Jean Eschenmann

Troy Ehrensberger: This is Troy Ehrensberger with Jean Eshenmann. It is March 26, right around 12:45. So Jean let’s just begin with a little background information, you said you were born here, lived all your life here. So what was it like growing up in Shippensburg?

Jean Eshenmann: It was very different from growing up in Shippensburg today. We were a small town, and the college was a small college. You knew practically everybody in town. You took a walk in the evening and you walked down and people were sitting out on their porches and you knew all your neighbors. There was no T.V., there was radio but you know people enjoyed people. It was just a small town. As far as I know, I don’t know if we had keys to our houses when I was growing up. The doors were never locked. Nobody ever locked their doors. And you wouldn’t do that today. But it wasn’t foolish at that time, in the first place, I was born in 1925, so I lived through the depression, and my parents did. We really didn’t have anything anyone would want to steal, I guess. Unless it would’ve been food. But it was just a nice little small town at the time, and the people who were professors at the university were part of the community and belonged to clubs and organizations, and helped with our Girl Scout troops. Dr. Mulder was at the college at the time and his daughter Louise was in my Girl Scout group, and so he named us the Pleiades, the seven sisters. There were seven of us in our scout group. And so he would take us out to the college and let us look through the microscopes and the telescopes and everything. It was just a very friendly relationship, and it’s amazing how many of the boys went to the service and came back. A lot of them were able to go to college who wouldn’t have been able to go. They wouldn’t have had the G.I. Bill.

TE: So a lot of your….

JE: my classmates. I graduated in 1942, in the end of May, so the December before that had been Pearl Harbor. And that really was very life changing to most of us, because we though we knew what we wanted to do when we graduated. But some of our boys left school and didn’t even finish the second semester. They enlisted and left and so it was. We grew up in a hurry. But it was a very pleasant experience.

TE: Wow. That’s great. So was there, you mentioned there was a lot of clubs and things like that, were there a lot of local hang out spots that kids would go to?

JE: Well in the late 1930’s and early 40’s, as I said, I graduated in 1942, the hangout was the V Shop. Where we’d feed the nickelodeon and dance, and also the M&N Restaurant, which was up on Lurgan Avenue. The very last street up in town. And we would go up their every Friday night and feed the jukebox and dance. Today I guess kids would have to be hauled there and maybe because of the situation in the town and so forth, it’s necessary, but we walked. I lived in the east end of town, almost out this far and you know we started, two or three of us started and then as we walked along we’d gather up until we had quite a gang walking up until we got to Lurgan Avenue, and so that and the activities at the school, you know basketball games and football games in the fall, and baseball games in the summer were about it. We had two movies in town at the time, which you don’t have today. But it was as I said, a pleasant experience because we really knew practically everybody in town. You knew where they lived

TE: Yeah, that’s a nice way to go up, that small town mentality. That’s how I grew up was in a small town. It was a little bigger than Shippensburg, but you knew your surrounding neighborhoods and everybody. It was very nice.

JE: It was even before the days of organized sports for kids because my boys, who were born in the late forties, they never played Little League ball or anything that was just starting. The kids in the neighborhood formed their own and they played baseball, according to their rules, but they are…they changed pretty often I think but that was alright. It gave them a good experience of working and playing with neighborhood kids, you know and they weren’t under anyone’s supervision. They were out playing until dusk, when it started to get dark they’d come home in the summer, and so it was very pleasant for me and even them. And even after it was starting to change, they were in high school and now of course it’s completely different.

TE: I was going to say, now you almost have to pull teeth to get kids out of the house. Now you mentioned the V shop, or the Varsity Shop, was there any other local stores, I know last semester we worked on a project on Orange Street, and we mentioned Bigler’s Store was a popular spot. Was there any popular local run store that…

