John Steigleman Jr.

Transcript:

Susan Meehan: This is Susan Meehan talking. We are at the Cumberland County Historical Society in the video recording studio. It's November 20, 2014, and I am talking with John Steigleman, with the German pronunciation, who has been a long time resident of Cumberland County, and he's going to share some of his reminiscences of that period. So you were born in Carlisle?

John Steigleman Jr.: Right.

SM: The old Carlisle Hospital?

JS: Yes, it was the old Carlisle Hospital. I don't think it was too old when I was born; nevertheless I was born there in a time when women were just starting to go to hospitals to have their babies rather than at home.

SM: And you were the first born in your family, is that correct?

JS: Yes, I'm the oldest.

SM: Were your parents lifelong residents of Cumberland County also?

JS: My dad was and my mother wasn't. Actually, I guess she was. She was born in Enola; that's in Cumberland County, so she was born there, and her father was a railroad employee of the Pennsylvania Railroad back then. That's why they were down in Enola because he worked in the Enola railroad yards. I think I mentioned in my book there that he was injured down there, had a back injury, [and] couldn't work for the railroad anymore. After his back healed, he came to Carlisle to seek work and where he had also worked as a youngster. He was a teenager; he lived over in Perry County, a place called Fox Hollow just over on the other side of Sterret's Gap. He became of the age that he wanted to get a job; no work over in Fox Hollow, so he came to Carlisle. [He] worked in one of the local factories--I'm not sure which, probably a shoe factory or a clothing factory, there were a lot of them there then--for work six days a week at ten hours a day. He only got off on Sundays. Saturday night he'd hitch a ride somehow to go back home over to Perry County and spend Saturday night and Sunday with his folks and family over there. Early Sunday morning he would hike out about four miles on Fox Hollow Road to the Sterret's Gap Road, and there was an early morning mail wagon, a horse-drawn wagon [that] came across Perry County and down into Cumberland County over Sterret's Gap. He'd catch a ride there to get back into Carlisle for his job early Monday morning. He liked being at home; he had a strong sense of family. He didn't stick around Carlisle because he didn't have any family there.

SM: Did he board with a family?

JS: He boarded somewhere in Carlisle, told me it took probably two-thirds of his pay for room and board. He stayed there and ate there too. In fact, he said, "If I needed a pair of shoes, back then I might have made ten dollars a week. It cost two dollars for a pair of shoes," so that's a pretty good chunk of your pay. Just to put things in perspective, things were expensive, relatively speaking, back then just like now. Actually, things are probably cheaper now than they used to be back then, relatively speaking.

SM: So you had a chance to know him?

JS: I spoke with him frequently because I had a unique position in Carlisle. My parents, when they were young, lived about two blocks apart. Of course they were neighbors, they met, got married, [and] they bought a house on East Street a block away from her parents' house and coincidentally two blocks away from his parents' house. So as I was growing up I had grandparents, both sides of the family, two blocks one direction, one block the other direction. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents because they were easy to get to. Mom was glad to get us out of the house anyway; [she] said, "Go see your grandmother." It worked out well for her and me. So yes, he told me a lot of stories, both grandparents.

SM: And you remember them?

JS: Yes, fortunately. I don't know how, but I seem to have very good memory. I can remember things [from] when I was three years old, not very many, but a few things stood out. I read recently that usually you don't remember much from three years back because your brain's still developing and you don't have much room for memory because you're learning to do things, and what memories you have are short-term. [00:05:22.27]

SM: So then your father also had a factory-working career, is that true?

JS: Yes, my father worked, at the time I was born, at the Carlisle Shoe Company and worked there for many years until the shoe industry kind of folded up in Carlisle. There used to be five or six shoe companies in Carlisle that manufactured shoes. They had foreign competition, and that kind of closed them up. Then he went to work for Carlisle Tire & Wheel, Carlisle Tire & Rubber it was called back then, and worked for them until he retired. He held down many part-time jobs in between; he was [undecipherable]. I remember, I think I did mention in my story there that at one point things were a little bit iffy for finances when the shoe factory was closing down, so he took other jobs, part-time jobs. He worked part-time as a janitor in our church down the street, the Biddle Mission[??] Church.  My brother and I were two years apart; we would go help him evenings and weekends. He did that, and I forget what else he did do.

SM: What sort of shoes did the factory produce? Were they working shoes?

JS: These were top of the line women's designer shoes. In fact, the name of the company was I. Miller, and he was a very well-known women's shoe designer.

