Category: Roger Harned – Writing

Bill Harned, my dad as I remember him

Bill Harned had been the dad in the 1960’s with his Kodak 8mm movies of everyone else in our family then later endless slide shows and even a poster-board chart of our family tree.

I remember this photo of him in his new uniform after his promotion from Assistant Chief of the Cortland VFD to Fire Chief. Dad is standing near the front door of our house on East Main Street which he and my uncle Bob built back in 1955.

He had a regular job just like all the other men answering the call of the fire siren sounding. Most of the men and women of our community volunteered time to serve our little village and surrounding communities in many ways, as was expected in the early 20th century A.D.

Later he would serve on our local school board. Earlier my grandpa had been a village councilman, mayor and traffic court judge.

Marie and Bill Harned

Mom, like so many other women born during the roaring 20’s, had been raised with just enough to get by during the Great Depression of the 30’s, then joined the factory workforce of the 40’s while Dad was in the Navy (building dirigibles in Akron, mostly) for WWII.

And in order to make ends meet like so many others, my mom and dad both worked as they raised us in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Many men had returned home to not enough peacetime jobs and a stagnant economy. Dad’s and moms both worked and even worked second jobs as their new babies (Boomers) needed fed.

(My parents managed the Cortland Roller Rink for a time where we grew up on roller skates with my mom sometimes playing the hit parade and 40's songs on the Hammond organ some evenings and on weekends.)

Roger’s ‘boomer‘ biography

Baby boomers (a demographic into which I was born just a little later than most) grew up in a smalltown era when everybody in town still knew everyone else.

Boom kids like me (we didn’t call ourselves that) frequently worked for grandparents or other relatives in town.

Of course along with these redefined roles of dads and moms came some less-than-ideal family situations (still hardly-mentioned) like divorce, separation and moving to separate towns and once never-imagined consequences of both parents fully losing authority and influence over a mass-media fed generation of flower-children rebelling against ducking their heads under our school desks while political leaders on T.V. threatened to blow up the world with nuclear weapons.

The Baby BOOM was so labeled due to the 'greatest generation' finally getting to have babies after war. Most still married. No pill to prevent a child from being born (of course), the natural result of a man and woman in love. 

(Besides, why would any young man or young woman not want that?)

I suppose that in the U.S. in the year of our Lord 1950 when I was born, WE simply overlooked God’s grace in sparing OUR COUNTRY from the savagery of war, unscathed in industry and infrastructure, as WE now ruled the world with an imagined blueprint from a story-book painting of our past.

God, County, ambition and an imagined melting pot of the best cultural characteristics of every failed and defeated nation of WWII quickly developed US into an uncommon country leading a new world into an evolution of Common Era change.

Yet WE rapidly turned against everything our forefathers had once passed on:

from generation to generation, grandfather to father, mother to daughter;

a duty to our family, to community, to the alien and for our citizen responsibilities of this land —

ALL in a SELF-preserving presence of a Common Era brought into being NOT by evolution,

but by revolution against GOD —

a fall and failing of all authority shaken by anarchy

re-defining artificial and human-made truths into that which WE know to be evil.

Times of Change

Let’s put the lives of my parents, Marie and Bill Harned, into a context of the times when they were born beginning with my older grandfather, Herbert Hall (who had worked for the Erie Railroad) born in the last year of the 19th century, 1900 A.D.

You can think back just 23 years to the end of the 20th century to 2000 in this Common Era, can't you? 

A child born this year will not remember 9/11/2001, but their parents and grandparents witnessed it.

The 20th century began without planes, televisions, and of course, computers. These inventions radically transformed the lives of people around the globe, with many changes originating in the United States.

Source: ThoughtCo

A.D. 1900-1923

• 1900 A.D. – William McKinley from nearby Niles, Ohio was President. On Sept. 6, 1901, he was shot at Buffalo, N.Y., by .. an anarchist, and he died there eight days later. – Source
• 1915 A.D. – As World War I raged in Europe, most Americans, including U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, remained determined to avoid involvement and committed to neutrality.. the sinking of the unarmed British ocean liner, the Lusitania, by a German submarine on May 7, 1915 (killing, among others, 128 Americans), prompted the U.S. to join the war on the side of the Allies. Leaving behind its isolationism, the U.S. became a global superpower… – Source
• December 1922 – the Russian Empire becomes the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

There were an amazing number of cultural firsts in the ’20s, including the first talking film, Babe Ruth hitting his home-run record of 60 home runs in a season, and the first Mickey Mouse cartoon. 

A Timeline of the 20th Century

In the year of our Lord, 1923

Economics
Federal spending: $3.14 billion
Consumer Price Index: $17.1
Unemployment: 2.4%
Cost of a first-class stamp: $0.02

• President Warren G. Harding [born in 1865 near Mount Gilead, Ohio] suddenly falls ill (July 28) while returning from a trip to Alaska and is rushed to San Francisco, where he dies on Aug. 2.
• William Alba Harned, later the Superintendent of the feed mill in Cortland, turned 20 that day as my grandma, Genevieve expected their first son just a month later.
• The Harned’s were long-established working class gentry, some who had remained English Loyalists during the American Revolution. My great-grandfather Heberling [Gen’s father] had taught school in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, near Conneaut Lake. They were German-Americans and I recall this aged teacher in his late years as he sat in his rocker with a Bible in his lap, frequently falling asleep, occasionally walking about and rarely speaking to most of the family gathered in their home.

A.D. 1923 – 2017 C.E.

My purpose today is to honor the 100th anniversary of the birth of my father, William E. [Bill] Harned.

It is NOT so much that WE ought to either dwell in or dismiss the lessons of these last days witnessed by the generation of my father.

Although WE look back at history of our family and nation through tainted and well-worn rose-colored glasses, let US remember our long line back to the faith of our fathers and religion of a Christian heritage once prerequisite in the everyday lives of our PEOPLE and the LAW of our governing.

Roger@TalkofJesus.com

I observe now during my own waning years why some fathers of ours just shook their heads at the Common Era of these last day; while distant memories of our forefathers sitting silently in their rockers read their Bibles while waiting for a new heaven and a new earth to include all souls of those judged faithful to the One who IS True, JESUS Christ our Lord.

Roger Harned, a Christian writer & site administrator of TalkofJESUS.com. This is NOT a personal blog, but Scriptural exposition inviting your questions about the Lord. ALL followers of JESUS Christ are welcome to COMMENT (moderated) and Share your own Scriptural posts.