It was an ordinary day. Reading one of my favorite Facebook pages known as "The Lancastrian - 7 Generations Of Trust - 1749". No matter whenever I open the page, I am amazed at the amount of information I find on the screen in front of me. Stories galore telling about every aspect of Lancaster, Pennsylvania life. I have written a few stories based on information I accumulated on the Facebook page, but the story I am posting today is one of many of the stories that Mr. John Earl Hambright has written and posted on "The Lancastrian."
"LANCASTER'S BEAUTIFUL BRIGHT GOLDEN DAY"
Thousands of lusty British voices join in song routinely at a U. K. football club. Reverently, in a stately cadence, they sing: "When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high and don't be afraid of the dark."
Rodgers and Hammerstein's "You'll Never Walk Alone,' is the official anthem of LIverpool Football Nation. And most of you reading this can probably recite its next line:
"At the end of the storm is a golden sky."
Oscar Hammerstein penned those words on his Pennsylvania farm in the darkest days of World War Two. CAROUSEL had its Broadway opening on the night of April 19, 1945. Only one week before, our country had lost the President who led us successfully worldwide in the fight against fascist dictatorships.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. In the wake of FDR's death, the uplifting assurance --"You Never Walk Alone" -- could not have been more timely.
This weekend in May, 2021, many American citizens have the beautiful feeling they're at a similar turning-point in our history. The darkness of our long isolation is melting away, we're told. Clouds are lifting. A new season draws us back to our blessed community.
It might as well be spring.
Every spring for years Oscar Hammerstein rode over from his home outside Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and enjoyed casting an appraising eye on the beautiful fields and farmyards of Lancaster County. He knew what he was looking for.
Hammerstein took a close interest in the black Angus cattle raised at his Highland Farm. Pondering them one morning from his study window in the summer of 1942, he had been moved to write down in his working notebook: "All the cattle are standing like statues, All the cattle are standing like statues."
Those statuesque critters, Hammerstein's steers, were purchased regularly at the Union Stock Yards in Lancaster. We Lancastrians took great pride in calling the place "the largest stockyards east of Chicago."
I grew up just six blocks away from the cows, horses, hogs, and sheep in our fair city's Sixth Ward. On warm spring nights, with the window open, one could hear the bawling adolescents being unloaded from the Chicago train, bound for summer fattening on farms throughout the Pennsylvania Dutch farm country.
It's easy to imagine Oscar Hammerstein, fresh from CAROUSEL's Broadway opening night, riding over from his Bucks County farm to buy cattle, enjoying his success and reveling in the chicks and ducks and geese of a Keystone State springtime.
Spring in that historic year of 1945 gifted me in Lancaster with one of my earliest memories. And it was not the one my father hoped I would keep.
Dad had wanted me to remember forever what he called "the night The War ended" in 1945. I was only four and a half but to impress the epochal event on my memory, he picked me up, put me on his shoulder and carried me up and over North Duke Street to join the crowds packing Lancaster's central Penn Square.
It was a grand night for singing. But I remember nothing of that evening, it grieves me to say.
What I do recall as the first memory of my life is quite another moment. And it involves not crowds but only one other person.
A lady.
On a gorgeous May morning that year, I was playing all alone in the back yard at 227 East New Street. Hazy sunlight got caught in the thick branches of our monumental pear tree and shattered into a hundred pieces to cast me into shadows in my sandbox below.
You've probably heard how people made do during World War Two. What I call my sandbox was an old wooden packing crate which had once freighted my mother's things from North Carolina when she married my father five springs earlier in April of 1940.
Sand spilled from a dozen cracks in the battered box, and the wood was full of splinters. I'd get them in my hand if I got distracted by anything. Like a robin popping up beside me on the wire fence between us and the Hoovers's yard next door.
Or Miss Hoover herself.
That lady now suddenly burst from her house this bright golden morning. She bucked open her back screen door with her gigantic wash basket. The door squealed on its rusty spring for an instant and then banged loudly shut as she descended her back steps.
Miss Martha Hoover, quite tall and with a queenly air, strode down her back walk and placed the wicker basket on the ground. She took a cloth from her apron belt and passed it rapidly over the clothes line strung between the two crosstrees, both of them circled round and round by colorful strings of morning glories in full bloom.
Miss Hoover rarely spoke. She normally kept folks at bay with a frosty quiet and, though she was capable of a sweet shy smile, certain sharp glances she sometimes shot my way could stop me immediately from any random mischief I might have in mind.
Like reaching through the fence to spill sand on her petunias.
My mother said Miss Hoover had every reason to be angry with the world. She was an attractive woman whose many siblings -- ten had grown up together on a farm out back of Strasburg -- saddled her with an irksome burden. She was sole caretaker for a bachelor brother whom neighbors alternated between humoring and hectoring because testy Zeke was said to be not quite right in the head.
On this bright morning, though, Zeke Hoover was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was at work down at Eshelman Feed in the first block of West Walnut where he swept up the loading platform across from the Northern Market.
Miss Hoover must have thought she was completely alone. this sunny morning. Though I in my sandbox was not six feet away from her, I'm sure she didn't see me in the shade of our pear tree. Perhaps that's why she took it upon herself to perform a stunning feat -- most unlike a woman of her years and dignity.
As she moved between the wash basket and the clothes line, grabbing pins from her apron pocket and pinning them to the rope, the lady began to sing.
I knew the song. We heard it all the time on the radio those years. Bing Crosby recorded it. So did Frank Sinatra. But our neighbor lady sang it -- lightly, trillingly -- as beautifully as I'd ever it heard sung.
"Oh, what a beautiful morning. Oh, what a beautiful day. I've got a beautiful feeling. Everything's going my way."
Then she sang it again as she pinned up her last pieces and went in with the empty basket to her house.
I sat in the sandbox completely spellbound. Did I get splinters?
Perhaps what I got was the longest lasting memory of my life.
Oscar Hammerstein -- the man who wrote the words Miss Hoover was singing to a beautiful Pennsylvania morning -- might well have been at that very moment not six blocks away from us at the Lancaster Stock Yards.
His biographers say Oscar had never been to Oklahoma when he came up with "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" to start off his first Broadway show with Richard Rodgers. Perhaps that's the reason some Lancastrians have suggested that when he wrote OKLAHOMA!'s opening line -- "There's a bright golden haze on the meadow, there's a bright golden haze on the meadow.…" -- he wasn't thinking of the Sooner State far, far away.
He was inspired by Pennsylvania. He was describing our own fertile fields and farms in Lancaster County.
On a bright golden beautiful day.
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