong table in a room next to the dining room that we used a lot. There was a TV room we hardly ever used. We had a full-time house mother, and we had “Cookie” the cook who came during the day.

On the weekends we drank the 3.2%-alcohol beer that was legal to serve to 18 year olds in the dingy bars on High Street. Ohio was the world epicenter of 3.2 beer. Two or three times each quarter, we had fraternity parties with harder liquor. I didn’t drink until my sophomore year, and I don’t think Doc ever drank at all. At the time, there were about a dozen bars along High Street that were packed with college students. After the Ohio legislature repealed the 3.2 beer law years later, all the bars on High Street disappeared.

My biggest memory is our sports competitions; Doc and I would compete at anything. In our dorm bedroom there were two rows of metal bunk beds with just enough room to walk between them. We would brace our hands and arms on the hard metal frames of the upper two bunk beds and push ourselves up in the air. Our competition was to see who could hold himself up in the air the longest. The hard metal bed frame would dig into your hands, and it would become painful very quickly. We ran the competition a few times over the year, and I think Doc beat me every time; he just refused to lose.

We played a lot of handball at the Intramural Sports building; and he beat me most of the time. We played a lot of table tennis (ping pong) at the dorm and the fraternity house; and he beat me most of the time. In ping pong, Doc had a strong forehand but a weak backhand, so he always played from his extreme left corner of the table; but he was quick enough that he could also cover the right hand side of the table from his extreme position. If you hit a weak shot to his forehand, the ball came back at you so hard at you that you had no chance of hitting it; I hit to his backhand so much that he got better using it. One time when playing Doc, I got so mad at missing a shot that I flung my paddle across the room and almost hit “Toad”, who was waiting to play; Toad didn’t blink an eye but I was shaken and never did that again.

The fraternity had an “A” and a “B” basketball team with the better players playing on the “A” team in the “A” league. Doc made the “A” team, but he decided to play with us lesser players on the “B” team. We only had five (and sometimes maybe six) players: Doc, Bruce, Steve, Doug, and me. Doc would drive the lane, draw everybody to him, and then sometimes dish off to me under the basket for an easy layup; and that was about the extent of my offense. We had a successful season in the “B” league, finishing first I think.

There was three-quarter mile loop up Iuka Ave from our fraternity house to North 4th Street and back to our house. I had been running the loop a little bit and was starting to get in shape when Doc decided he would run it with me. I think we were getting ready for the fraternity bed race on the OSU Oval. We ran at a slower pace on the way up but started to pick it up on the way back, finally sprinting all out over the final quarter-mile. I was gasping for air and was about ready to back off and quit when Doc finally slowed down. One thing you can be sure of when you beat Doc at something is that you have beat his best effort, but I won only because I had been training ahead of the time.

The late 1960’s were the waning years for Woody Hayes as head coach of OSU Buckeyes football. In 1968, the Buckeyes had a great team with Rex Kern, Jim Otis, Jim Stillwagon, Jack Tatum, John Brockington, and Rufus Mayes; they won the national championship, beating USC with OJ Simpson in the Rose Bowl. The Buckeyes also had good basketball teams with Dave Sorenson and Jumpin’ Jim Cleamons; I sat court-side at St. John Arena to watch Ohio State play Michigan with Cazzie Russell. In that era, players stayed all four years; and we students were able to get excellent seats at all home games relatively inexpensively.

In spite of it all the fun we had, my memory is that we were both serious students, spent a lot of time studying in our room and elsewhere, and did fairly well in our grades. Doc was in pre-med and thus got his nickname. After trying different majors, I finally settled in Computer Science, which was brand-new in the mid 1960’s, because I liked the pure logic of writing programs. It took hard work for me to get good grades. My angelic Mother didn’t understand computing and worried that I would not be able to get a job after I graduated; but, when I had retired in 2013, I had worked steadily in the field for 42 years.

These were the days before the grade inflation of the past couple decades, and we knew numerous fellow-students, especially in the dorm but also in the fraternity, who flunked out. Two of our fraternity pledges escaped “finals” reality by going to a bar the night before final exams and, when they came back drunk a few hours later, told of a woman patron dancing topless on the tables in the bar; in this way they flunked out. Brother “El Choto”, who had a respectable 2.7 GPA, just stopped going to classes one quarter; he sat in his room all day and smoked cigarettes; and he hung around with girlfriends or with us in the evening. After a couple of weeks, he told his professors how he had been travelling out west for a far-fetched reason; but they agreed to allow him to make up the work. After this burst of creativity, El Choto went back to sitting in his room, ended up with a 0.0 for the quarter, and flunked out.

Years later after I had retired, I was a part-time Computer Science instructor at a local university. I always gave open-note exams to my students because I remembered pulling some late-nighters before final exams to memorize information that I immediately forgot after the exams. I think I heard almost every excuse in the book from my students for not attending classes or not completing assignments, but none were as creative as El Choto’s.

In 1965, college students got “student deferments” from the military draft as long as they stayed in college, as this was in the buildup era of U.S. forces in the Vietnam War. OSU strongly encouraged males to take Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) courses in their first two years of college. After the first two years in ROTC, you could freely decide to go “active ROTC” for the final two years of college and then automatically be commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the military reserves when you graduated; and soon after that you could be leading platoons through the rice paddies, mountains, and jungles of Vietnam. Doc joined the Air Force ROTC, and I joined the Army ROTC for the first two years only. So we marched, studied military strategy, learned how to read maps, practiced shooting rifles, and got some easy A’s. We had to wear uniforms and to spit-shine our shoes for the ROTC classes. Five years later, when I was in graduate school, there were student riots against the Vietnam War on many college campuses that lead to the Ohio National Guard shooting and killing four students at Kent State and to OSU being shut down for a week.

Doc was working his way through college and had a job as a UPS package handler in the evening during school; this was when college was affordable and you could actually work your way through college without racking up big loans. I could not have kept up his schedule. One night he brought us cigars that had fallen out of one of the packages. Doc had a summer job as an inspector on the building of Interstate 70 through Zanesville; he said it was the easiest job he ever had. He would sit on a hillside and periodically measure the compaction of the soil in the roadbed. If he found a problem, Doc would write an incident report; and then the construction foreman would write a variance to avoid doing anything about it. I worked on a summer maintenance crew in the Stainless Steel plant in Coshocton.

