Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Way It Was
    The Way It Was
    The Way It Was
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    The Way It Was

    By Jack Dunn

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A memoir, the life story of a "depression baby" who in his formative years as a farm boy experienced life on the home front during World War II. Educated at Penn State and earned under graduate and graduate degrees in geography. The majority of his forty-three years in planning and community development was at the executive management level;. His years in York. Pennsylvania included community shelter planning at the height of the Cold War and the turmoil caused by the Three Mile Island nuclear accident.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJack Dunn
    Release dateFeb 4, 2015
    ISBN9781310696169
    The Way It Was
    Author

    Jack Dunn

    Reed J. Dunn, Jr. writing as Jack Dunn was born in 1934. He grew up on a farm in rural, southwestern Pennsylvania. His childhood experiences included attending a one-room country school, being engaged in a variety of farm chores and following the military exploits of older cousins. He was educated in the Washington County public schools. He earned Bachelor of Science and Master of Science Degrees in Geography at Penn State University.His entire professional life was in the field of planning and community development most of which was at the executive management level. His earliest employments were with a consulting engineering firm and state government. From 1965 until 2000 he was the Executive Director of the York County (Pennsylvania) Planning Commission. He was a charter member of both the American Planning Association and the American Institute of Certified Planners and in 1972 was President of the Pennsylvania Planning Association.During the years that he lived in York he was involved in a variety of civic and quasi-governmental activities that focused on such area as economic development, tourism, community infrastructure and the environment.His wife of forty-five years, Almeda Engle Dunn, passed away in 2008. A son, Bradley, resides in York. A brother, Daniel, resides in California.He currently resides in northeastern Pennsylvania with his partner, Naomi Meyer. His leisure time activities include writing and volunteer work. Special interests include genealogy and family histories.

    Read more from Jack Dunn

    Related to The Way It Was

    Related ebooks

    Personal Memoirs For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      MY SISTER WAS MURDERED... Then She Helped Mum To Heaven

      Aug 18, 2021

      Jennifer Newland, 48, Forster, NSW My mum, Rose, was my best friend. Whenever I got teased at school, she always made me feel better. ‘You’re mine and I love you,’ she said, drying my tears, after one tough day. Then, she broke out into the Monty P

      3 min read

    • Article

      Jaycee Lee Dugard

      Aug 3, 2020

      Jaycee Lee Dugard, then 11, was walking up the street near her home in Meyers, California, when she was abducted on June 10, 1991, by a man in a car who knocked her unconscious with a stun gun. Her stepfather, Carl Probyn, saw the kidnapping throug

      1 min read

    • Article

      Everest Death Toll Rises To 10 This Season After 4 More Climbers Found Dead

      May 24, 2017

      The bodies were discovered in tents by Nepalese Sherpas at Camp IV, the camp closest to the summit of the world's tallest mountain. The victims have not yet been identified.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Guilty Party

      Jun 17, 2021

      Guilty Party
      4 min read

    • Article

      Life After Death

      May 27, 2022

      Life After Death
      14 min read

    • Article

      The House Exploded

      Jun 17, 2021

      The House Exploded
      4 min read

    • Article

      Mummy’s Dark Side

      Sep 1, 2022

      Mummy’s Dark Side
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Perfect Daughter

      Jul 10, 2021

      Standing in a handstand, Jane arched her back and lowered her feet towards the head. Scorpion pose. She saw herself in the mirror, balancing in this challenging position. It was close to perfection… And she felt sick at the sight of it. From the loud

      8 min read

    • Article

      Balancing Act: In 'Mrs. Everything,' Jennifer Weiner Explores Her Mom's Sexuality, Evolving Gender Roles And Donald Trump's America. Is It A Beach Read? Maybe!

