1969: The Kansas City Chiefs

By Corinne H. Smith

1969:  I turned twelve years old.  I was in seventh grade (section 7FL) at Centerville Junior High School, where Mr. Bailey was my homeroom teacher.  Daddy was 40, and he worked as a research chemist at Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Penna.  Mom was beginning to work as a nurse for a local clinic.  We lived on Dale Avenue in West Hempfield Township.  (Did you notice the change in scenery?  We moved to a brand-new house a few miles from our first one.)  The #1 most popular song on the radio on my twelfth birthday was “Wedding Bell Blues” by The Fifth Dimension.  Mom snapped this photograph.

     My father taught me about music.  My mother taught me about football.

     Mom was the youngest of four, and she had two older brothers.  Maybe that’s why she knew about sports, specifically about baseball and football.  She grew up within walking distance of the Allentown High School stadium, so she probably went to games there when she was a teenager.  She definitely used to go to the college football games both when she was a student and then when she began working as registered nurse at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.  She once even witnessed Penn daring to tie Notre Dame, much to the chagrin of her Irish-supporting date that day.  (The 1952 home opener, 7-7)  He was so upset that he had to throw up.  She was overjoyed, and spent the rest of her days madly cheering on every one of Notre Dame’s opponents.

     Daddy played in the marching bands at Emmaus High School and at Lehigh University, so he spent eight years in a row on football fields.  I followed in his footsteps and did the same at Hempfield High School and Clarion State College.  Daddy had seen enough football in person, and he understood the game.  He just preferred participating in or watching the halftime shows.

     So it was Mom who explained the rules of the game to me, as we sat down to watch football on TV each weekend in the Fall.  College ball on Saturdays, the pros on Sundays.  Four downs, the line of scrimmage, the difference between offsides and illegal procedure.  When to go for it and when to kick.  The beauty of the downfield spiral.

     Based on mere geography alone, we should have rooted either for the Philadelphia Eagles or for the Baltimore Colts.  Mom had been a Phillies baseball fan when she was young, but for some reason her loyalties to the City of Brotherly Love never extended to the Eagles.  And the Colts?  Well sure, Johnny Unitas was a talented player.  But how could we ever cheer for a Southern team?  We were firmly entrenched Northerners.  A full 30 miles of buffer-zone landscape lay between us and that crucial Mason-Dixon line.  Was that all?  It sure seemed like a lot more.

     By the late 1960s, the two of us were scrambling for a good pro team to root for.  The NFL and AFL were still separate entities.  We gravitated toward the AFL teams, which then consisted of the Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, Cincinnati Bengals, Denver Broncos, Houston Oilers, Kansas City Chiefs, Miami Dolphins, New York Jets, Oakland Raiders, and the San Diego Chargers.  Mom thought that Joe Namath was too much of a showboater, even though he was a native Pennsylvanian and therefore otherwise could have won our favor.  But after eliminating the Jets, we still weren’t sure who “our” team could be.

     Then during one broadcast in 1967 or 1968, Kansas City quarterback Len Dawson was lined up at center and shouting the count.  He turned toward us:  well really, to the line-of-scrimmage camera.  “Wow, look at those beautiful blue eyes!” Mom said.  And that was that.  We started watching the Chiefs.  OK, so I’ll admit that at first, we were attracted to Len Dawson’s eyes.  But we liked his leadership style, and the way he lined up his teammates in two rows instead of in a huddle.  And the Chiefs had a number of other great players then, too:  Bobby Bell, Willie Lanier, Otis Taylor, Curley Culp, kicker Jan Stenerud, and a rookie running back named Ed Podolak.  I loved it when Otis Taylor leapt up to catch one of Len’s passes.  And what wasn’t to like about Hank Stram, the quintessential pro coach?  Coincidentally, we made this choice in time to follow them all of the way to the Super Bowl during the 1969 season.  What a great ride!

