Our family moved to Barkeyville when I was ten years old. I started fifth grade soon after moving and I went to Victory Joint School. I rode the bus there and developed some good friends there at the school and in Barkeyville.
Barkeyville was a little village along Route 8 in Pennsylvania. It was small, and it was a great place to grow up in. My Dad was a Pastor so we lived in the parsonage owned by the Barkeyville Church of God. It was an older two-story home that had three bedrooms upstairs. One for my parents, one for my sister, and one for my brother and me. It had a coal furnace in a section of the basement and a coal chute down into the basement from the side of the house for the deliveries of coal.
There was a yard all around the house but not much of it was in the front between the porch and the road. On one side of our house, there was a E.U.B. church, Evangelical United Brethren, which was a group that later merged with the Methodists to become the United Methodists. I don’t know how United they ever were but in my twenties, I ended up working at a United Methodist Church in Ohio that had been E.U.B. before the merger, and much later I worked at a United Methodist Church in Iowa that had been Methodist. The two seemed to have different histories in their approach to the Bible, at least that is how it appeared to me.
Anyway, the churches in the Barkeyville area were friendly with each other. It was just that some people went to different churches. Fortunately for me, they were friendly because one day I was playing catch with someone in the yard between our house and the E.U.B. church, which I wasn’t supposed to do, and I threw the ball too hard and too far and it crashed through one of the stained-glass windows. I felt really bad about it and knew I was in trouble. My Dad worked it out with the other pastor somehow and the window got fixed and I never played ball near that church building again.
On the other side of our house, we had a garage. On the back of our garage, there was a basketball hoop that I shot baskets into a lot. It was great to have it right there. In the yard between our house and the garage, there was enough space to put up our tent sometimes in the summer and camp out with my friends overnight. It was so much fun to do as we would talk, stay up late, eat snacks, and play Monopoly and other games.
Behind the house, separated by just a little bit of a field but visible from our house was a cemetery. A big old graveyard with old tombstones and the moon would shine over it at night and sometimes my friends and I would go there. It was a scary place.
It wasn’t always scary outside though. I remember one night that I felt God speaking to me and it was a powerful moment for me. The moon and the stars overhead and a real feeling, a knowing, that God was speaking to me. Not a voice that I or anyone else could hear but a voice that spoke into me. That would have been in the 1960s and it has stuck with me all of these years.
At the back of our backyard, there was a cable that stretched from the dog house for a nice distance so that Skippy, our dog, could run freely but not run away. Skippy would run back and forth with the chain around his neck connected to the overhead cable. Sometimes we would take him off of the cable and take him for a walk. But that didn’t work out very well because he was so strong that we would get dragged along. So almost all of the time Skippy was connected to that cable.
On the other side of our garage, there was a lane that ran back to the cemetery. It was very narrow, just wide enough for one vehicle at a time. On the other side of the lane was a Feed Mill. Lots of farms surrounded our little village so a Feed Mill was very important. After the Feed Mill, there were a bunch of houses on both sides of the road. Directly across from our house was the Barkeyville Church of God where my Dad was the Pastor. I have a lot of good memories there. Singing in the children’s choir, going to Sunday School and worship, all-night (late night at least) sings, midnight New Year’s Eve music and worship, and just being with my family and friends there. It was a good time. A great place to grow up in.
God was part of my life. Jesus was real to me. It was a simple but real belief. God was guiding me and I knew it but of course, that didn’t mean I didn’t have the ordinary wonderings and wanderings of any boy. Sometimes I would push my limits with my parents but I am so glad that I had limits and rules and was taught right and wrong. And I knew that my parents would always love me. I never doubted that.
Behind the church building was a field we used to play baseball in when it didn’t have a crop growing. So it was rough to play in it but it was close and we didn’t mind. Beside the church, across from the E.U.B. Church was one of my friends and we would play soccer in their backyard and also put on musical shows for our families. Right beside that family was the family of my best friend.
His family got a pool table one year and I wanted to play but my mom, in particular, didn’t want me to play pool. She minded my going over there because she liked the family, his Dad was a school teacher, but I wasn’t supposed to play. I never told them that I played but I guess my Dad probably knew and maybe my mom too. I never lied about it. They just never specifically asked me if I had played when I came back from there.
I couldn’t figure out why my Mom was so much against pool since we played ping pong at different times, including my Dad over the years, and it didn’t seem any different to me. It was just another game to play. When I got older my Dad told me that Mom had grown up in a rowdy coal town in West Virginia. In that town, there was only one place that had a pool table and it was a bar, a very rowdy bar where men drank and got drunk and had fights, and played pool. She had been taught that pool was evil and so she didn’t want me to play. She was protecting me I suppose. But of course, playing pool in a bar with fighting drunks is a far cry from playing pool at the house of a friend. So yes, I disobeyed my parents and got away with it. It’s interesting the things parents pass on to their children because of their own upbringing. But this didn’t get in the way of the love and acceptance that I always felt from my parents.
Oh, and we weren’t supposed to play cards either since that was considered sinful. But my brother and I did late at night and sometimes with friends, in my Dad’s study, with cards, and the chips to bet with from our Skunk game. We didn’t play for money but it seemed more fun to at least bet with chips like real poker players would.
So Barkeyville was a good neighborhood to grow up in surrounded by church buildings, a cemetery, a Feed Mill where you could take small critters that you had trapped, and friends nearby up and down the road. And a Service Station at the bottom of the hill where I could buy a bottle of coke for a dime on occasion.
It was the place of my boyhood with adventures in the woods past the cemetery where we shot at dragonflies with BB guns at the rock quarry that was already unsafe enough. But we were kids and we survived playing outside all day and only coming in for meals. Everybody in town knew who I was, and who everyone else was also, and in those days everybody looked out for each other. So my parents weren’t worried that we would get away with anything and more importantly they knew that if I was hurt someone would help me until they could get to me.
I was 16 when we moved from Barkeyville in the middle of my Junior Year. We moved less than ten miles but we moved into a small city and they had a different school for me to attend. Fortunately for me, I met some wonderful people there who were kind to this country kid. I am grateful for my adventures in Grove City...but Barkeyville is the place I grew up in.
Barkeyville was a place where I could ride a bike, deliver newspapers, play baseball and soccer, sing with my friends for my family, and hear from God. So many adventures for a boy. So many lessons were learned. But that’s how you grow up. And Barkeyville was that place for me.
