The Menno Simons Historical Library has a number of these cars still, and occasionally they come up on vintage toy websites. Only 200,000 were made and sold originally, so I understand that they are highly collectable!

-Simone Horst, Special Collections Librarian and Archivist

Thanks for your interest and sharing more about your mother. I’ve emailed you directly to connect you with Simone Horst, who wrote the article and is also our university archivist.

–Lauren Jefferson, Director of Communications

My mother, Miriam Lehman Weaver and her sisters Esther and Dorothy (children of C.K. Lehman) told about their childhood memory of going “up to school” during the depression years to buy food at cost from the EMS kitchen storage room. My Aunt Dorothy remembers getting dried beef, cheese, dried beans, and raisins among other things. They would weigh their items on a scales and take everything to the kitchen where they wrote down what they had gotten on a board behind the door. One of the cooks would tally their order and accept their payment. Aunt Dorothy also remembers her father bringing home from the kitchen a huge box of cornflakes which they stored in the dry attic and ate from for weeks and weeks. Her memory is that the box was a three foot cube, but I suspect it looked larger to her as a child than it really was. She also remembers her father bringing home a fifty pound bag of sugar. Allowing faculty to buy staples at cost was one of the ways the school tried supplement their meager salaries.

When I talked to Aunt Dorothy today she commented that at least EMS continued to pay their faculty throughout the depression as opposed to Goshen College (where Dorothy now lives) who had to stop paying faculty salaries altogether for awhile.

In addition to the toy manufacturing mentioned in the article, most faculty members had to create an additional source of income. For my grandpa, it was raising chickens. If you walk down College Avenue where a number of faculty members lived, even today, you can see vestiges of chicken houses behind almost every house on the right side of the street from Mt. Clinton Pike to Shenandoah Street. Aunt Dorothy remembers washing the water fountains for the chicken house, a job she hated but that needed to be done. All the children had to help with that venture.

Unfortunately, almost all of the faculty children who experienced those years are now gone. I’m sure many good stories have disappeared with them.