 

My honorary contract with the Kansas City Chiefs, for the 1972 season

     In 1972, I spent a few dollars to become an “official” Kansas City Chiefs fan.  I got an honorary contract (“signed” by Lamar Hunt himself), a felt wall pennant and a few other gim-gaws that I may still have in a box in the basement.  I taped a Len Dawson poster to the back of my bedroom door.  We watched and cheered for the Chiefs whenever they were on TV.  In high school, I checked out a football manual from our school library.  It had a photo of Hank Stram on the cover, and he may even have written part of the book.  Yes, I was quite proud that the Chiefs were my team.  It was even more fun that they weren’t local, and that not many people around us shared in our support.

     Of course, loving the Chiefs meant that we had to hate the Oakland Raiders, their natural rivals.  These guys turned out to be easy to hate.  That’s why I was watching the Raiders-Steelers game on TV on December 23, 1972, and why I was hoping the Steelers would win.  My mother and I were at a friend’s house; and as the clock wound down on the game, we got ready to leave.  It was all too obvious that the Steelers weren’t going to be able to prevail against The Enemy.  Mom was already out in the kitchen, goading me to get a move on.  “Wait a minute,” I said, as I watched the TV screen for what was sure to be the last play of the game.  That’s when it happened.  Franco Harris made a shoe-string catch – The Immaculate Reception – and ran for the touchdown.  I screamed and drove everyone back into the living room to watch the replay.  Steelers 13, Raiders 7.  Take that, John Madden.

     When I went off to college in western Pennsylvania in the Fall of 1975, it was in the middle of the Steel Curtain run of the Pittsburgh Steelers.  Everyone on campus was wearing Black and Gold.  This wasn’t a bad bus to jump onto.  I still liked the Chiefs, but I didn’t get to see their games very often on local TV.  I turned into a Steelers fan.  I also grew to have a soft spot in my heart for the Buffalo Bills too, especially once Jim Kelly started playing for them.  Gosh, if he’d only gone to the college closest to his home, we would have walked on the same sidewalks of the same campus and would have been able to share that same football field…

     When I lived in northern Illinois from 1995-2003, I had difficulties sustaining my AFC allegiances.  The Bears-Packers tension of the region gave preference to NFC games on TV.  I kind of liked both teams.  (But you can’t say that in public out there.  Or anywhere, really.)  I eventually became more of a fan of the game in general instead of donning specific colors, one way or another.  I will admit that I bought and wore a foam Cheesehead to a pro game, however.

     I have attended five pro games.  Bills-Oilers at the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, Tennessee, 1997.  Packers-Lions at the Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit on Thanksgiving Day, 2001.  (Both were my birthday presents to myself.)  I’ve been to three or four games at Orchard Park, N.Y.:  Bills vs Colts, Bills vs Patriots, Bills vs Steelers, and perhaps one other.  I’d have to check my ticket stubs.  Yes, I have had lake-effect flakes fly off of Lake Erie and into my face, and I have sat in snow to watch the Buffalo Bills play ball.  Life is good.

     I have made four visits to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.  One was just to see the place and to take the tour in 1994.  The other three were to watch my favorite players get inducted into the Hall:  Lynn Swann and Marv Levy (2001); John Stallworth and Jim Kelly (2002); Rod Woodson and Bruce Smith (2009).  At one of those ceremonies, I saw Len Dawson from a distance and waved to him.  He must not have seen me.  I guess I blended in with the rest of the crowd.  He’ll never know what he started.

     I gave up watching college football long before the BCS system was created.  But I still have to watch the pros on Sundays in season.  I still cheer for the Bills and the Steelers, and still root consistently against the Raiders, the Cowboys, the Eagles, the Dolphins, and the Browns (in both their current permutation and their previous one, now known as the Ravens).  I believe the cities of Tampa Bay, Jacksonville, Seattle, and Charlotte (i.e. “Carolina”) host merely untested expansion teams that don’t really account for much in the grand scheme of the game.

     When I moved to Massachusetts in 2003, I additionally became a New England Patriots fan.  Again, this was not a bad bus to jump onto.  I mean, really.  Tom Brady?  Mom never got to see him play, but she sure would have fallen hard for him.

     As we were saying our goodbyes for the last time, a former boyfriend once quipped:  “At least I know where you’ll be every Sunday, every Fall.”  Yup.  Sitting on the living room couch, watching the big boys pass the pigskin and run for touchdowns.  I would have been insulted by his remark, if I hadn’t known in my heart that it was all too true.