      Jun 17, 2019

      Jennifer Weiner, New York Times bestselling author of 16 juicy, layered, courageous books, always knew she wanted to write a novel that followed her characters from birth to death. She knew she wanted that book to be loosely based on her own life and

      4 min read

    • Article

      BESTIE’S BETRAYAL CONNED out of ﹩200,000

      Oct 19, 2022

      For years, Susan Hughes and Anna Bonner were inseparable. The pair first became friends in 1999, when they worked as carers at the same assisted living complex. Seeing Anna’s long blonde hair getting in her way as she served food to the residents, Su

      3 min read

    • Article

      My girl was SAVED BY A BRUISE

      Sep 1, 2021

      Christine Wheeler, 26, Weipa, Qld As the text flashed up on my phone, I saw it was from my daughter’s day care. Charlie’s fallen over but she’s okay, it read. Because of that last part, I wasn’t too worried about my lively two-year-old. And when

      3 min read

    • Article

      Web Of Lies

      Nov 28, 2019

      Web Of Lies
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Murder Of James Bulger 30 Years On

      Feb 7, 2023

      This week marks 30 years since two-year-old James Bulger was abducted and murdered by two 10-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. James would be in his 30s now. Would he be married? A father? With a career? All that was snatched away from

      4 min read

    • Article

      Standing Strong

      Oct 22, 2022

      Standing Strong
      10 min read

    • Article

      Sex, Lies, Love And Regrets

      Sep 3, 2021

      Sex, Lies, Love And Regrets
      4 min read

    • Article

      Out Of This WORLD

      Apr 20, 2021

      Out Of This WORLD
      6 min read

    • Article

      Is She Hiding In A Submarine? In A Bunker? The Hunt For Ghislaine Maxwell

      Dec 15, 2020

      This time last year, Ghislaine Maxwell was off the grid. The Oxford-educated socialite was lying low as the focus of a frenzied media hunt pivoted to her after the suicide of her erstwhile lover Jeffrey Epstein. “For Ghislaine-watchers, the autumn of

      5 min read

    • Article

      ‘I Could Go To Therapy And Unpack It All – But I Don’t Have Time For That’: Julia Fox On Chaos, Kink And Dating Kanye West

      Oct 7, 2023

      There is a motif running through Julia Fox’s new memoir that hints at the incredulity one may experience while reading it. “I can’t believe this is my life,” writes the 33-year-old in Down the Drain, and the phrase is not a rhetorical flourish. The s

      14 min read

    • Article

      The Living Victims

      May 8, 2020

      The Living Victims
      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Way It Was

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Way It Was - Jack Dunn

      THE WAY IT WAS

      A MEMOIR

      BY

      JACK DUNN

      OTHER BOOKS BY JACK DUNN

      HOME AND AWAY - 2012

      MEMORIAL DAY - 2012

      DEDICATED

      TO

      THE MEMBERS

      OF

      MY IMMEDIATE FAMILY

      REED J. DUNN

      MAJORIE DUNN

      DANIEL DUNN

      Table of Contents

      PREFACE

      EARLY YEARS

      DUNNS STATION

      THE FARM

      THE FARMSTEAD

      ELEMENTARY SCHOOLING

      ON THE HOMEFRONT

      EAST WASHINGTON HIGH SCHOOL

      FAMILY & RELATIVES

      OTHER CHILDHOOD AND TEEN RECOLLECTIONS

      BASEBALL

      COMING OF AGE

      UPS AND DOWNS IN THE FIRST DECADE

      MATURITY - SEVENTIES & EIGHTIES

      WINDING DOWN - THE NINETIES

      RETIREMENT

      REFLECTIONS

      PREFACE

      This is my memoir. It is the life story of a Depression Baby born into a lower middle-income family in rural southwestern Pennsylvania. My childhood and teen years were the tail end of the Great Depression, the years of World War II and the balance of the Forty’s. Those of us born during the 1930’s are sometimes referred to as the Quiet Generation. I’ve often thought of us as the Forgotten Generation in much the same way as our war, the Korean War, seems forgotten. There weren’t a lot of us as birth rates plummeted during that time. But we made our mark in the technology advances of the Sixties, the Seventies and beyond.

      The home setting of my childhood and formative years was physically comfortable and sheltered. Life was simple and consisted of farm work, school, church and occasional social events. The people that I had contact with were almost exclusively White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants (WASP’s) and in my thirty’s I had little framework of reference to fully understand cultural changes such as civil rights and anti-war issues.

