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.
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