Whizzing Through America: Living Memories Tour, Cincinnati - OH

I lived in three places in Cincinnati. The most recently at Stratford Manor. The entire Stratford Manor apartment complex has been torn down in favor of Medical and Office buildings. In fact, if what I suspect is true, Stratford Avenue has been further chopped up by these same buildings. It now exists in several discrete sections.

I have several memories of this place that no longer exists. We got our first piano while here but my lessons started on a fold out cardboard representation of the keyboard. I practiced my fingering and timing but couldn't produce any melody, even after we got the piano.

I also remember the wooded open space down the embankment, which is why I think this place is probably fairly close to where Stratford Manor used to exist. That former wooded open space is probably part of UC's recreational facilities now.

I was a health activist even then as I found a pack of cigarettes hidden in a hollow of a tree outside our apartment and saved somebody's lungs. It got scary, for me, when the lungs that I saved came up and asked me point blank if I had seen those cigarettes. I may have closed my eyes when I dismembered them but they were definitely open wide when I dissembled about them.

I also got a new Huffy bike while here. I probably remember it so well because the sidewalks were narrow and high relative to the surrounding grass. This meant I fell a lot but eventually learned that once I went off the sidewalk not to try to get right back on.

Before Stratford Manor, we lived in two apartments right on the campus of God's Bible School. The most recent one was the bottom floor of a three story, three apartment building, either to the right of or where the right side of this building is.

This place is significant in my memory for several reasons: my most significant remembered childhood illnesses occurred here, German Measles and Mumps. I remember having to stay in bed with the window shades drawn for the measles. I remember a high fever with the mumps. That and getting yelled at when I was finally allowed to go outside and the first thing I did was jump off the end of a concrete retaining wall.

Then there were the toys. I still remember the Jarts and water under pressure rocket that we made special trips to Eden Park to play and shoot off. I don't know whether they disappeared before or after their recall.

I was still small enough that it was easy for me to get under the boardwalk that the college students used to get to the cafeteria. I found a lot of money under that boardwalk.

I also walked right by William Howard Taft's home place on my to William Howard Taft Elementary. At the end of the school year we got a tour of the next year's classrooms. I was going to get to change rooms for each subject. I was so looking forward to art. Who knows, if I had gone here, I might have been another Picasso. I certainly wouldn't have been in the realism genre.

In addition to going to school during the day, my father was working full time at Westinghouse as a night shift welder. This meant that he would get home around 2:00 AM. Many of the times that we started out to West Virginia were when he got home. Later, when my sister and I would entertain ourselves on road trips by singing in quarter tone harmonies, which by their very nature weren't, I realized why they made the trip at night, we were asleep.

Before we moved to the above, we lived in an even smaller apartment where the left side of that same building now sits. This place stands out in my mind for many reasons:

I started going to school while here, a kindergarten class in a large room actually in the same building. I was so disappointed after my first day when I didn't learn to read.

I ate my first dirt while living here. I can't remember whether this was taste testing the finished product of making mud pies or checking out the primary ingredient that was going into them.

I got my first roller skates here. They were the metal clamp on type with steel wheels and practically square ball bearings, meaning that they didn't roll all that well. Even so there was one really broad ramp just off the relatively flat sidewalk I would skate on that proved to be challenging.

I may have gotten the skates at one really special Christmas that still stands out in my mind. For many reasons that a young boy probably wouldn't have understood with the most likely having been one of money, my mother made a Christmas Tree out of styrofoam balls, toothpicks, silver spray paint, and fake snow. It was a thing of beauty that still shines in my memory far more than many of the real trees and all their laden ornaments and bountiful presents underneath.

The school would hand out bags of food for Thanksgiving and would run busses from the less savory sections of town to the school and back to bring the recipients to the school for the bag distribution.

Even while going to school and working full time, my father was also helping out at a tiny mission-like church run by an Armenian, a Reverend Kajikian(sp). He had written a book about the Turkish massacres of Armenians when he was a boy. Most of his family perished in them. I remember a drawing in his book of a Turkish soldier bayoneting a whole family of Armenians, including a baby.