SM: My mother wore I. Miller shoes.

JS: Yes, and my dad worked with those his whole career. I worked there myself two summers when I was sixteen and seventeen years old.

SM: What was the nature of the work that you did?

JS: Menial, production line work. It didn't require any skills. One of them was very simple: They had this moving belt that had prongs sticking out of it on which you could put shoes. The shoes were put on wooden lasts and you could handle them by their heels because they were almost all high-heeled shoes. You'd put them upside-down with the heels pointing up onto these three prongs, and they would go through a thing up in the ceiling that dried the glue in the soles, and that was my only job. I put those things on, take them back off when they come back the other end.

SM: I'd be curious, and you may not know this, but when they make shoes in a line like that, do they do all the same style in different sizes?

JS: Different. The shoes that I handled came in what they call lots. A lot was a rack full of shoes that might have anywhere from three pairs of shoes up to a dozen pairs of shoes on it, depending on the orders that came in for whatever style they were. Sometimes there'd be a lot coming through called samples. These were from the designers, and they were hand-built. They would come through as samples, and the man who ran the room--it was called the finishing room--assigned the samples to his best workers so they would get top-notch work in them. My dad was one of the sample guys; they respected his work enough that he did most of the samples that came through his area. Each rack had a different style of shoe on them, and different colors and how high the heels were. I don't remember any flat shoes ever coming through; they were all shoes with heels on them. I remember distinctly [that] my first year there convinced me I did not want to be a factory worker the rest of my life because it was very boring work, and to relieve the boredom most people would start fights with one another. They would joke around and generally get on one another's nerves to relieve the tension.

SM: How many were employed in that particular factory?

JS: A couple hundred; I couldn't say for sure how many, but a couple hundred.

SM: Was that one of the larger factories?

JS: Yes it was. I couldn't tell you about the other factories. I knew of them at the time, but--

SM: Is that the one that was out at North Street?

JS: It was on Penn Street, Penn and Bedford, and the back of it was Elm Street, so it kind of fronted on Penn Street--actually it fronted on Bedford Street. It was a three-story high factory; it was all brick, floors were about four inches thick in there because of the heavy machinery, and the timbers that held the floors up were really big timbers, so we didn't get much vibration.

SM: Is it still standing?

JS: No, it's been torn down. But what really convinced me not to ever work in the factory was I saw one man there who'd only had the same job there for x number of years; I couldn't tell you how many, but he'd been there a long time. He was deaf, probably from the machinery that he ran, but his only job was to wax the bottoms of the shoes. When he performed his work, he had a shaft with four or five different wheels on. One was one that put the wax on the soles of the shoes, the next one buffed it, the next one buffed it, the next one finished polishing it. He went through this little routine where he shuffled from one position to the next with each pair of shoes. On the floor right where he walked, there was a groove worn about an inch deep. The man made his own rut, and he worked in it. That's pathetic. So I thought, I don't want to be like that.

SM: But to have employment for that for someone who might have a limited intellectual capacity would be a good thing.

JS: Yes, it was a good thing, certainly. People made a living out of it, even though it was very boring. [00:12:00.16]

SM: I know you mentioned several times in your genealogy stories about the Biddle Mission Church, and it seems like that was an important building in your neighborhood.

JS: Yes, because it was just down the street from me, half a block. The neighborhood children, my friends, we all went there to Sunday school and that sort of thing. So it was kind of a social thing, that's what it was. It was really old; it has since been torn down too.

SM: Is that where the Alliance Church is now?

JS: Yes, they bought it eventually. The building was too old for them to maintain. It had a slate roof and a stone building, historic building, but they couldn't afford to maintain it. So they had to tear it down and start with a new building. I thought that was a shame because it was a nice building. I helped my dad keep it clean.

SM: Yes, you know it was nice.

JS: And we attended there for years until I was a teenager.

SM: When you were in your childhood years, did you have a buddy, or was it just [that] you hung out with your brothers and sisters?

JS: I was the oldest, so the only buddy I may have had would have been a brother who was two years younger, but he and I were on different wavelengths. He was an outdoorsy type and I wasn't, so that was our big difference. I liked being outdoors, but I didn't seek outdoor activities like he did. He hunted and fished and trapped.

SM: Did you play at all in the LeTort Spring?

