Brother David was a clown as far back as March 1962. This looks like kindergarten or first grade at Trinity Lutheran School. He’s in green, fourth from the left in the front row. Click on the photos to make them larger.
I know what part I’d get
I don’t have access to a playbill, so I don’t know anyone except David. I’m pretty sure I’d have been cast as the south end of the horse the little girl is climbing on.
I don’t have many pleasant memories of school plays.
I TOLD my kindergarten teacher that I REALLY had to go to the bathroom before I went on stage, but she said I’d have to wait. Well, there are some things that won’t wait, even if you are going on stage. It was lucky I was wearing dark blue pants.
Friend CT, who who was an editorial writer for an east coast paper messaged me not long ago, “It was you, wasn’t it, who told me 40 years ago that writing editorials is like wetting yourself in a blue serge suit: it gives you a nice warm feeling and nobody seems to notice?”
I swiped that line from someone else, but I’m sure my traumatic moment on stage seared that old saying in my mind.
High school plays
By the time you got to high school, being accepted by acting clubs like Red Dagger or Silver Spear raised the odds that the actors would have a modicum of talent as opposed to elementary school performances where everybody had to play a part. Here are some high school and college plays.
I don’t have any more information about the play, so it is up to you to ID the players. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.
When we moved to 1618 Kingsway Drive, we were outside the city limits. That’s our green house with the white wooden fence around it in the spring of 1962. The back yard dropped down steeply, so Dad trucked in load after load of dirt and built a retaining wall to create two levels. The bottom half we called the “garden” because we it was planted in veggies. Click on the photos to make them larger.
Cows and horses for neighbors
The cool thing for a kid was that our neighbors at the bottom of Kingsway, the Hales, kept horses and cows in the pasture behind us. Mr. Hale gave me the OK to roam around all over his fields and to pitch a tent on the hill opposite our house from time to time.
Hills drained into gully
The surrounding hills all drained into a deep gully that eventually fed into Cape LaCroix Creek (we always called it 3-Mile Creek). I never did too much exploring of the deep gully right behind the house. The walls were steep and covered with brambles. They looked like the kind of place where you’d encounter way more snakes than I cared to see. (That would be one snake, to set the record straight.)
Most of the livestock was pretty gentle, but one of the fields had a bull or two that I tried to avoid. I spent some time up a tree once when one of them took more interest in me than I wanted to take in him.
Don’t look AT the cowpies
The Hale fields were where I learned the technique of picking my way through cowpies. The key is not to look at the steaming pile; to navigate through, you look at where there ISN’T a steaming pile. That technique has helped me avoid flats on my bike: don’t look at the object you’re trying to avoid – look for the open space.
Houses replaced horses
The cows and horses are long gone. Houses have sprouted up where I used to pitch my tent. What’s interesting is that the gully behind our house is still there and running wild. Houses were built on the hill north of it, but the bottom lands have been left pretty much untouched. The way the streets were laid out, I don’t see how that area could ever be developed. Here are aerial photos of the Kingsway / Kurre Lane area from the 1960s.
Some of the houses have taken the time to keep the area behind their homes clean and mowed, but the spot behind us is as unruly as ever and must be a great habitat for wildlife.
That brings up something else. We never saw deer in the fields when I was a kid, but Mother will have one cut across the yard from time to time now that the hills have been developed.
I was emptying and filing mostly family pictures that were still in slide trades from an Ansco slide projector that was long ago retired. These photos of Easter 1962 were in the mix. I find them interesting for things that are in the background of some of them.
Brother Mark inspects an Easter egg he’s found in the front lawn. You can click on the photos to make them larger, but I’ll warn you that some of them aren’t all that sharp.
He’s listening for the sound of the ocean
Sometimes he gets things a little confused. He remembers hearing someone saying that you can hear the sound of the ocean if you hold a shell up to your ear. He didn’t get the part that it had to be a SEA shell, not an EGG shell.
Scampering past the Ailor house
Mark is running up the hill on the west side of the house. The Ailors lived there then. The hedge between the two houses has grown up over the years and some maple trees that we planted as saplings are huge and just about the end of their life.
A view down Kingsway Drive
That’s Brother David on the right The white house down the hill, occupied by the McCunes in 1962, has been torn down. The basketball goal would have belonged to Bobby and Gary Garner. I see the Ailor car still has snow tires on it. They must be afraid that winter is going to make one more pass.
The Easter Bunny liked making things a challenge. This egg was located under the windshield wiper. That’s Dad’s Chevy truck in the foreground and our 59 Buick LaSabre station wagon in the background. Ernie Chiles hadn’t taught me to drive yet, so the right front fender is uncreased.
Easter egg hunt at Capaha Park
I’m not sure what group this was. Mark’s in the red shoes and sweater, so it has to be some of his friends or his class. This pavilion is east of the ballfield and north of the pool.
The Boat House in background
When the kids weren’t stomping errant Easter eggs, they were climbing on the playground equipment. Cape’s landmark Erlbacher Boat House is in the background.
Mark stands out
Notice how Mark is placed right in the middle of the group and how his bright red sweater takes your eye right to him? Mother recognized that he had just a few cute years in him, so she tried to make him as visible as possible during that small window of time.
I was all set to delete this shot. At first glance, I thought that it wasn’t overly sharp and there was no clear center of interest. Then I got to looking at it like a photographer in the Ohio University Fine Arts program and convinced myself that it was art because of all of the interesting elements. Notice how the running boy and girl and the one bending over have been frozen in time, never to reach their goals. The two women on the left are oblivious to the action that’s going on behind them. The woman on the right keeps you from sliding out of the frame and the little girl at the bottom adds mystery.
