Athens Ohio Archives

January 24, 2013February 16, 2021

Snow is Like Cold Sand

I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. After doing a dry run at the Athens County Historical Society and Museum, I decided to rework my presentation to include more photos taken in Athens County.

I was feeling a bit sleepy (make that REALLY sleepy) around 2 a.m., so I thought I set the alarm on my cellphone for a 20-minute nap. I set it all right, but failed to hit the DONE button. I woke up with a start at 4 a.m., saw the time, saw the phone alarm, then decided I was still too tired to do anything. I set the alarm for 7:30 and hit SAVE and DONE.

After getting the show put together, Friend Jan Norris and I headed downtown for breakfast. Excellent food. Jan had eggs, two sausage patties, hashbrowns, toast and an order of pancakes (which she pronounced the best she had ever eaten). “I heard that you’re supposed to eat lots of carbs when it’s cold,” she justified.

Presentation went well

I had a good audience for my photos of Southern Ohio and the years of protests at Ohio University. There’s a good chance that I’ll be working with the group for quite awhile. (You can click on the photos to make them larger, by the way.)

An icicle!

Jan was excited to see an icicle hanging above us. I tried to explain how guys at Scott Quadrangle, the dorm I lived in, would suspend a thin wire out a second or third floor window, then drip water down it. Layers and layers of ice would build up until the ice spear would be 20 or 30 feet long and a foot or more thick at the top.

The university, not looking forward to writing a “Dear Mom and Dad, Your child took part in an innovative experiment to determine just how long an icicle can grow before breaking off, ” letter, put an end to the practice.

Starting to find the style

She was looking a little less like a rainbow-covered Michelin Man today. [Wife Lila suggests that I clarify that the Michelin Man look is from all of the layers of clothing, not the natural Jan. Of course, Wife Lila hasn’t seen the size of those breakfasts….]

She got cold AND snow

Jan went roaming around town while I was wrapping up at the museum. She came back to say that it was snowing. Indeed, it WAS. A fine dusting of dry snow that didn’t look like it was going to amount to much.

We made arrangements to meet OU friends Terry and Lyntha Eiler for dinner, then drove around to find the apartments Wife Lila and I lived in when we were newlyweds. We found one for sure, and maybe a second one. It looked “almost” right, but I couldn’t be positive. By this time, the ground was turning white and some of the intersections were getting slippery.

We had a great dinner (sure wish I had left off the onions), then walked outside to see the sidewalks covered and quite a bit on the roads where the cars hadn’t worn it off. On the way back to the motel, we passed a car that had slipped off onto the median.

We head toward Cape Thursday if we don’t see bad weather rushing at us. I told her she’ll have a chance to scrape ice off the windshield in the morning. I mean, after all, she wants the WHOLE cold weather experience, right?

January 22, 2013January 22, 2013

Cold: A Matter of Degree(s)

Road trip Day Two checked off some boxes:

Friend Jan wanted to go to to Mary Jo Fabrics in Gastonia, NC. Done.

She got to see snow

Norris wanted to see snow. She got to see snow going through the West Virginia mountains. This area got about a foot-and-a-half of snow in the last week or so. I would like to have taken a better photo, but my model was whining and running inside.

She wanted to feel cold air

She wanted to experience cold. She got to feel minus 3-degree wind chill when we pulled into Athens around midnight. I have to admit the 10-16 mph cut right through you.

From now on, “cold” will be when she turns the AC down to 65.

Photo gallery of Day Two

Here some other photos of the day that I’m too sleepy to write about. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.

December 9, 2012May 28, 2021

Droppin’ a Dime

Want to know where the phrase “droppin’ a dime” on someone came from? It was what a phone call cost Back in the Day. These coeds are waiting their turn to step into iconic phone booths outside Scott Quadrangle, my old dorm at Ohio University in 1967.

They are probably waiting because you were lucky if one of the three were actually working. (You can click on the photos to make them larger.)

No helicopter parents in our day

Buddy Jim Stone, who attempts to pour physics into student heads at Boston University, was talking about “helicopter parents” the last time we got together in Cape. In these days of cell phones, email, Facebook and texting, parents are involved in their kids’ lives to an unhealthy degree, he contended: parents don’t give their kids an opportunity to solve their own problems. The world conspired to force us to be more independent, he pointed out.

