Growing Up Farm Life & Basketball in the 1940s & '50s

Harold Schoen

eBook - 2017

FAMILY, FARM WORK AND PLAY; BASKETBALL FOR LEGENDARY COACH TOM BLACKBURN'S DAYTON FLYERS; WINNING THE 1962 NITBorn in 1941, Hal Schoen grew up on a small hardscrabble family farm located in an almost exclusively German-Catholic rural community near the Ohio-Indiana border, the oldest boy in a family of 13 children. His mother's siblings still spoke German to each other, even though their ancestors had lived in Ohio for over one hundred years. No one in the family had attended college, and neither parent graduated from high school. At first the farm had no electricity and was operated with workhorses. The farmhouse, which was torn down by its new owner in the 1960s, never had central heating or indoor plumbing.From age seven or eig...ht, Hal milked several cows by hand every morning and evening and helped his parents and others in their neighborhood group to thresh wheat and oats and to butcher hogs among many other farm chores. Few farmers in the area had telephones until the... more