April 2015

April 22, 2015

Why Weren’t We Killed?

Looking at this photo from Steve McKeown’s collection of his dad’s old family photos made me think of the red Radio Flyer wagon Brothers Mark and David and our buddies used to streak down Kingsway Drive.

Our wagon had a tongue which folded back so a rider could steer the wagon, unlike the rope contraption in the photo.

We trudged up the hill time after time for a 45-second ride down from in front of 1618 Kingsway Drive to the fishhook-shaped J-curve at the bottom.

A physics lesson

We discovered the elemental law of physics that heavy objects at the top of the hill have lots of potential energy that gradually bleeds off by the bottom.That was the advantage of loading up the wagon with brothers and buddies. It also meant you had people to help pull it back up to the launch site. The brothers, unfortunately, would frequently beg off, saying they were “too tired” to walk back up the hill, leaving us to pull them AND the wagon back. It was amazing how their tiredness went away when it was time for another run.

Too often, the blast to the bottom would be interrupted by the cry of “CAR!!!” that would result in the tongue being abruptly twisted in whatever direction would throw us off into a ditch for safety.

Check out the socks

This wasn’t a generation of white sock wearers. Looks like Mom must have bought his jeans with the idea that he’d grow into them, and until he did, then rolling up the cuffs would keep them from dragging in the dirt.

Looks like his shoes are holding up well. I had a lot of pairs that had been half-soled. Late in grade school days, I would nail “taps,” onto the heel. Ostensibly they were to keep your heels from wearing down, but the real reason for putting them on was to make a cool noise when you walked the hallways in school. They came in various sizes – from tiny to huge horseshoe-shaped ones that were suitable for clogging.

The coolness factor was negated if you happened to hit a slick patch of floor that would cause your legs to spread apart like a guy with one leg in the boat and one on the dock.

April 21, 2015

On Their Permanent Records

Just to show you how your permanent record can come back to haunt you, here is a note I found stuffed away between the pages of a book. I was captain of the Trinity Lutheran School Safety Patrol in the eighth grade.

Mr. Mueller, the eighth grade teacher, was also advisor to the safety patrol. He evidently caught two of my patrolmen leaving their post three minutes early (with an exclamation point, no less). He wanted me to mark them down for five demerits each.

I won’t tell you who they are

At this late date, it’s really not worth it to add to their shame by publishing their last names, but they DO appear in this photo.

Here are other school safety patrol stories and photos:

April 20, 2015

Phillip Sheridan Statue

I drove 590.1 miles from Athens, Ohio, to Cape Girardeau on Sunday. While on the road, I listened to an audio book about World War II submarine warfare.

That was an appropriate topic because, except for about the first 20 miles and the last 75 miles, it felt like I was IN a submarine. The rain varied between light to “Holy Cow! I can’t see.” Then, somewhere around Louisville, the Holy Cow rain mixed in with road spray and fog.

So, what does that have to do with the statue of Civil War General Phillip H. Sheridan’s statue in the Somerset, Ohio, town square?

Did Sheridan die in battle?

To be honest, my brain is fried and I either had to skip a day or post something that didn’t take much research.

Sheridan was a local Somerset boy, and his statue is near where his house was. I asked Curator Jessica if she could remember the “horse code” that says the number of legs in the air indicate the way the rider died. I don’t recall her exact answer, but Snopes set me straight. If the leg count equals death status, it’s more likely to be coincidence than plan.

For example, Somerset’s statue of Sheridan has both front legs off the ground. According to the urban legend, that would indicate that he died in battle. A statue of him on Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C., has a horse with all four hooves on the ground, which is supposed to signify that he died of other causes. In Sheridan’s case, the Washington statue would be correct. He died of heart failure.

Waiting for the bird to fly

Photography is all about capturing the moment. By the time we finished dinner, it was getting pretty dark, but Jessica wanted to walk up to see the statue up close.

I stood there patiently waiting for two things:

A puff of wind to come along to bring the flag to life
The bird to fly off the horse’s head so I could capture it in midair.

The flag finally moved, but, after several minutes of waiting, I discovered that the “bird” was the horse’s ear, and it wasn’t EVER going to fly away.

April 19, 2015

A Cemetery Mystery

I have to head back to Cape on Sunday morning, so Curator Jessica wanted to do one last ramble around SE Ohio on Saturday. We found some neat stuff I’ll share later, but this tale shows the value of knocking on doors.

We wanted to see if anything was left of a street scene I had shot in the late 1960s in Rendville, Ohio. It was a small town that was predominately black and produced the first black mayor in Ohio, and one of the first black union organizers.

At the top of a hill overlooking the town was a cemetery. What struck us right off was that a wide path had been mowed to a circle in the middle of the graveyard. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

It gets even more curious

In the top of the circle was a small black fence surrounding a freshly-planted tree. A tree so freshly-planted that the ground was still wet where it had been watered.

Next to the fence was a metal post with an upside-down bottle on it. Glued or somehow affixed to it was a small bowl, and in it was a glass with water in it and some fresh flowers. On the ground was a lei made of orchids. Miz Jessica pointed out that they wilt quickly, so they had to have been left recently.

Knock on a door

I said, “There’s a house across the street. Why don’t you go over, knock on the door and ask if they know what this is all about?”

She demurred, so I said I’d do it with her in tow.

Steve, the man who answered the door, said he didn’t live there. He just borrows the house for two weeks a year to go turkey hunting, and he didn’t know what was going on, but we had made him curious.

Scratching our collective heads

We all went back to the circle, walked around a bit tossing out theories, and admitted we were stumped.

“I know the mayor,” Steve said. “I’ll give him a call. If you give me your phone number, I’ll ask him, then let you know.”

I never expected to hear from Steve again, but we were half-way back to Athens after a great dinner in Somerset (just down from a big statue of Civil War General Phillip Sheridan) when my phone rang from an unknown number.

Mother of the town clerk

It was Steve. He said the mother of the town clerk had died and they held the ceremony in the circle and planted the tree in her honor. She must have been cremated because there was very little earth disturbed. So little, in fact, that I thought it might have been excess from when they dug the hole for the tree.

A minute or two after we hung up, my phone rang with Steve’s number showing. I heard him telling the story of the funeral to someone in the background. Evidently he had butt-dialed me.

“We all win”

“We all win,” I told Miz Jessica. “We got our question answered, and he can dine out for a week telling his buddies about this crazy couple who banged on his door with something that sounded like it was out of the Twilight Zone.”

History is all about HIS story and HER story, and I love knocking on doors to capture snippets of history.