Forest City Courier, Sept. 22, 1938

Each person has his or her favorite season of the year. Mine is autumn. Somehow the word fall is not a good name for this season. I suppose it was called fall because the leaves are shed. And, too, it seems more a period of increase rather than that of defeat or deterioration. The harvesting of crops come at this time, and it is indeed a season of “golden days.” Golden pumpkins lying around the corn, golden chrysanthemums in the florists’ windows, golden days in the sunshine, golden leaves rustling beneath treading feet, golden sunshine through the maples and golden fields beyond distant hills. This is the gold for us; it is not the gold of the spend thrift or the miser. This is the true gold which brings happiness, it is not gold which we have hoarded or spent, and surely we have not earned it.

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Even in this advanced age there are still a few parents who are completely out of touch with the public school life that is lived by their children during the larger part of the day. We do not believe that there are mothers who breathe sighs of relief when sister or brother becomes six years old and feel that their work is practically over and now the child in question has become teacher’s problem. Nor do we believe that I there are fathers who never wonder how John or Jane are adjusting themselves to the public school system, limiting themselves to the task of signing the monthly report card with only a few words of praise or reproof. When there was no Parent-Teacher Association, we did more or less leave the major part of the training to the teacher, but now that this great organization was formed in order to meet just such problems as these, the case should be different. It has been highly successful in bringing the fathers and mothers of school children into closer contact with the teachers and the school system. The teachers in our midst should receive cooperation in every way, and no better medium than the P.T. A. was ever organized for this purpose.

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How fortunate we are to live in a democratic country where the control of affairs is vested in the mass of the people, who in their decisions are superior to the mandates of a king, emperor or dictator. The editorial page of this week’s Saturday Evening Post carries a short item stating that in Burg, Germany, 800 iron fences used for marking off plots in a cemetery have been removed and the iron is being used for industrial purposes. Things of this kind go to make up the Four-Year-Plan for self-sufficiency.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Courier. Copyright owned by The Daily Courier.