Doc drove his old car, a white 1960 Ford Falcon stick-shift, to his job. Doc told me this story after he got back from work one icy winter night: He had followed an upscale sports car up the small hill from our house to the stop sign on the hill. After stopping, this sports car slid backward on the ice into Doc’s old car. The driver, a skilled boxer, started pummeling Doc. After getting his road-rage out in this way, the boxer came to his senses, realized it was his fault, and apologized. Doc being Doc did not press charges; he said to me something like “Anybody can make a mistake.” Another time, Doc loaned me his old car to go on a date, even though I had never driven a stick-shift before. The car jerked hard each time I popped the clutch to shift gears. The girl was not impressed but didn’t say anything, and I was relieved when I returned the car to Doc intact.

After that second year, Doc’s Mother died; he was so dedicated to his family that he dropped out of college to go home and take care of his younger brothers and sister. He eventually completed his degree at a local college while working full-time; then he raised a family with Jane and led a local manufacturing plant for many years. I’ve been fortunate to see Doc again many times over the years here in Cambridge; if I don’t see him first, he comes up behind me, surprises me with a bear hug, and laughs his distinctive laugh.

Me in front of Fraternity House.  Nov, 1966

Michael and Mary (Polly) Bentz Family Story

The Michael and Mary Harpold Bentz family story comes from notes made by their daughter Emma Bentz Hayman in 1907 in the Bentz family Bible and research done by their great grandson, William W. Bentz, in the 1990’s.  Also, I used these references that I found online in 2014:  The Pioneer History of Meigs County written by Stillman Carter Larkin in 1908 and A History of Shenandoah County, Virginia written by John Walter Wayland.

Although the focus of this story is the Michael and Mary Harpold Bentz family, I have organized their individual stories chronologically so hopefully the reader can follow it better, starting with Mary’s Great-Grandparents, John and Sussanah Roush.

Ancestors Henry Roush and brothers served in the Revolutionary War;  Adam Bentz and a brother served in the Civil War; William W. Bentz served in World War II.

John and Susannah Roush, Great-Grandparents of Mary Harpold Bentz, emigrate to in Shenandoah County, Virginia in 1738

From an excerpt from A History of Shenandoah County, Virginia:  “THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY ROUSHES contributed by Rev. L. L. Roush, Rutland, Ohio.  John Roush (Rausch) and wife Susannah were among the early settlers in Shenandoah County.   About 1738 they emigrated from the Palatinate, a small country on either side of the Rhine, near Alsace-Lorraine.  The causes for their coming to America were religious persecutions, devastating wars, and political oppression, but most especially the former.  Devout Protestants they were from the beginning and more ardently later when they espoused the pietistic movement, or “religion of the heart” which even occasioned greater persecution from their Catholic neighbors.  First in Pennsylvania and later in the Shenandoah Valley they became active as land owners, tanners, builders of churches, etc
.

“John Roush, Sen., took up a tract of 400 acres of land on Mill Creek, a little west of Mount Jackson, and from time to time added to and sold until there are more than 30 land transactions recorded in his name or some of his sons.

“This man and woman were the progenitors of a large family the descent of whom is now to be found in almost every state of the Union.  They are specially numerous in Mason County, West Virginia, Adams. Highland, Meigs, and Gallia counties, Ohio to which they emigrated from the Valley in 1795-1800.

“They were active in the Lutheran faith in these early days and John Roush, Sr., lies buried in the old cemetery at Pine Church.  The leaning grave stone shows him to have been born 1711 and died 1786.  The family was largely responsible for the founding of Old Solomon’s church near Forestville in 1793.”

Henry Roush (1752-1831), Grandfather of Mary Harpold Bentz

Henry Roush was the son of John and Susannah Roush.

Henry Roush & Brothers in the Revolutionary War

From a second excerpt from A History of Shenandoah County, Virginia:  “There is a well supported tradition in the Roush (Rausch) family now widely distributed over Ohio and other western states, that nine Roush brother,  Jacob, John, Daniel, Samuel, Henry, Lewis, Michael, George, and Jonas were soldiers in the Revolution.  If so, they were probably in the famous German Regiment of which no roll has been preserved.  Two of them, Jacob and Henry, were enrolled in Capt. John Tipton’s company as already shown in an earlier part of this chapter (jb, shown below).  Their father, John Rausch, Sr., died October 19, 1786 and his tombstone may be found in the old Pine Church graveyard, between Forestville and Rinkerton.”

From a third excerpt from A History of Shenandoah County, Virginia:  “In a manuscript volume called the “Romney and Winchester Pay Roll,” pages 29 and 30, is a list of men in Capt. John Tipton’s company, who were in service early in the Revolution.  John Tipton was a very prominent citizen of Shenandoah County; and it is probable that most of the men were from the same county.  The author is indebted to the manuscript collections of Hon. Boutwell Dunlap of San Francisco for a copy of

 The pay given John Tipton and his men was for terms of service from 22 to 158 days, on October 25, 1775, and they were paid off at Romney or Winchester.”

Henry Roush Comes to Letart Township, Meigs County, Ohio in 1797

From Emma Bentz Heyman’s note #2 made in 1907:
 

“Ma’s (jb, Mary’s) Grandfather Roush (whose first name was Henry) came from the Shenandoah Valley when Dolly (jb, Dorothy Roush) was 3 years old.  He bought land from the farm 1 mile below Letart (my Bro Peter owns now) clear down to Plants where Burlingame owns now.  He gave first to Henry then Michael - Her Dolly – Balser – Anthony – Elizabeth Peter Wolf Katie Milbarger. – bought land in 1797 when GrandMa (jb, Dorothy Roush) Harpold was 3 years old.

“Adam Harpold born 1790, Oct 9, came to Letart from Ripley W Va & Ma (jb,Mary) says – settled right there & had a family of 8 sons & 8 daughters all in one home & the only one who died at home under marriage age was Adam – 7 years old & drowned.”

Emma’s notes in 1907 record that Mary Harpold Bentz’s Grandfather, Henry Roush, and her mother Dorothy Roush Harpold, emigrated to Letart Township, Meigs County, Ohio from Shenandoah County, Virginia, in 1797.  Dorothy was three years old at the time.