1968: Pixanne

By Corinne H. Smith

1968:  I turned eleven years old.  I was in Mrs. Young's sixth grade class at Farmdale Elementary School.  Daddy was 39, and he worked as a research chemist at Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Penna.  Mom was a stay-at-home Mom.  We lived on Hathaway Street in West Hempfield Township.  The #1 song on the radio on my eleventh birthday was “Hey Jude” by The Beatles.  Mom snapped this photograph.

   I was not a Mickey Mouse Club or a Romper Room kid.  Captain Kangaroo was the nationally syndicated children’s show that I preferred to watch on TV.  I liked the Captain, of course, and I was also partial to Mr. Green Jeans, Bunny Rabbit, Dancing Bear, and the adventures of Tom Terrific (with his mighty dog Manfred).  I still remember some of the picture books that the Captain read to us.  “Caps for Sale” by Esphyr Slobodkina and the classic folk tale “Stone Soup” especially come to mind.

   Since we lived in the lee of Philadelphia, as it were, and could pick up Philly stations with our rooftop antenna, we had some other semi-local options to choose from.  I really liked Cartoon Corners with Gene London.  But my ultimate favorite show for kids was Pixanne. 

    Pixanne was a female Peter Pan pixie character who was portrayed by singer-educator Jane Norman.  Pixanne lived in a magic forest, and she told stories and sang songs.  She could fly, too.  Oggie the owl and Fliffy the butterfly were among her friends.  She walked around and watered big colorful flowers that grew at the forest’s edge.  She played a magic rock that was really an organ called a celeste, which created ethereal sounds.  Her nemesis was Windy Witch (who Jane Norman also played).  Pixanne ran on WCAU from 1960-1969, and then went into national syndication for the next seven years.  You can see a video clip of the show here.

   

   I was fascinated.  I longed to live in such a place.  Our suburban yard had some interesting sections to it: with a garden, lots of different bushes and trees, and a great sugar maple for climbing.  None of the plants or animals sang back to me.  And anyway, we sat smack dab in the middle of Lancaster County farmland.  A sizable stand of woods was difficult to find.  The only chance I had to walk into one was whenever I went camping with my Girl Scout troop.  Those opportunities were great but were short lived.

   At the end of the show, Pixanne sang this song:

          I’ll see you in the forest

          And I’ll meet you in the forest

          Come to the forest with me

          Where things are always happening

          There’s plenty of things to see

          So don’t go far away

          Come back, come back every day

          Back into the forest with me

Yes, Pixanne, that’s where I knew I wanted to be.

     On a spring day in 1974, Pixanne came up in conversation during a behind-the-wheel driver’s ed session.  Fellow classmate Tom Markow was driving the car, and Mr. Nuhrenberg was guiding him in the passenger seat.  I think they were arguing.  They were always arguing.  That left me and Jeff Gunzenhauser in the back seat.  Jeff was our class president and would later work for many years as a doctor in the U.S. Army.  But back then, he was someone else to talk to whenever Markow drove.  And it turned out that Jeff had been a Pixanne fan as well.  We reminisced and quietly sang “I’ll see you in the forest” while we rode around the farmland of our school district.

     A few years later, at an event at Dutch Wonderland (our local amusement park), I had a chance to meet and chat with Pixanne, Jane Norman.  I thanked her for what she gave me as a kid.  She autographed the back of a photo card for me.  I asked for a second one for Jeff.  (I was prudent:  I decided to mail it to his house instead of his room at West Point.)  He was polite and gallant enough to write me a thank-you note in return.

     Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my past and the influences that led me to make specific choices in life.  And it may sound silly to some, but I can see that it isn’t too far a stretch from “I’ll see you in the forest” to “I went to the woods to live deliberately.”  Had watching Pixanne set me up for loving nature and the forest, and for being receptive to the words of Henry David Thoreau a few years later?  I think it’s possible.  Henry had grown up in an agricultural community, too.

     During my high school and college years, when Pixanne no longer ran in our market, I morbidly tuned in on occasion to WMAR from Baltimore and watched Professor Kool and his Fun School.  It was a nutty show, and except for its use of Herb Alpert tunes, it was a waste of time to watch.  No one could ever beat Pixanne and her magic forest, in my heart.