Then there was the community swimming pool that we went to only once in the three or four years we lived in the two apartments there.

Somehow the streets were much steeper and the campus much larger in my memory than they were in this visit. Maybe it was because my legs were shorter then. Even as my memories have been jogged by this visit, you might say expanded, they have also been cut down to size.

Whizzing Through America: Living Memories Tour, Batavia - OH

I couldn't find this place and suspect that it doesn't exist anymore. Since I found a vacant lot, I'm claiming the lot as the place we used to live, even though it is diagonally across from a church that looked old enough to have been there when we were and I don't remember there being a church there.



Even though the house was a small bungalow-type with a basement and overlapped wood siding, this brick somewhat similar sized building on a corner lot matched several points of my memory, well, those two, but I'm sure it wasn't this building or in this location. But, the brick building was next to the empty lot.

My most significant memory of the house was the basement coal hopper that fed the furnace. It was my "manly" job to fill the hopper.

My only real memory of the school was my enrollment. I was asked what kinds of grades I got and I said that I had gotten a "C" once. Indeed I had, but it wasn't a final grade maybe not even a quarterly one. Anyway, after being in a class for a week or two they must have gotten my transcripts and I was transferred to another class.

My best memories of this place were of the church. Here my father was the youth minister and my mother helped out. I particularly remember the Biblical children's stories that my father would read or tell while Mother did chalk drawings as illustration. (I, and my sisters, used to be entertained for as long as she could stand it by her taking our squiggles and completing them into real pictures. I was amazed at the imagination that saw that particular picture almost as much as I was the artistic ability that gave it life.)

We spent a lot of time with the pastor's family and I remember their parsonage probably better than where we lived. The parsonage had a main stairs up to the upstairs and a back stairs down to the kitchen. Plus, they had at least one child my age--a girl--so we didn't run around that much but there has to be some reason I remember these stairs that well. Then, they were also members of a local swimming pool...

Whizzing Through America: Living Memories Tour, Mowrystown - OH

Even though my father's circuit was in Brown County, the first parsonage was in Mowrystown. While we lived here, Mother took we children to the Evangelical United Brethren Church in town and my father spent Sundays, and a lot of other days traveling around Brown County.

Again, school dominates my memories but does not consist of them all. It was here that I had my first and only fight. I lost in terms of the damage I took but since I was too stubborn to quit and eventually got my opponent on the ground, which limited the damage he could further do, it was officially called a draw. What's better, I never had any more trouble from that boy and his crowd. I think I earned their respect.

This was the place that my mind went to when I told my children about walking to school in the snow, up hill both ways. It was very flat but in the winter it was often in snow. Even though the town was small, it was at least a half mile walk each way, even with the short cut.

This is the place that my father had to go to bat for me to allow me to read books from the adult section of the book mobile. I wanted to, and did, read "Animal Farm." I don't remember whether I got all of the analogies, but I did catch the meaning of pigs and that they were "more equal" than the other animals.

This is the only place that I earned a sports letter. I played in the band here, including a Memorial Day march to the town's cemetery of at least a mile carrying and sometimes playing a B-flat Sousaphone. I took piano lessons here.

I worked here. I mowed lawns and raked leaves. I even had contract help, my sister, at least for the leaf raking. One leaf raking and burning had the fire department show up. I assured them that I had it all under control and they didn't do anything to help but they did stay around until it was done burning.

I also worked at home. I had to mow our yard for free, to pay for the mower, and work in the garden. One of our neighbors had a hand pushed harrow(?), which I used to cultivate the weeds out of the garden. It was here that I learned my life long dislike of lima beans. But I really loved eating the peas raw, right out of the pod. Mother had to harvest them quickly to get any.

And I still had plenty of time to play. There were a number of children in houses on both sides of ours. We loved playing hide and go seek in the dark. I liked to go out in the middle of our back yard and drop down into a darker shaddow. I don't think I was ever "found" in that spot. Then there was the refrigerator box and the real horse drawn wagon in the barn, if we had had a horse that is. As the largest, I was always the horse.

