Storytellers
Gervasius, 19 June 2026
Dot Fry was a one of the most fascinating people I ever met.
She was a natural-born storyteller, probably because she was such an avid reader. Every story seemed to begin the same way: “Did you know so-and-so? They lived up near Bergstrasse. Well…” From there, the tale would unfold — sometimes humorous, sometimes serious, but always memorable. Not being from Lancaster County, I didn’t know many of the people she talked about, but so many of her stories ended with me laughing until tears streamed down my face. Dot’s unmistakable high-pitched chuckle filled in the background. Some of my favorite stories were of the man who hoarded Mercury dimes because he thought the world was ending. What was he planning to buy if the world ended? And the one about the lady who introduced her husband as a “successful business man,” when in reality he worked for the transportation department and picked up roadkill.
Dot Fry and a much younger me in the early 2000s.
Dot was born in 1914 in Clay Township, Lancaster County to William and Irene Eberly. She devoted her life to education, serving as a teacher and librarian for an impressive fifty-one years. By the time I came to know her, she was living at Fairmount Homes in Ephrata, where I visited her often until her death in 2012.
I can still picture her living room: stacks of books and magazines everywhere, evidence of a lifetime spent reading and learning. Dot was not an early riser, so our visits were always scheduled for late afternoon. They often stretched right into supper time as one story led naturally to another.
Fairmount Homes sits high above Lancaster County’s patchwork of fields on the Cat’s Back — or, as many of us know it in Pennsylvania Dutch, the Katzebuckel. The road still bears its name in Pennsylvania Dutch, a small reminder of the region’s language heritage and a fitting landmark for visits with someone so deeply rooted in that culture. The way they spelled Katzebuckel on the sign was such an oddity; Dot always called it the “French spelling.” HA!
Katce Boucle Weeg as spelled the “French way”
I have much more to share about Dot in the future. I just found an old cassette tape of one of our visits and it is filled with the stories that made her such a remarkable person. Listening to her voice again brought back vivid memories of the those afternoons spent talking, laughing, and learning. If you’d like to hear Dot for yourself, here she is talking briefly about the hill where she lived.
Her voice, like her stories, is well worth preserving.
I miss talking to these excellent storytellers. We had so many of them in the Pennsylvania Dutch country and I’m sad that I didn’t record everything and talk to more of them. So many great stories have been lost, but I hope that we can preserve and keep telling the ones that we have. I’m eager to nurture a culture that keeps telling stories, even new ones.
