The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Paper From Home
I WAS waiting my turn at Gaston's while the freshman polished off an Ag instructor, when Kohl, who, though he is a junior, is still an enthusiastic supporter of his home town, came in to borrow the Centralia Daily Sentinel to read the personal column.
Curiosity got the better of my early training in manners, and I glanced at the paper. He was reading:
"James Heffington is playing the cornet for Linn Byers.
Postmaster Bill Whitney has had a new sign painted for the postoffice.
Miss Jessie Siegler will entertain the embroidery club at her home this afternoon.
McKinley Miller visited over Sunday with friends in Odin.
The Baptist Sunday School will give an ice cream supper Saturday evening at the home of Frank Chumbley. Come and bring your friends."
"That Heffington kid is some cornet player," Kohl commented when he saw I was looking. "He'll be a soloist in the University band one of these days. I've been wondering, too, for a long time whether or not Mac Miller was still thinking about that girl over at Odin. I knew her when we were in grammar school. It's some town I live in."
The life in college is likely to wean us too quickly from the old home folks and the old home life. We may come foolishly in time to feel that there is no training worth while but that which we get in college, that there is no education but that which we get out of books. We who are in college are living and feeding too much upon theories, so that it is good for us occasionally to get a taste of the simple, commonplace things of practical life. There is nothing that will give us this better than the home paper.
While we have been learning calculus and economics; the theories of versification and genetics; conversational French and Ibsen, it is helpful to be reminded that the home-folks have not been altogether standing still—that Frank Chumbley is developing social finesse and religious fervor in circulating the ice cream, that Jessie Siegler is cultivating a love for the beautiful through the embroidery club, and that McKinley Miller is taking an elementary course in home economics by correspondence and by an occasional private lesson from the girl at Odin.
There is no agency like the home paper for developing a broad human interest and for keeping us in touch with the friendships and the ideals of our youth.
February