My “cedar chest of family history” produced another couple of items: a pair of college pennants, well over 100 years old. They were among the few things my dad, Elmer Weyand, saved from his college days in Kirksville, Mo.

His mother died in 1897. Three years later his dad died, and he was taken in at the age of seven by an uncle, Joseph Miller. For the next several years he would live and work on his uncle’s Black Oak Stock Farm north of the village of Granger in northeast Missouri. Miller, a graduate of Iowa Wesleyan University in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, had donated a part of his property for the construction of a country school. He named it Black Oak School, after his farm, and became its first schoolmaster in the 1870s.

Through hard work and his with uncle’s support, my dad was able to attend a three-year college, Kirksville Normal School, founded in 1867. His college career would be made possible by doing extra summer work on the farm for his uncle, doing janitorial work at the college, and pinching pennies while in school.

The school would become Northeast Missouri State College in 1968, then Northeast Missouri University in 1972. In 1996 it acquired its present name, Truman State University.

In later years, my dad often reminisced about his college days at Kirksville, where he had to compete with city kids whose high school background gave them a big advantage over a country school graduate.

At Kirksville, my dad didn’t have much time for sports, but he did play tennis, and kept his original racquet, heavy by today’s standards, with a wooden frame and catgut strings. I eventually donated it to a local museum.