1967: The Fifth-Grade Spelling Words

By Corinne H. Smith

1967:  I turned ten years old.  I was in Miss Enders' fifth grade class at Farmdale Elementary School.  Daddy was 38, and he worked as a research chemist at Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Penna.  Mom was a stay-at-home Mom.  We lived on Hathaway Street in West Hempfield Township.  The #1 song on the radio on my tenth birthday was “To Sir With Love” by Lulu.  Mom snapped this photograph.  No, I wasn’t wearing pantyhose yet.  Mom was growing impatient to take the picture and was yelling for me to hurry, so I slipped my shoes on quickly and ran downstairs to stand in position.  I may even be poised on tiptoes here.  You know that raw feeling you get when your bare feet touch the clammy insides of shoes meant only for socks?  Slick and sticky.  Yuck.

     Each week, Miss Enders gave us a list of spelling words.  I don’t remember how many there were.  10?  15?  20?  Our assignment was to write out each word (in our best cursive handwriting, of course), to copy a definition from the dictionary, and to use the word in a sentence.  This was a simple and universal assignment, back then.

     When you’re the only child in the household, it’s difficult to hide.  I was working on my spelling words early in the school year when one of my parents stopped by the kitchen table to see what I was doing.  (In my opinion, the inquisitor was more likely to have been my logic-oriented father.)  I explained what had to be done.  My parent thought that writing random sentences was silly and almost a waste of time.  He/she suggested that I write a story instead and incorporate all of the words within it.  This would make more sense, as it would end up as a final, cohesive and worthwhile product.  And it should certainly meet Miss Enders’ requirements, since the words would indeed be used in sentences.  It’s just that each one would be connected to all of the others.  A story would be far more interesting for my teacher to read, too.  After all, she would have to grade 28 of these homework papers each week.

     So that’s what I did.  I first looked up the words and found their meanings.  Next, I stared at them for a while and considered the possible plot that could develop from them.  Then I started writing.  I set my weekly series in a neighborhood of mice.  Why mice?  I probably wouldn’t have been able to explain it at the time.  But the choice could have something to do with the fact that our cat Tigie was an adept and ardent mouser.  Since I often had to clean up the remains after his kills, I must have subconsciously wondered what kinds of lives these tiny innocents had had.  (You can read more about Tigie in a previous post, “1960: Brother-Cat Tigie.”)  My stories came complete with at least four recurring characters -- two boy-mice and two girl-mice -- that had first names.  I don’t remember their names or any of the other details.  The stories themselves have unfortunately been lost to time.  (Miss Enders would later tell my mother that she wished she had kept them.)

     It was fun to make something out of nothing, especially with words.  I’d gotten my first taste of this glee the previous year, in fourth grade.  That’s when we learned about the poetry form of haiku.  We were all asked to write an original three-line poem with the 5-7-5 syllable pattern.  Then we had to draw a picture that went with it.  Our artwork was thumb-tacked up in the hallway outside of our classroom in time for Parents Night.  Mine was of a wheat field lying between two green trees; a gray spot with a tail sat at the right-hand edge.  Across the lower portion of the page, I had printed my haiku:

          A golden meadow

          Can hold secrets to explore.

          Maybe a small mouse.

     What can I say?  I was fascinated with those little guys at the time.  And I was reading books like E.B. White’s Stuart Little and Beverly Cleary’s The Mouse and the Motorcycle, too.  I knew that mice had other lives that could be written about.  And I wanted to be one of the people writing about them.

     I don’t remember Miss Enders talking to me about my spelling word stories.  But I do recall being taken out of class and given a series of intelligence tests.  I assume now that the school authorities were determining whether or not I would make the cut for enrollment in the district’s “Creativity Classes.”  Every so often, a handful of top fifth and sixth graders would get on a school bus and go somewhere else for the day.  No one ever spoke about where they went and what they did.  They must have been the kinds of kids who would later be labeled as “gifted.”  I guess I showed some promise along these lines, what with my story-telling prowess.  But I turned out to be relatively normal instead.  No Creativity Classes for me.  I was just an only child with a thriving, very vivid imagination.

