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JULY 2007

THE LOST NOTES OF LOREN EISELEY

I have been reading The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley, a collection edited by Kenneth Heuer and published by Little, Brown and Company. At the time of his death in 1977, Eiseley was chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the author of many books, including The Immense Journey, The Night Country, All the Strange Hours, and The Star Thrower. He was also a poet and many of his poems were published, some in book form.

Although I came upon Eiseley rather late in my life, and after his death, his thoughts have made a great impression on me, and the easy style of his writing set new goals for my own endeavors. His willingness to bare his soul – including self-confessed inadequacies – helped strengthen my own sometime fragile psyche. In the words of another great writer, Ray Bradbury, speaking of Eiseley, “I shall be in debt to him to the end of my life.”

The Lost Notebooks contain fragments of Loren Eiseley’s journals, portions of an unfinished novel, letters to friends and admirers, and notebook entries dating all the way back to his boyhood.

“I was born,” he once reminisced, “when father was forty, of a marriage that had never been happy. I was loved, but I was also a changeling, an autumn child surrounded by falling leaves.”

His mother was deaf. As he grew older, he also came to realize that she was paranoid, neurotic, and unstable. His father was an itinerant actor, often away from home for long periods of time. The family lived in Nebraska and most of the time was impoverished. Yet he acknowledged that from his mother he gained an appreciation of beauty and from his father a love of poetry.

In his early 20s, Loren was diagnosed as having tuberculosis but fortunately for him the disease went into remission. During the Depression, he worked at odd jobs, rode the rails, traveled west and eventually, after discovering his affinity for science, continued his education. Assisted financially by a well-to-do uncle, Eiseley obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Nebraska and completed his graduate work in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

After he married he made a conscious decision not to have children because there had been talk of insanity in his mother’s family. All of his life he suffered from insomnia, but (happily for the rest of us) he did a lot of his writing when he couldn’t sleep.

For a while he was the head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Oberlin College in Ohio. Later he returned to the University of Pennsylvania to head the Department of Anthropology.

The great achievement of Loren Eiseley was to transcend the traditional scientific role of field trips, scientific papers, and the writing of textbooks and emerge as one of the most perceptive writers of our time – a metamorphosis that was belittled at the time by many of his colleagues. In the process, he revealed himself as a man of great compassion, a scientist, a naturalist, a writer of vision, and a humanist who was never pretentious enough to think he knew all the answers.

He died in the summer of 1977. His wife, Mabel, died July 27, 1986. She was buried with her husband under a tombstone with thissimple legend: “We loved the earth but could not stay.”

DECEMBER 2005

Last month in this column, I was reflecting on the subject of signposts in one’s youth that might provide clues to future adult achievements. I listed some of the more obvious influences that undoubtedly determine some of our choices and life paths. I think we can all agree that our parents, siblings, teachers, and good friends play an important role in this drama. And, there are outside influences galore. Consider the massive impact of television, radio, movies, books, magazines and newspapers on a child, not to speak of the mind-boggling resources of the Internet.

Think back on your youthful years and try to remember what were the biggest influences in your life. Concentrate especially on the years between 7 and 15. In my own life, those years seemed to be loaded with signposts. In thinking back on those times in my own life, I have come to the conclusion that there were also some developments beyond explanation. I say this because there were no outside influences involved that I can remember. For lack of a better term, I call these episodes “illuminations.”

As an example, when I was about 8 years old, out of a clear blue sky I hand-printed on yellow-lined tablet paper a little newspaper that I called “Mrs. Peabody’s Rose Garden.” Where on earth I came up with that name, I don’t have the slightest. For the weather column, I rephrased the radio weather report, supplemented by my own observations looking out the window or walking to and from the old Douglas Elementary I attended. I forget what the rest of the editorial content was. Probably little tidbits about our limited family – my mother, brother, and me. It wasn’t long after that when I got a small Dispatch route. That’s when I cornered the owner of the paper in the elevator of the apartment building where we lived and tried to sell him a paper. Illuminations, I guess, for lack of a better word.

