Our Horatio Alger House

close enough in age to socialize together. We formed the core of a group of young people who called ourselves "The Sunday Night Club." We met at one of our homes after the Sunday evening union church service and had serious if informal discussions on the issues of the day. A few of us had attended National Methodist Youth Conferences where pacifism and socialism were wholeheartedly embraced in those depression days .We became would-be evangelists to the others. We were encouraged in our radical beliefs by trips to nearby Antioch College, looked upon by Cedarville residents as a hot bed of radicalism. --0ur-heuse--net-enly-provided-more-room-than-did-the-otherhouses;-irals-o-p-rovrded more fooclas ----– my mother was used to feeding many people and always had a well-stocked refrigerator. Gradually, the group met more and more in our home. In some years, our three families would gather for pot-luck Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners in our spacious dining room. On hot summer nights, we would drag mattresses onto our roofless side porch and enjoy sleeping under the stars. · We young people talked much about what we would do with our lives -- we were all quite idealistic and we did all go into some kind of human service occupations. Not one of us entered the business world!. Looking at all 13 young people in the three families -- three became homemakers, two missionaries, one minister, three high schoolteachers, one a school superintendent, one a YWCA Secretary, and two university professors. We have served in China, the Philippines, Brazil, Japan, and England. Our minister's son who married a West girl, became a chemistry professor at the University ofChicago, a frequent guest professor at Oxford, and lecturer all over the world whom I proudly heard when he came to Harvard. After the war was over and the college was having hard times and the mortgage had long since been paid off, my parents decided to give up taking in roomers. They would use the big house in a more appropriate way for their stage in life at that time. They added a bedroom and a bathroom to the first floor. They made the upstairs into an apartment and rented it to my sister and her husband and their two young girls. It was a happy arrangement for all concerned until my mother died and my father eventually married again. Then my sister and her husband bought their own home. While attending seminary at Oberlin College, I would often bring friends home for Thanksgiving and other holidays. Forty years later I received a letter from a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory ofMusic whom I had not heard from in all those years. He told me that he had recently driven from Cleveland to Indiana to attend his sister's funeral. " I was feeling very depressed on my homeward trip. On the interstate just south of Springfield, I saw the exit marked,' Cedarville, 12 miles.' On impulse, I took that exit, drove down to Cedarville, drove slowly all around your old house and remembered the wonderful times we had there. I felt better!' That, incidentally, was the beginning of a renewed friendship . After my father and his second wife had both died, we sold the house to Cedarville College to be used as a dormitory. The legacy enabled me and my sister to put down payments on houses in Hadley and Amherst -- adjoining towns in the Five College Area in westerm Massachusetts..