JE: Well most people use the grocery stores in their area and I did as part of a program for the historical society about two years ago and they gave me the period from the thirties to the sixties, and Dr. Freeman took over after that. But I was surprised that I found more than thirty little corner grocery stores in Shippensburg at that period of time. Almost there was a corner grocery store on almost every corner. And at that time it was at Winters, the grocery store where Bigler’s is, and when Art came back from the service, Mr. Winters was retiring and he bought that, but he’s just one of many corner grocery stores. There was one on the corner where the Members First Bank is now, across from Sheetz. There was a little grocery store there and we at the time lived in the 400 block of East King Street and my boys were second or third grade and there were a group of neighborhood boys. So one day I went into the grocery store and the men started to laugh and they say “well here she comes.” And I said, “now what?” And they said, “if you could’ve seen your son the other day.” And I knew which one, I said, “Kurt” and they said yes and said what did he do? He said this group of kids, six or seven of them, came walking in. They went back to the freezer and they all pulled out a popsicle or whatever it was they wanted and they walked up to the register and my son was in the lead and said, “put it on the bill.” And they walked out. Well I didn’t have a bill, but a lot of mothers did who worked because then if the children needed something they could go to the store if they need a can of soup for lunch or something and they’d put it on the bill and when the parents were paid at the end of the week, they went in and paid their bill. You know, so they had been playing and decided it was hot and they wanted some ice cream but nobody had any money. And the one little boy said, “well you don’t need money up here at the store.” And they said, “what do you mean?” And he said, “you just get what you want and they put it on the bill and walk out.” [laughter] Well my son never did it again. He learned to understand it. But they said it was just priceless to see these kids come there just as important as they could be, without a qualm just took what they wanted and put it on the bill an walked out. [Laughter] So as I say times have changed. Sometimes I say, I’ve lived too long. This isn’t the world I wanted to remember.

TE: Yeah it’s a lot different now. I can’t imagine any store doing that…

JE: It isn’t that friendly neighborhood, trusting life that we grew up in.

TE: Yeah anymore it’s all business. You know it’s all money.

JE: So in the town there were, I don’t remember now, there was thirty-one or thirty-two grocery stores I found, from Queen Street, because this development was not in yet at that time. It was just starting. Orange Street was just starting. It was still R.F.D. on Orange Street and out here. So from Queen Street, west up to Lurgen Avenue, there were thirty-one corner grocery stores that I could remember. There might’ve been a few more.

TE: That so surprising because you walk through town now you might find a few local shops. Wow, it’s strange how that…

JE: Of course we didn’t have a big assortment, but you know today you walk in and there’s shelf after shelf of cereal and all that sort of stuff. We had maybe a couple kinds and whatever and if you couldn’t find what you want, the clerk got it for you and brought it to you and rang it up.

TE: That sounds a lot nicer than it is now. Now you go in and you barely…

JE: One of the biggest, and it wasn’t on the corner really, Hawkersmith’s grocery store, which was…do you know today where Knute’s is? It’s cattycorner across the street from that. I think there’s a beauty parlor or something in there and Hawkersmith’s was on this side of the alley. And it was a family run store. They had started in a little corner store, where the pizza place is across from Aruga’s or whatever.

TE: Oh ok, yeah I know where…

JE: They started there then moved down. And Saturday night was a big deal in town. I can’t get over going through town now on a Saturday night and its dead as a doornail, because everybody came to town, on Saturday Night. All the farmers and all the people that lived in town went downtown. In fact many people, the husband would drive the car down and park it on King Street and walk home and then the family would walk down that night and then they had a place to sit while they visited the people that came to town and they could have a ride home. And it was booming. The stores were all open and it was just crowded. Mike Billes would get out his peanut roaster and had it set up over in front of his store. It was just…Murphy’s was a gathering place and I know even in the late, the forties, I’d take my boys uptown on a Friday night and my grandmother’s sisters came in from off of farms and they came in and you know you’d see them standing up at Murphy’s. It was up until the late, or I guess it was the beginning of the fifties it was pretty much…

TE: Ok. That sounds pretty nice…

JE: Of course the college grew. They were in trouble for a while because they didn’t have students. Of course they’re facing depression age and so forth, but when the boys came back from the service they used their G.I. Bills and that’s when the college started to grow and the town started to grow. Because as the college grew there was more faculty and the faculty needed places to live and businesses moved in, S.K.F. and some of the others.

TE: At that time, I was curious…so when the campus was growing in the fifties, would the students come down and was it a good relationship?

JE: They didn’t come down to town as much. No they had pretty much their own. I know when I, as a said with the Girl Scout troop I was in, we loved to go up to Stew Hall, which was the old gym and watch our student teachers all dance. We’d get up on that track that goes around, you know, Mr. Mulder would take us up there and let us stand and we’d watch our student teachers dancing with their girlfriends. [Laughter] It didn’t take much to please us in those days.

TE: Yeah I know I’m working on a project with the history department right now on an oral history of Stewart Hall. So I’ve been listening to interviews of past alumni talking about the dances and things like that. Just listening to that I was curious because most of them don’t mention, they would either go home on weekends and wouldn’t really go downtown.