From an excerpt from Pioneer History of Meigs County:   “….we find that Henry Roush, Sr., lived in Letart township in 1803, but at what date he came to Ohio we are not informed.  Henry Roush, Sr., owned land in Letart, Ohio, opposite Letart Falls, and brought up a large family.  His son, Henry Roush, Jr., entered (jb, purchased) land in 1808….. Mrs. Dorothy Harpold was a daughter of Henry Roush, Sr.”

From another excerpt from Pioneer History of Meigs County:  “Black bears were numerous in these parts of southern Ohio in the first years of the nineteenth century.  Henry Roush, of Letart township, related an incident of his encounters with bears.  He said:  I was going out to bring in the cows, and contrary to my usual custom did not take my rifle with me, and while passing along the rear of my neighbor’s field of corn I saw two young bears helping themselves to roasting ears.  I succeeded in capturing one of them, which began to squall at a furious rate, which brought the mother bear rushing upon me with great fury.  I had to drop my prize and run for a high fence which was near, with the angry bear at my heels.  After gaining the top of the fence, I seized a stake and beat off my assailants.”

From Emma Bentz Heyman’s note #3 in 1907: 

“The Wolf Cemetery below Letart 2 miles is named after & was given as Cemetery ground by son-in-law (Peter Wolf) of Old Mr. Roush in which he lies buried in the west front part of the yard – as a Roush descendant  Ma (jb, Mary) is one now past 84 & the last of 16 children.  Old Aunt Anna Sayre Roush who lived over 103 or 4 was a daughter was a daughter of Roush-wife of Henry the 2^nd.”

Adam (1790 – 1869) and Dorothy Roush Harpold (1794 – 1865) Bentz, Parents of Mary Harpold Bentz

From Emma Bentz Heyman’s Note #2 in 1907 (see note #2 above):  “Adam Harpold born 1790, Oct 9, came to Letart from Ripley W Va & Ma (jb,Mary) says – settled right there & had a family of 8 sons & 8 daughters all in one home & the only one who died at home under marriage age was Adam – 7 years old & drowned.”

Adam Harpold and Dorothy Roush Harpold were married on January 23, 1812.

From an excerpt from Pioneer History of Meigs County:  “Adam Harpold was born October 9, 1790, and came to Letart, O. in 1812, where he married Dorothy Roush in August, 1812.  They settled on a farm and Mr. Harpold conducted a store, the first one for dry goods and groceries in Letart township.  After the county of Meigs was organized and Courts of Common Pleas were held in the meeting-house in Salisbury township – in the July term of 1819, among the jurors impaneled is the name of Adam Harpold.  He was prominent in township offices and a patron of education, strictly honest in business transactions, and maintained the respect and confidence of the community.  Mrs. Harpold was a woman of strong character, of wonderful physical power and vitality.  They had a family of sixteen children, and all save one child, who was drowned at seven year of age – seven sons and eight daughters – grew up and married, each making a new home of thrift and industry.  The sons were mostly farmers and have been identified with the material prosperity of Meigs county for more than sixty years.  Henry Harpold, Spencer Harpold, Peter Harpold, Philip Harpold, William Harpold, George B. Harpold, John Harpold.  The daughters:  Mrs. Pickens, widow, later Mrs. Wolf; Mrs. William Hester, widow, Mrs. Jacob Baker; Mrs. Michael Bentz, nee’ Polly Harpold; Mrs. Eben Sayre, Mrs. Augustus Justice; Mrs. Hezekiah Quillen, Mrs. Bradford Roush, Mrs. Barbara Ann McDade.

“The greater number of the Harpold sons and daughters had large families, so that the descendants in the third and fourth generations were notably numerous.

“Mr. Adam Harpold died in October, 1869, and his wife Mrs. Dorothy Harpold died in December, 1865, having lived in their Letart home for more than fifty years”.

The picture below is a Spool Cabinet that I believe was in the Adam Harpold store in Letart, Ohio.  My father, William Bentz, told me it came from Ripley, West Virginia, from where Adam came to Letart.  I remember the cabinet sat in my Granddad’s, John L Bentz’s, workshop for many years, where he kept screws, nuts, bolts and drill bits.

Michael (1815-1864) and Mary (Polly) Harpold (1823-1912) Bentz 

Emma Bentz Hayman’s Note #1 was made in 1907:

“Michael Bentz was born in Edigheim, Germany on March 11, 1815.  Michael and his brother Conrad Bentz came to America from Edigheim – Frankenthal – Rhine.Grise.Germany in the year 1837.  They settled in Pomeroy, Meigs County, Ohio.
 

“In 1851 Conrad went back to Germany and brought their parents to Pomeroy.  The Mother died soon after at Conrad’s home.  The Father stayed the rest of the winter with Michael then went back to Germany, saying America is no rat trap for him.  The Mother was buried at Horton Naylor’s Run Cemetery - Pomeroy, Ohio.  E.B.H.”

Mary (Polly) Harpold was born on November 29, 1823 in Letart Township, Meigs County, Ohio.  Her parents were Adam and Dorothy (Dolly) Roush Harpold. 

 

Michael Bentz married Mary Harpold on February 17, 1842. Michael became a naturalized U.S. citizen on October 29, 1844.

Michael and Mary first lived in Pomeroy, Ohio and in 1864 at the time of the Civil War moved to Letart to a farm originally purchased by Mary’s Grandfather, Henry Roush, in 1797

From the Meigs County Herald, on February 1, 1878, Leslie Carr, of Orange has sold his farm - 100 acres - to Conrad Bentz for $2200.

.

The Michael and Mary Bentz family attended the Methodist Episcopal Church in Pomeroy, Ohio

.

Michael and Mary had 9 children.

Adam born 13 Dec 1842; died 13 Mar 1886; Adam fought and was injured in the Civil War.  His Civil War letters are in separate postings in this blog.

Emily born 31 Aug 1844; died 29 Jun 1846

Henry born 6 Feb 1847; died 6 Jun 1911; married Mary Virginia Quillian.  From Adam’s letters, I believe that Henry also fought in the Civil War.

Peter born 18 Sep 1849; died 31 Dec 1908; married Maryle Wolf & 2^nd Jennie Pickens

John born 6 Nov 1851; died 3 Sep 1930; married Hannah Wolf

Emma Elizabeth born 15 May 1854; died 5 Dec 1936; married George N Hayman 27 Feb 1876;  Emma appeared prominently in Adam’s Civil War letters when she was 9 years old, and much later Emma Bentz Hayman kept family history notes and Adam’s letters in the Bentz Family Bible.