I also collected stamps during my boyhood. It’s not difficult to figure out how I got into that. My father had collected stamps, and, after his death, my brother carried on the tradition. When it came my turn, I was already captivated by the stamp company ads in magazines like Boy’s Life and The Open Road for Boys. Stamp collecting was a great hobby. I cultivated a lot of good habits. In the process of collecting stamps, for example, I became much more aware of the many countries around the world. Influences? Easy to answer that one: my family and the magazines, not to speak of the stamp companies with their tempting offers.

A major illumination occurred when I was about 10 years old. I started keeping a series of war scrapbooks that continued until I joined the Navy. I still have nine of these notebooks and am amazed at how neat and professionally done they were. They contain headlines, news stories, pictures, cartoons and maps clipped from the three local newspapers: The Columbus Dispatch, The Columbus Citizen, and The Ohio State Journal. Columbus was served by three newspapers back then. Isn’t that amazing! If I remember right, the Journal was the morning paper with an early edition that hit the streets the night before. It was called the Journal Night Green because the cover page were printed on green paper. I think the Citizen and the Dispatch were afternoon or evening papers. I don't know, maybe it was the other way around. There are also clippings from The New York Times and Time Magazine.

At any rate, that’s the way I chronicled the chaos and conflict that prevailed in the world – even back then. Let me tick them off for you: First, there was the Japanese invasion of China and the crisis when they sank the Panay, an American gunboat that was patrolling the Yangtze River. Then there was the Spanish Civil War and the invasion of Ethiopia by Italian soldiers. And, of course, during much of this time, Adolf Hitler was weaseling his way into power. I have the clippings. Then, on September 1, 1939, he invaded Poland, and World War II was off and running. It’s all in my scrapbooks, all the way to the screaming headlines of Sunday, December 7, 1939, telling of Pearl Harbor.

I was still in high school, so I had to wait a couple of years before I joined the Navy. I was a navigator aboard the U.S.S. LSM 245, as proud and jaunty a little ship as ever ploughed its way through the islands of the South Pacific. One of my duties was keeping the ship’s log. After the war, I majored in journalism at Ohio State University, and during my senior year wrote a weekly column in The Lantern. I also was writing a column for the Columbus Citizen about campus life.

So, you see, there were signposts all along the way.

NOVEMBER 2005

In writing this series of articles, many of them about my boyhood, I have had to delve deep into my memory, not to speak of doing a lot of soul searching.

As a result of all this digging into the past (exploring my own boyhood), I became aware of all kinds of intriguing facts and fancies along the way. Oddities that I hadn’t thought of in years and years, if ever at all. And, increasingly, as I continued my digging, I wondered how I had become the individual that I am, for better or worse, take it or leave it. In a nutshell, I wondered what were the ingredients of childhood that go into making an adult.

In other words, are there signposts along the way that point to where that particular child is headed? Do some of these signs suggest future careers and vocations? Are such signs readily apparent or vague and indistinct? Do they change over the years?

The answers to the above questions in no given order are yes, no, and maybe.

Okay, let’s check out some of the possibilities, and remember, we’re doing this as a layman, not an experienced psychologist.

Surely, one’s parents and siblings exert a big influence on the life of a child. In my case, I was blessed with a well-educated and articulate mother. She was southern born, a native of Nashville, Tennessee, and a graduate of Ward-Belmont, a finishing school for girls. After my father’s death, my mother never remarried. Instead, she devoted her life to raising her two sons. She was a good parent, although way too overly protective.

For instance, when I was a sophomore in high school I had an opportunity to go to the marine institute at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to work and study. In spite of my pleading, she was relentless in her refusal to let me go. The episode left me not only bitter and frustrated, but even more eager to get away from home. Eventually, I accomplished that by enlisting in the Navy.

My only sibling was my brother David, seven years my senior and an intellectual whiz kid and bookworm. Were we close? No. Too big a difference in ages. He had his friends. I had mine. Of course, I couldn’t help but pick up some of his love of books. He even went to a private school from grades 8 through 12. It was called the University School and was located at Woodruff and High streets on the Ohio State University campus. He hung out with all these kids from wealthy families and professor’s kids and whatnot. And, meanwhile, my mother was breaking her back taking in roomers to pay for all this. All the while, I was going to public schools. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know the difference. But, what the heck. I wasn’t jealous of him or anything like that. I was proud of my brother. The schools I went to suited me just fine: Ninth Avenue Elementary, Everett Junior High, and North High.