     More than 40 years later, I was sitting around a table with other members of our local writing group, Women of Words.  We were looking through dictionaries for interesting words that began with the letter D.  We found five doozies:  dryasdust, dingus, dotard, dystopia, and dolichocephalic.  (If you don’t know that last one, check it out for yourself here.)  Then we gave ourselves the assignment of writing something with those five words in it.  We shared our pieces aloud at the following month’s meeting.  I came up with a fictional short story called “Fortunato.”  You can read it by clicking here.  This one’s not about mice.

I still use my favorite dictionary, which I got as a high school graduation present.

     I still think it’s an amusing assignment:  to take a few random words and to craft a new story around them.  Isn’t there a saying about the dictionary having all of the other books in it?  It’s true.

 

1966: The Sound of Music

By Corinne H. Smith

1966:  I turned nine years old.  I was in Miss Brubaker's fourth grade class at Farmdale Elementary School (though she soon married and became Mrs. Crouse).  Daddy was 37, and he worked as a research chemist at Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Penna.  Mom was a stay-at-home Mom.  We lived on Hathaway Street in West Hempfield Township.  The #1 song on the radio on my ninth birthday was “You Keep Me Hangin' On” by The Supremes.  Mom snapped this photograph.  You can see some changes in our living room.  We put up paneling, and we exchanged our old black-and-white television for a console entertainment unit that combined a color TV, a record player, and a radio with stereo sound.

     A lot was going on during the summer of 1966.  People were marching for civil rights in Mississippi.  The AFL and NFL were negotiating a merger agreement for a united football organization.  In our neighborhood, a new stretch of U.S. Route 30 just opened to traffic, from Rohrerstown Road to Prospect Road.  And The Sound of Music finally came to Lancaster County.

     The movie had been officially released more than a year beforehand, in March 1965.  But that didn’t mean that it automatically appeared in theaters in every market.  According to Cinematreasures.org, The Sound of Music “was among a number of prestigious productions given the ‘roadshow’ treatment, whereby a film was booked as an exclusive engagement in major cities and would play for many, many months before being put into a nationwide general release.”  And that’s what happened to us.  Oh sure, if we had wanted to drive 50 miles, we could have gone up to Harrisburg, where The Sound of Music had been showing nonstop at the Eric Theatre since the middle of July 1965.  But no, it wasn’t that crucial.  We had decided to wait.

     In the meantime, the movie set all kinds of box office records across the country.  It won five Oscars at the Academy Awards ceremony on April 18, 1966, including Best Picture of 1965.  And still it eluded us.

We could buy the soundtrack album months before we could see the movie itself

     When the Fulton Opera House announced that it would open The Sound of Music on Wednesday, June 22, 1966, we saw our chance.  School was out for the summer.  Mom and I could go to the 2 p.m. matinee.  Off we went, to stand in line and get reserved seats for the show.  $1.50 each.

     Every city and town has its traditional elegant theater of old.  The Fulton is the one for Lancaster.  Named after local legend Robert Fulton, it was built in 1852 on the foundation of a jail that pre-dated the American Revolution.  Across the decades, it had had its ups and downs as a venue for both film and live shows.  By the late 1950s, the Fulton was “repositioned … as an art moviehouse, with occasional stage performances.”  The Sound of Music hit the Fulton at the right time.  Soon the decision would be made to limit its offerings to live shows only.  Lucky us.

     Even though I was fairly young at the time, I have clear memories of going to this movie.  A lot of people were there.  We had to stand for a long time in a long line that wound down the sidewalk along North Prince Street.  It was hot, very hot.  (Turns out that we were a few days into a week-long heat wave that featured sustained daytime temperatures in the 90s.)  When we finally were allowed to enter, every empty seat filled up quickly.  The air was stuffy.  I don’t believe the theater was air-conditioned.  And when the projectors were supposed to start rolling, they were delayed by a mechanical problem.  We had to sit and wait for something to get fixed, perhaps for as long as an hour or more.  But I remember that the place was still packed.  Nearly everyone stayed.  We had all waited this long for The Sound of Music.  We weren’t going to leave.