I didn't recognize it and almost didn't find it. The current owner, Franklin "Doodle" Stivers did add on a cool brick addition on the back and made it the kitchen. He also put in brick edging and sidewalk in the front. But the thing that made it so unrecognizable were the trees. Not only were there no trees to speak of when we lived there, but these were so big.



I was directed to it by the town historian, Jerry Pruitt. I was directed to Jerry when after several times cruising up and down the street trying to find it, I stopped on the side of the road. A woman courteously asked if I were looking for someone. I guess nearly every house in Mowrystown must have been a parsonage at some time or another because hers was as well. She didn't know of my parsonage but she and her husband did direct me to Jerry. (I'll write more on my times in Mowrystown in my tour finish blog posting: "After Wroad.")

Whizzing Through America: Living Memories Tour, Brown County - OH

For a brief time, about six months, after our house, the parsonage in Greenbush, burned down, we lived here in Mount Orab. That it was closer to my school is about the only positive thing I have to say about it. When we were here the toilet was still an outhouse. The only running water was in the kitchen. I slept on an upholstered bench downstairs. I don't remember whether or not I ever went upstairs. My memories of this time are not dominated by this humiliating experience. In fact, what I've already written is about the extent of it.

Instead, I remember going through the ashes in the basement of the burned down house and not finding any of my silver coin collection, finding a few razor thin pennies, and also a few badly deformed nickels. I remember singing the theme to Oklahoma in the school's spring variety show. I remember being one of the co-stars of an operetta, La Raquitta(sp) with actual solos. Somewhere I have a year book on this high school year but who knows which box it is in. I really liked Earth Science, Latin, and English. The Earth Science final consisted of about twenty unlabeled rocks around the class room and we were supposed to provide the complete labels. Latin gave me an understanding of English that I still benefit from today. English spurred a love of writing that I use almost daily.

It was accidentally riding by the school that got me oriented well enough to find the actual place. I was glad to see that they must have finally put the plumbing inside but I know I found the right place.

My memories of this place, Greenbush, actually started while I was living at the next place I'll document in another blog entry. After a church member next door donated a large and empty house that needed to be refurbished as the future parsonage, I was old enough to help. I particularly remember the old style plaster over lathe strips because one mistimed blink got plaster in both eyes. When it was done, I ended up with a rather large room of my own. My sisters had to share though. And my youngest sister was born while we lived here.

While the above building may or not be a parsonage now, it was the replacement parsonage built that I never lived in. The reason it may not be a parsonage is because the church is no longer a United Methodist Church. My father built up attendance to at least 150 a Sunday. He was breaking records, literally, LP records that had the previous high attendance mark written on it. One time he couldn't because it was made out of unbreakable plastic. If the sign is too small, it is now a Baptist Church. I don't know how long it may have been unused before becoming a Baptist Church, if at all.

Estate sales were big then and I loved going to the auctions and finding treasures cheap. Once I misinterpreted the auctioneers patter and bid far more than I had for something. I was immensely relieved when someone overbid me. I did buy a hand-cranked Victorphone complete with a set of 98's to play on it. I cranked it up frequently. I think my best buy was a box of books, which included a 1908 history text book. It was quite jingoistic and disproportionately covered the war with Spain and the Rough Riders but it was certainly a fun read. Of course, all of these things were lost with the fire.

I played my first, and only as I recall, game of spin the bottle at this school. Afterwards I figured why kiss someone at random. I'd rather kiss someone I really wanted to. After still more time, I overcame my social shyness and proceeded to do just that. (I know that the picture doesn't have a school. It has been torn down.)

I enjoyed the ice cream socials at the Brownstown Church. I enjoyed the invitations that were extended to us for Sunday dinners after church. Somewhere I still have a recipe for No Bake Cookies that I got at one of them. Then there were the special families who had children somewhat in my age range. One of them were the Tutts. Every year their two sons would rearrange the baled hay in their barn to be a maze of interconnected holes and small rooms. We would play tag in it. I think my love of reading was developed at another family place. I don't remember ever eating there but I did go there quite a bit. They had a daughter just a little older than me, books and magazines all over the place, and every car they owned was an exotic Saab.