JS: Constantly. It was one of the main focuses of our activities in the summertime because you could fish down there, catch crabs, do whatever, go in there when it was hot, get cool, keep cool. The older teenagers then would trap in the wintertime because large numbers of muskrats inhabited the banks of the stream. So there was a major trapping industry in Carlisle. Each person would stake out a territory and put their traps in with identification tags on their traps, and the responsible ones would go every day. In fact, my father and one of his brothers, for a couple of winters, did trapping up and down behind my dad's house where he lived on East Street, and for another half mile or so up and down the stream. They'd go out before work in the mornings to work their trap line and get the muskrats they had trapped.

SM: Was their an outlet for the skins?

JS: Yes, there were several places that would buy them from you. You had to skin them, and you had to stretch the hides, and you had to dry them and that kind of stuff to sell them. But they know how to do it, and they made a little money on it, and it was fun to do.

SM: If your home was on North [Street], and LeTort was--

JS: I was on Northeast [Street].

SM: --Northeast, I'm sorry, Northeast, and LeTort was behind you, then how much farther out was their building? The whole way to the ribbon factory like now?

JS: Yes, my father's house fronted on Northeast Street. If you go down the block to where North Street is, or where Louther Street is up the other way, and go from there down to the LeTort Spring, that's how long my dad's yard was behind his house. It was fifteen feet wide and about a block long, real long, narrow yard, and we used it for gardening most of the time. Of course, in the wintertime we used it for sledding because there was a hill there, and it was half a block long. [00:15:57.17]

SM: What was the impression that you had as a child of the presence of the Barracks?

JS: I knew it was there, and we would see soldiers around town, and I knew people who--women especially--[meet a soldier out there??] and get married. I had one or two relatives that happened with. A lady who lived down the street had married a man who was a soldier. They got married and had a child, and whenever he got out of the service, he wanted to move back home out to Michigan. She didn't want to leave Carlisle because all her relatives were here, so they split up. One of my best friends, his child was this fellow whose mother wouldn't move out to Michigan; she stayed there. So he lived there with his mom and his grandmother about three doors down the street from me. I knew him very well; his name was Teddy Hoover. I knew him all through high school until he died.

SM: I was interested in your story of the temporary housing that was built along the LeTort after the war. I hadn't been aware of that. Is that where the school is now, the elementary school?

JS: There's nothing there now. It's Biddle Mission Park. Where it is relative to the spring is you go down North Street, you come to the LeTort Spring, just on the other side on the left is open space now, and it's called Biddle Mission Park there. That's where these houses were, on that corner, and there must have been--I don't know how many units, I think I mentioned maybe ten units in there. I knew that people lived in there for a good many years. They were meant to be temporary housing because they built them very cheaply, I remember that, but people lived in them for at least ten years.

SM: Were they active duty at the time?

JS: No, these had been people discharged. They were veterans who had first dibs on the houses.

SM: Were you aware that that was happening in other areas too, or was that because of the Barracks being here?

JS: No, there was another area in town where they had these same kinds of houses. Up at the corner of Hanover Street and Penn Street, where One West Penn sits right now, there are a few of those houses in there too; I don't know how many, but they were the same type of houses.

SM: That was from the federal government, not the local government?

JS: Right, it was a federal program. In fact, back then probably those houses I just talked about were probably for black veterans. They had segregation back then, not blatant, but you could see it.

SM: That was customary.

JS: It was customary, yes. That was toward the black section of town up there, that's where all the blacks lived, up above Hanover Street and Penn, in that area.

SM: You were mentioning your school experience. Were there any special teachers or outings that you took or your daily routine that you think might be interesting?

JS: Nothing stands out, though I lived just one block away from where I went to elementary school for four years. The Penn School on Bedford Street was just up the alley from where my parents' house was, so I'd walk up the alley and back every day to school, just a short distance. In fact, I made a point that almost all over town you had schools within two or three blocks of where children lived. They don't anymore.

SM: Yes, I liked your point about walking.

JS: You could walk anywhere you needed to go. Yes, I think we should get back to that.

SM: How about any other characters that might have left an impression on [your] childhood? Doctor, or minister, or music teacher?

JS: No, I appreciated my teachers, and I can't say I never knew one that I didn't like, but you know. There are times you don't like a teacher because they make you work too hard.

SM: Did you use the library system?

JS: Yes I did. I visited the Bosler Library frequently, yes.

SM: You could walk straight down to it.

JS: Well it was a good distance from where I lived down East Street. It was at least a mile.

SM: But you walked miles other [times?].

JS: Yes, sure. Well I had a bicycle by then, so I rode a bicycle everywhere from the age of ten or eleven years up. I'd bicycle over town where I needed to go.

