One night she just got nervous fidgets something awful, worrying lest her brother might not get to the Baptist chicken dinner after all, when he'd gone and paid seventy-five cents for his ticket.
Sunday there was church to attend, the Catholics flourishing, the Episcopalians next, four other denominations tottering this way and that. I heard the Baptist minister preach that every word in the Bible was inspired by God, ending with a plea for the family altar.
“Christian brethren, I'm a man who has seen both sides of life. I could have gone one way. It is by the grace of God and the family altar that I stand before you the man I am.”
There were thirty-one people in the congregation who heard his young though quavering words, eight of them children, two the organist and her husband, nine of the remainder women over sixty.
The Methodist, that morning, preached on the need of a revival at the Falls, and Mr. Welsh, the electrician, whose wife was resting up in Pennsylvania, thought he was right. Sunday baseball—that day our bleachery team played the Keen Kutters—pained Mr. Welsh. The Methodist minister before this one had been a thorn in the flesh of his congregation. He frankly believed in amusements, disgraced them by saying out loud at a union service that he favored Sunday baseball. Another minister got up and “sure made a fool of him,” thank goodness. Where was the renegade now? Called to a church in a large Middle West city where they have no more sense than to pay him twice what he was getting at the Falls.
That night I heard a visiting brother at the Methodist church plead for support for foreign missions, that we might bring the light of the ideal Christian civilization under which we live to the thirsty savages in dark places. He poured his message to an audience of twenty-one, ten of them gray-haired women, one a child.
All the ministers prayed long for Harding and were thankful he was a child of God.
Three of us girls rowed up the lake one night and cooked our supper and talked about intimate things. It was a lake worth traveling miles to see. It was one block from the post office. Mamie had been to the lake twice in all her life. It was good for canoeing, rowing, fishing, swimming, and, best of all, just for the eyesight. Yet to the great majority it did not exist.
The bleachery, through its Partnership Plan, ran a village club house on Main Street. The younger boys, allowing only for school hours, worked the piano player from morn till night. There was a gymnasium. Suppers were given now and then. It was supposed to be for the use of the girls certain days, but they took little or no advantage of it.
Otherwise, and mostly, when the weather permitted, up and down the street folk sat on their front porches and rocked or went inside and played the victrola.