Sisters see a century of change Edna Vickers, 99, and Kathryn Livingston, 101, reminisce about their past. January 01, 2000 By SUZANNE MILLER Evening Sun Reporter Edna Vickers remembers stopping at a candy store in Hanover with her younger brother as they waited for the afternoon train to take them home from school. The store had high shelves filled with candy, which fascinated her as a young girl, she said. One day her brother, Charles Alwine, ordered black licorice drops and they watched the store owner climb up a ladder and reach across for the box. The store owner placed a few pennies worth of licorice drops into a bag and asked for the money. "Charlie looked at me to pay it that day and I looked at him," she said laughing. "Nobody had any change he offered to lend it to us." That was around 1909 ­ nine years after Vickers was born. Vickers is now 99 years old. Born May 5, 1900, she and her sister Kathryn (Alwine) Livingston, who is 101, both live at Homewood at Plum Creek in Hanover. As the sisters prepare to experience a second century, they remembered what life was like in the first 100 years. They grew up in Berlin Junction in Oxford Township with their parents, Cora (Miller) and William Alwine Sr., and their three younger brothers, Charles, Walter and William Alwine Jr., now all deceased. Their grandfather, Peter Alwine, founded the Alwine Brick Co. in 1851 and their father, William Alwine, later took over the family business. They recalled that life was "much harder" when they were growing up. "I can see my mother scrubbing clothes with homemade soap," Vickers said. "Work? You have no idea unless you lived through it." Every morning the girls would have to milk the cow before school and gather the eggs from the chickens in the afternoon. Vickers said she was always glad when the canning season was over because she had to help her mother can everything. "I'm very thankful that I had all that discipline," she said. "Because there is nothing I don't like to do." As young girls, they would walk about a mile to their one room schoolhouse, Red Hills School, which had eight elementary grades and about 40 students. During the summer, classes were not held at Red Hills School, but Vickers and brother Charles would catch the train into Hanover where they continued classes and later attended Hanover High School, she said. "We would go to Hanover on the train and we would walk to the school located somewhere below Baltimore Street," she said. "We were always allowed to be late because of the train schedule." When it snowed, their father would hook up a bobsled to a horse and pick up all the kids in the neighborhood. If the weather was still bad at 4 p.m., when school ended, he would pick them up as well. Vickers remembered one time when the family was getting ready to go to Hanover in their new car and her father was taking too long. She decided she would speed things up by pulling the car out of the garage and get it ready to go, she said. "I got to one side too far and ripped the wood off," she said. When her father came outside "his eyes laid on that right away," she said, but fortunately he was not upset with his youngest daughter. "He asked, 'who did that?' and I said, 'It was me, father,'" she said. "And that was the last I ever heard about it." When Vickers was around 10 years old, her family was getting ready to go to their first talking picture in New Oxford, she said, but something came up and they didn't get to go. "I thought the world had come to an end," she said, but they eventually got to go. "It was so primitive, everyone ate peanuts and dropped the shells on the floor." "Life was so simple," said Livingston, who was born July 26, 1898, "But I was yearning for town even then." After the Red Hills School, Livingston attended the academy at Hood Seminary in Frederick, Md., for two years and then college for four years, she said. She studied English and later became an English and French teacher and taught in Virginia and Hanover. She first married J. Robert Horn and then later married Stuart Livingston, who are both deceased. Livingston used to work at the Alwine Brick Co. and also served in World War II in the Women's Auxiliary Corps. "I was in charge of the station hospital at Fort Meade (Md.)," she said. "I would see nothing serious some (soldiers) had lost their minds, but I wasn't part of that." Vickers' stepson, Leonard Vickers, served in World War II, she said. He was a career officer and he stayed in the Navy for 20 years, she said. Vickers married Leonard's father Damon Vickers after she graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh where she studied dietetics. She later became a dietitian for the Philadelphia school system and lived in Drexel Hill outside Philadelphia. Vickers moved back to New Oxford in 1980 and then later to Hanover. The sisters remember events from the century like World War I, the stock market crash and the Great Depression, but they didn't affect them much. "World War I didn't affect me," Vickers said. There was not as much media back then and they were pretty removed, she said. And as far as computers and other technologies are concerned, "I never wanted to bother my poor little head," Vickers said. Nancy