Darrel and Joyce Billings recently presented me with a copy of the Home and School Visitor, published in Greenfield in Oct. 1906.
The cost of the publication is 75 cents a year, or seven cents an issue. Have you ever heard or seen it? It was published by Goble Printing, which is now the parking lot next to the current prosecutor’s office. Two ads in the publication include the National Adjustable Chair company, which was in Greenfield, and the Central Normal College in Danville.
A travel ad also attempts to sell a train ticket to California and Seattle for $30. The publication contains stories, songs, memory work, history lessons, poems and civics lessons … I am sure that your children receive some sort of similar publication in grade school today.
D. H. Goble published this effort first in Jan. 1881. After 1928, he brought his sons and daughter into the publication. In the early days, Lee O. Harris, the Hancock County teacher, Riley friend, Civil War veteran and poet contributed to the publication. Richard Goble told me some years back that Gobles for many years printed the Primitive Baptist Hymnal, too. The Goble family house is now the law office on South Street. Dick said missionaries used to visit and sleep in the attic.
The publication has several sayings for students to remember.
“Time is a money box. Yes, and each of us coins his hours into gold, silver, copper or bogus metal, according to his taste, industry, skill or the lack of them.”
Or another is, “To do to others as I would, That they should do to me, Will make me honest, kind and good, As children ought to be.”
Enough. I have told you everything that I know and some things I don’t. Talk to me.
You can write to Joe Skvarenina at [email protected] or in care of the Daily Reporter at 22 W. New Road, Greenfield, Indiana, 46140.