SM: Did they have reading programs where you would get certificates, like summer reading programs?

JS: No, they didn't have anything like that that I can remember. I certainly wasn't aware of them if they were. No, I just went there and took out books as I needed them or wanted to. I read one book at least four different times. Each time I checked it out, it turns out I was the only one whoever took it out of the library. It was a weird book; I have odd tastes.

SM: Do you remember what it is?

JS: Yes, it was a book called Desert. It was about a group of monks and how they had to survive in their monastery. It was a very mysterious kind of a book, and a very exotic kind of a book, but I was the only one who ever checked it out.

SM: You should go look for it again.

JS: Yes, it might still be there. Then the other book I remember checking out, they looked at me kind of strangely because when I was in ninth or tenth grade in English class and literature class, we talked about the Canterbury Tales. I got curious; I said, "Well there's more to that than what we're learning here in school," so I went over to the library to take out Canterbury Tales. The librarian didn't think she wanted me to have it because there's X-rated stuff in it, but I took it out and I read it anyway. It was educational. [00:22:45.24]

SM: How about the Market House? Do you have memories of going there?

JS: Oh yes, we went there most Saturdays to get fresh fruits and vegetables. My great-grandfather was a truck farmer; he attended there regularly.

SM: Is that the Perry County--

JS: No, this is the one who lived in Carlisle. This is on my dad's side of the family. His name was John Glass; I think I have a whole write-up on him in there. He farmed the land that is now right below the LeTort Spring on High Street. On the left side where there's a food market now, back then that was a vacant lot; he farmed that. He also farmed on the other side of the street where there's a bunch of houses and buildings now. He grew potatoes, cabbages, whatever he could grow down there. It was close to the market, only two blocks up the street, and he grew corn and whatever down there. I had no recollection of it, that was before my time, but I have an uncle who as a teenager worked for my great-grandfather. I think I mentioned him in there; his name was George Steigleman, one of my dad's brothers. He was different than his brothers like I'm different than my brothers. I'm kind of the black sheep--actually I'm the white sheep. They're the black sheep because they all hunted and fished and all that. I would rather spend my time in a library than out hunting, and that's the way George was. He spent time with his great-grandfather by helping him with his farming—[change in video source]—rather than out hunting and fishing like his brothers. He said he didn't like hunting and fishing, so he never did it.

SM: So he had a stall at the Market House then?

JS: He had a stall at the Market House. In fact, there's a picture of him in the--one of your publications, Pictures of Cumberland County? [Steigleman may be referring to Pictorial History]

SM: Maybe the 250th, perhaps?

JS: When you started to sell it, you had a sample copy for people to look at, and if you recognized anybody there that wasn't mentioned in the [caption?], you were supposed to circle the person and write down who they were, and I did that. There was a picture of him and a man who had a stall there right at the corner of High and Hanover Streets. There was a restaurant called the Jacol, and there's a picture of my great-grandfather standing there, looking right at the camera with this other man. You have a large picture of it too somewhere in the archives. I don't know whether it has been identified or not.

SM: We'll have to look for that. That may have been in the book about the Greek restaurants.

JS: Possibly, but I don't think so. This would've been pictures of the Market House.

SM: Oh, I thought you meant he was standing by the Jacol.

JS: Yes, he was.

SM: Okay, well the Jacol was one of those Greek--

JS: That was at the corner of the Market House. They were in the first-floor corner of the Market House.

SM: So were there baked goods or candy or other good things like that in there?

JS: I couldn't tell you; there probably were in the Market House. It was pretty much on its way out when I was a child. They were getting ready to tear it down.

SM: By that time there were some pretty big food markets, right?

JS: Yes, that cut into their business. [00:26:32.18]

SM: What do you remember about Kronenberg's or any of the stores downtown? Do you have any [remembrances]?

JS: Oh yes. One of the big deals back then was a social thing on Friday nights and Saturday nights. People would go downtown and shop, go to the movies, go to a restaurant, whatever. Each spring and each fall they would have window dressing contests among the stores where they would put a typical display window in your store, and you'd go around and you would vote on the one you thought was the best one, and usually it was Kronenberg's. They did the best job of decorating. But there was Bowman's store; they did a good job of decorating too. Back then, that's how stores advertised; they would put samples of their stuff in the display window in the stores. That stood out to me. I don't think I bought too many articles of clothing in there because they were a rather expensive store; I think they were. They sold good quality stuff. Most of my clothing was bought at J. C. Penney's or Montgomery Ward's.

