From Margaret Leidy Harner's One Day at a Time: A Social History of Boyertown, PA

by Jane Stahl

To begin our second year, The Boyertown Area Expression is proud to present vignettes from Margaret Leidy Harner’s book: One Day at a Time: A Social History of Boyertown, PA. Margaret, a career educator with the Boyertown Area School District, published this unique book in 2017. For each day of a calendar year, she presents a “happening” that she learned from her research and writing over the years and from “digging through [her] notes, personal library of books about Boyertown history and the archives of the Boyertown Area Historical Society.”

She writes in the introduction to One Day at a Time, “I was amazed by what I learned about our town….I have developed a tremendous admiration for the community where I live, as well as for the people who have lived here for 300 years.”

Her “social history” includes exciting, tragic, or humorous events—not just the renowned like General Carl A. Spaatz, Jerry Karver and Colonel Thomas Leidy Rhoads but “the commoners whose antics mishaps and successes have brought us laughter, tears, or respect.”

Margaret has co-authored A Walk Through Turn of the Century of Boyertown, The History of the National Bank of Boyertown: A Century of Progress, Walking Historic Boyertown and Boyertown’s Sesquicentennial: a Year of Celebration, and written St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church of Boyertown, Pennsylvania: 200th Anniversary 1811-2011. She contributed the chapter on civic and social groups for Boyertown’s second pictorial history book and written hosts of newspaper and magazine articles.

The profits from the sale of Margaret’s book are donated to Boyertown’s non-profits in her efforts to benefit the community that she loves.

August 14, 1936: After unsuccessful attempts in 1928 and 1932, the internationally renowned track star and intrepid miler Gene Venzke, who grew up in Engelsville and ran track for Boyertown High School, has been selected for the 1936 United States Olympic team. At the games held in Berlin, Germany, Venzke won his heat with the fastest 1500 meters of any of the Americans in the trials with a time of 3:52.3 and placed 9th in the final race. Venzke had sustained a pulled muscle during a training session for the 1932 Olympic team but he still tried out and just missed making the team. He was a student-athlete at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating this year. He has competed in track events for 18 years, and at one time held a world record in the mile with a time of 4:08.2. The Venzke Relays, begun in 1939 at Boyertown High School., were named for this Boyertown hero.

August 15, 1900: Henry Bauer, of Barto, arrived home 5:00 on Sunday morning in a drunken frenzy to beat his wife into an unrecognizable mass of facial bruises and serious injuries all over her body He also threw one of his children down a steep embankment on the side of their house. The little girl escaped his clutches and ran to a neighbor's house, who called the police. Constables Fronheiser and Groff responded to apprehend Bauer, and entered into an exciting chase with the desperate husband through a corn field, over a barbed wire fence and into a creek, where Fronheiser caught him threw him to the ground and cuffed him. A doctor was sent for, and he dressed Mrs. Bauer's injuries and pronounced her in critical condition. Bauer was committed to jail in default of bail. 

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