My father, unfortunately, died in a tragic accident when I was 4 years old. My memory was just catching hold so I have few details of the events leading up to his death – some of which are available in the Legendary Tales archives on the Short North Gazette Web site. Funny thing, the older I get the more I think of him. Well, of course, that’s because of all my digging around into the past. “Goes with the territory,” as Willy Loman would say.

Other relatives often play a role. My maternal grandmother was far and away the closest and, consequently, the greatest influence. I kiddingly refer to her as “my orbiting grandmother” because she almost always lived somewhere nearby. And, we moved around a lot! And friends, teachers, librarians, and Sunday school teachers, of course. Society at large and all of its cultural ramifications. Huge influences.

Just consider how many of these exterior influences there are and how awesome their total impact must be. There are newspapers and magazines, television, movies, of course, a big influence in their own right. And let us not forget radio. All of these things must have a profound effect on the life of a child. And, I forgot books. How could I have done that? Since sometime in junior high school books have provided me with a treasure house of enjoyment and information.

I will continue these thoughts next month. I hope you will accompany me on this exploratory trip into the past. And, I hope you will do some exploring of your own!

October 2005

There is a kind of rare magic evident in the lives of a growing segment of our population today. It has to do with their interest in wild birds and the numerous spinoffs that originate from that interest.

This sorcery enables those affected to transcend everyday life and, at least partially, to escape the humdrum work-a-day existence. It beckons them from their own backyards to numerous beautiful and remote wildlife sanctuaries scattered across the United States. The call of this siren is so strong that on an autumn weekend for those affected it is well nigh impossible to work indoors or, for that matter, stay at home.

The study of birds inevitably leads to ever greater adventures and to trips further and further afield. For beginner and veteran alike, hundreds, if not thousands, of bird books are available in bookstores, libraries, and wild bird stores. They deal with every aspect of ornithology and birding. And then, it doesn’t take long to discover the vast array of books on other phases of natural history. Attending natural history lectures and going on organized field trips is also an excellent way to broaden one’s interests and pick up a lot of useful knowledge.

But in the long run, for hands-on learning, there’s no substitute for just getting out-of-doors at every opportunity and keeping one’s eyes wide open.

In past articles in the Gazette, it has been my pleasure to write about a number of Ohio naturalists I have had the good fortune of knowing, and others I have encountered through my own reading.

As I often lament, there is so much to learn that one lifetime is barely enough time to scratch the surface. No wonder that the best time to get interested in birds – or any other discipline of natural history – is at an early age. The early teens would seem to be ideal.In my own case, I was fifteen.

The natural world is a fantastic place and the process by which it came about and continues to function is equally amazing – and absurd and beautiful and abhorrent and wonderful and intriguing and unbelievable and sad and enchanting. Take your pick. And, studying the birds is like having a ringside seat at the greatest show on Earth.

Birding as a hobby or sport is equally entertaining and challenging. Just identifying a bird can be tricky and difficult. Over 400 species have been known to occur in Ohio and some of them are remarkably alike. Many birders keep lists, and they can range from birds seen in one’s backyard to daily, annual lists, life lists, and other categories. Many of the birds are incredibly beautiful, their plumage often intricate in design and unbelievably colorful. This is especially true of the neo-tropicals, the species that migrate back and forth between our temperate latitudes where they nest and the tropics. Some of these journeys cover thousands of miles and, in many cases, the individuals return each year to the exact same nesting spot.

Sometimes Chimney Swifts, for instance, fly each fall all the way to the slopes of the Andes Mountains where they spend the winter. What a monumental achievement! How they do this is still not entirely known. Many of them fly during the nighttime hours, adding to the mystery.

Perhaps that’s why – for me – birds have come to symbolize the beauty and the fragility of all life on this mortal coil.

For a good many years, I have had the good fortune to share my thoughts with many other people. Sometimes ideas would materialize or restructure themselves in conversations with friends or impromptu discussions on birding hikes that I have led in the Clear Creek Valley and up on Lake Erie. At other times, inspiration would come in the middle of the night or, not infrequently, in the early hours of morning.