SM: How about the Molly Pitcher? Did you ever go into that for a meal?

JS: No, I remember of it though. I didn't know they had a restaurant.

SM: Do you remember eating out at all as a child?

JS: No, that was not too common. I can't remember my parents ever eating out [that we took the children with them?] till later, after I was in high school.

SM: What was the sort of food that your mother would make? Corn beef or chicken on Sundays?

JS: Yes, she would usually have something special on Sundays. In fact, the main meal Sundays was in the early afternoon rather than lunchtime or dinnertime. We would have a late lunch, big meal, and then it'd just be a light supper later in the evening on Sundays. The main meal of the day on Sundays was around two o'clock, between one and two o'clock. That was after church most of the time, that's how that came about.

SM: How about a car? Did your family get a car while you were still at home?

JS: No, my dad never had a car, never needed one. He could walk wherever he needed to go.

SM: So when you got a car, it must've been quite something.

JS: Yes, well he got a car later on. My grandfather had a car that he was going to trade in, and my father liked it; I'm not sure how he got a license. He never had a license as far as I know, but he got a driver's license somehow, and he bought that car from his wife's father. [He] sold him this station wagon, that's what he drove, his first car that he drove, and he usually got that to drive to work after he quit working at Carlisle Shoe and had to go to work up at Tire and Rubber because it was further away. So he had to find another way to get there. But he never had a car the whole time I was growing up. They barely had a TV set. We'd usually go to my grandparents' to watch TV Friday nights to watch the Friday night fights and to watch some of the shows that were on then on weekends.

SM: Where were the car dealerships in Carlisle at the time?

JS: Scattered about town; there were a few right in the town. One of them was a place called [LAD??] Motors at the corner of South Street and Hanover Street. There's a restaurant in there now. Fay's Country Restaurant [Kitchen] is in there now. That was their showroom where there are big windows. I think they sold Chrysler products. I'm trying to think where the rest of them were, but they were scattered about downtown, right in the downtown area, those car dealers. They had showrooms right in the stores.

SM: Did you buy your first car in Carlisle or somewhere else?

JS: Somewhere else. After I moved away from town for a short time, I moved to Delaware, needed a car, so I bought one down there, and that was my first car. Then when I came home about a year later, I bought all the rest of my cars in Carlisle.

SM: How about an ice cream place? You must have gone out for ice cream.

JS: Oh sure, there were a bunch of them. There was one notable one that people made; their name was Read, and they had an ice cream shop, and they made it all themselves. It was handmade ice cream. [It was] out on way out South Hanover Street, beyond where East Street comes out, and it was common in the summertime for us to walk--that was about a mile from our house--out to Read's for an ice cream cone, Read's Ice Cream Parlor. You could sit in there and eat too, if you wanted to. That was one I could remember of. There was one downtown Carlisle next to the library called Kohrs, K-o-h-r-s, Kohrs Ice Cream, and they had the first--I forget what you call it, soft serve ice cream now.

SM: Would that be on the corner that's now part of the library?

JS: No, it would have been the other direction. It would have been east of the old library section there.

SM: So where the Back Door Pizza [Cafe] is now?

JS: That's exactly where they were, they were in there. Yes, that was kind of a hangout for teenagers back then, of course. [00:32:56.16]

SM: How did you get your connection with Dickinson?

JS: Well it was rather left-handedly. My wife and I met and got engaged, and at the time I worked at a store in Carlisle where I got laid off because their business slowed down, and it was at a particularly bad time because there were no jobs available around Carlisle. I didn't realize it at the time until I was out of a job and couldn't find one, so there was a recession going on.

SM: Would this have been in the late fifties?

JS: This would have been the late fifties, '58 and '59, like 1959, and early '60. My wife and I went to church regularly where she went to church, and after we got engaged I just joined her church. It was the Church of Christ out on A Street where they had their building that they met in. We went one Sunday night after I was out of a job--I had worked at a bunch of temporary jobs--and I met somebody there from the college that was a professor who was a friend of one of the other church members, and I was introduced to this man. He asked all the usual polite questions, where I worked and what I did and all that kind of stuff. The next morning, he called me at home wondering if I'd be interested in a job. He said, "Do you have a regular job?" I said, "No I don't. I've been working in temporary jobs." He said, "Would you like a regular job?" I said, "Sure, what is it?" "It's hard to explain," he said. "Could you come in and I'll show you." So I went in to the physics department at Dickinson College. The man's name was Henry Yeagley. He had come down from Penn State; they hired him to organize a physics department. He was used to having a technician at Penn State, didn't have one here at Dickinson. He had a part-time man he hired as a machinist to do some of the work that needed done, but he was looking for a full time person. I asked him why he thought I might be qualified. He said, "I've looked at your high school record. You had some math and science courses in school and did very well at it. You should do well at this." In fact, he said, "It's going to be a learning experience because it's not the kind of job you can train for. You have to just learn to do it as it comes up." So I spent four years learning to be a technician. [00:35:41.07]

SM: Think you mastered it?

