WHAT’S THE VALUE OF AN EDUCATION?

 In 1941 Rolland Cole stepped off a freight train in Baker, Oregon.  Rolland was a hobo.  He was like hundreds and thousands of other men who rode the rails during the years of the Great Depression looking for work and for a way to earn a living for themselves and their families.

Rolland had grown up in Kansas.  He was a bright young man with a bright future.  He was athletically inclined and did very well scholastically.  He won a math scholarship, and planned to obtain a college education.

But then the Depression hit, and robbed him of his future.  He and Irene Wilkinson married in 1934.  By 1941 Rolland had a wife and three small children to support.  Work was not to be had in his area, so Rolland hit the rails in a search for employment and for a place to move his family.  He worked wherever he could find anything to do, and sent all of his meager earnings home.  In Colorado he worked in a saw mill.  In Utah he worked at a gas station.  In Western Oregon he tried to become a faller of big trees, but couldn’t do so without a partner to run the other end of a crosscut saw.  After looking unsuccessfully for a partner for three weeks, he gave up and rode a train to Pendleton where he was able to get a job falling trees with a crosscut saw all by himself.  He was able to do it by using a “rubber man.”  He tied the opposite end of the crosscut saw to a neighboring tree with a strip of rubber, which returned each stroke of the saw, and enabled him to cut down trees without having a partner.

When the Pendleton job ran out, Rolland hopped aboard another freight train, and got off when it stopped in Baker, Oregon.

In Baker Rolland walked into a bar with the intention of inquiring if anyone knew where work could be found.  A man entered right behind him, and asked if anyone needed a job.  Rolland and another man answered affirmatively.  The rest of the men in the place laughed, knowing what was in store for the eager volunteers.  His new employer loaded Rolland and the other man in a wagon and carried them 15 miles north to his farm on Tally-Dobbins Lane between Haines and North Powder.

The two men were shown to the barn, which became their living quarters for the next month.  The two men commenced putting up hay.  Meals were delivered from the house to the barn.  There was no time off, no diversions, long days, and no way to get to town.  Rolland served there as a slave.  At the end of the month, the man paid Rolland, as agreed.  Rolland took the money to Baker, mailed it to Irene, and began looking for another job.  He found it at the steam plant as an electrical steam turbine operator.  The future looked promising, so he sent for Irene.  When his family arrived, he installed them in a made-over chicken coop.

Rolland worked hard.  He became a janitor.  He couldn’t qualify for anything else because of his lack of education.  He and Irene stressed to their children the importance of getting an education.

When it came time for the eldest son to go to college, Rolland went downtown to the local loan shark and took out a loan at 36% interest to finance Billy’s education.  Billy never knew what his father had done.  Rolland made those who did know promise to never tell Billy.  Billy got his education, worked his life as a master machinist, and died without ever knowing the secret.

One day Rolland walked uptown with his 16-year-old grandson, Brent.  They went into the loan shark’s office where Rolland proudly made the last payment on the loan he’d been working on for eight years.  Thus it was that Brent became privy to the secret.

More years passed.  Brent got his own college education, and began farming.  In the course of his labors, he bought some farm ground.  Sometimes our lives take some strange turns.  By chance, or perhaps by some other unexplainable means, Brent bought the same place on Tally-Dobbins Lane where his grandfather had spent a month of hard servitude.  It gave Rolland unimaginable pleasure to go there, visit those acres, view the barn he’d lived in, and think that in two generations times had turned from his being a slave there, to his grandson owning the farm.

Rolland never got the college education that he’d dreamed of—but all four of his children did.  The eldest child, his only daughter, got married just out of high school.  Her husband attended two years of college, and then quit to become a logger with his father.  After a year and a half of logging, he came home one spring day, and was told by his wife that she had enrolled in secretarial school so that she could finance his education.  She informed him that he was going back to school that fall.  He did.  She put him through school, he got a degree in engineering, and was able to support his family in a much better way than if he’d spent his life in the logging industry.

Rolland’s numerous grandchildren got their educations, too.  His great grandchildren are working on it.  His great, great grandchildren are babies or in elementary school.  They’re all happy, healthy, hard-working, and without a slacker or a delinquent in the lot.

Rolland was a success.  His numerous posterity look upon his memory with reverence.