     The movie sure lived up to its reputation.  Nothing could match the opening scene of the Alps on the big screen.  In an instant, we were flying from our seats in downtown Lancaster to a magical mountainous place, thousands of miles away.  It seemed as though we were in the congregation for the wedding, too.  The chords of the cathedral organ resounded throughout the hall, nearly shaking the walls around us, and Maria strode past us in white, down the aisle.  Then we were dragged into the chase scene.  Run, run!  At last we made our way up into the mountains again.  The music and the whole production were thoroughly magnificent.  For nearly three hours, we were in it, we were there.  I still get chills, remembering.

     In 1986, my father, my then-husband and I joined a tour group that traveled to Munich, Bavaria and Austria.  This time we had a chance to witness The Sound of Music settings ourselves.  The big estate that was used in the movie was in private hands, but we could see the mansion from across the other side of the water.  The gazebo had been moved off the property so that tourists could take pictures of it and dance through it themselves.  Some of our fellow travelers did just that.  Downtown Salzburg looked familiar, as we passed the same fountains and walked through the same city squares that Maria and the children had skipped across.  And the Alps!  Wow.  Nothing can quite prepare you for them.  It was magic, again:  Life imitating Art imitating Life.  Who could imagine such beauty?  And really, we felt as though we’d already been here.

     Maybe it’s because of our own German heritage and musicianship that we have adopted “Edelweiss” and “The Sound of Music” as family standards.  Both songs have been played at recent funerals of Hosfeld relatives.  Our ancestors didn’t come from Austria, and they arrived in America well before the time of the World Wars.  But somehow The Sound of Music has ended up being our story.  How did Hollywood do that?

1965: To the Moon, Robert

By Corinne H. Smith

1965:  I turned eight years old.  I was in Mrs. Jenkins' third grade class at Farmdale Elementary School.  Daddy was 36, and he worked as a research chemist at Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Penna.  Mom was a stay-at-home Mom.  We lived on Hathaway Street in West Hempfield Township.  The #1 song on the radio on my eighth birthday was “I Hear a Symphony” by The Supremes.  Mom snapped this photograph.

     In 1962, President John F. Kennedy challenged the American space program to reach the moon by the end of the decade.  His dream would become a reality that, unfortunately, he didn’t live to see.

     By the time I was in third grade, a number of Mercury and Gemini spaceships had begun to lay the groundwork (so to speak) for the ultimate journey.  People were getting very excited about the possibilities that lay ahead.  Including one of my fellow classmates in Mrs. Jenkins’ room.

     Robert Mattern remains a mystery to me, in hindsight.  He was in my third grade class.  He and I spent a fair amount of time talking during recess.  I didn’t know then that he was merely a temporary traveler on our educational path to Hempfield High School.  If he was enrolled in our school before third grade, I didn’t run into him.  If he stayed at our school after third grade, I didn’t see him much at all.  I assume he moved into our area for only one or two school years; and then just as quickly, he moved away.

Robert Mattern, as pictured in our third-grade classroom photo

      One day Robert Mattern explained to me that he was building a rocket in his backyard.  He was quite animated about the details of the machinery.  When it was ready, he would take off and head to the moon.  And he wanted me to go with him.  Actually, he expected this.

     I was shocked.  Not at the fact that a seven- or eight-year-old was building a space craft.  That part of the story, I accepted without question.  I was upset at the me-going-along part.  I never said that I would accompany him.  And for some reason, I found him difficult to argue with.  I didn’t have the courage to admit that I had no desire or intention of going to the moon.  In my mind, I pictured us riding on the back of the rocket as if it were a round-bellied horse, speeding toward the unknowns held by a star-filled sky.  (How would we breathe without an atmosphere?  I never considered this dilemma.)  We would travel like an intergalactic “Born to be Wild” duo, years before Steppenwolf even recorded that song.  This was scary stuff.

