A tribute to Jonas D. Gingerich
Letter to the Editor,
On this day, March 30, 2024, snuck in between Good Friday and Easter, we pay tribute to a local son, Jonas D Gingerich, and to the old school in the village of Mt. Hope where he attended as a fourth-grader and tribute also to the teacher in that school who inspired him to write a poem. The old two-story schoolhouse with a clapboard exterior is long gone. That teacher, and I am made to wonder whether it wasn’t Mrs. Ethel Kraus of Mt. Hope, also long gone, and Jonas the author have been laid to rest.
But the poem remains. His ball-playing years as a star softball player are long past. Those were glory days, times in building friendships. But the poem shows an illustrious other side. It was written in a time that shrouded the world in the darkness of World War II, 1943-44, but a teacher helped bring about this little gem of brightness, and someone saved it over all the years and had it framed, and that is as I saw it on a display table of photographs at his funeral:
I think that every boy or girl
Should have a pony small
So they can ride and drive him
And need not walk at all.
Paul A. Stutzman
Millersburg