Whizzing Through America: Living Memories Tour, Otterbein - OH

I've always called this place Otterbein because that was the name of the church that my father was pastor of right across the street. To find it on Google Maps to get directions, I had to call it Otterbein Cemetery. This was one of four churches in Darke County my father was pastor of. In the two years I was here, a lot happened...

I ran cross-country, the 13th runner on a twelve-man squad. The official track was through and around a corn field that was about four miles away from the school. The bus would take us out there and we had to run back. Since this was before I drove, I then also got to "run" home. (By that time it was more like walking. It was good that cross-country was a warm weather sport.) On the days that I did not run at school, mostly in the summer, and wasn't particularly lazy, I ran around the cemetery lane. It was almost exactly one-quarter mile in length. Many of the trees that made it so eerie to run around at dusk are gone.

The summer before I got my driver's license, I painted a fence, no longer there, and my neighbor's house and barn. The house now has an enclosed porch and what looks to be vinyl siding. One particularly hot day I rode my pedal bike to the closest swimming pool. It had to be at least five miles away and my bike was no gear shifting touring bike, nor was it adjustable to my then height. Needless to say, I only did this that once.

I'd like to say that my vistas opened up when I got my license. I'd like to but I can't. We still had only the one car and my father had a job that kept him in it all the time. That was one of the reasons that I practiced my parallel parking skills on the way to the test, once. All I can say is that I passed. Maybe rural Ohio standards were a little laxer than California ones, but none of my children passed on their first attempt.

Of course, school life dominated. These were heady times. I enjoyed playing chess with some people of whom at least one was much smarter than me. He would challenge anyone to come up with a list of things, 25 or more long, and would develop a mnemonic such that he could recall it almost at any time later. I read "Dr. Zhivago," including the poems that Boris Pasternak had at the back. I memorized poems just for the fun of it, and since many of them were depressing, "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant, it's a good thing that I've forgotten them all.

I even remember thinking I was bored, but definitely don't think that of then now. Wow! I did a lot of things and they all were new and fun. I now know what boring really is and that wasn't it.

I was in chorus and went to several contests. Even though I didn't get the best rating, it was my singing at one of them that got me a music scholarship offer from Miami University at Oxford, Ohio. I also co-starred in plays, at least three in the two years I was there. One spring in my junior year I was in two at once, one for the church, in which I played a soldier at Christ's crucifixion. I had some really long monologues in it. I tried to get a cassette tape of it but due to operator error I never did. At least the words in it were far different than the school play occurring at the same time. In the school play I played the only sane person in a mental hospital, which was being visited by outsiders. Then at the end I blew my sanity cover by proclaiming that I, as J.D. Rockefeller, would finance one of the crazy schemes.

For a brief moment I was a tenor in a barbershop quartet, then my voice changed. I also was a professional singer, once. I sang at a funeral and got an honorarium. I don't remember whether or not it was before or after my voice changed but do remember the song, "Beyond the Sunset." I don't remember my voice changing in any abrupt and cracking way. It was almost as if one day I was a tenor, the next few a baritone, and finally a bass with a large range. (Definitely don't have that range today and my voice cracks like it is making up for not doing so then.)

It was also while I was here that I bowled in a church league. If I did the team any good it was because I established a high handicap early. I did do something that is rarely done, I bowled a triplet, all three games one night had the same score. If only it had been a higher score than the 159 it was.

I also worked at a lumber yard in town for a while, at least one whole summer. This was before nail guns and my job was to nail trusses together. I got so I could start the nail with a tap and drive it with the follow on blow. The best part about nailing trusses was the delivery afterwards. Some of the places were really far away, or at least the driver made them appear so by driving slowly.

Of all the places I've lived, This is the only place that I still can't remember the upper floor, even though I know my bedroom was up there and I can remember the stairs going up, at least the downstairs entry to them. I blame a traumatic experience. I went out on the roof to adjust the TV antenna that had been blown off its ideal direction. Smartly I got out of my slick soled shoes. Foolishly I left my socks on. I was really surprised when they started rolling off of my feet and I almost tumbled off of the roof. I didn't have that much time for TV anyway and there couldn't have been that much on to watch. We could have only poorly received Dayton channels.