JS: I hope so.

SM: He probably replaced you with three people.

JS: Actually he replaced me with a guy who turned out to be just a machinist because that was 80 percent of the job. The other 20 percent was more fun because I got to help design and build a lot of scientific equipment, both research equipment and equipment for the students to learn about physics. There was one landmark program that one of the professors, in my later years, organized a thing called Workshop Physics where the students would actually not study too much outside of class, but they would do hands-on stuff in the lab to learn physics rather than out of a book. So I got to build a lot of small equipment things for them to learn physics which you could not buy commercially. It was fun because it was stuff that had not been built before and nobody else built. After I was finished and she organized this whole thing, somebody asked her, "Where can you get this? Where can you get that?" She said, "You can't, you have to have someone build it for you, a technician." "We don't have a technician available." At one point I got to build a couple things for other colleges part-time on my own time and got paid extra for it. That was kind of fun, and it's still in use today. In fact, they had online that she said that some people wanted to build their own stuff, but they didn't know how to do it. So I wrote how to do it, instructions, how to build these simple things to use in the labs for the students using ordinary materials you could get out of a hardware store. That's what we aimed for. So there are some articles online yet with my name on them that have drawings in [them] and how you do this: buy this and do this to it, this is the size you make it, and this is how you put it together, and that kind of thing. It was just a how-to-do-it manual kind of a thing. That was fun; I learned a lot doing that, learned how to use a computer-aided design program to make the drawings, and that was fun. So I had a really fun job, it was more fun than job. It wasn't that tedious. It was a little exasperating at times because you had to try to figure things out, and sometimes things didn't come really quickly. So that's what I spent forty years doing at Dickinson College, doing that kind of thing. The latest thing that I built was a thing called a positron accelerator, a quite extensively complicated device which we built all in one summer. It was one of the few devices I ever built that worked the first time we tried it, never had to do any modifications or messing around with it to make it work. It worked the first time. Like I said, we spent a whole summer building it, me and two students whose project it was. We put it together, I said, "Let's try it out," we tried it out, and it worked so well they started taking their data for their paper; they were doing a special paper on it. They did their data-taking in two days, shut the thing down, [and] it's never been used since. It got used for two total days, and we spent months building it, and nobody also ever used it after that. As far as I know, it's still sitting in the attic over in the physics department. Nobody knows what it is now because we got new professors. "There's that aluminum thing sitting up in the attic, we don't know what it is," you know.

SM: Interesting. This goes back into town here, the question that I'm meant to ask you. You mentioned in your recollections of people a woman who had one leg shorter than the other, and she was one of your neighborhood characters. Do you remember a man who had a similar--his first name was Charlie. He lived on Pomfret Street, I think, but he would come around on East, and he had a built-up shoe.

JS: Did he walk with braces?

SM: Yes he did.

JS: He had special canes?

SM: Yes.

JS: I think I mentioned him in there, I think we called him Josh.

SM: Oh, I think his name was Charlie.

JS: It might have been Charlie.

SM: I wondered whether you knew anything more about him because he sounds like a character.

JS: He sounds familiar, but this guy that I knew worked in a junkyard. I don't know what your Charlie did.

SM: Well I think he had long since stopped working regularly when I knew him.

JS: Did he smoke a pipe?

SM: Yes.

JS: That's him.

SM: He had been kicked by a horse when he was a young man and injured.

JS: Oh I didn't know that. [00:41:18.16]

SM: Anything that has come to your mind while we were talking here that you wanted to expand on?

JS: I was kind of hoping you would have something you wanted some expansion on. In fact, I do better probably at writing than I do actual interviewing here because I have time to think about it, read it back and forth and correct it, change it, do whatever I need to do.

SM: Your father, his war service, did you have anything that you wanted to mention about that? Did he talk about it?

