Northwestern Bible School - Scroll Yearbook (Minneapolis, MN)

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Left alone in the room we had occupied together, I was fortunate enough to secure a man to share the room with me who had recovered from home¬ sickness, and the rest of the school year moved more satisfactorily. However, it was not a year of financial flourishing; my board cost me $L45 a week, my room considerably less. I had gone to school with a two- dollar trunk, and a $13.00 suit. It was dark blue with a brown stripe in it and I wore it all the week; borrowed an iron of my landlady and pressed it Satur¬ day nights for Sunday wear. Before the year closed, the seat of the trousers gave away; but with the suit there came, according to custom, some pieces of goods off the same bolt, and so I patched, carefully striving to keep the patch above the coat-tail line. More than once I had to be careful about letter writing, lest I should not be able to scare up an additional three-cent stamp with which to make a further appeal to my father to send me a few dollars more of my tobacco crop balance. The lessons were extremely difficult. I had had only the advantages of country schools and my attendance there was not regular, owing to the farm work which often kept me at home for days together. The Latin I had never seen until that year and the dead language seemed to me to be worse than dead; it was “rotten.” The main event of the year lent assistance and inspiration beyond the conception of those who participated in it. My first Sunday in Valparaiso I went to the Baptist Church and learned to my delight that the pastor’s name was Rev. Edward S. Riley. His audience was not large and he spotted me as a stranger, came down to the pew where I sat, shook hands cordially, and asked me where I came from. When he found out who I was, he invited me home with him and taught his children to claim me as a kinsman. I suspect that that single fact saved me from surrendering the attempt at education and returning with my homesick roommate to old Kentucky. By the spring of 1880 I had accomplished sufficient to secure a teacher’s certificate, and later, in the summer, secured my school on Possum Ridge. However, when the season for school opening approached in 1880, the serious illness of my brother Theophilus, twenty-one months my junior, and the young man to whom the leadership of the farm would naturally fall, pre¬ vented my teaching. His attack was that of typhoid fever; it lasted many weeks and left him unfitted for work that autumn; hence the delay of further schooling for a year. By this time the profit of the tobacco sales was used up and how to get to school became a problem. When discouragement was complete, and I had decided to secure another school and teach, a kindly providence opened a better way. In the autumn of ' 81 a big-hearted, well-to-do farmer in Boone County, Kentucky, James T. Mason, who had known me from my birth, offered to lend me money to complete my college without respite, and also to provide that money without interest. The college selected for my training was Hanover, Indiana. It was one of the oldest of the western Presbyterian colleges and was located five miles out of Madison, in the little village of Hanover, on the crest of a hill by the Ohio river, one of the most beautiful and picturesque spots ever selected for a college. It was near “the Clifty” and other falls made famous by the author of Hoosier School Master. Here I put in four strenuous but delightful years. All my fellow students had enjoyed the advantage of high school training, [ 18] 2

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My home m Union, Boone County, Ken¬ tucky, where I spent my early boyhood, and where my youngest brother Walter was born [Dr. Riley paid a spe¬ cial visit to Kentucky to secure this photo graph. This house is over 100 years old, and still retains its original appearance -] It was In the spring of 1879 that I rented my father ' s farm. I promised to pay all the expenses of the conduct of the same, and pay him a thousand dol¬ lars in cash when the crop was sold. It was an amount of net money that no year had ever yielded; but I was desperate in my desire for an education, and determined upon that method of testing myself and the promises of God, For a brief season that spring my prospects seemed doomed. I had plowed! With the aid of three of my brothers and mv father and the hired man, I had made ready and planted to tobacco twenty-four acres, a crop unknown, in size, to that neighborhood. On the Sunday morning before the church hour I walked the fields over and found that fully half of the plants lav dead by the work of cut-worms. I was in my eighteenth year, big enough to be a man, but so close to my babyhood that I laid me down in the open field and sobbed in infant style, and felt and said, as many another enterprising business man has felt and said, “I am ruined.” But Monday morning, instead of breaking bright and fair, brought a furious rain, the one thing of all possible occurrences that could he in my favor. I rode the neighborhood over and purchased the leavings of every tobacco bed in the vicinity, and, with the assistance of the farm contingent, set it out again; and this time more than twenty acres of it lived. The next year in the summer of ' 80. I sold on the market in Cincinnati at one time $1,700 worth of tobacco. The most of it was paid to me in $5.00 bills, and I took the entire roll and put it in my trouser pockets. They bulged as they had never bulged before; nor, sad to say, since! That same season I became a tobacco trader. I purchased two other crops at eight cents a pound, and sold them, together with a poor balance of my own, left behind at shipping time, at a price, which at that time was most unusual, twenty cents a pound, So I cleared all expenses, paid father his thousand dollars, and had a small balance left. With the balance in hand I set out for school at Valparaiso, Ind., where Dr. Brown had built up a unique Normal. The winter of 1879-80 at this Normal School was one never to be forgotten. It was a lad ' s first experience away from home, and his homesickness was severe. To add to the seriousness of his own attack, his roommate, who had come from Kentucky with him to the Valparaiso school, had a far greater siege of the same, and after four weeks of complaints, he quit school and returned to his country home.

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whereas I had known but eight months in a normal school and the somewhat desultory work of an ungraded school. President Fisher proposed to let me attempt the freshman class, on condition that I would graciously go back into the preparatory department if I proved insufficient for this more advanced work. Suffice it to say that by hard study, often lasting till twelve or even one or two in the morning, I so far mastered the lessons as to make the freshman year in fair form, and from that time the work grew easier and my pleasure in the same increased accordingly. While, owing to the generosity of my backer, I was never financially embarrassed during these four years, yet no lack of economy characterized my conduct I boarded in the country, at a farmhouse, a mile away from the col¬ lege in order to keep expenses down. The annual outlay of these four years never exceeded $250.00 per annum. Even that amount might have been shaved a bit, but for the fact that I had brought my horse and buggy with me from Kentucky. This increased both my outlay and income, as I used the same to fill a preaching appointment at North Madison and other near-by points. My Greek letter fraternity, Iota chapter of the Beta Theta Phi, was not a mere social organization, as is now too sadly true, but a most serious and helpful fraternity. We had our feeds, of course, and our frolics; but the main business of our sessions was to inspire and assist one another in the compe¬ titions usual to college honors; and the history of the college, at that time, will prove that we greatly profited thereby, carrying off honors in numbers equaling the trophies of our several competitors. It is a sad confession to have to make to the present generation, but since it is solemnly true, let us say it; in spite of my splendid physical frame, I was not a famous athlete. At football I was a failure; even at baseball I was never a winner; and at tennis, only passable. There were only two respects in which I excelled—wrestling and debating; in other words, in physical and mental tussles I took the college honors. Home from Hanover College for the holidays. New Liberty, Kentucky 1882 . My father and four brothers . Reading from left to right: Back row — Orlando Branson , William Bell, Tkeophiltts Joel , Fletcher Tivis; Front row—My father , Bran¬ son Radish Riley , and Walter Levi.