In 1904 Blanche’s parents, Annie Simons Spotts and George Billow Dum prepared for the family’s move from Landisburg to Carlisle. Annie was pleased to have acquired three quarts of onions. As Annie wrote in a letter in April of that year, onions were scarce in Landisburg, where she and George had been raising their children. “Some people,” she wrote, are sending to Carlisle for them.”
Blanche Lightner Dum (1886-1977) began her teaching career in Ambler, Perry County and continued well beyond 1929 at Carlisle High School, where she taught English for over thirty years. Her diary for 1929 is written during the year of the stock market crash which began the series of cascading market rallies and crashes resulting in the ten-year Great Depression. Her diary for that year records a year in celebration of the ordinary, unsuspecting of the events of autumn that would cause despair for so many.
Her teaching in Carlisle during the 1920’s was interrupted by a relocation to New Mexico of several years in order to help her widowed brother Rev. Ray Spotts Dum and his now motherless child, Jeanne (“J.E.”). Later the child would become as a foster daughter to her in Carlisle. Thus, Blanche wrote in her diary for Thursday, March 21, 1929 that “J. E. go[es] to the Hamilton Library to hear Miss Emeline Knox Parker (Mrs. Peachy) read her paper about her great uncle, John Brown.1 I wanted Jeanne to see and hear Miss Parker who … is but an echo of Carlisle’s cultural past of fifty years ago. The audience was of the past too. On Saturday morning Mrs. Parkinson described Miss Parker gowned in an old plaid silk gown brought from an attic trunk, descending the old stairs in her father’s lovely old colonial mansion to greet in the soft candlelight the guests who were entranced by her charm.”
On April 4th Blanche’s brother Ray arrived in Harrisburg from his then current home in Salt Lake City. “Ray preached an excellent sermon in St. Paul’s Lutheran Church … Aunt Sue [Dum] and Sara [Kane Kitner] came from Perry Co. to hear him. They took dinner with us. We had a very pleasant visit together. In the evening Ray preached about God’s Superlatives – God’s love, mercy, power, and wisdom. His sermons were scholarly and spiritual.” She attaches a newspaper article noting Ray’s morning and evening sermons at the church, noting that “Mrs. Sarah Yeingst sang a solo at the morning worship.” The following evening Blanche and J.E. see Ray off. On their way home Blanche purchased “our first air mail envelopes. I also purchased two cards of the Carlisle Indian School”, the students of which she, her sister, and their father had led in worship through Allison Methodist Church during “outings programs” held by the school.2
Many of Carlisle’s later residents have heard of the old market house that once stood on the town square where the new courthouse came to be at the corner of Hanover and High Streets. Blanche attended the old market house. On Saturday, April 27, 1929, Blanche wrote “Attend[ed] market at 5:30…Have my picture taken at Mr. Guth’s. I hate to have my picture taken. [At] 1:30 Dr. Line fills two of my teeth…J. E., Eva Fitzgerald, Kathryn Bell, Olive Fitzgerald and I have a food sale at the Market House…[Cousin] Paul [Kitner] enters in the Y.M. pet exhibition one of his pigeons…”
Blanche prepares for a trip to England and Scotland. On Friday, May 3, 1929, a “Beautiful Day,” she writes, I make application at the prothonotary’s office for my passport. It costs me ten dollars. Paul wins the two- mile bicycle race.”3 Blanche gives high school tests in English on Thursday, May 9th of the same year. The following day, as she writes, she “Finish[ed] labeling the Lamberton Essays. Return [home] from school at 7 P.M.”
She sailed from Montreal, Canada to England on the S. S. Antonio on June 21st, returning from Southampton, England on August 3rd aboard the S. S. Pennland and arriving in New York on August 11th. She devotes a separate diary to this trip which she greatly enjoyed. By October she is well settled back into her activities at Carlisle High School and at home. On the 25th of that month, a Friday, she is able to say of her students’ work that the “Essays on the Charcoal Furnace at Boiling Springs come in. Helen Jackson and Margaret Martin write very interesting themes.”
The following day, a Saturday, Blanche and her niece J.E. “walk to Bonny Brook to get some autumn leaves…” Along their walk they chanced upon “three beautiful pictures: (1) Evelyn and Frances Robbins plus their cat were coming with little bare legs to their father’s greenhouse.4 (2) A tramp with his pack on his back and a cane in his hand was walking down… (3) A man in the midst of blue smoke was sitting at the front of the railroad bridge wailing for a nibble and listening to the breathing of the nearby sedge grass.” She noted another chance vista for Monday the 28th, the day before panic selling crashed the stock market:
With a paragraph the heading “Pals”, Blanche writes that “from the window on the stairs of the Lamberton [High School] Building I saw Betty and Bob Trayer return in their pony cart. Evidently, they had taken Father to the laundry. When the pony reached the stable, both children jumped from the cart and ‘together’ unhitched the pony. In a few minutes the pony was free and Bob and Betty were on their way to school.”
