Pilgrimage of Joy . . .

CRITICAL TIMES DURING WORLD WAR I
by W. Carl Ketcherside

The little congregation made its greatest progress under the efforts of the men who constituted it. No other argument for the power of the gospel was as strong as that of the lives of men who had been completely transformed. Rude miners, listening to a man imported from afar to convert them, had little hope of ever becoming like such a well-dressed professional who harangued them nightly, but they could identify with those who daily descended into the shaft on the same cage with them. So effective did L. E. become that when he was assigned a new partner on his drill the rest of the miners said, “Well there goes another future member of the Campbellites.” And they were more often correct than not.

L. E. and my father were not content to keep the gospel in our village. They thought it should be sounded out and not sounded in. They lived for the study of the Word and wherever they could band together a few saints in some backwoods schoolhouse they “set them to keeping house for the Lord.” On Sunday one of them would go and instruct the people and I can recall that, as a lad of less than seven years, I walked six miles with my father to a schoolhouse out in the timber, and I walked back home again in the hot afternoon sun. I was so tired I fell asleep on the floor just inside the front door and never knew who transferred me to the pallet on which we children slept in the summertime.

It appeared that God was smiling upon the little group when catastrophe struck for us, and the whole course of life was suddenly and rudely changed. We had moved out of the shack in which I was born, into a four-room house closer to the company store. My father, in a moment of reckless abandon, had made an offer of sixhundred dollars for the house, and his bid was accepted. My mother was unquestionably proud of it. She moved in, with the fond hope of sometime purchasing a Congoleum floor covering for our living-room, and by dint saving and hoarding nickels and dimes she was able to accumulate the six dollars required in a few months. When the rug was unrolled, smelling new and fresh like linseed oil, we were not allowed to walk across it, but had to step carefully around and walk on that portion of the floor which was not covered.

My father had always been troubled with a cough. Sometimes at night he would have to get up and sit in a chair, but no one thought much about it for all of the miners, with few exceptions, coughed hard and long. But when my father could no longer get his rest, regardless of the shift he worked, my mother persuaded him to go see Dr. McClellan. He was reluctant to do so, thinking it was both foolish and an unnecessary expense. But he finally consented to go and when he returned home we knew something was seriously wrong. Our mother went about her work crying, and we could hear her talk to my father about “making a move.” Years later I learned that our family physician had diagnosed “Miner’s consumption,” since no one used the “silicosis” in those days. My father was told that his only chance to survive was to get out of mines and go to a colder climate.

It must have been a frightening experience since there were now six children and one of them a babe in arms. Somehow they broke the news to us and it seemed incredible. My father had written to the Apostolic Review, edited by Daniel Sommer, and had stated in its columns the need to make a change. He expressed a desire to locate where there was a “loyal congregation” in which he could assist by taking his turn in teaching and doing personal work. He received a reply from Marshalltown, Iowa and after several letters were exchanged it was decided we should go there. The congregation offered to help my father find a job and a house in which to live.

Only one who lived in a tightlyknit village at the beginning of the twentieth century can understand the unforgettable shock created when a family was forced to leave for another area. In our present mobile society it is absolutely impossible to portray. For days before we left, relatives and friends gathered to help pack and weep, and generally get in the way. The women clung to our mother and tears flowed freely as they wailed and expressed the thought they would never meet again.

Mother took all six of us on the train to see her immediate family and our Grandfather Hansen met us at McBride’s Station with the big wagon drawn by a span of skittish mules. It was great fun sitting on the old quilt placed over the bed of straw in the back and riding the six miles to the farm. Our grandmother, who was very heavy, came waddling out of the house, speaking German with such rapidity that even our mother could not keep up. She had cooked every Danish and German recipe she had ever known and we ate to repletion. I drew the biscuit with the fly in it. There were no screens for the doors and windows and I never recall eating at that grandmother’s home without having a fly in one of the biscuits.

All the folk from the transplanted old world colony came to bid us farewell. My mother was always one of their favorites. Grandfather, who was a great wine maker, freely handed around samples of his handiwork and as the night wore on and tongues became more lubricated it sounded like a wedding celebration in a Bavarian bierstube. The next day we left, but as we looked back we could see all the members of the fmnily standing on the front porch and waving.