JS: Most World War II veterans did not talk extensively about their exploits because they didn't consider them exploits. They figured it was a job to be done, they got it done, and they wanted to forget it. They did what they did, what they needed to do, that was what the whole attitude was, I think, among most of them. There were a few people who remembered a lot, and I don't know whether they enjoyed doing it, but they thought it was important enough that they would tell other people about it. But my father, he had a few experiences that he mentioned to me, one of which was he was in a reconnaissance group. They were out at night one time, searching for--whom they knew was in the neighborhood--a German tank battalion. They were out snooping around through these woods, that also had valleys in [them] and streambeds and a lot of hills, but they heard some engines running, and they heard some people talking. Now they knew there were some Americans in the same general area, but they weren't sure; back then communications weren't like they are today. So the platoon leader said, "John, Steigleman, [undecipherable], try and sneak down through these bushes there and see if you can hear what people are saying. See if you can tell whether they're German or American." They could hear the tanks sitting there idling, but they couldn't tell from the idling whether they were American or German. It's only when they were running [that] they could tell the difference. So Dad went down through these bushes and went down, and he couldn't really quite make it out. He thought he would shout something and find out if he got a response. He did: they shot at him. He shouted, "Friend or foe," or something, and he said it got awfully quiet. He thought, That doesn't seem good, and he started working his way back up the hill. Of course they started shooting through the bushes where he was, where they heard the voice coming from. The way Dad told it, he said, "I think I broke the hundred-yard dash record going uphill through the brush." He said, "I got back to the platoon leader. He says, 'Well?'" He said, "Well what do you think? I think we ought to get out of here. We know where they are." [00:44:32.13]

SM: Now would there have been other men from Carlisle in his unit?

JS: No, he wasn't with anybody from around here. He was the oldest man in his unit. The men would call him Pappy because he was twenty-three years old when he joined up. He didn't really have to because he had two children at home, and he was older, but his brothers all went in. None of them were married yet. But he went in because his brothers were in, and he wanted to do his part. So that's why he went in.

SM: Did his brothers come back also?

JS: Yes, everybody came back all in one piece, not necessarily good shape, but physically they were okay. His brother George, an uncle, was a combat medic, and George was pretty well psychologically shot when he got home. My grandfather told me, "Your uncle George when he got home was very quiet. He spent a whole month sitting in his room listening to the radio and didn't go out and do much of anything." In later years, I took care of Uncle George; he didn't have any children. After his wife died, I would look after him and see that he got what he needed, and I tried to draw him out to talk a little bit about it. There were only a few things he would talk about, but not much. He told me one time [that] the only German he ever came across the whole war was one German soldier they picked up who was not in very good shape. He had been shot in the leg, and he [George] said he died from gangrene while he was with them because it was already infected by the time they got him. They tried their best. George ended up being in charge of a field hospital, like the chief nurse. He was a chief medic. He was in charge of making sure they had all their supplies and had a duty roster to make up every day for everybody and all that kind of stuff. In fact, I've looked through some of his papers that he left after he died, and there was a paper in there, one of his rosters that he'd typed out years ago with the names of the guys who were to be on duty that day. But yes, that's what he did, and in fact, whenever he was down at the nursing home--he was down at the nursing home his last three years--when it got into his later days, the hospice came in and we talked with hospice, and he had told them that he was a medic in World War II. They said, Did you follow up being in the medical field after you came back? He said, "No, I've seen enough of that kind of stuff. I did something completely different." But the only story I can remember him telling me was one day they were sitting out somewhere, sunning themselves and doing their laundry. He said, "We used to wash our socks out every day. The big thing was to keep your feet in good shape, and taking a bath out of my helmet which was used as a wash basin. All of a sudden there was a sniper shooting at us. I had a towel laying beside me, the towel moved, [and] I figured that [it] was time to get away from there." That's the only time he told me about it, that's the only thing he told me about that sort of thing, being shot at himself. The other thing was they were in an old barn somewhere, had set up a field hospital inside of an old barn, when a bomb came in and lodged in the wall of the barn. It was a dud, didn't go off. Turns out it was an American plane; it thought it was a German position, and they bombed it. Fortunately it didn't go off, so he was very fortunate there.

SM: Those angels were watching over him.

JS: Yes, I told him, "It wasn't your time yet, George." [00:48:38.14]

SM: How about Agnes? Do you have memories of Agnes and the flooding?

