In those years of transition from boyhood to youth, young William McKinley passed through a period of ill health. It interfered a good deal with his labors at home, and was the cause of cutting short his attendance at the college in Alexandria. It is by no means an unusual phase of a young man’s life, and it vanished as he advanced to the years of maturity. Throughout his life, with that exception, he has been a healthy person; and the season of delicate health at the threshold of manhood left no harmful consequences.
In 1896, when one of the enterprising publishers was hurrying to issue a “Campaign Life of William McKinley,” he sent a writer into Mahoning and Stark counties, and elsewhere throughout that portion of the Buckeye State, with instructions to find some record of the boyish escapades of young William. The writer found a number of men who had known the nominee in his boyhood, and asked one of them:
“Was he never in mischief—like robbing orchards, or stealing watermelons, or carrying away gates on ‘Hallowe’en?’”
The old man thought for a moment, apparently passed the lad’s life in review before the judge that abided in his memory, and then he said:
“I don’t remember that William was ever in any scrape of any kind.”
Then he waited for a moment, filled his pipe, lighted it reflectively and added as he pinched out the flame before throwing the match away:
The incident proves one of two things. Either young William had all his life the studious regard for the rights of others which has marked his manhood, or he had unconsciously enrolled this staunch old man among the friends who could not possibly be induced to “tell on him.” And either view shows the subject of their conversation in a very creditable light.
From infancy until he had attained the age of ten years, the family lived at Niles. The removal from there to Poland, where the Academy could offer better educational advantages to the children, was the last breaking up of home the boy knew. He retained the latter city as his home until after his return from the army, until after the completion of his law studies, when he cast about for a location that promised best for the life he had planned for himself.
But about the old town of Poland are still resident many men and women who knew him as a child, who watched him grow up to sturdy boyhood, and who learned to love him through the years that were adding to his stature and his wisdom. Those friendships he held to the very end. And there is no place in the United States where the blow that came with the news of his assassination fell more heavily than in the boyhood home of William McKinley.