When we left the village of Cantwell it was as if someone had died. We went on the local train to Saint Louis where we changed to the Wabash line at Union Station. I had never seen such a throng as filled this great structure and how our parents managed to get six wide-eyed children through the shoving mob I shall never know. As we passed through the great midway, a newsboy was standing at the top of the stairs hawking his papers. I have never forgotten the words he was yelling, “Saint Louis Globe-Democrat, telling of the allies’ great victory in France!” The British troops under Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig had made a breakthrough.

I must spare you further details of the journey, vivid as they are to me. One of the leaders, S. M. Brees, met us at the Marshalltown station in a huge Velie touring car and took us to the home of another elder, Alexander Campbell Blake, with whose family we were to lodge until our furniture arrived by train and could be unpacked. The people were all good to us, but we were out of place, like strangers in a strange land. Even the polite formality seemed cold to us. We were hill-folk, villagers and country people, wholly unsuited to a city existence in the north. We were glad when we could move into the humble place we had rented on the outskirts of the city.

There were some things we had never had before, such as electric lights, running water in the house, and a bathroom. At first it seemed awkward and inappropriate to have “a privy” inside the same house in which you lived, but we soon became accustomed to it and were especially thankful for it on days when the rain came down in torrents or an Iowa blizzard swept across the land. I suspect that my parents sensed from the start that it was an untimely move, but it was too late to do anything about it then. We were broke, and we suffered as only the poor can suffer during wartime.

Our father secured employment scraping or fleshing hides at the H. Willard Son and Company tannery. It was a dirty, stinking job and his cough was intensified by the dampness of the place and the vats in which he had to labor. Crippled, though he was, he took a job with a moving and storage firm and stuck with it through a cold winter. We could barely make ends meet. The wartime economy had driven sugar up to the incredible level of twenty-five cents per pound. Flour was rationed and government stamps issued for other commodities. And, right in the midst of our other woes, the influenza pandemic struck us all down. Each day the paper told of hundreds of deaths. In many areas there was no one strong enough to dig graves and the corpses accumulated. We were sure that some of us would die but we survived, although we were so weak and anemic we could hardly stand.

Through it all we never failed to study the Word daily and to cling to our faith in God as our only hope. My father attended every meeting of the saints, taking the two of us boys with him when we were able to walk the long distance on the crunchy snow. There was never a meeting that prayers were not offered for the war to cease and our men to return home. On every side people could be heard referring to the Kaiser as “the antichrist.” It was freely predicted that these were the last days and that World War I was the battle of Armageddon. It was believed that the conflict would be terminated with the coming of Jesus. I shall never forget the celebration of the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, four years, three months and fourteen days after Austria-Hungary began it all by a declaration of war upon Serbia. In those four years there was a total of 37,494,186 casualities, men killed, wounded and missing.

I was ten years old when it ended, and already it had been decided we could not make it in the city. For a year we had survived on an unvarying diet of pork neckbones and potatoes, with only an occasional dish of kraut to relieve the monotony. It was all we could afford. We would have to admit defeat and go to a smaller town.

It was not all a loss, for in Marshalltown I was introduced to the first Carnegie Library I had ever seen. I read a book per day and sometimes more. A free library opened up for me a great new world in which I stuffed my mind like a hungry urchin would his stomach at a picnic.

We moved to Gilman City, a little north Missouri town, where the only dwelling we could rent was an abandoned railroad section house. When we moved in, the weeds were higher than the windows and our first task was to clean the debris and trash out of the house and cut the high growth in the yard. The place never really became fit for human habitation and was so close to the railway tracks that the trains at night sounded as if they were coming through the side of the building. The house was infested with rats and the yard with snakes. The job my father expected did not materialize and the help we received from congregations which he was invited to visit on the weekends was not sufficient to sustain us.

Once again, we took up our trek, seeking for a solution to the rugged problem of life. This time we settled in Chillicothe, Missouri. There are two things which stand out in my mind. One is the gathering of coal which fell off railroad cars as they swayed along the tracks. Our success meant the difference between being cold or warm in the old rattletrap house. We did not have the money for fuel. Another, is the fact that the congregation, which was in trouble when we went, divided soon afterwards. A little group of us met in an old upstairs room above a store. Division brought sadness and disillusionment. A number of people simply dropped out.