      I have little idea of the standards, if any, that exist for a memoir but I am going to write it in a conversational format, as if I were telling a story.

      In this writing I’ll make reference to the members of my immediate family.

      Dad. Reed Jackson Dunn (1903 -1961)

      Mom. Marjorie Anna [Debolt] Dunn (1904 – 1967)

      Dan. My Brother, Daniel Lincoln Dunn (1930 )

      Jack. Reed Jackson Dunn, Jr. (1934 )

      So in my Eightieth year, here goes.

      Jack Dunn 2014

      EARLY YEARS

      A little background. My Mom and Dad were married in 1929 in June before the Stock Market crash and the beginning of the great Depression. They had both been teachers at what is now Trinity High School in Washington, PA. The name Trinity came from the original building of its predecessor the Trinity Hall Military Academy. That structure, first built as a residence in the 1850’s, exists today.

      In the 1920’s, for reasons unknown to me, married women were not allowed to be teachers. So after they married, Mom was out of a job. At some point they moved to a place far south in West Virginia called Ronceverte, where Dad coached athletics and taught. That didn’t last too long. When things got really tough in the depression, if you weren’t a local person you lost your job. In the meantime, things were difficult on the farm and my Grandfather was having a hard time so they moved back home.

      Back home meant the farm in the immediate vicinity of the village of Dunns Station in south western Pennsylvania. It had been in Dunn family ownership since the mid-1800’s. The farm acreage included two residences, the largest of which was a two story, twelve room structure. About one-eighth of a mile to the east across the bottom land was a smaller one-story residence which was always referred to as the little house, not to be confused with that same terminology sometimes applied to privies in rural areas.

      For the first few years we lived in the little house. The little house contained a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, a fairly large bedroom, a small bedroom and a bathroom. The small bedroom was where Dan and I slept. It was very narrow and we in slept in twin bunk beds. I had the bottom bed and I have some sense that Dan didn’t like having to sleep in the top bunk. I guess he had to climb up and down a ladder and it was probably hot up there in the summer. That was before home air conditioning. There was a small front porch with an entrance into the living room. I think that there was a little back porch that may have included some kind of an outdoor pantry or storage area. I don’t know who occupied the little house before we did, when it was built or what its origin was. After we no longer lived there, it was a rental property for a few years. The last time I saw it, it looked abandoned and beyond rehabilitation.

      Dan was born in 1930 and I came along in 1934. I was born at Washington Hospital. I remember Mom telling me when I was an adult that she had a difficult time with my delivery. I was premature. That was before the time of widespread use of infant incubators, at least in the Washington Hospital. She said that they had me wrapped with narrow strips of cotton in the nursery. Dan had been named for ancestors on Dad’s side of the family. The original plan had been to name me for one of Mom’s ancestors; Stephen Maple, a Revolutionary War veteran. She said when they came around with the papers at the Hospital, she was feeling pretty tough and the idea of going through another pregnancy and childbirth didn’t have much appeal. She said maybe she should give Dad some credit while she had the chance. So that’s how I was named Reed Jackson Dunn, Jr.

      There’s a little anecdote about how I’ve always been called Jack. The story is that when I came on the scene, Dad had been reading my brother, four years old at the time, the story of Peter Rabbit. When Dan saw me for the first time, he announced that I looked just like Peter Rabbit. Consequently for the first two or three months, I was known as Pete. Mom brought that to an end since there was a relative in the community also known as Pete who was best known for his ability to consume large quantities of alcoholic beverages. I gather there was a family conference of some sort. Junior was unappealing and the idea of two family members with same name seemed awkward. So Jack was the compromise and came from my middle name, Jackson.

      It was sometime in the late 30’s that we moved over to the big house. I have very few memories or recollections about living in the little house. I remember that someone came to that house and brought me an ice cream cone. Turned out it was butter pecan and up to that point I guess the only kind of ice cream that I’d seen was vanilla and chocolate. Dumb kid that I was

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1