Matilda (Tilly) Sophia born 21 Oct 1857; died 24 Dec 1944.  She lived in Syracuse, Ohio with Emma later in their lives.

George Jacob born 4 Oct 1860; married Melvira Wolf

William Spencer born 13 Sep 1863; died 14 May 1947; married Lydia Annette Weaver 14 Sep 1884; William and Lydia are my great grandparents.

Michael died on September 20, 1864 at approximately age 50.  I remember my father William telling the story of Michael’s drowning when I was young; he said Michael died as the result of a drowning accident while he was pulling a boat along the Ohio River.

Mary died March 22, 1912, when she was 88 years old, in Antiquity, Ohio.

This corner cupboard was built at Chester, Meigs County, Ohio in 1845 for Mary for her marriage to Michael.  Originally, it had walnut panels in the upper doors.  Mary left it to her daughter, Emma Bentz Hayman, who left it to her nephew, John L Bentz, who left it to his son, William W. Bentz.

Emma Elizabeth Bentz Hayman (1854 -1936)

Emma Elizabeth was born 15 May 1854 and died 5 Dec 1936.  She was the daughter of Michael and Mary Bentz.  Emma appeared prominently in her brother Adam’s Civil War letters when she was 9 years old.  She sent Adam a dollar so he could buy food, and Adam sent items for her to keep for him.  Please read other posts in this blog containing Adam's Civil War letters.

She married George N Hayman 27 Feb 1876; apparently they had no children.

In 1907, Emma Bentz Hayman made family history notes and kept Adam’s letters in the Bentz Family Bible.

Matilda (Tilly) Sophia Bentz was born 21 Oct 1857; and died 24 Dec 1944.  Tilly lived with Emma in Syracuse, Ohio later in their lives.

Here is the Certificate of Admission for Emma Elizabeth Bentz, daughter of Michael and Mary, to Sunday School in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Pomeroy, Ohio in 1861 when she was seven years old. 

Here is picture of Emma Elizabeth Bentz Hayman taken in 1931.

William Spencer (1863-1947) and Lydia Annette Weaver (1864-1941) Bentz

William Spencer Bentz was the son of Michael and Mary Bentz. 

William Spencer was born September 13, 1863; and died May 14, 1947, Racine, Ohio.

Lydia Annette Weaver was born September 12, 1864; and died October 14, 1941, Racine, Ohio

William Spencer Bentz and Lydia Annette Weaver were married on September 14, 1884.  They lived in Antiquity, Ohio.

William and Lydia are my Great-Grandparents.  There are pictures of them below.

I remember my Dad, William W. Bentz, their Grandson, telling me a few things about them.  He said that William S. was very strict and demanded that his children call their parents Father and Mother.  He said that he liked to sit and have extended talks with his Grandmother, Lydia.  He said that when visited them in Antiquity, he slept up in their loft and on winter mornings he would wake up with snow on his blankets.

They had 10 children:   There are family pictures below.  

Mary Virginia (Stokes), born May 24, 1885, Antiquity, Ohio; died August 4, 1933, Alhambra, California

Bertha Matilda (Sayre), born April 30, 1887, Athens, Ohio; died March 29, 1964

John L, born June 21, 1889, Antiquity, Ohio; died May 9, 1980, Coshocton, Ohio.  John L Bentz is my Grandfather.

William Hayman, born December 30, 1891, Antiquity; died March 26, 1925, Cincinnati, Ohio

Jennie Electa (Pickens), born March 11, 1894, Racine; died October 20, 1969

Lillian Elizabeth (Coe), born June 15, 1896, Racine; died August 27, 1973

Helen Malinda, born January 2, 1899, Racine

Dixie Kathleen, born November 26, 1901, Racine

Dorothy Annette (Whitmer), born April 30, 1904, Racine; died September 21, 1981

Isabel Adonna, born September 3, 1906

Be sure to look at the background

Golden Wedding Anniversary, September 16,1934

John L (1889-1980) and Bertha Wickline (1988-1959) Bentz

John L Bentz was the son of William S. and Lydia Annette Weaver Bentz. 

John L, born June 21, 1889, Antiquity, Ohio; died May 9, 1980, Coshocton, Ohio.  He worked as a carpenter and helped build electric power plants along the Ohio River.  Later, during retirement, he worked with Weaver Skiff Works in Racine, Ohio, building boat stems.  I remember him making the boat stems in his shop on his farm.

Bertha Wickline was born November 5, 1888; and died February 7, 1959, Racine, Ohio.  She worked as a school teacher in Antiquity, Ohio and then as homemaker.

John L Bentz and Bertha Wickline Bentz were married on June 1, 1912.  John and Bertha are my Grandparents.  There are pictures of them below.  They lived on a small farm in Racine, Ohio.  They kept a large garden, chickens, a milk cow, and a pig.  When we visited, we would have delicious meals of food that they had produced on the farm.  Behind their house was a series of outbuildings, including a smoke house, my grandfather’s workshop, a three-hole outhouse, a garage, storage buildings, a chicken house with a milking parlor for the milk cow, and a pig house with a pig pen.

They had 2 children:

William Wickline Bentz was born October 5, 1913, Norwood, Ohio; and died March 26, 2001, Coshocton, Ohio.  He was a Technical Staff Sergeant in the Army Air Force during World War II. He married Cozette Royer Bentz on July 18, 1945.  They lived in Coshocton, Ohio.  They are my parents; you can read their story in several other posts in this blog, including “Growing Up in the Fifties”.

Helen Bentz Rhodes died January 20, 2001.  She married Russell Rhodes. The lived in Marietta, Ohio.  Helen was a school teacher.

Here are family pictures below.

William Bentz and Bill Hunter with Dog

William, James, Nathan, John L, 1974

John L Bentz with Great Grandchildren, Tyler, Bryan, Jeffrey, Nathan, Melissa, June 21, 1979 in Coshocton

Appendix 1. Genealogy Chart of Mary Harpold Bentz

The following chart showing the genealogy of Mary Harpold is derived from the genealogy chart developed by William W. Bentz. 