College kids in our generation weren’t virtually connected.
Dorm rooms didn’t even have phones until late in my junior year. There would be one or two hall phones per floor that would be answered (maybe) by someone walking by when they rang. You might or might not get notified that you had a call.
There was no privacy. There was usually a line waiting impatiently for you to get off the phone.
Ohio was cold in the winter and it would rain for days, things that didn’t lend themselves to long outdoor conversations.
Long distance was exotic and expensive. You didn’t call home unless it was IMPORTANT (like, you were broke).
The coin-operated phones would become so stuffed with change that you couldn’t make a call until they were emptied by the phone company, something it took its own sweet time doing.
By the time you finally DID get around to calling home, you had probably already worked out your problems yourself (except for being broke).

Calls used to be a nickel

You can see from the instructions on the phone that “ONE nickel will NOT work. Use TWO nickels or one dime.”

I’ll never forget one telephone booth on the west coast of Florida. I had been chasing a hurricane all day, alternately being buffeted by the wind and deluged by horizontal rain. I needed to check in with my Number Two guy at home to see what was going on at the office, so I was happy to see the glow of a phone booth in front of a gas station off in the distance. I ran from the car to the booth, which was rocking in the wind hard enough to make me wonder if it was going to pull loose from its slab. Directly overhead was a huge swinging advertising sign. If that puppy snaps off, I thought, it’ll slice this booth and its contents – me – like a guillotine blade, leaving me both twice the man and half the man I started out with.

To make the experience worse, John and Susan had just adopted a baby and thought it was “cute” to have a long answering machine message that featured the baby crying. Never much fond of “cute” under favorable circumstances, I found this less than amusing while contemplating my mortality. I “gently” suggested that he go for a shorter greeting for the duration of the storm.

Other phone booths

Here’s Jim Stone trying on the Scott County Court House phone booth for size.
My favorite Bob Rogers and phone booth photo

September 25, 2012

Tom’s Pizza, Not Tony’s

I was all excited when I found these negatives of what I thought was Tony’s Pizza Palace across from the Rialto. That was the place that defined pizza for me. I sat in there many a night wolfing down pizza that cost, maybe, three bucks, and pumping quarters into the jukebox. Tony cut his pies into square slices, too, something I haven’t encountered anywhere else. We had a long discussion about pizza places in Cape in a May 2010 post. (Click on any photo to make it larger.)

Joint in Columbia looked like Tony’s

In the summer of 1964, Nancy Jenkins and I went to a summer workshop for yearbook staffers at Missouri University in Columbia. While we were there, we walked into a pizza joint that had the same look and feel as Tony’s: same ovens, same square pieces, same layout. It was uncanny.

Deju vu all over again

Shortly after I transferred to Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, I walked into a pizza place about four blocks down Court Street from the student newspaper office and this crazy feeling of deja vu: the place was laid out like Tony’s, had the same menu, same square slices. The only difference was that it was called Tom’s Pizza Palace. I was blown away.

Watching it being made

After I became a regular, I told Tom about the crazy coincidence of three pizza parlors in three different towns in two states that were carbon copies of each other. He laughed and said that they were all relatives of Tony’s. He found the formula of small college towns and good quality for a reasonable price to be a hit with college students and locals alike. Every so often, Tony would go back home to Greece and recruit a new relative to open up a pizza parlor.

I don’t know if the story was true, but it had the right ring to it.

Where’s the Jukebox?

When I started looking closely at the pictures, something didn’t feel right about it being Tony’s. I remembered the jukebox being in the back of the room, not the side of the room.

That’s not Broadway

The view out the front window should have been the parking lot between the Rialto and the H&H Building on Broadway, not a storefront.

Pizza box is the giveaway

The giveaway was when I looked closely at the top of the pizza box: Tom’s Pizza Palace.

So, if you were in Athens during the late 60s, this will make you feel right at home. If you were in Cape and loved Tony’s square slices, this is as close as I can get you until I find some new negatives.

Tony’s is a tattoo parlor

When I took this photo October 24, 2009, a tattoo parlor had moved into Tony’s old place. The sign fixture looks like the one I remember from Back When.

(You know, I may be wrong about the sign. I looked in the background of some photos of the 1964 Homecoming Parade and noticed the sign was square, not rectangular. Maybe the new business used the same mount, but changed the sign.)