In those days people made their own entertainment. They never had much money to spend, so had to rely on Spelling Bees, Festivals, Singing Classes and School Exhibitions. We would hire an old gentleman for two or three dollars a night to teach singing, with the understanding that there wouldn't be much singing but lots of intermission. He was very earnest in his endeavor to teach us the notes, but nobody paid much attention to him. It was a place for boys and girls to meet and spend the evening. When the Christian Endeavor Society would get new singing books, they would gather at different homes to learn the new music. They would sing until about nine-thirty or ten o'clock, then partake of a lunch, then all home and bed. There was a real sociability among the farmers of that day. They had to make their own social life, an art that is lost in this day. This had not always been the case in my township. The population was made up principally of descendants of German settlers, interspersed with a few Scotch Irish families. In my grandfather's day a meeting of these two factions usually ended in a fistfight. Things had improved in my father's youth, but still there was little social mingling. However, by the third generation they had learned to live together quite amicably. These people were an honest God fearing people, thrifty, hard working and very good citizens. They raised large families on a hundred acre farm, many of them quite hilly and in many instances abandoned now. They managed to clothe their children, feed them good, and often sent some to places of higher learning. As we had no High Schools, anything above the Eighth Grade was entirely at the expense of the parents. The farms were self-supporting; most of the food was raised on the farm and material for part of the clothing. In the fall they killed eight or ten hogs, a beef, and this lasted the year around. The hams were smoked and hung in the smokehouse or granary. Many a good ham dinner I ate at threshing time in the fall. These hams had a flavor you cannot duplicate in the supermarket. They spun their own wool, knit their own socks and stockings and mittens. They also had hides tanned to make calfskin boots and shoes, made at the local shoemaker. My father was a tanner by trade and tanned many of the hides for shoes and boots. Tanning was quite a complicated trade in that day. My father had twenty-eight vats for curing hides. These vats were formed by digging a square hole and lining it with plank and made watertight.