REV. A. B. KENDALL, D.D.

I am not a self-made man. I doubt if any man is. I guess I was born with a love for books. I did not make that. I learned to read, so I have been told, by bringing a book to my mother and asking her the names of the letters and what they spelled. I recall with a pleasure, that has never lost its peculiar charm through the years, a visit at the home of a neighbor when I was not yet three years of age and the placing in my hands of a blue covered book with pictures of birds and animals in it. The feeling of delight, the thrill of joy, the profound impression of that one day and incident have never left me. I love a book still. Just to feel it, let alone peruse it, is like caressing a loved one.

I possess, I always have possessed, an unusually good memory. I did not make that. I was naturally observant. No credit can accrue to me from that source. I loved to learn. Some grammarians may differ with me in the use of the word “love,” but let them; I do not care, it may be because they have never loved in that way. I must have inherited that. I was passionately fond of music. Another 68 day stands out across the years as memory travels back, when as a boy of eight or nine years of age I traveled from the little log cabin on the farm where I lived to the nearest town, three miles away, with a pail of blackberries on my arm which I peddled from door to door. In my travels I found myself in the vicinity of a group of fine brick and stone buildings which I knew instinctively was the State Normal School and from within the walls of that building there floated strains of heavenly music. It may have been some pupil practicing scales, I know not; but this I do know, it was celestial to me, and I see that boy in poor, shabby clothes, but neat as mother’s love could make them, barefooted, tired, dusty, standing there with the big tears running down his cheeks, his heart filled with an inexpressionable longing to be able to play like that, and with it a desire to go to school and obtain an education. I did not make that desire.

And then at the back of and under and through all the woof of every man’s life, if he be not blind, he can see, or if he be not dishonest and will acknowledge it, there ever runs the warp of the wonderful influences of other lives and the strange providential guidings which do more than anything else to make men and women.

Supreme among these influences, as in most men’s lives, was the influence of my sainted mother, whose self-sacrifice for her boy, who so many times was so unworthy of it, has been the most potent factor in 69 helping me achieve whatever of real success I may have attained.

My mother was a widow left with six children, five of whom were at home. The youngest was a girl less than two years of age, another was under four, and I was not yet six years of age. We moved at the time of her widowhood from the city to my grandfather’s farm. Grandfather had died and grandmother was left with no one to care for the farm. My brother and I were the farmers. He was fifteen years of age and I was about six. The country school was a mile and a half from our home. I went winters rather irregularly, for the cold weather and deep snows of northwestern Pennsylvania in those days made it well-nigh impossible to attend regularly. In the summer there was the farm work which prevented my getting the benefit of the summer term. But I studied and read not with any definite aim, but just because I liked to study and read. Grandmother’s death and the sale of the old farm when I was about eleven years of age, left the mother with nothing but her bare hands to support her growing family. I went to work on a farm and the outlook for an education was anything but reassuring. I still continued to get some schooling at the little country school during the winter. The summer that I was fifteen I was working in the garden of the pastor of the little Christian church, which I attended, and he told in the neighborhood that he had found a diamond in the rough. I have 70 never questioned the latter part of that statement as applied to me, but have always felt that the good old man’s vision must have been somewhat impaired by his years. However that may be, he resolved to see if some way could not be devised for polishing the rough specimen.

Soon after this he retired from the active ministry and went to live in the town of Yellow Springs, Ohio. At this place the Christian denomination had a college known as Antioch College.

One day our little family was thrown into excitement by a letter from the afore-mentioned pastor, the Rev. Joseph Weeks, saying that he had procured for my mother the position of cook for the college boarding club and an opportunity for me and my sister, next younger than I, to work our way through school. After much deliberation and many councils, it was finally decided that we go. That was a happy time for me. The impressions which crowded thick and fast into my life at this time can never be erased or forgotten. The wonderful journey, the great stone building, the dormitories, the beautiful campus, the teachers, and the dear old library. Oh, the............