Appendix 2.  Ancestral Chart of William W. Bentz

Growing up in the Fifties

My Parents, William and Cozette Bentz

My Mother, Cozette Royer Bentz, was born in Coshocton County, Ohio in 1913.  She grew up on a farm off Route 83 south of the city of Coshocton.  Her father, Charles Royer, was a farmer, school teacher, land abstractor, and County Recorder.  Her mother was Nora Sandel Royer. She had an older brother, Cecil, who became a civil engineer.    You can read her family history in the blog post entitled History of the Adam and Susan Royer Family (REF #1).   She was proud of the fact she was educated in the one-room Wills Creek school house through 8^th grade; and she graduated as valedictorian of her class at Coshocton High School.  She went to a local Business School in Coshocton; and then she worked as chief clerk at the USDA North Appalachian Hydrologic Research Station near Coshocton until my Dad returned from World War II.  After they married and had children, she stayed home to raise her three sons until they all were in school.  She returned to work at age 44 as purchasing agent at Universal Cyclops Specialty Steel manufacturing near Coshocton; her desire to provide her sons the higher education that was highly valued in her family was her motivation for returning to work.  So my Mother prepared meals, kept house, did laundry, and did the grocery shopping while working a full-time job.  She retired from her job at age 65.

Mother, Cozette Bentz

Every Saturday afternoon, my Mother went to her Cousin Cleo Royer’s beauty shop to have her hair done and to visit with her.  Cleo grew up in the “Royer Home Place” (REF #1) that their Grandparents, Adam and Susan Royer, built, and my Mother grew up across the road in the frame house on my Grandpa Charles Royer’s farm.  One of the family’s greatest heartbreaks was to see these and other farms wiped off the face of this planet by a mammoth coal strip mining shovel, circa 1960.  These gently rolling farm lands were among the most productive and breathtakingly beautiful in the world.

Royer Home Place

The great tragedy was that increasingly debilitating conditions of Alzheimer’s began to appear in my Mother even before she retired from work; she spent her last five years in a nursing home, did not recognize anybody, and towards the end could not talk.  She died in 1990 at age 77.  The day my Mother died I was sitting alone in my cube at work when I clearly heard her voice call “Jim” as in old times; I looked all around and didn't see anybody nearby; a half-hour later my Dad called and said she had died.

My Dad, William (Bill) W. Bentz, was born in 1913 in Norwood, Ohio near Cincinnati, and grew up in the small rural town of Racine in Meigs County, Ohio, along the Ohio River.  His Dad, John L Bentz, was a carpenter and his Mother, Bertha, was school teacher at one time and a homemaker.  My Dad had a younger sister, Helen, who became a school teacher.  You can read his family history in the post entitled the Michael and Mary (Polly) Bentz Family Story (REF #2).  My Dad grew up during the depression, and he liked to tell us he worked for $1 a day picking tomatoes during high school.  After graduating from Racine High School, he worked at a government Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp in Southern Ohio during the Great Depression.  He then worked at the USDA North Appalachian Hydrologic Research Station near Coshocton.  He enlisted in the US Army Air Force in World War II and rose to the rank of Technical Sergeant where he specialized in repairing Bomb Sites for the planes bombing Germany,  a very high-tech job for the time.  He was stationed at an airbase in Northampton, England.  After the war, he returned to work at the USDA Research Station and married my Mother.  He used the technical skills he learned in the Army to become a “Hydrology Engineering Technician”, where he designed and built instruments to measure the underground flow of water. 

The work ethic my Dad inherited from his ancestors was more relaxed: one should work and do one’s best to fulfill life’s obligations, but not at the expense of not taking enough time along the way to enjoy some hobbies or recreations that bring enjoyment to one’s life.  He took time to go hunting with the hound or fishing occasionally which he of course also engaged his sons in; see blog post entitled Hunting Rabbits (REF #3).  He was a Boy Scout leader for several years.  He appreciated the lifetime benefits of his career in government without begrudging the financial ceiling that it imposed.  The balance of what could be entered into with one’s life was also important; and he enjoyed a beer in the evening. 

Dad, Bill Bentz

One benefit of his government work was that he was able to retire at age 55; in retirement, he had many hobbies to keep him busy, including wood carving, wood working, investing, genealogy, antiquing, and wine-making.  My Dad cared for my Mother through her long decline with Alzheimer’s with all the generosity of heart.  It’s sorrowful to experience what none of us could help.  My Dad died at age 87 in 2001.

Mother, Dad, and Granddad Bentz

Grandparents Bentz, Parents, and Boys

My Mother and Dad married comparatively late in life at ages 32, after the Great Depression and after the Second Great World War, and they must have done a lot of thinking on how to raise children.  They could pinch a dime until it squealed and focused on what they felt was important; we were comfortable but there were no luxuries.  My parents tried to infuse “good” ethical and moral values into our lives.  The transmission of these values was largely through their living examples of them.  They both came from strong Christian families, and from the earliest time I can remember, our whole family went to the Lutheran Church and Sunday school every Sunday almost without fail; we had to shine our shoes and put on our good clothes for church.  We prayed children’s prayers before meals and before we went to bed.  We always ate meals together, and we only ate out a couple of times when visiting my Granddad Bentz after Grandma Bentz died.

Ready for Church

My parents demonstrated the values they expected of us – work hard and a “just do it” attitude reinforced by physical discipline.  My Dad, as many people at that time, believed in the old adage “Spare the rod and spoil the child”, and administered spankings to us boys whenever he felt we needed correction, which led us not to be totally open and forthright in what we told our parents. Also, did we have not topical discussions around the dinner table; we focused on eating only.   My parents seldom verbalized that they loved us, but we knew it from their actions. These non-verbal tendencies may have come from their rural farming heritage where there was little need for “refined” verbal skills and where working to provide for the essential needs of life was the greatest need, but these tendencies inhibited development of our verbal skills.  I learned much later in life that my Dad was a good conversationalist.

Since neither of my parents had college degrees, an important aspiration for them was getting their children through college; they communicated to us early on the importance of education and helped provide the means to attend college when the time came.  My Dad started us working at an early age by getting us paper routes to deliver newspapers so we could “save for college”.   They left it up to us to pursue whatever our field of interest was, as long as it was a field where we could find a job after college. 

Growing up in the 1950’s

My brother John was born in 1946, I was born in 1947, and my brother Joe was born in 1950.  The doctor injured my older brother’s eye nerve using forceps during his birth, and it always affected his vision but he has adapted remarkably well and led a successful life.   Although my Mother had been working for years, she now stayed home with the children until all three of us were in school.