JS: Hurricane Agnes? Oh yes, I remember, it was pretty major. I lived in a part of town at the time, I lived in the 200 block of North Pitt Street, up in the high part of town. We thought, We're safe here, and I had a next-door neighbor who was a little worried. He was a law school student renting the house next-door to me. We started getting water in our basement. It didn't flow in, it came up through the basement floor, so the water table was very high. My house was an old house with a dirt floor, so there was nothing to impede--the water came up about three feet into the basement. So he worried, "Oh my, what are we going to do if your house floods?" I said, "The house isn't going to flood. Until you see water laying on the streets outside and it doesn't go away, don't worry about it." So that was my recollection of it. One story my wife and I are fond of telling was we had a cat at that time. His litter box was in the basement, and whenever it got wet down there, we took his litter box and brought it up and sat it next to the basement door so at least he could find it. But his deal was whenever it was time for him to do anything, he would dash down the steps, do his business, and come back up. There was no place for him to go down any steps; he got confused. So what he would do [was] he'd go into the other room where there were stair steps, went to the second floor, he'd go up there and then come down there and go to the pot. So we knew every time he needed to go, he'd go up the steps then come trotting down to go to the litter box.

SM: Did you go out and look around at any of the--

JS: No, we knew not to go out and get in the way of everybody trying to keep themselves straightened out. I watched TV and watched what was happening down the Susquehanna River. I guess the local creek flooded a lot, backed up into people's yards. Being along the banks of LeTort Spring, my father never got water in his basement. The water came up maybe two or three feet up into his yard, not very far. In fact, we had sudden thunderstorms where the water would come up a lot more than that. This was just a steady rain that kind of drained off as it rained. So my personal recollection was that that was the only thing; I had three feet of water in my basement.

SM: How about Dickinson? Was that affected?

JS: Not very much, not that I can remember [of everybody flooding up there??]. I went to work every day except the days when their basement was full of water, but that was only for about three days till we got that to drain out. So that's all I can remember of the Agnes Flood. None of my family was directly affected by it.

SM: That was fortuitous.

JS: Yes.

SM: I had something else, it slipped my mind. Oh, because this coming year is the year of the mill, because we're publishing a book about the water-powered mills in Cumberland County, do you have any memories of seeing any of the mills?

JS: No. The only thing I can remember was out along the Conodoguinet Creek where the town had a power plant at one time. I remember that; it wasn't operating, it had long since stopped operating, but I knew it was there. I wondered about it, and somebody told me that was an electric power plant at one time out there for Carlisle. But I never saw any of the mills working, except perhaps out at Barnitz. That was still a working mill when I was young, but I was never out there to see it. I just knew it was there, and it was still working. [I] didn't ever know anybody that worked in them. [00:53:08.25]

SM: Well that's about it for the questions that I had prepared for you, unless you have something else that you would like to--

JS: Nothing specific right now, but if there's anything you would like me to expand on, I'll be happy to write more.

SM: That's great.

JS: I'd love to, as a matter of fact. I like doing it. Now there are other people who might be interested.

SM: Yes, that would be good.

JS: I'd like to give you some names.

SM: Yes, why don't you do that?

JS: William [Alwood??], I just talked to him yesterday. He's the former fire chief of Carlisle. Now if you would give me something with a name and phone number, I'll get him to call you because he told me he'd definitely be interested. He lived in my neighborhood too, as a matter of fact, on East Street. He lived on East North Street, up around the corner of where I lived. He's a few years older than me, so [you] might want to catch him sooner than later.

SM: Sounds like he would have some interesting information.

JS: He will, he will have some interesting stories about any fires that happened in Carlisle. You'd have firsthand information during the time he was fire chief. Another friend of mine who might be interested [is] William Hench Sr. I think his--I forgot to bring with me--his wife wrote something similar to what I wrote about recollections of living in Carlisle. Hers wasn't as extensive as mine; she lived in downtown Carlisle, and I lived in a different kind of a neighborhood.

SM: They were very distinct in a way.

JS: Yes, because we knew people who lived in apartments downtown who had a different kind of a lifestyle than we did.

SM: Well thank you very much for sharing your stories and your time.

JS: Anytime, I'd be glad to come back.

SM: Marvelous, really, it's a treat to hear them. I wish I could go back and be in Carlisle in that time period, even just for one day. It must have been just so totally different.

JS: It was. I think I did mention somewhere in my book there that people seemed to get along better then. I'm not sure, they seemed to know one another and weren't belligerent toward one another like people are today. Everybody cooperated more. I remember, like I said in there too, that people were generally kind to children. I never knew anybody being mean to a child, unless it was their own child.

SM: Then they had the right.

JS: Yes. [00:56:10.03] End of interview