     Mom used to tell this story, too.  She said that I came home from school one day, frantic.  I told her then about Robert Mattern and his plan to take me to the moon.  And I moaned to her that I didn’t want to go.  She probably had to stifle laughter as she assured me that I had no need to worry.  She and Daddy would never give me permission to make the trip.  I must have felt relieved.  Memories of the rest of this vignette have therefore faded.  I don’t recall if I ever officially turned down Robert’s offer.  Maybe Mom convinced me to “just wait and see,” and to deal with the decision when the rocket was finally ready for launching.  Naturally, that day never came.

     So many people pass in and out of the course of our lives.  Some leave traces that linger.  And sometimes a casual remark, an image, a sound, or a smell will take us back to a past moment and to a random interaction with another person.  And we’ll be curious.  Where did that person go, who was with us for only a short while?  What has he been doing?  Who did she become?

     On occasion, I search online for Robert Matterns.  I look at photos of fifty-year-old men, scanning their faces for some resemblance to the boy I once knew.  I wonder what happened to him.  Did he keep an interest in space, or was it just a passing fancy?  Was it instead the building of the thing that intrigued him, the mechanics involved?  Does he ever think back to those days at Farmdale Elementary School, when he chatted with that girl with the white-rimmed glasses?  Does he ever look at the full moon and smile? 

1964: Armstrong and Macon

By Corinne H. Smith

1964:  I turned seven years old.  I was in Mrs. Felty’s second grade class at Farmdale Elementary School.  Daddy was 35, and he worked as a research chemist at Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Penna.  Mom was a stay-at-home Mom.  We lived on Hathaway Street in West Hempfield Township.  The #1 song on the radio on my seventh birthday was “Baby Love” by The Supremes.  Mom snapped this photograph.

     Daddy worked for Armstrong.  Didn’t everybody’s father work for Armstrong, back in the Lancaster of the 1960s and 1970s?

     The Armstrong Cork Company, later known as Armstrong World Industries, had its beginnings in Thomas Armstrong’s two-man cork-cutting shop in Pittsburgh in 1860.  Technological progress gradually expanded the business into creating insulating corkboard, fiberboard, ceiling board, linoleum, and vinyl flooring.  In the early part of the 20th century, “a new [flooring] factory rose from a cornfield on the edge of Lancaster, Pennsylvania,” according to the official corporate history on the Armstrong web site.  My father was among the many men (at first, almost exclusively men) who were hired at the company’s additional post-war research and development office on Columbia Avenue.  “It was a good place to work at the time,” he says.  He spent 34 years here.

Armstrong Cork Company, Columbia Avenue, Lancaster PA, in late 1950s

     Daddy graduated from Lehigh University with a B.S. in chemistry in 1950.  He was hired by Penn-Dixie to analyze Portland cement at two of its plants:  first at the one in Nazareth, and then at the one in Butler.  He grew bored with the task.  He was the lone chemist on the site; and it was up to him to run the same tests, over and over, day after day.  During one full month in Butler, he didn’t get a single day off.  “I didn’t think that was right,” he says.  He quit the job and came back home to eastern Pennsylvania.

     For the next four years, he worked for Keasbey and Mattison in Ambler.  Here he devised the formulations for asbestos boards.  He figured out the amounts of necessary ingredients, depending on what kind of binders were to be used for the final products.  With thin paper, it was flour; with the thicker paper, it was tapioca; and with heavy millboard, it was Portland cement.  The boards would be purchased by companies that needed fireproof protection.  “I had to walk through the plant every day, and the air was full of asbestos fibers,” he says.  “At that time they didn’t know that asbestos wasn’t good for you.  When it gets into your lungs, it doesn’t dissolve because it’s inorganic.  It’s magnesium aluminum silicate.”  Much use of asbestos in the U.S. was outlawed by the EPA with the Asbestos Ban and Phase Out Rule in 1989.  While Daddy has benefited a bit from some of the resulting legal proceedings for victims, his lungs have sustained only minimal long-term effects from his exposure.  He is lucky. 

     1955 turned out to be an important year, and one of change.  On a blind date my father met Jeanette Banzhoff, a registered nurse from the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia.  She was in charge of the seventh floor of the Maloney section.  Here she once took care of Alexander Maitland Stewart, father of actor Jimmy Stewart.  She gave Jimmy updates over the phone on at least one occasion.  She had also been a student at Penn at the same time that C. Everett Koop was earning his medical doctor’s degree there.  And like my father, she too was originally from Lehigh County.  She also liked music and dancing.