Early Family Photo

We bought a two story house in a slightly lower middle class neighborhood on Chestnut Street in Coshocton, Ohio for $6000; the house was built in 1910; my parents moved in 1947 and lived there for the rest of their lives.  It had three bedrooms and one bathroom upstairs, and a living room, dining room, and kitchen downstairs.  When I was little, I remember my Dad shoveled coal into the furnace in the basement every day in the winter and that our town was dirty because all the houses were spewing coal smoke.   There was a “coal room” in the basement into which the coal truck dumped coal through the window in the fall.   The coal furnace made spring cleaning more meaningful because the walls had to be cleaned in the spring to remove all the coal fire dust that accumulated during the winter.  Eventually, all the old houses were converted from coal heating to gas heating.  Much later, after he retired from work, my Dad converted the “coal room” a “wine room” where he kept his homemade wine.  Our air conditioning consisted of opening all the windows and, eventually, my Dad installed a large fan in the window in the upstairs hallway; but our house got very hot on summer evenings, especially, upstairs in the bedrooms. 

Chestnut Street House

Inside house with Skippy

We burned the burnable trash in the brick fireplace my Dad built in the backyard. 

The refrigerator was very small so you couldn’t store very much food in it and the freezer compartment was only large enough to make a couple trays of ice cubes.  The Meadow Gold milkman delivered milk to the house every day.   My mother would send us to McConnell’s Store, a small neighborhood grocery store two blocks away, to buy a loaf of bread for 20 cents.

My Mother washed the clothes in the wringer-washer in the basement.  In the summer, she hung the clothes on the clothes line outside to dry; in the winter, she hung them in the basement.  When I was very young, my Mother made me take a nap in the afternoon in my parents’ room.   I remember she would often be sitting in the room resting and watching me when I woke up.  My Mother had a part-time job at home typing land abstracts from Dictaphone recordings that my Grandpa Royer had made; she would type them at the kitchen table.   My Dad called my Mother a good country cook; food I remember she prepared were meat loaf, Canadian bacon, fried chicken, chicken pot pies, corn on the cob, green beans in the pressure cooker, and mashed potatoes and gravy.

My Dad had a large vegetable garden in the backyard when we were young; he would get mad at us for hitting the baseball into it.  He eventually turned his garden into a flower garden for growing Gladiolas and then, much later, a vineyard for growing grapevines for making wine.  He would take us to the local PBF farm in West Lafayette to pick strawberries in June.   Many nights, my Dad read us a chapter from one of his Horatio Alger books before we went to bed; these stories were about poor boys making good through thrift and hard work; one title I remember is “Sam’s Chance”.  My Dad cut us boys' hair himself in buzz style in our kitchen.

There were families with children about our same age living on both sides of us and other families with children nearby, so there were always my brothers and lots of other children to play with, and we spent a lot of time outside playing with the other kids in the neighborhood.   The games I remember playing  were baseball, football, basketball, sledding, throwing snowballs at cars, catching lightning bugs, running, climbing trees, playing with our dog Skippy, shooting at birds with a slingshot, building a treehouse in our big apple tree, and wrestling in the yard with my brothers.  There was the old abandoned Pope-Gosser Pottery a couple blocks away from us that we explored.  On bad days when we could not play outside, my brothers and I played inside; we built all kinds of building with “Lincoln Logs”; and we played with a Lionel Electric Train set on a table my Dad had built in the basement and with an Electric Football game.  We would walk a block and a half to McConnell’s Store to buy a pack of Topps baseball cards.  A pack contained five or six cards and a piece of bubblegum and cost 5 cents; we usually threw away the bubblegum.  My brothers and I each had large collection of baseball cards, and we traded cards with each other and the neighbors.  My Dad built a plywood full-size ping pong table for us in the basement, where my brothers and I spent hours learning to play until we played reasonably well. 

My Dad brought the dog we named Skippy home; he had found him on the USDA station where worked.  He was a mixed-breed, medium-sized red hound.  My Dad thought he could make him into a rabbit-hunting dog, but Skippy never have the nose for it.  We kept him tied up with a chain that he could pull along the length of the clothes line outside so he had a good long place to run, and he had his box to stay in, and a cherry tree to lie under when it was hot.  Skippy stayed outside most of the time, but when there was thunder and lightning, he would bark and whine until we let him inside.  He had a place in the kitchen where he was supposed to stay when he was inside and generally he stayed there, but occasionally he would come into the living room to be petted.  He was always trying to run away; sometimes we could run him down; one time he got away and was gone for a month.  We had given him up as gone for good, but we were surprised when he eventually came back looking very skinny and bedraggled, and scratched at our front door.  Another time he got away and ran down the aisle in our neighbor’s church at Sunday services.  Our neighbor recognized him and brought him home to us.

Boys with Skippy

When we got older, we played sports in Hall’s Lot with the boys from “Hardscrabble Hill”.  Hall’s Lot was a vacant lot near our neighborhood when we were growing up; but later Coshocton made it into a City Park with tennis courts, basketball courts, and playground equipment.  It lay between our neighborhood and Hardscrabble Hill,  a run-down neighborhood filled with boys whose families didn’t have much money but some of whom were very good athletes; they went to Washington Grade School with us but didn’t have a lot of interest or success in education.

So on many evenings in the spring, summer, and fall, my brothers and I would walk up to Hall’s Lot to play pick-up games slow-pitch softball or baseball, or football.  The games would last until dark.  There would usually be 10 to 15 boys, sometimes more, and sometimes a couple of adults would show up to play; there was no formal organization or rules; we just chose sides and played. For softball equipment, we had a couple of wooden bats that everybody would use, enough gloves that we could share so that those playing in the field had a glove, and a couple balls.  Often, the bat handles were cracked so we had to tape them to hold them together.  Sometimes, we decided to play without gloves, not out of necessity but just for fun to do something different.  Sometimes, we would only have one or two outs per inning, instead of three, before changing sides to speed up the game.  There was septic tank run-off in right field, so we tried not to hit the ball there; but, if we did, we would have to wade through muck to get the ball back; we never thought about how unsanitary this might be; we lost a few balls there.   

If nobody else showed up, my brother John would hit long fly balls to me and I would shag them either with a glove or sometimes without a glove.  I got to be pretty good a catching fly balls in general, especially running catches, and also in catching them without a glove.  The trick to catching without a glove was catch the ball with two hands and to quickly move your hands back on impact with the ball so your hands didn't have to absorb the full impact of the ball.