It is definitely not a parsonage now. No parsonage would have a shop/garage of this size. The hedge that I maintained is gone. The trees may even be new. The church looks to have been closed for some time. It was established in 1881.

Whizzing Through America: Living Memories Tour, Liberty - OH

This was absolutely the best parsonage I lived in while my father was a minister and I lived in it only my high school senior year and two summers while I was in college. All in all, not the shortest time I lived in a place but it also wasn't the longest. This was also the first assignment my father had that wasn't a circuit. It was also his last ministerial assignment.

While I was living in Columbus, he moved out to West Virginia, the place that will be my 26th residence in three weeks as I move back in with my parents. But that story is for another entry.

For such a short time, truly a lot happened here. There was a quite robust youth group, which traveled to Washington DC and New York in separate trips but I was already gone by then. I did get to participate in fund raising for lesser fun things. I particularly liked the sub sales.


While here I went to Boys State, held at Ohio University at Miami, by virtue of being nominated at my previous high school. I also went to Youth in Government, held in the capital in Columbus. There I was elected Lieutenant Governor and presided over the Senate. All of this "political" experience made me want to get into politics, at least until my first Political Science class in college.

I actually visited this place twice. The first time was the previous day and it wasn't raining. It turned out I had left my SPOT in Mowrystown, three or four blog entries from now, although the SPOT story will be told after all of the other Living Memories Tour entries in an entry I plan on titling: After Wroad. While the double stop did make the second one be in the rain, it allowed me to meet Teresa Lilly and her grand niece, Lilly Yuppa. Since they so kindly allowed me to take their picture, I thought I would include it here.

Teresa bought the parsonage ten years ago and said that the mostly elderly attendees of the church still speak fondly of my father. My father has remained friends with several of the former congregation members and my son still remembers visiting the home of the person who co-owns a fishing boat with my father because of shooting firewood out of the authentic black powder cannon one Fourth of July. This also happened long after I lived here though.

She also reminded me to pick up my SPOT so I wouldn't have to repeat my experience of the previous day on this wet one.

This was the place that I went to two proms on back to back nights with the same girl. Unfortunately they were a couple counties apart and I traveled home after each of them. I had to drive with at least one shoe off to stay awake. This was also the place that saw me driving to Ashtabula County every weekend the summer between my Sophomore and Junior years of college. I had been smitten the school year before and it just seemed like a good thing to do. These travels led to my being married by my father in this church. (Since I did stay at her parents' house in Orwell, I do plan on having a bonus blog entry about it after all the places I've lived are covered.)

I guess the only other significant memory of this place is about the Vietnam War. I turned 18 while living here and had to register for the draft. I was seriously considering proclaiming myself a conscientious objector, not to get out of serving although I would have had my parents support had I fled to Canada, but to get out of killing. Conscientious Objectors, if approved, would be medics or of some other service while in the service. My neighbor, basically my age, and I were both very interested in the lottery. All the birthdays were given a number and then each county had a quota to fill roughly based on their population, which determined how deeply they had to go into the numbers. My neighbor had no college plans and was basically waiting to get drafted. My lottery number was 150 and his was 185. Mine was right on the cusp, depending how many deferments the draft board granted.

Instead of registering as a Conscientious Objector, I requested and got a student deferment and by the time I graduated from college the war was over. It turned out that this was the last year they would give student deferments. Given my CO status thoughts, it probably was a little ironic that my college scholarship grants came from/through the Department of Defense.

Whizzing Through America: Living Memories Tour, OSU Campus - Columbus

After we were married, we got a second floor apartment in a cute red brick building, very close to here. It was only a three-month deal because they were to be torn down for the parking lot for this hotel. As a result, the rent was very cheap, $90 month. We paid for the full three months. It was a good thing that we did because we existed on a lot of peanut butter. When there was a Whopper left over from my ending shift at the local Burger King, I would bring it home and Becky would have it her way--although I would have to wake her up for her to eat it.

One time we found some Campbells New England Clam Chowder mismarked at the local Big Bear, also torn down but for the Schottenstein Center, for $0.17. They were regularly over a dollar a can. We bought out the whole shelf and told them about it after we had. I think we spent all of our peanut butter, bread, and boysenberry jelly money on clam chowder.