JE: Well most of them didn’t have cars to start with. And when I was in high school, the only people that had cars were boys who were farm boys and they had a car and they would fill it up with kids from neighboring farms on their way into town because there were no school buses. If you didn’t have a way to school after finishing eighth grade in a country school, your schooling was over unless you had someone who could get you in. I know one of our high school girls came in with her aunt. She lived out by Roxbury and she’d come in with an aunt who worked at one of the factories. So she was here before seven o’ clock in the morning and then had to wait until after five, when school was over, till her aunt was done working to take her home. And she was a good example because then her mother would bring her as far as the aunt’s in the morning and pick her up there in the evening and take her back to her farm, and then that didn’t work out anymore, so for a year she lived with a girl she had made friends with in school down at Walnut Bottom area and she moved in there and lived there for a year. And the lady wouldn’t take any money or anything. They were friends, her daughter and this girl, and she just took her in. Then her boyfriend who was two years older went to the service. And she just didn’t have ways in and so forth and things were rough. She was from a big family and so forth. And they got married and she went with him as long as he was in the states. Then, of course, when he was shipped overseas she had an allotment that she could rent a little apartment in town. She ended working at the University years later and her husband was in the family business and they got along fine. But you know it was hard to finish twelve grades.

TE: Oh wow, yeah I can’t imagine…

JE: And most of our parents were happy to see us graduate from high school. Neither one of my parents had gone that far in school. They grew up on farms.

TE: Yeah I wouldn’t never thought of that.

JE: And so it’s a different situation, but at that time you’ve got to remember that a high school graduation could get you jobs that today a bachelor’s degree will get you.

TE: Yeah it’s a big difference.

JE: Our girls in the business course or commercial courses, they called it, could come out and get jobs in lawyer’s offices and doctor’s offices, you know that sort of thing, typing and short handing and that stuff from high school. Though a high school education was important. Then Letterkenny moved in and a lot of the girls went up there and really made out very well that had been in the commercial course.

TE: Now would this be during World War Two then?

JE: Right after the war, or during the war.

TE: Now did Letterkenny employ a lot of people from town? Because I know…

JE: And that’s what brought people into the town. People got jobs there and moved here. That’s the time when the town started to grow. Up until that time we were a one horse town. Maybe two horse town. Orrstown was a one horse town and Newburg was one horse, but we were a two horse town.

TE: Let’s see what do we got here…

JE: But to get back to your question, no there was not a lot of town and gown at that time. Except because, the campus kind of they had everything they needed there they had the dining hall and they had Stew Hall and athletics, you know. And very few cars on campus.

TE: So it was sorta separate between them and town. I guess it’s sorta like that even today, in some ways. I come into town a lot to eat, but other than that there’s not much really.

JE: We don’t have much to offer. [Laughter]

TE: Yea not many hang out spots.

JE: No.

TE: So you mentioned, you remember when the turnpike was being constructed. Now how did that change the town at all, also?

JE: It changed the town because a lot of people, including my grandmother, took in borders, men who were working, on the turnpike. And they had a room there and she gave them an evening meal and packed them a lunch, gave them breakfast and packed them a lunch to take to work and a lot of people did that. Took them in as because as far as hotels and stuff, and anyways it was cheaper for them to go at a place. They probably lived at my grandmother’s place and got three meals a day for maybe five dollars a week.

TE: Oh wow! [Laughter]

JE: But you much remember at the same time Burkhart’s Restaurant was serving twenty-five cent meals. You know their blue plate special for twenty-five cents.

TE: Different times.

JE: It was a completely different, different way. There were quite a few, well I don’t want to say quite a few but there were girls in town who married men who came here working on the turnpike.

TE: So were most of the workers from different areas brought in through the work relief programs and stuff like that…

JE: The C.C.C. camps also brought quite a few people to town.

TE: So were they mostly from Pennsylvania these workers came from or from everywhere do you know?

 JE: Most of the ones that I knew were from Pennsylvania. A lot of them were from, like the mining districts and so forth. But as you know they got so much pay but so much of it was sent home to their family. Then they had a little bit to..and they lived almost like on an army barracks. You know, it’s the same type of thing that they lived in, but there were some girls from town who married these guys and they settled here and their families are still here.

TE: That’s great. So it did help…

JE: So it was a combination of things that had helped the town to grow. I guess I want to use the word help. But you know a combination of the C.C.C. camp, and there was an organization for the girls and they lived out by where the Catholic church is now out by the old Hosfield house. And they were taught, some of them worked in restaurants here, waitresses and they taught them to sew and that sort of thing, and trained them like a female part of the C.C.C.

TE: That’s interesting. You mentioned you worked with the university, volunteer work. When did you start volunteering with the university.