     My future parents were already engaged by the time Daddy interviewed with Armstrong in Lancaster in May 1955.  He’d seen a recruitment ad in the American Chemical Society’s Chemical & Engineering News.  He knew that Armstrong marketed a line of insulation that Keasbey and Mattison manufactured.  He came over for an interview, and he was quickly hired as a research chemist.  After participating in a week-long training and indoctrination session with 15-20 other new hires (held at the Armstrong Manor, the company estate located north of the city), my father embarked on what would be his life-long career.

     In the meantime, he and Jeanette got married in October 1955.  They bought and moved into the little brick Cape Cod house on Hathaway Street in early 1956.  I would eventually show up in November 1957.

 

M. Jeanette Banzhoff & Lewis K. Hosfeld, married October 22, 1955

      At work, Daddy’s specialty became the development and adherence of paint to fiberboard for the creation of ceiling tiles.  Armstrong employees were then encouraged to be innovative.  Daddy lived up to this challenge and was able to file his first patent in 1963.  It described a “Method for Producing Roller Embossed Warp-Resistant Fiberboard.”  This technique was first used on an Armstrong ceiling tile design called Crestmont.  Eventually he would hold seven U.S. patents and two Canadian patents, all dealing with some portion of the process of making and/or painting ceiling tile.  (Click here to see them: U.S., CA-1, CA-2.) 

     White or off-white ceilings weren’t necessarily universal.  Once, an Atlantic City casino ordered brown ceiling tiles.  Some Europeans seemed to favor colored tiles.  Daddy and his associates had to use formulas to guarantee consistent hues for each batch of each tile design.

     Daddy’s job required a fair amount of traveling, too.  Though he sometimes visited suppliers to check on specifications, he most often went to the places where the fiberboard (or later, the mineral wool fiber) was made.  These included the Armstrong facilities in Pensacola, Florida, and in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.  Once he even flew to Munster, Germany.  But the factory he frequented – sometimes as often as a week each month, when I was growing up -- was located in Macon, Georgia.

     The Macon plant made fiberboard for ceiling tile.  Armstrong owned some nearby forests.  Trucks would bring in logs – “Mainly cottonwood and loblolly pine,” as Daddy recalls – and run them through a de-barker.  Then they would be ground down to little particles of wood fiber.  A slurry was made out of this material, and it proceeded through a big forming machine to make the panels.  The last steps involved the applications of a primer and a top coat of paint.  Voila!  You had ceiling tiles.  Well, maybe it wasn’t that simple.

     When I was in second grade, my mother and I got a chance to travel to Macon with my father on one of his business trips.  I was permitted to miss school, since this was an educational experience.  We flew down to Georgia.  Mostly, I remember the heat – both in the usual southern air, and inside the plant itself.  I stood next to a huge vat of floating wood pulp, the slurry.  I couldn’t believe that my father and these other men willingly worked in such a hot and noisy factory.  He told us that the constant walking on these concrete floors was hard on his feet in dress shoes.  He always took extra cushiony insoles along on these trips.  One visit to Macon was enough for Mom and me.

     Armstrong began to emphasize the creation of even more new products.  Its employees developed such items as floor wax, cleaners, and caulking compound.  But in the long run, these endeavors weren’t worth the special effort.  “After a while, Armstrong decided to make just the floors and the ceilings, and let the little guy do the little stuff,” Daddy says.  “And that’s the way it is today.  They dropped the word ‘research’ from the sign.” 

     The kind of work that Daddy did at Armstrong from 1955 to 1989, no longer exists. Since then, advancements have been made in paint technology.  No one has to use slide rules or logarithm charts in order to insure consistent pigment measurements across the board.  In hindsight, it seems as though Daddy was the right person for his job, and he was in the right place at the right time to do it.

     Maybe his work was another reason why our birthday photos became so special to us.  During my childhood, Daddy was often away in Macon, and we didn’t always spend much time together.  Our commitment to this photo tradition meant that for at least a few minutes each year, we would be able to stand shoulder to shoulder and to be with one another.