And then there’s Stuart.
Thank goodness I have some memories about Stuart.
Not a lot, but I do recall a couple of incidents, one of which is probably distorted.
I remember Stuart being around on the farm quite a bit. He was five years older than I was, so he wasn’t a peer, but he was still going to school when I lived on the farm. So I saw him often, but because of the difference in age, we didn’t exactly hang out together.
There is one memory that sticks out. Now I know it has be be distorted because it couldn’t have happened quite the way I remember it for reasons that will be obvious, but I relate it the way it appears in my memory banks.
Both Stuart and I were in the kitchen in our grandparents house, and Stuart was making himself a cup of cocoa (that’s what we called hot chocolate, which we made from cocoa powder, Hershey’s Cocoa, still my favorite). When he sat down to drink it, it wasn’t sweet enough, so my grandmother asked me what he should do, and I said that it was too late, you needed to add the sugar before you heated it, because adding sugar after it was heated didn’t have any effect.
OK, I presume you notice the flaw in that memory.
Presumably this took place when I was around six or seven years old, because that’s about the time that I began making cocoa for myself. I know that I was making my own cocoa while we lived on the farm, because cocoa and toast was my favorite breakfast back in those days, at least during the colder months.
I used to believe that adding sugar to cocoa after you heated it wouldn’t make it any sweeter. I don’t know where I got that silly idea. Anyway, I’ve been mulling this over in my mind and trying to come up with some plausible way that it makes sense, and here’s what I came up with.
Stuart made himself a cup of cocoa, but because he was leery of adding too much sugar (remember his brother Byrd had diabetes and he may have believed that consuming too much sugar was the cause), he didn’t follow the directions and shortchanged himself on the the sugar. When the cocoa didn’t turn out as sweet as he wanted it, my grandmother, who perhaps wasn’t used to making single cups of cocoa (she cooked for the group of farm hands so she made large pots of everything) but she knew that I had started to make cocoa for myself, so maybe she did suggest that Stuart consult me, perhaps jokingly. And I proffered my not very useful advice. Whether he added more sugar or not, I don’t know, because the memory ends with my offering the advice.
My other, much clearer memory of Stuart is much later, and must have occurred very near to the death of my grandmother.
We were at my grandparents’ house in Womelsdorf (after the farm was sold and after my grandfather had died) and Stuart, who had gone to Penn State, was telling me about campus life. Thus, it must have been when I was thinking about applying to Penn State. Perhaps the summer of 1966.
The one clear thing I recall him saying is that he thought the Shields Building, which was built while he was there, was the ugliest thing he had ever seen. This was a common refrain that I heard once I got to Penn State, it seemed to be the conventional wisdom. Personally, I had no problem with the architecture of the Shields Building. The problem that people seemed to have with it is the windows.
Stuart I. Troutman was born on February 9, 1944, in Mount Zion, Pennsylvania. I can’t find any celebrity named Stuart that he may have been named after, most of the Stuarts, like Jimmy Stewart, spelled their names differently. Perhaps he was named after a friend of the family. Or maybe his name is actually an anagram of the first letters of the names suggested by a bunch of relatives. I guess we’ll never know.
He seems to have done well in school (he was head of his Northern Lebanon graduating class in 1962), and when he got older, he published several letters to the editor in the Lebanon Daily News. Thankfully, he did not make an ass of himself like a lot of other people did. The subjects of said letters had to do with gardening tips and the dangers of pesticides and were apparently in reply to other letters or articles. He even wrote one from Penn State and I’ve appended that one to the end of this post so you can get an idea of his thinking back in 1962.
I’ve mentioned in the past that I do not know the political affiliation of most of my older relatives; politics was a subject that just wasn’t discussed. (Unlike some of my Zellers cousins who no longer speak to me because I do not support a certain hate-filled lunatic.) But thanks to a newspaper article that I dug up, I now know that Stuart’s parents, my uncle Clarence and aunt Elsie, were Democrats. And I think I can reasonably infer from that that their parents, my grandparents, were Democrats as well.
You see, Stuart won a four year scholarship to Penn State that was awarded by the Young Republicans of Lebanon County; it was valued at $105 per year (which was a significant sum in those days). There was a followup article where it turned out that the Republicans were dismayed to learn that they had awarded their scholarship to the son of registered Democrats. Well, take that, Republicans! Nyah, nyah-nyah, nyah, nyah! (I’m writing this from the perspective of 2025 where the GOP has become a clown show and deserves to be mocked at every chance.)
Stuart did well at Penn State, making the Dean’s List and graduating in 1966 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering.
And then he went into the ministry.
I certainly didn’t see that coming. (My mother told me that he had gone into the ministry but I’m not sure when she told me. Perhaps she had to tell me several times before it stuck.)
He graduated from Lancaster Theological Seminary of the United Church of Christ in 1970 and became pastor of the Church of the Apostles in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania.
According to his relatives’ obituaries he was still in Waynesboro, so a few weeks ago I decided that I’d try to get in touch with him.
But of course, I had waited too long.
He died on October 4, 2012, aged 68, just a couple months after his mother Elsie passed away.
That means that Bryan, the oldest of the four brothers, is also the longest surviving of the four Troutman cousins. I have memories of him as well. He should be about 91 by now.
Here is the letter that Stuart sent to the Lebanon Daily News. It seems that despite his chosen profession, I may very well have had more in common with Stuart than I do with most of my Zellers cousins. I’m sorry that I didn’t make more of an effort to reach out to him sooner.