Pay day is Friday, November 1st, as Blanche writes in her diary: “I receive my salary and after paying almost all of my assumed debts I had $22 left. I am determined to live on my income for this month.” Then there is a sad note: “Paul Shetron, one of my junior boys was accidentally shot this morning.” More comes the following day, Saturday, although it begins well enough: “I darn six pairs of stockings…In the evening …I shop up town. Fire breaks out in the Woolworth Building. Firemen soon have the fire under way…I visit the fire.5 At midnight there is another fire, in Mr. Roy Devinney’s store.”
An amusing event transpires which Blanche records in her diary entry for Monday, November 4th. An affixed newspaper clipping from the “Lost” section states that a “package containing 4 pairs silk stockings, 2 handkerchiefs, on South Hanover Street Saturday night. Reward if returned to 256 South Hanover Street.” Blanche’s young cousin Paul Kitner had actually found the package and when he returned it to its owner, another cousin, Milicent (Line) Kitzmiller, she gave “Paul a dollar for finding it.”6
A wonderful event took place on the evening of Thursday, November 7th. Josephine Lucchese, who was to sing the title role in “Lakme” with the Philadelphia Grand, performed in Carlisle. Blanche writes “This evening…I hear Josephene Lucchese sing in the high school auditorium. She has a beautiful voice.”
On the anniversary of Armistice Day, November 11th, Blanche writes that “President Hoover gives a splendid speech in the evening…”. Earlier in the day, Blanche, Paul and Jeanne “attended the football game: The Carlisle High School played the Shippensburg High School. The score was 7-6 in our favor.”
“May the changes that we make,” Blanche writes on November 18th, “wake us up, vitalize, bring us near to the things that do not change, and make us useful. ‘I will go anywhere provided it be forward,’ David Livingston.”
On the last day of high school before the 1929 Christmas break Blanche wrote on that Friday, December 20th that the girls in her classroom “exchange ten cent gifts. The Christmas program was lovely.” By January 1930 there were five million citizens unemployed all across the country. The Great Depression was in full swing. Blanche’s diary for the new year is sparse and grossly silent. She barely scratches in a few words here and there between occasional news clippings. She continues to teach at Carlisle High School.
The Current Literature Club met on the 9th with a “round table discussion at the A.A.U.W. meeting.” Blanche finally writes of it on the 16th: “Mrs. Springer reviewed in a most charming way ‘Abigail Adams’. Agnes Woods gives a very interesting and original review of the short story. After the meeting Miss Sara Black shows us the new offices. They are elegant but I feel out of place in Old West. Old West is too full of sacred associations…to be commercialized…It should have remained a dormitory.”7
The movies at Carlisle Theatre were a great attraction the newer ones less so for Blanche. On Monday February 9th she “saw ‘The Virginian’. I was disappointed in the picture. I do not like the talkie movie. The voices are mechanical and monotonous.”
Less than a month went by when Blanche noted toward the end of November that “The Dramatic Club presented ‘Skidding’. The play is beautifully acted. It is filled with wholesome humor.” She ends this sparse volume of her diary with a sigh and a hope for 1931, “The year 1930 has been for the most part an unhappy one.” She writes that she is worried about so many things and hope feel more joyful in the new year. The Great Depression would require a prolonged endurance, true to her temperament.
By the 1940s, WWII has begun the healing of the Great Depression and caused even greater wounds. Blanche’s sister Miriam (Dum) Frey, her husband and family are now sharing her home in Carlisle as a result of the Great Depression. Blanche has already survived a bout of Spanish Flu and the effects of WWI. In her 1944 diary, she writes on Tuesday, June 6th, “Invasion Day” better known as “D-Day”, that on this 158th day of the year, with 208 days yet to follow:
“The church bells rang between 1:30 and 2 o’clock this morning and again at 9:20 but I did not hear them. Bobbie [Frey] came home from Mr. Johnston’s store about nine and brough us the news of the invasion.8 Peggy, who was sleeping [at] Hannah Ritter[s’], heard the ringing of the bells.