President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed Sunday, April 7, 1968, as a national day of mourning for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I wrote back in January about a class project at Ohio University that put me in an ideal position to cover the event in front of the John Calhoun Baker University Center as both a student and photo editor of The Ohio University Post.
Last month, I got an email from Bob Stewart who was looking for photographs of the Day of Mourning for a video to mark the date. He reached out for a mutual friend, Tom Hodson, who worked on the OU Post when I was photo editor in 1967-68. Tom said I had probably the best overall collection of photos of the formal ceremony and the sit-in that followed.
We traded emails for a few day, then I sent him way more pictures than I thought he could ever use. Much to my surprise, in a day or so he produced this video that was better than I could have ever made myself.
Here’s some background on the images Bob used in the video.
Students filled the street
Hundreds, if not thousands, of students filled the street in front of the student union and spilled out onto the Main Green.
OU President Vernon Alden spoke
The Kennedyesque OU President Vernon Alden, center, wearing a black armband, spoke.
Religious leaders were present
All of the local faiths were represented.
Crowd was solemn
I was struck by how seriously everyone took the ceremony.
A salt and pepper group
The front ranks were heavily represented by black students, many wearing signs that said “In Mourning.”
Not your normal gathering
Most of the white students in the back were dressed more casually, but this wasn’t your normal student gathering.
The mood was solemn and there was no laughing or calling across the group.
I had been to many protests, concerts and gatherings on the Main Green, but this one had a feeling of dignity about it.
Instead of being your normal batch of campus radicals, you had a mixture of jocks, sorority girls, frat boys, professors and townspeople all coming together to try to make sense of what had happened.
The racial mix on this day was probably proportional to the school’s makeup.
The ceremony ended
After the formal ceremony ended, the crowd started to disperse. Many of them walked a block north to Court and Union, the main intersection in town.
A small group of students sit down
A small group of students sat down in the middle of the intersection.
The crowd grows
More and more students joined the sit-in. Again, uncharacteristically, this wasn’t your normal group of rowdy drunk students who block this intersection on the first warm spring night after a cold winter. You can tell from the expressions that this is a serious occasion.
All of downtown is blocked
Finally, the whole intersection for at least a half-block in all directions was full of students.
James Steele addresses crowd
James Steele, who was one of the speakers at the formal ceremony, addresses the crowd.
I should explain something before we get to the part where things turn ugly. Ohio University was founded in 1804, so the local police have a lot of experience in dealing with unruly students.
The usual procedure was to see if they’d break up on their own. If not, a half-dozen cops would show up in “bats and hats,” somebody would read the riot act over a bullhorn, then there would be some pushing and shoving, followed by everybody heading back on campus.
Rarely were any arrests made. Some bricks and bottles might get thrown and a few windows could get broken, but I never heard of any looting of the downtown stores. The police didn’t even use teargas at any event I covered until the spring of 1970.
Captain Charlie Cochran didn’t follow script
Athens Police Captain Charlie Cochran, always a hothead, didn’t follow the script. Instead of giving the normal order to disperse and having enough officers present to enforce it, he waded into the demonstrators and literally threw them off “my street.”
Seriously misread crowd
Charlie didn’t realize this wasn’t your normal unfocused mob of kids out for a good time. These folks had seen their national leader gunned down. They were hurting and looking for a place to direct their anger. They didn’t take kindly to being manhandled on a day of mourning.
Cooler head prevails
A friend grabbed the fellow who had been thrown to the ground just before he could retaliate. If the two had tangled, I’m convinced the whole crowd would have joined in and someone would have been seriously hurt.
Chief, James Whalen works out compromise
Before things could get out of hand, Police Chief Fred James, left, and James Whalen, university vice president for administrative affairs, right, worked out a compromise.
The chief agreed to allow the students to continue the demonstration for a “reasonable amount of time” and the students agreed to leave peacefully after that.
Charlie didn’t look happy to have me part of this confab, but this isn’t the first nor the last time that we’d have an awkward moment together. I’m not sure who the concerned citizen in the middle was.
Before long, intersection open
The bulk of the crowd retreated to the corners, then, after a “reasonable time,” everyone else moved on.
“Where do we go from here?”
A writer in The Athena, the university yearbook, penned, “The King is Dead! It echoed in microphones; and hearts were horrified throughout the campus, country, and world. Martin Luther King Jr. started a dream, but a bullet couldn’t shatter it. Now, where will his dream go?
“We talk about the coup d’etats of South America and the street riots in Europe, but when will we stop destroying our Kennedys and Luthers? Let us not scatter after the black arm bands have been put away.”
I’ve included a wide variety of photos. If you were there that day, you might want to share them with your grandkids. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.
Post and Athena folks, I’m pretty sure I’ve spotted Clarence Page, Joyce Halasa, Ed Pieratt, Todd Schofer and Tom Price. (Now that I think of it, I think this is a class I flunked because I didn’t turn in an assignment. Wonder if I could submit this for extra credit 43 years late.)
2013 Exhibit Catalog
In 2013, I was invited to put together an exhibit of the Day of Mourning photos for Sigma Gamma Rho, Inc., in conjunction with the College of Arts and Sciences, the Athens Historical Society and Museum, the Foster and Helen Cornwell Lecture Series, University College, the Campus Involvement Center, The Athens Messenger and The Post.
Here is a catalog of selected photos in the exhibit.
Brother David was a clown as far back as March 1962. This looks like kindergarten or first grade at Trinity Lutheran School. He’s in green, fourth from the left in the front row. Click on the photos to make them larger.
I don’t have access to a playbill, so I don’t know anyone except David. I’m pretty sure I’d have been cast as the south end of the horse the little girl is climbing on.