Some of my past articles have been drawn from articles that appeared in The Columbus Dispatch, Columbus Citizen-Journal, and a number of periodicals. Other material was derived from commentaries that were aired between 1988 and 2004 on National Public Radio’s Columbus station, WOSU-AM. But many of the pieces were written expressly for the Gazette. A good many of the pieces that have appeared here concerned themselves in one way or another with the Clear Creek Valley in Hocking County, Ohio.

Basically, everything I have written is true, even the flights of fancy were true in their own way because if they didn’t happen, they might have, somewhere, sometime.

The second edition of my book Birding in Ohio is also available as a resource from the Indiana University Press.

In the future, I hope it will be my pleasure to bring you other stories about birds and the great world of nature.

In the meantime, get thyself outdoors!

A Valentine for Melissa (September 2005, February 2008)

Every now and then I think of a curious little story told to me by a friend and neighbor, the late Bob Bowman who worked at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus.

Bob had been a child of the Great Depression. His father was an Indiana dirt farmer, and the family, relying on “Give us this day our daily bread,” eked out a meager living from the land.

One afternoon in February, the father was fussing around with the tractor in the barn just about the time Bob’s oldest brother arrived home on the school bus. The smaller children, including Bob, were playing in the yard and, unnoticed by them all, the family’s favorite cat, Melissa, a gray tabby, was headed for the partly open kitchen screen door.

Bob’s mother, busy with supper, had placed a platter of liver and onions on the kitchen table and was headed for the door to ring the dinner bell. She didn’t see the cat passing by her feet like a phantom ship in the night.

Melissa was a Depression cat, a cat who had listened to many a FDR fireside chat and knew that the only thing to fear was fear itself, but right now her nostrils were quivering in ecstasy as she sniffed the heady, maddening scent of the liver.

Deciding that opportunity knocks but once, the cat’s subsequent leap to the table was a brilliant act of daring, perfectly executed. She landed on the liver with the grace of a barefoot girl stomping on grapes in southern France.

The mother screamed, “Oh, my Lord, the cat’s in the liver,” just as Bob’s 16-year-old brother came in the door. Sizing up the situation, he lunged at the cat unaware of a piece of liver that had slivered onto the floor as a result of the cat’s passionate dancing about.

The boy went down with a crash that shook the old frame house to its foundations. Undeterred and shouting words his mother never realized he knew, he pivoted up on one arm and continued his crazy charge like a San Franciso Forty-niner going after a fumble.

He scooped the cat up in both hands, ran out into the yard, and there he did a remarkable and terrible thing. He shifted the cat to one hand and then, like a passing quarterback, he let it fly.

Well, that cat described an arc that took it over the road and into the field beyond where it landed with a deadening thud, its inert body sprawled in an unnatural position.

It seemed only then that the boy realized what he had done, and he buried his face in the same hands that had doomed the cat to its wild ride. “I didn’t mean to kill Melissa, honestly I didn’t,” he wailed, and the tears streamed down his face. Then he sank to the ground beside Melissa’s body and bawled.

The other children reacted to this scene with mixed emotions, but for the most part they remained stoically silent, all of them, that is, except the smallest girl. She looked at her brother with the cool eyes and solemnity of a judge passing sentence. Then she stuck her tongue out and hissed, “Cat killer!”

Bob’s father and mother herded the small children back into the house and left the older boy with his grief. After a while he got up, walked to the barn, selected a spade, trudged back to the body of the cat and tipped the steel blade into the sandy Indiana loam.

He bent his back and started digging for all he was worth. When he was satisfied he had dug deep enough, he leaned over to pick up the cat. At first he didn’t know whether he was having a dizzy spell or what.

What he saw was Melissa pushing her legs out from her belly – sort of like she was stretching – and then she moved her head. Shortly after that she opened her eyes, got up, sort of shook herself, then walked away. She seemed no worse for the wear, except for a wobble in her rear end, like maybe she was a little bit out of alignment.

The boy was elated. He was prancing around like an Indian doing the Ghost dance and, after all, that would have been appropriate, seeing that this was almost like a reincarnation, only in this case Melissa had come back as her old familiar self.