“Bobby spent his short vacation playing tennis. His Invasion Day will come soon enough. Carolyn went into the Second Presbyterian Church to find no one present. Miriam and I tuned in for news. This afternoon at three o’clock, we heard King George II call his people to prayer. We also heard [broadcast] the Evangelical service at a church in York.9 This has been an eventful day – possibly the most important date in World History. The Allies found the first step comparatively easy but they are anticipating a difficult and bloody counter attack.”
The weather in Carlisle on that day was, as noted in Blanche’s diary, cloudy in the morning, later clearing. But there are also other recent local events. According to a newspaper clipping in her diary, “Guests were entertained in the home of Miss Edna Wright, June 3 from 4 to 6 p.m. in celebration of the 88th birthday of her aunt, Mrs. Marie Wingert Rumbaugh. Many persons will recall her as a seamstress making beautiful gowns, wedding dresses and garments of fine needle work…” Among the guests were some of Blanche’s relatives or their wives from within the Dum and Lightner families, including Mrs. Amos Dum, wife of Blanche’s cousin Amos. The following day, June 4th, as notes that “Rome fell to the Allies without a shot…” It appeared to Blanche at that point that, as she wrote, “There is yet something that Germany respects.” Here there is another local news clipping, this one from “Harrisburg, June 4. (U.P.) – William Stewart Duncan, 57, president of the Duncannon National Bank…admitted embezzling $33,468.52 of the institutions’ funds, using the money chiefly to play the stock market and operate a turkey farm.”10
On July 2nd, Blanche is able to write that “Paul [Kitner] and [wife] Maryetta arrive from Camp Shelby, Mississippi for a furlough of two weeks.”
Carlisle loses one of its physicians to heart disease. Dr. Calvin R. Rickenbaugh of West Louther Street, “a member of the medical and pediatrical staffs of Carlisle Hospital”. He had served “continuously on the Board of Health since appointment in 1917 and was its oldest member in years of service.”11 As Blanche wrote on December 29th, “Dr. Rickenbaugh died this morning at eleven o’clock. Mrs. Rickenbaugh died Dec. 30 fourteen years ago. His wife was the late Kathleen Gooding, a daughter of Dr. and Mrs. William Lambert Gooding. The price of the newspaper bearing the article quoted here is printed as “Three Cents.”
Beneath this diary entry for Friday the 29th, Blanche notes that her niece “Carolyn and Baird Ritter attend the Snow Ball Dance at the Y. W. C. A.” and Carolyn’s younger sister “Peggy attends a dance at Little House.” The year closes on a sober note relieved in part by the activities of young people.
An amateur poet, short story writer, and artist, Blanche had a sensitive nature. She was known to turn her students’ attention to the window pane, marveling at individual raindrops in their leisurely descent and described the crescent moon as being embraced, hence only partly visible. In a sentiment worthy of the Craighead family of naturalists, Blanche felt sympathy for a mouse that her mother had killed, pitying the creature who had appeared so unassuming and, after all, not stood in their way. She was also an ardent amateur historian who had established a history prize in the Perry County school system and oversaw the Lambert Prize for Carlisle.
In January 1974 Miriam Anna (Dum) Frey (1891-1988) wrote a letter describing a favorite family story. Written from her home at 629 So. Hanover Street, the letter was addressed to grandson Stephen D.
1 Also see, for instance, “Parker”, Gardner Digital Library; the Parker home is referred to as the “Burton Mansion”, page six, last paragraph, “In Old Bellaire”, Mary Dillon, The Century Co., c 1906,
2 Former Carlisle Indian Industrial School student Montreville Yuda (class of 1913) married a distant cousin of Blanche’s, Lillian Flickinger.
3 The receipt for her passport is affixed to the diary page and actually reads $9.00.
4 The Robbins Greenhouse and the family’s home sat directly behind the house in which Blanche lived. The alley there was later named for them, “Robbins Lane”.
5 This was Bowman’s Department Store at the time.
6 Milicent’s mother was Katie (Spotts) Line, a sister of Blanche’s mother, Annie Simons (Spotts) Dum. Paul Kitner, son of Samuel Kitner, and grandson of G. B. Dum’s sister, Sue (Dum) Kane, scored many touchdowns for Carlisle.
7 Although not herself a dormitory student, Blanche graduated Phi Beta Kappe from Dickinson College (1910). The changes of tense in her diary excerpt are her own.
8 Bob worked at Johnston’s Store as a young man. See Robert Mark Frey, Gardner Digital Library.
9 Radio broadcasts.
10 “Duncannon Bank President Held”, June 4, 1944 edition.
11 Dr. Rickenbaugh Is Dead at 58”, December 1944 edition.