Delaware County PA Archives Biographies..... Harry Galen RINIER Sr. File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Karen Favorite [kbfavorite@gmail.com] ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/pa/pafiles.htm ************************************************ (from a biographical tribute to H. Galen Rinier, on the occasion of a testimonial dinner in his honor, May 26, 1948, held at No. 2 Fire House, Chestnut and Moore Streets, Darby, PA) Our Honored Passenger on the Flight Down Memory Lane first took off with a siren wail from a hangar and field situated at the corner of Main and Quarry Streets, Darby, where the Penn Fruit now stands. The date was Election Day, November 6, 1877, when President Hays, finally inaugurated after a bitter election contest, was busy vetoing bills passed by a Democratic Congress. Our passenger was promptly named Harry Galen' by his father, Jacob, and mother, Anna Rinier, who hailed from Lancaster County. He attended the Old Ridge School and sold doughnuts after school until at the age of sixteen he turned to something harder and was apprenticed as a stonecutter with a side line of breaking and riding race horses. As falling off a forty-foot scaffold while erecting a monument and being dumped into the Garrett Paper Mill Pond by a bucking horse were not exciting enough, he played football with the Old Darby Rams. All of this rigorous training well fitted him for his marriage to Catherine Howard in 1902 and the janitorship of the Walnut Street School building in 1904, literally following in the footsteps of his father whom he had helped in his spare time as janitor of the Old Ridge building for the previous eight years. The Walnut building was then eight years old, and from it had graduated four high school classes of four or five pupils each so that Mr. Rinier was not then pestered by the Alumni. After being hired in March, 1904, and fired in April, he was re-elected in August at an increase in salary to forty-five dollars a month for the school year but did the summer cleaning and repairs without extra compensation. He not only took care of the heaters and cleaned the whole Walnut building himself but found time to pat the heads of the children as they came in to school. Over the years, he not only became Pop' to Helen, Harry, and Alice at home, but Pop' to school generation after school generation of children whose heads he patted, childish prattle he heard, and play he supervised. As a natural born mechanic, he became famed as a fixer of all sorts of equipment from children's toys to sewing machines and later, band instruments and athletic equipment. He had a shoemaker's last in the furnace room and not only repaired the cleats and soles on football shoes but the shoes of children not too well shod. He thus ministered to the soles of their shoes through his mechanical skill, and with his sympathetic understanding of child nature he ministered to their spiritual souls. He devised many a weird gadget for scenery and sound effects for school plays and over the years has arranged night practices and pulled the curtains for countless stage productions oft-times coached by temperamental directors. Mr. Rinier has not only helped the pupils while in school; but for forty-two years since October 2, 1906, as truant officer, he has helped get them to school to be helped. He has aided and befriended four superintendents, eight principals, and numberless teachers by smoothing their troubled roads and catering to their whims. As a resident of the old farmhouse on the school grounds, he has really served the Darby School District day and night for a half century, and as a side line he and Mrs. Rinier have filled the sweet tooth' of people far and wide with their famous Riniers' Candy. While Mr. Rinier on retirement leaves the service of the Darby School District, he will not leave Darby nor give up his pet hobby of service to the athletic teams and the school band.