To play football, all we needed was a football.  Generally, we played two-hand-touch, but on rare occasions we played tackle without helmets or pads; we played mainly a passing game.   I liked to play quarterback and on many occasions got to play it because I could throw the ball pretty well.  I guess I learned to throw when playing with my brothers in the back yard where I threw because my older brother John always liked to catch.   When playing at Hall’s Lot, I learned to put some “touch” on the ball because there were sometimes little kids playing with us.  All the bigger kids would be covered, but nobody would cover the little kids.  If I threw it hard to the little kids or threw it a little bit away from them, they would not be able to catch it; so I threw it as easily as I could right to them.  I also learned to put some “zip” on the ball because there were some good athletes defending the receivers; I especially liked “zipping” it to a receiver between two defenders.

From the time I was in 4^th grade until I graduated from High School, I had a “paper route” where I delivered the Coshocton Tribune.  My Dad helped me and my brothers each get a route when we were young in order to save for a college education.   I guess it was an early education in working.  I started out with 40-some customers a day and finished my career with 120 customers a day.  When weather was nice, we rode our bikes and other times we walked our routes; my route was over two miles long with some hills so it was good outdoor exercise.  We folded the papers so we could throw them onto porches instead of walking up to each and every porch, and I became an expert in both folding and throwing them; some of the porches were up on a hill a good ways from the street so it took a good long throw to get it onto the porch; so this helped me develop my throwing distance and accuracy skills because if you missed the porch, you had to walk up the hill and pick the paper up.  The Tribune prided itself in being a seven day a week newspaper, so we never had a day off.  On Saturday mornings, we had to go to all our customers and collect for the week; the paper at that time was 40 cents a week, of which the carrier got 10 cents; so if you had 40 customers, you got $4.00 a week; if the customer didn't pay us, we still had to pay the newspaper for the papers.   Sunday mornings in the winter were the worst time, because the Sunday paper was by far the heaviest to carry and we had to get up at 6:00 am to deliver it in the snow and cold; afterwards we had to go to church where it was then hard to stay awake during the sermon.  In high school, we also worked in the circulation department at the newspaper office; I took papers off the press and pushed a big cart loaded with newspapers up Main Street to the Post Office before I delivered the papers on my paper route.   Some of the boys from Hardscrabble Hill worked in the office too.  I think after nine years of working, I had saved $5000 for college.  

I never regretted or begrudged doing the paper route and even liked the activity, but years later I still regret that I never had the opportunity to try to play high school football because I was always had to deliver papers after school; I still believe that I could have made the football team.  So, my brother John and I played Sousaphone in the High School marching band.  My brother Joe gave up my paper route 2 or 3 years before graduating from high school.  At one point, the head football coach, Jerry Ipp., encouraged him to try out for the football team.  Naturally, he asked Mother and Daddy if he could do this. And in their inimitable way, they were clearly discouraging to him about doing that. The gist being that in football sometimes you get injured, and then you have to live (suffer) with the limitations from those injuries the rest of your life.  So he quickly dropped the idea. 

My parents always emphasized the importance of education.  We walked to Washington Grade School, which was about a block away from our house on our same Chestnut Street.  My brothers and I all naturally did well in school.  I enjoyed the schoolwork and wanted to learn.  I felt very contented working in the classroom, especially when it was raining outside.  At the time, I never thought about how I was doing in the schoolwork compared to other students; I did well, became mildly upset if I didn't do something right, and worked to correct mistakes.  I was the youngest kid in my class, being born on the last day for the year’s class, and this contributed to my feeling that I was somehow below the other kids.  I was surprised one time when another kid asked me how to do something. 

We listened to Cleveland Indians baseball on WTNS our local radio station and knew all the player’s names, positions, and statistics.  The Indians won the American League championship in 1954, but lost the World Series to the New York Giants with Willie Mays.  The Indians had a strong pitching staff with Bob Lemon, Mike Garcia, and Bob Feller and some outstanding position players with Al Rosen, Bobby Avila, and Larry Doby.  The next year, rookies Rocky Colavito and Herb Score joined the team.  One year, WTNS had a contest where they would ask a question and the first person to call in with the right answer would win two free tickets to an Indian’s game.  My brothers and I developed a scheme where John and I would listen to the question, and Joe would dial the phone just as question was done being asked and talk to the radio announcer.   John and I would get the answer and give it to Joe just in time so he would be the first with the right answer.  We won enough times so that our whole family got to go a couple of games.  My Dad drove us up to the game and our Grandpa Royer went with us.  The old Cleveland Municipal Stadium was a huge stadium holding 80,000 people, but less than 10,000 went to the games, so we got free seats down close to the field.   We took our gloves but never caught a foul ball.  We loved it!

I like to tell my grandchildren and other youngsters, who now have to continually watch TV, XBOX, and cell phones, that we did not get a television until I was 10 years old.  There are also many young adults who have to continually look at their cell phones.  I think we were better off for not having TV because we spent more time outside playing with other kids and were forced to use our own minds and imaginations to entertain ourselves.  We were one of the last families in our neighborhood to get a TV.   Our TV only got 3 channels; we had to get up from the couch to change the channel; we had a tall antenna in the back of our house with a rotor to turn the antenna in the direction of the station we wanted to watch; but many times there was a lot of “snow” on the TV screen because of a poor signal.  The picture was in black and white only.  All stations shut off at 11:30 pm with only a “test pattern” on the screen for a half-hour.  Then, all you would see was snow on the screen; I have read recently that 20% of this snow is background radiation created by the Big Bang.  The whole family sat in the living room and watched the one TV.   As kids, we liked to watch Howdy Doody, the Mickey Mouse club, big-time professional wrestling, and Cleveland Browns with Jim Brown running the football.  My Mother liked to watch the Lawrence Welk show, which we also had to watch because there was only one TV.

First TV

At first, our telephone did not have a way of manually dialing but when you picked up the phone, the operator said “Number please”, you gave her a 4-digit number, and she connected you; we were on a “party-line” with 3 other houses so you had to wait if another house was using their phone.  Eventually, we got a private line and a rotary dial phone.

