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.