Well, we did have some other money. We had to. We bought a refrigerator for $25. When we moved my grandmother, who had just gotten electricity, got the refrigerator and used it for years, initially as a refrigerator and then cranked down as an upright freezer. It was small.

Becky transferred to Ohio State this quarter and also majored in Computer Science. We even had one course together.

Prior to the above, I began the school year a little north of this spot, 10th and High, right where this building now is.. Becky and I weren't married yet but we were planning on it. Since I was working at Burger King and Becky was still going to school at Miami University at Oxford Ohio, I loaned her my car and she drove up to Columbus every weekend.

Across the street was the Souvlaki Palace. Great for loud music late into the night, the nights I wasn't working that is.

Amazingly, with all that was going on this quarter, including twenty hours of classes, I managed to get all A's.

For my first two years of college, I actually lived in the OSU football stadium in unit DD.

They've obviously changed a lot of things with the stadium, including that it is no longer a place for sleeping. I don't know exactly when it had the super structure built over it and with it removed the dorm.

Most of my Freshman memories are of staying up until midnight for the deadline inspiration to write my papers. Of course I had a paper due every week. Then there was the final papers. I now had two due on the same Friday. I did one a night, all night and day, for two days. I then proceeded to sleep through the night and all of the meals the following day.

While I was hungry, I didn't need them because, if there was one thing the SSD did right, it was feed the students. If the regular meals weren't enough, there was always the Sundae Sundays, about once a month in the hotter months.

My freshman year was the year of rising protests against the Vietnam War. I was a somewhat supporter (of the protests) but didn't do anything that got tear gas directed at me, although I breathed enough of it just walking to my classes and the library. It was kind of funny to see the National Guard march across the area in front of the library with the active protesters just slipping through and around and then the guard would turn around and march back with the same effect. I did see some female protesters putting flowers in the gun barrels when they weren't marching. I was playing intramural touch football and got back to the dorm to find out that the campus was shut down. The guard at Kent State had killed a protester. It wasn't funny anymore.

We came back to school but school life never was quite the same again. I no longer played intramural sports for one, probably because I got a job at Burger King, now a pharmacy. Then my sophomore year I also brought my car to school. I didn't really use it much but it did go on one road trip to Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, with a bunch of us because someone knew a girl there. There I met Becky and I made other trips on my own after that. (The rest of this story is in my next entry, Liberty.)

One night we didn't have much worthwhile to do, or too much of it, so we decided to adorn the pointed tops of the gates outside our section with soda cans. We scoured the whole dorm, partially filled them with water, and dropped them out of the window. We got quite good by the time we dropped the last can on the last spike--in front of the returning Dean. He made us take them all off. At least he didn't impose any other punishment. I guess he thought that no one seeing our handiwork would be punishment enough. It was.

Lots of memories were made here but one last one to recount: There were some rivalries between units. The unit below us used an M-80 to blow up a pigeon in our unit, out by the registers. It took us forever to clean up the micro-particles so it wouldn't stink. Some in our unit wanted to collect and poor urine over their registers. I don't know how many actually contributed to it but the unit leader made the collectors dispose of it properly. I do know it stank.

Whizzing Through America: Living Memories Tour, Innis Rd. - Columbus

I'm not sure that this place deserves a full entry, but however short, Becky and I lived here, the second floor on the end, right. We were both students at the time so this place was rent subsidized. (When we started making more money, unfortunately not that much more, the rent went up so much that it was cheaper to buy, the Norwood entry.)

I worked part time as a cashier at Sears Automotive in a mall that doesn't exist anymore. Since in my high school youth I had worked at a lumber yard, I applied for the job at the lumber yard right next door but didn't get it. The only questions I remember from the interview was: "What is this question mark for your middle initial? Don't you know your middle name?" I did and do, but admit my cursive capital "E," at least in my signature, looks a lot like a question mark. It's really just how the pen touches the paper as I scrawl my name. At least I'm consistent.