JE: Well let’s see, I started back…I know the Davis House was still the foundation house at that time. I’m saying I started about in the sixties.

TE: So sixties.

JE: And then we got interested in, by this time then the boys are grown and they’re out on their own, you know. And we got interested in the sports. My husband was always very sports minded and we started going to football games and so forth, and I think I told you I ended up being president of Century Club, which was the money making thing for the football team at the time. And then one thing kind of led to another, you know I started out stuffing envelopes there and working with the foundation and still do that. And then the Luhrs Center was built and I was one of the first ones. They said, “hey we’re gonna need volunteers there too, so.” And it came at a time that was nice for me. I don’t want to use the word nice that doesn’t sound right. It was very opportune for me because my husband had passed away and my evenings were lonely. And so I started volunteering at Luhrs and I’ve been there, for I don’t know how much longer, you know as long as I can still help them I will. I still do that and help at the foundation.

TE: Did a lot of people volunteer up at the university from town?

JE: Well they have a list of people that come in and it keeps changing. I keep saying the women that were doing the mailing and so forth when I started are all gone. I’m the only one of those older ones that are still. Well Marthy Eastep is still living but she’s in Florida, and she’s one hundred and two or three now. She’s in a home in Florida. But Libby Nispool, Thelma Franklin, all those women are..Helen Krauss, there all gone. But it’s a way that it keeps the people interested in the university and so forth and a lot of the alumni come. When we have a big mailing out there, there will be alumni who came from the west shore, up to work there, and from York to spend and volunteer a day’s time to come up and help.

TE: I know a lot of the alumni, just working with that oral history project and so many mention that they’ll always come back and help out.

JE: And I think I did tell you my husband and I are honorary alumni.

TE: Oh really.

JE: Yes at the university they made us honorary alumni.

TE: That’s great. [Laughter] So you also established that scholarship with the university.

JE: Yes. When my husband passed away the boys and I decided that instead of flowers we would give to a scholarship for a Lady Raiders basketball player. And it was just supposed to be in his name, but the boys and the university insisted that my name be on it too, so it’s the Dick and Jean scholarship. But it was really started in his time.

TE: Oh ok. That’s great.

JE: After he passed away, because we’d been very interested in the sports there. We used to go to the away games too but then we realized in football season we really didn’t have any business being over the mountain and going up to Slippery Rock and on up further, so Mansfield. But I still go to all the local home games. I got to a couple of the away football games this year and of course I always tailgate. And I always have to take two hot apple pies to tailgating. And I think now that I’m ninety I should be relieved of that, but they say oh no. [Laughter] So we’ll see. But now the games start earlier you really have to get up early in the morning to have a hot apple pie ready by ten o’ clock. Because tailgating starts at ten o’ clock instead of eleven. You know, but anyways it’s lots of fun and I met a lot of friends and a lot of interesting people, parents and students and alumni that come back.

TE: That sounds great.

JE: Both of our boys are alumni from out there, they graduated from there.

TE: You mentioned Hurricane Agnes that hit in ’72. Can you just describe for me what it was like for Shippensburg.

JE: Yes I can remember because we had an in ground swimming pool at our place. We lived on Ridge Avenue, which is out Walnut Street. You go off of Garfield and go up a hill. Ridge Avenue is only a block long that runs from Garfield Street up to Walnut Street. And anyway we had and the neighbors all came and got the water out of our pool to use for dishes and that sort of thing because we didn’t have water service. Now they didn’t drink it. It was treated with chlorine and was probably as safe as what we were drinking, but I can remember a young couple who lived in an apartment across the street. They still say when they see me, “I don’t know what we would’ve ever done during Agnes if we couldn’t come over and got water out of your swimming pool to rinse out diapers, because there were no disposable diapers at this time, you know. So they’d come and get water and heat to take some kind of bird bath or something, but it was a very popular spot at the time because it was pure water. Now I don’t know, I wouldn’t have suggested anyone drink it but it was pure and we kept it that way during the time so the neighbors, and us too. I used it to wash dishes.

TROY EHRENBERGER: Now how long was the area affected by that?

JE: Oh just a couple weeks.

TE: So just a couple weeks.