My Dad bought a used 1949 Lincoln car; I remember when he brought it home; he said he bought it from on old lady for $800; and that was the only car we had for a long time.  I don’t remember what car we had before that.   My Dad would buy $1 worth of gas at the Shell station just down the street and the price included checking the oil and cleaning the windshield.  We stored our bikes in the garage next to the car; and we would sometimes scratch the car with our bicycles that each had a large basket for delivering newspapers, so the side of the car became pretty scratched up.  On Sunday afternoons, my parents someitmes took us for trips in the car into the surrounding country-side.

Painting my Mother commissioned from an old country photograph from one trip

We took periodic visits to my paternal grandparents’ home and small farm, at least, every summer.  We always looked eagerly for to those trips to the small rural town in Southern Ohio along the Ohio River – especially us boys. These trips often meant an exhausting time for us in endless outdoor fun and adventures: of simply going for rides in the old children’s wagon; exploring the root cellar and all the interesting rooms in my grandparents’ house; exploring all of the various outbuildings – my Granddad’s woodworking shop, storage sheds, smoke house, chicken coop, hog shed and outhouse; watching my Granddad working his large garden, milking the cow, gathering the eggs, slopping the hog, or killing the chicken for dinner; playing for hours building dams with my brothers in the stream at the bottom of the hill; climbing to the water tower at the top of the next hill; going swimming at “Bailey’s Lake”; going fishing; going down to the Ohio River; and visiting Uncle Dane’s house.  See separate blog posting entitled Uncle Dane’s House (REF #4).  Bailey’s Lake had three high diving platforms – the ten foot, twenty foot, and thirty foot.  We would jump of the ten foot platform again and again, and tried the twenty foot platform a couple times, but never jumped off the thirty foot platform.  These visits also meant positive interactions with our grandparents, and often included get-togethers with my Aunt Helen, Uncle Russell and Cousins Dauna Lee and Dale as well.  My Grandma always prepared delicious meals with most of the food produced directly on the farm.

John and Jim in wagon at Granddad's house

Cousins by Granddad's garden

Granddad making boat stems

Visits with my maternal Grandpa Royer in my memory were associated with visits with my Uncle Cecil, Aunt Margaret, and Cousin Ann’s home. My grandmother Nora had died from cancer before I was born. He moved in with my uncle and aunt not too many years after I was born.  What are most memorable to me again were visits to my uncle’s home in the country along Wills Creek near Coshocton where there was outdoor space, room, and even a spring house.  These visits were different, however. They still lived in a rural setting but the visits were more for just visiting – mostly indoors.  By 1960, they had moved into town and into a new ranch style home. With that move the transition of my nearest relatives from rural settings to town life was completed.

Mother, Dad, and Grandpa Royer

We would go to three family reunions – Bentz, Royer, and Sandel - each summer; each of our Grandparents had lots of brothers and sisters and so our parents had lots of cousins, aunts, and uncles that they would get to see once a year.  They would hold the reunion at the fairgrounds, or a grange hall, or a cousin’s farm on a Sunday afternoon.  There would be lots of good food, everyone brought potluck, but nobody wanted to go first so it would be up to my brothers and me to go first.  After eating, all the adults would sit around and talk, which was pretty boring to us.  There were usually some other young kids around and we would play a game of baseball, play on the playground equipment, or explore the surroundings.

Health Care

Our family was generally pretty healthy then.  We had the usual colds and flus; and I remember my Mother telling me that my health got better once I started my paper route that required me to walk two miles every day.  As children, we all had the childhood diseases of mumps, chicken pox, and measles that every child got in those days before there were vaccines for these diseases.  You were pretty sick, were out of school for a few days or a week, and then got well.  In the post-war US, polio was a devastating disease among children, and we knew people who had been affected by the disease.  My Mother’s cousin-friend, Opal, walked with a conspicuous limp from the disease; when I started my first job after college in 1970, my boss had to get around in a wheel-chair as result of polio in his childhood.  Our Washington Grade School principal called the whole school into an assembly in 1954 or 1955 to announce that Jonas Salk had developed a vaccine for polio; at the time, I believed that this was important, but I definitely didn’t understand the significance of it. 

My older brother John clearly remembers that the doctor came to our house to check on him when he had the chicken pox.  I vaguely remember the doctor visits to the house, but what I remember in later years was going to the doctor’s office, sitting in the waiting room for what seemed to be an interminable wait, and then finally seeing the doctor on a first-come-first-serve basis.  I don’t think that the office visit cost very much; I’m guessing maybe $5.  I was only in the hospital one time then, to have my tonsils removed when I was six years old; it was a common practice to remove your tonsils whether you needed it or not.

 

My brother Joe went to the hospital after he accidentally jammed a pencil down this throat when we were chasing him around the living room.  Joe remembers walking-running-trying-to-cry his way out to the kitchen sink with pieces of pencil falling out of his mouth into the sink amongst all the blood.  Mother and Daddy rushed him to the nearby hospital as Mother held Joe with a towel to catch the blood.  The bleeding stopped, and the hospital just gave advice on how to keep from aggravating the hole in the back of his throat.  The doctor said that had the pencil hit a little differently from where it did, it could have punctured a primary artery to his head and that would have been his end.  Our parents were so shocked and grateful, they never made too much of it in terms of the further punishment that we all expected.  We felt pretty fortunate for these strokes of providence. 

 

My brothers and I were listening to a debate on the 2017 topic of Trump’s “repeal and replace” of Obamacare.  We tried to remember if our parents had health care insurance when we were young, and we couldn’t remember ever hearing or seeing anything about it; at any rate it was not a big deal at our house.  According to a Wikipedia article, 75% of Americans had some sort of health insurance by 1958.  Since it would be decades before computers were commonly used, health insurance then must have been a balky paper system.

Denouement         

I am happy to say my brothers and I all graduated from college and have had successful professional careers.  John has started and managed some successful businesses, notably, one that assisted couples in adopting children from Russia.  Joe had careers as project manager in a diesel engine company, where he successfully developed ceramic parts for diesel engines, and as a marriage counselor; and he has pursued a calling to spiritual inquiry.  I have been a computer programmer/project leader for three companies, developing an artillery fire control system for the US Army; point-of-sale systems; and weighing terminals for truck scales, batching systems, and factory automation.  We are all now at least semi-retired.

Jim, Joe, John in 2017

Reference

Some of the words and ideas in this blog post came from a college paper written by my brother Joe in 2006, entitled Individual Development and the Family Life Cycle B – Family Genogram.

Appendix 1: Genealogy Chart

William Bentz developed this genealogy chart in the late 1980's/early 1990's.