Former Lebanon County state Rep. Peter Zug was in college when his father, John Zug, started a oral history project at Conrad Weiser School District’s Womelsdorf Elementary School.
The goal was simple: Equip students with tape recorders and have them capture the stories of people who grew up in the area.
It was a project in character for John Zug, who was born in Stouchburg and had a career at the family feed mill, as well as real estate, before a second career as a teacher, along the way serving on the board of directors for the Pennsylvania German Society and helping to found the Union Kanaal Grandsau Lodsch No. 17.
Pete Zug says he remembers going along on some of the interviews his father conducted. Conversations that were fascinating, he said. Stories you couldn’t imagine today.
Like the interview with Ralph Degler, a practitioner of water seeking, or water witching. Degler used brass welding rods resting on a copper tubing bent at a right angle and watching them for movement to identify water. He could even use a twig in a pinch … but only so long as it was still alive, he explained to the Zug father-and-son duo when giving his oral history describing his dowsing days.
Or the one with Early Leiby, who grew up in the Lebanon County Almshouse. Leiby’s father was killed when he was 7 years old and Earl, one of five, ended up as a ward there. Leiby said he was sent out as a hired hand at age 9, a common situation for orphans.
“If Hershey Industrial School had only existed back then, it would have been quite different,” Leiby told the Zugs in his interview, no bitterness evident through the pages of his childhood, one as hardscrabble as they come.
“What he experienced is pretty phenomenal,” said Pete Zug. “He, as an older man, would never have any resentment in his attitude.”
These stories existed for years in loosely bound, school-produced volumes, with silk-screened covers and mimeographed type.
John Zug died in 1994. When later his wife, SallyAnn, also died, Pete and his brother Joel cleaned out the family homestead, where the four volumes were discovered and re-read after decades of the oral histories going unheard.
Pete said he reached out to Tom Gerhart, the president of the PA German Society who grew up in Robesonia, and found they had mutual interest in sharing the stories in a single publication.
The result was “Die Gluft,” a name taken from a mountain pass in the South Mountains.
Just as the pass was used to traverse from one side of the mountain to the other, the book “Die Gluft” is meant to pass local stories and folklore from one generation to another.
The 204-page volume is divided into 52 chapters, covering facets of life from early schools, amusements, funerals, and farm life, to unique local topics, like the paw-paw tree, the Union Canal, and the Belsnickel.
Pete said that he and his brother Joel were very excited to get the project done.
“It puts in black and white permanently something my dad did, which I think is beneficial to the community,” said Zug.
Stories like Leiby’s showcase how, despite the odds and tough early life, some took on the challenge and succeeded.
Zug said he thinks the book keeps for history and future generations a way to know where they came from, and how far we’ve come and improved the area.
“I really think it was a great area – western Berks and eastern Lebanon counties – and I think this shows in many cases how people took care of their neighbors, how they took care of their family,” said Zug. “It was just very insightful.”
For some, the book might bring back memories; for many others, it will highlight just how much life has changed.
The book is available for purchase at $30 through the PA German Society.
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