JE: And I can remember my husband at that time we were just starting in the antique business and one of the auctioneers in town came and asked him to go out to [Hockleberry Land?] which you probably don’t know where that is. It’s out in the South Mountain. It was real primitive. The people that lived there, you know it was very Appalachia place out in there and he had to go out to a house. And he asked my husband if he could come out and appraise the thing of what was left of the furniture just so they could settle, because it was completely gone, you know. But there was one piece of furniture that my son bought, the one that’s was at Virginia Tech, and he liked it. So he was in school at the time, in college and he refinished it and has it in his house today. That he bought from that estate, one of the pieces that could be salvaged and then the auctioneer, anything else that could be salvaged the auctioneer took but there was very little. There were scads of newspapers and magazines that were ruined that would’ve been, you know, there wasn’t the computer that has it all on the computer then. Some of those early newspapers would’ve been of great interest.

TE: ; Oh yeah, I bet.

JE: But it effected not just the town but. And as I said, I know Dick and I took a walk one night and we walked over there to the Branch Bridge, you know, by the library and the house across the street. And here was water flowing out of there basement across the street. They had opened the basement windows so the water could run out. [Laughter] So it really was an experience.

TE: Yeah I can imagine.

JE: And an eye opener to a lot of people.

TE: Yeah like I said, I never thought of that. I grew up in western PA. We never got hit by hurricane weather. We’d get little downpours here and there but I never thought of a hurricane hitting Pennsylvania. That’s interesting.

JE: And the Newburg area was very bad hit because the creek there was back half a mile or so over the land and you know you couldn’t get out.

TE: So you said you and your husband worked with the historical society here in Shippensburg. Working there, does that connect you closer to the town and I know you guys mostly do local history so is there any specific period you guys…

JE: My husband was very interested in the French and Indian War era. He figured that everything had been written about the Civil War that could be written. There were books after books after books and research had been done. And this area was a hot bed for French and Indian War so he got interested in that and researching that and that’s what started this map thing because it was the first land owners from mountain to mountain. So then after he passed away, Mr. Stewart in Carlisle gave money so that his maps could be protected and so forth. For Paul Barner to continue, who had gotten interested and he’s still working today on it. It’s much easier today for him because much of this stuff is now on the computer, where Dick would have to write a letter down to the state and ask for sections and patens or give them the number and then it would take a couple weeks until he’d get them and often times they were wrong. And then they asked him, well won’t you help us with this because it would be the number that he sent them but it would be for some place out in the western part of the state. You know, not here. The number was right but it was for the wrong place. And so he got very interested in that period of time. But local history we were always interested in. We gave the historical society all his local pottery that was made in Shippensburg, when he died. And we sent a set of chairs that had been made here early and local history he was always interested in. Other than local history, his interest was the French and Indian War. And that’s unusual because his grandfather fought in the Civil War, but he just felt that there was a lot of information on that and there had been research. But near the time before he died, we could see how, when we would visit some of these places that they would be enlarging parking lots or they could be you know, the interest was growing. And now there’s a lot of interest in the French and Indian War in this area.

TE: Yeah that’s actually, for Dr. Burg’s class, I’m doing my research paper on the Pittsburgh region but right after the French and Indian War, so I’ve been doing some research on that. It’s very interesting period. It’s neat. It’s pretty interesting because I noticed you can’t really do research on Pittsburgh without tying it into Carlisle and Shippensburg and all the areas there. And I think that covers most of my questions. Is there anything else you would think to be important the history of Shippensburg that you can remember that’s significant?

JE: Well I think one of the important things is that the historical society has really grown. It started out as more of a little social group, meeting in the Luhrs, Henry Luhrs’ house, he and his wife. And members today can’t understand. We were in a meeting one time, well not a meeting, but another thing and I mentioned, it was a Civic Club meeting for women there and I mentioned that Dick and I were interested in joining the Newville Historical Society. And they said, “why would you join Newville?” And I said, “well we’re both interested in history.” Two or three years before that we had told a member of the historical society that we would be interested in joining and we were told that as soon as there was an opening they would let us know. Well we had waited over two years. And these women said, “what do you mean an opening?” And evidently the person we had contacted was the wrong person, you know, and so we joined Shippensburg instead of Newville because it made sense, and became very active and very interested in it. But up until that time it was just..and now, you know, in fact it’s growing and people are giving things because before they had a place to meet. They met over at the library but they didn’t have a place to store stuff. A lot of stuff that people had given never ended up really with…anyway, so people are getting interested more interested in the history of the town. And I think the historical society has really created that interest and they’re growing because of it. There are more people interested in research genealogy and the history of things and that sort of thing.

TE: I know just being down there last semester and doing research there it’s a very well set up and all the workers are very helpful. It’s always nice.

JE: It’s nice to see it grow.

TE: Well I think that’s about it Jean.

JE: Alrighty, I hope something of what I said will be of help to you. I kind of ramble a lot.