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[p. 42: Uz Ameriku/Zelta zeme 4]
In school again!
After a fairly brief, but experience-filled interruption, I was in school again. Greer College was in a small town of
about 5,000 people [Hoopeston, IL], which was called 'holy' because for many years, based on the local option, buying and
selling alcohol was prohibited. For that the nearby county seat, Danville, was grateful, since it got plenty of customers.
A wealthy farmer, John Greer, had built a fairly large brick school building with an adjacent dormitory, and had given it
all to the city. The motto placed on his donation was "The poorest is heir to the best." I started at the beginning
of the academic year taking all of the available classes in teachers' preparatory education, as well as commercial subjects,
especially bookkeeping. There were some ten teachers and about a hundred students.
Most of the students were the nearby farmers' children. There were also some from more distant places, but not many. Among
the foreigners I was the only Latvian (at the time marked as Russian); the others included three Mexicans, two Japanese, two
Indians [i.e. from India], and three Greeks. For a small town it was many.
I didn't have to worry about tuition, room and board for the first three months, which were paid. When they came to an
end, I had to go to the school president to talk about the future. We worked it out so that I would work at the school without
any pay. The first job was washing dishes in the cafeteria. With some 40 or 50 people at the table at any given time, there
was no shortage of dishes. The next job was cleaning the rooms. In order that sweeping wouldn't raise too much dust, I had
to sprink1e the floors and hallways with oiled bark dust, and tied a handkerchief over my nose. After this I moved on to making
the beds and cleaning rooms in the dormitory. I don't remember just how many rooms there were in the two-story building, but
when I was working, there seemed to be many. I had the most trouble with bedbugs and rats.
The first [bedbugs] were in the seams of the mattresses, especially in the corners. We sprayed with a special solution
that was supposed to exterminate them. In reality, the spraying didn't help; we had to catch almost every one and drown it
in the solution. The bedbugs gave particular problems to one slow-witted theologian.; I couldn't understand exactly why him.
I asked if he wasn't a follower of Tolstoy, and didn't "refuse to resist evil". Actually, he worked and studied
so hard that he slept soundly enough that he didn't feel the bedbugs' bites. The rats lived in the basement, probably because
the building was right next to the fields of grain, on the edge of town. When I moved on to the next job, lighting the central
heating boiler with coal, then I started to feel what real work was like. I had to wake up at three in the morning to heat
the class rooms; I had to run around to the radiators to make sure there was no water or steam leaking from them; and I had
to take the ashes out of the boiler room. My working and studying day ended at eleven o'clock at night. You can imagine how
soundly I slept if I tell you that I was awakened one morning by a rat which had bitten me on the end of the nose to start
its meal. I jumped up and struck at it, but it seemed like several rats ran down into the basement drainpipe. The tooth marks
stayed on my nose for a long time, at least ten years.
The job at school paid for my tuition, room and board; for other expenses, I had to earn money on the outside. I went
to milk cows on the edge of town; in the fall and spring I raked leaves and did garden maintenance work. I looked for odd
jobs to earn extra money.
Once my father's brother Martins came to visit me. On account of the economic crisis at the time there was no work to
be found, and staying at the school was cheap. As a special student, not enrolled in the program, he began taking English
classes. The crisis was so deep and widespread that many of the Latvians were nearly starving. One can imagine how serious
it was since two immigrants, my companion [Vilis Tomnovics] and one Laimins, got the idea of pulling a robbery to get to some
money. Being beginners, the attempt went badly. One of them shot a cashier and his own finger, but didn't get any money. Later
he was worried that he might die as a result of the infected wound. For a while my traveling companion, Vilis, worked on a
ship. He quit that job, not being able to put up with his crude co-workers. Then he went out west and married a widow who
owned a lumber mill; he died long ago. After I went off to school, we never saw each other again.
During this time at school, I visited all of the churches that were in the town, including the Holy Rollers. I also didn't
miss the chautauquas which happened in summer. At one I got to hear William Jennings Bryan give his "Prince of Peace"
lecture, in which he set forth the question of how much a person could possibly earn in a lifetime. Was it one million, or
three million dollars? He answered that a person could earn so much; that Christ and Lincoln had 'earned' that much and more.
Yes, they had earned that much, but hadn't 'collected'; those who earn don't have enough time to collect, but those who collect
don't have enough time to 'earn'. I also heard Captain Hobson, commander of the battleship Maine, sunk at Havana harbor. The
same with the famous evangelist, Billy Sunday, the ex-baseball player. These giant traveling tent shows carried 'culture'
to all of the little prairie towns, and made good money.
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