Eighty-nine-year-old Paul Rikert remembers the day he first set foot in Northfield, on Feb. 2, 1934.
His father had been hired as the “creamery man” at the Northfield School for Girls, so the Rikert family packed the belongings from their one-story bungalow with no running water in Dutchess County, N.Y. into a moving van and made their way east.
Before an audience at Northfield’s Trinitarian Congregational Church on Saturday, Rikert recounted how he and his older brother, John, rode in the back of the frigid, uncomfortable moving van during the all-day trip.
During the event, called “Growing Up in East Northfield,” Rikert shared his childhood memories of playtime, attending Pine Street School, the summertime religious conferences and even getting groceries without a car.
His family settled into the first floor of a two-family home on Birnam Road. From there, Rikert said he could ride his bike less than 1 mile to Pine Street School, where he had an experience that changed his life.
“At that time, it was not unusual to call attention to aircraft that were overhead,” he said. One day, when the students heard a plane, they all rushed to the window, both scared and excited. It was a significant day for Rikert, as it was the first time he had ever seen a plane. Eighteen years later, he became a multi-engine pilot in the Air Force.
After school, there were plenty of games to participate in with the large number of boys in town, Rikert said, who would argue over whether to play touch or tackle football.
“This was at a time when nobody had anything that resembled equipment,” he said. “Someone was rich enough to have a ball.”
So when it came to playing tackle football, Rikert joked, “the only word that comes to mind is pain.”
Playing with boomerangs and flying kites was also popular in the summer, when people flocked to Northfield for the religious conferences started by evangelist Dwight L. Moody.
“To me, it was kind of like having the theater come to your house,” Rikert said, noting he’d often travel to campus to listen to the services.
Then there was skiing in the winter.
“When I was growing up in Northfield, we got a lot of snow and a lot of cold weather,” he recalled. “It was an automatic sequence of events.”
The children were all aware of four hills with varying levels of difficulty: one on North Lane; one near the auditorium on the girls’ campus with a pond at the bottom for skating; another near Round Top, where Moody is buried; and a fourth near Gould Hall, which is now hidden by trees.
Skis were simple — made of wood with leather straps to secure the skier’s feet. The Northfield kids had a trick to keeping the skis on their feet — wrapping canning jar seals around their ankles.
“With good luck, that ski’s gonna stay on your foot,” he said. “In cold weather, the jar rubber will break, so you had to carry a pack of them.”
Instead of being given work to do around the house, Rikert said his father wanted him to focus on getting a good education, which he hadn’t gotten himself. But he was responsible for walking to the nearby IGA store — not to be confused with the current Northfield Food Mart — to get groceries using a three-wheeled wagon. Riding in the cart on the way there was always fun, he joked; hauling the load back, not so much.
Rikert also helped out with earning money as a kid by selling wagons full of fruits and vegetables.
“My record was $4.50 in one day,” he said, “and that’s because it was berry day.”