I then worked over the summer at a construction company, putting in footers. Since any house not started was not going to be able to get natural gas, there were a whole lot of footers to put in. (The construction crew would come in after us and build the basement concrete block walls to complete the start of the house.) Most of our work was between Morse Rd. and 161, but a few were even further north. Now I couldn't begin to guess which house I laid the foundation for. It was truly grunt work. The concrete often had to be moved from a single point, where the truck's extension could reach, all around the footer, the perimeter of the house. Most footers were four inches down and four inches up for a width of 16 inches. A couple of them were for truly massive houses and were six inches down and six up with a width of 24 inches. Whatever the size, it was a lot of concrete to move, in the heat.

Becky doesn't remember much about this place as she had one very bad memory while here, a really bad bout of the flu. I don't know what my excuse is. We were its first tenants.

One last memory: While I can no longer be exactly certain of its location, 3C or Sunbury, I am certain that it was a good thing that I had such a physical summer job. We discovered an A and W that had the most delicious root beer floats on those hot days. We couldn't afford to go as often as we would have liked but any more often would have probably rendered even my work ineffective. The few A and W's that still exist, and that one doesn't, just don't make root beer floats that taste as good. It may be my memory or it may be that I'm not nearly as ready for one as I was then. I certainly am not working any off.

Whizzing Through America: Living Memories Tour, Norwood - Columbus

On the corner of Weldon and Norwood in the near north side of Columbus still sits the first house I ever bought. In the 70's it cost $16,400 with a monthly payment that was less than our soon to rise rent. (I imagine it would cost much the same now from its condition and the real estate melt down. I know I saw foreclosed houses on the Internet in Columbus for $20,000 that looked much the same.) Property taxes were just over $500 a year, which if you think about it, was really quite a high percentage of actual market price.

The sweet old lady that sold it to us, while truly sweet, had strategically covered up really worn patches in the carpet with furniture. And both of us wondered what was really under that old and faded aluminum siding. While the place really required a lot of work, we had to get all the tools first, including a lawnmower. Furniture we either had or was supplied by my in-laws, for the most part. I do remember having a sofa reupholstered. We also antiqued all the woodwork, tiled the upstairs bathroom floor, and eventually replaced the carpet.

One rainy day not long after we bought the place there were boats, well one boat and that a canoe, on the street and a couple feet of water in the basement. This led to an SBA loan of a very modest amount to buy a new clothes washer and dryer. On another very cold day toward the end of my living here, our sole car wouldn't start so I took the bus and walked about a mile to get to work--at 20 below.

This is where we "rescued" a cat we named Weldon, for the street, and called Butt for no real reason. We had an electric can opener to which "Butt" would come running whenever we opened a can, even though many of the cans that we opened weren't his most loved food. We also grilled chicken on a little hibachi in February. It didn't quite cook it so we finished it up in the oven but we did get that barbeque taste. (I was living here when my parents, and two of my still at home sisters, moved to West Virginia after years of planning and preparing for the move.)

Columbus was small enough that I could drop Becky off at her job on Broad Street and drive to my first job after college in Worthington and get back to pick her up in the evening and even wait for her. I still remember the miniskirts and maxi-coats. I can't believe she wasn't cold.

Then she got a new job, and I got to travel with her to Annapolis. We traveled to a Greek Orthodox wedding in Buffalo and we traveled to visit family: clambakes at her parents, Thanksgiving at my grandparents, and splitting other holidays. Not all that much excitement.

Somewhere along the line she got a new car, an Accord, and she told me she didn't love me anymore. I don't think it had anything to do with the car. While I didn't really know where it went wrong, I understood how it went wrong and made sure that I put the lesson to good use later with Marilyn. We, at least, never fell out of love.

The place has changed. The front stoop used to have a simple awning-like covering, which you can still see where it probably was attached. It also used to have a shed in the backyard right behind the concrete grill, which can't be the same but sure looks like it. The fence used to be a chain link fence and, of course, we always kept it mowed. It's undoubtedly a rental now. But the thing I think I miss most about the place is the Red Bud tree that used to be in the back outside the fence. I don't know whether or not it was on our property, but I always mowed around it. Care taking is 90% of the law.