Ithaca, New York
October 2, 1936
Dear Folks,
Well I am still alive although I am not feeling up to par. In fact I have felt lousy since Tuesday. I have had cramps in my stomach and stiff legs from walking but feel much better today. However, I have been working for my meals every day (3 times a day) and walking back and forth (2 miles down and 2 miles back). I got a ride down one day and I measured it on the speedometer.
Today is the first day that I haven’t worked every meal and probably won’t work more than one meal a day after things get going, although I will probably get a lot of chances to sub for others. Monday and Tuesday were very hard days for me as I had to go through a whole lot of red tape as well as go down and back to work.
There were 1500 of us that registered in the New York State Armory. There were about a dozen different things that we had to register for and for each one we had to stand in line for anywhere between 1 and 2 hours. It took me all day Monday and Tuesday to finish it. They soaked us for $20 for our R.O.T.C. uniforms (1 shirt, 1 pair of pants, 1 necktie, 1 cap, 1 belt, and 1 swell pair of riding boots).
The lieutenant wouldn’t let me register for the artillery af first because so many had registered before, but the next day I went up to see the major to see if I could get changed to the artillery and I did. One gets $19.50 of the $20 back at the end of 2 years and one has a chance to take advanced drill with pay and get so many credit hours for doing it but not many do.
I never walked so much in all my life except when I was in Washington D.C. The hard pavements are very hard on one’s legs. Every day during the week I have walked 12 miles back and forth to work along and about half that distance around the campus and have lost 5 pounds. However I expect to gain it back when I get to feeling OK again.
I washed dishes about half of the week for 60 people and dried them the rest. I have advanced so that it only took be 25 minutes to do breakfast dishes this morning (dry them) and less time to wash them. However it takes 2 hours to do supper dishes. They have 6 courses and absolutely clean dishes for each course. At dinner time, it is nearly as bad but only takes 1 hour and a half. It takes 20 minutes of fast walking to go one way and a little time to eat, so you see it takes more time than I can spare from my lessons to do it 3 times a day but I can stand it once or twice a day.
I am taking Geology, Bacteriology, Animal Husbandry I, English I, Orientation, Botany, and Hygiene I. So you see I have quite a bit of studying to do. They are all term subjects except Botany and English, 17 credit hours in all. One has to have 122 credit hours to graduate so one has to take around 16 or 17 hours a term.
We have an English teacher who is even more concise than Miss Hoffbeck was and twice as strict. It is my smallest class; there are only 20 in it. I have 200 in my Geology Class, 400 in Botany, 300 in Bacteriology, 300-400 in Orientation, 400 in Animal Husbandry, and I don’t have Hygiene until Monday so don’t know about that. I am making a copy of my schedule so you will know what I have and when and where.
This morning I had to walk all the way from Cayuga Heights where I worked to the Dairy Industrial Building, nearly 2-1/2 miles. If you look up on the map I sent you, you can see the distance between my other classes. They soak me like the dickens for books but I managed to get a couple of mine second hand so that helped some, and I am going to borrow a couple of the others from the library for a day at a time and thus save buying one. In some of the subjects you are required to buy several books and also lab manuals for 2 subjects.
My lunch today only cost me a dime as I wasn’t very hungry and I had some cookies which I brought back from the fraternity house where I work. You get perfectly elegant meals and I can live on two meals a day when I eat down there. Last night we had a half of a chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, beans, cranberry sauce, soup, buns, ice cream with chocolate sauce etc. However I didn’t eat much because I wasn’t feeling too good
I have just finished trying to arrange my room a little differently so as to have room to turn around but it is quite a job. It has been quite cold here lately and Mr. Lender has such a cold that he can’t talk. There are four of us that room right near each other, two from Long Island and one from Auburn. There is one fellow from Saugerties who rooms on the second floor and he said that it was only 175 miles from there to Ithaca and that maybe we could arrange about going home together sometimes. Saugerties is 10 miles north of Kingston.
I got a nice letter from Martha yesterday. I got 100% in my Geology laboratory experiment yesterday. I don’t get time to use Willard Strait Hall now so the fee is really wasted but everyone has to pay it. I intend to use the gymnasium and swimming pool a little to make for having to pay that fee. I don’t need anything besides the towels.
I hope everything is going smoothly at home and that the corn didn’t get frosted. It froze ice here once. It is very nice today. Write often because I love to get letters.
Lovingly, Hall
Gilbert Hall Flint was born August 14, 1918 and raised on Flint Hill Farm in Amenia, New York. His formal education began in a one-room schoolhouse in Smithfield. He graduated from Amenia High School in 1936 and from the Cornell University College of Agriculture in 1940. He taught high school agriculture from 1940 to 1944, served in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946, taught high school agriculture from 1946 to 1963, and finished his career as a school principal from 1963 to 1975.
Gilbert Hall Flint passed away on December 16, 2009. The letters are published in his memory. To view the letters in chronological order, please click a timeline label from the side bar menu, scroll to the bottom, and read up.
Gilbert Hall Flint passed away on December 16, 2009. The letters are published in his memory. To view the letters in chronological order, please click a timeline label from the side bar menu, scroll to the bottom, and read up.