“Melissa’s alive!” he shouted and the children came running out of the house laughing and clapping their hands.

That night the family fed Melissa all the liver she could eat – and in the kitchen at that. They sat down at the table and all they had for themselves was boiled potatoes, some carrots, a dish of hominy grits, bread and butter and hot cocoa.

All during the meal they couldn’t keep their eyes off that cat.

The valentines the children had stuck on the old ice box seemed to radiate some kind of extra special happiness. After that Melissa could do no wrong, and until her natural death, years later, she enjoyed some of the best meals of her life.

Bob’s oldest brother, of course, had the greatest interest in Melissa’s welfare. He made sure she was well fed and was receiving all the attention to which a reborn cat deserved. All of this happened a long time ago, in February, before the last snow, on St. Valentine’s Day.

FIRE AT THE FURNITURE STORE

PART I

I was 8 years old. My brother, David, was 15. Our mother was 37. We were in downtown Columbus, near Broad and High, waiting for a streetcar.

Because it was a beautiful summer day, we had walked downtown from the Cambridge Arms at 926 East Broad Street.

My mother was the manager of that beautiful and prestigious high-rise apartment building. Notable among the residents were two members of the Dispatch Wolfe family and a Mr. Garber, a State Senator who had romantic ideas about my mother.

One day he asked her for a date to see a movie at a downtown theatre. Mother said she would love to – and asked if it would be all right to bring her two sons?

He must have said ok because I remember all of us sitting inside the old Grand Theatre on East State Street, near the old Hartman Theatre which is also no longer there – part of the rape of downtown Columbus.

Anyway, as you can well imagine, Mr. Garber never asked our Mother out again.

The year was 1932 and the country was reeling from the first effects of an economic depression that was to last until World War II. But our spirits were high.

We were on our way to pay a Sunday visit to our orbiting grandmother who at that time lived with our grandfather out on Northwest Boulevard near Goodale Street.

They lived in a duplex next to Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins. A couple of doors down the street on the corner was a small factory that was home to a company the manufactured a cleaning product name Skidoo.

This was a neat scouring paste that came in a little gray can with a bright red lid. For some reason unknown to me, it fell by the wayside years ago.

So, anyway, there we were waiting for a streetcar.

Streetcars were really neat, lots more fun to ride than the bus. I especially liked the streetcars that were on the Grandview route because they had a lot of wood in their construction. For some reason this gave them a smoother ride than those that were all metal.

You would think just the opposite but, believe me, they had the smoooothest ride you can imagine. They just glided along.

Another thing. Along Goodale Avenue the tracks were not in the middle of the street like they were everywhere else. They were set in the ground on the south side of the street.

There weren’t many stops (at least on Sundays) because there were a lot of small manufacturing plants along there. So the motorman could open up the throttle and really let her rip. I can’t begin to tell you how exciting it was, gliding and swaying along for blocks on end without stopping.

All of the streetcars were electric . That is, they had trolleys that extended up to overhead wires, For that reason, they didn’t pollute the air like busses do.
They also had two-man crews: a motorman up front, a conductor at the rear.


Back then not all that many people had cars. So lots of people rode the streetcars – and took cabs.

It cost five cents to rise the streetcar. Less than that if you bought a strip of tickets for a quarter. The cabs were a bit more, but really not all that much considering they would take you right to the door of where you were going.

Some of them might have had meters, but during those depression days when they were competing for business they had all kinds of payment plans. The one I remember the best was a map they had posted in the back seat that had the city divided up into zones and it was five or ten cents every time you went from one zone to another.

There were probably half a dozen cab companies. The ones I remember were Hill’s, which my mother like best, and Green Cabs and Radio Cabs.

So, on this particular day my mother had evidently decided that we would take the streetcar. Probably to save a few cents because, after all, it was quite a way out to Grandview.
We were standing in front of Howald’s Furniture Store. Back in the 1930’s the two leading furniture stores in Columbus were Carlile’s and Howald’s.

Howald’s was located downtown on the east side of High Street between Gay Street and Broad Street.

Carlile’s was actually my mother’s favorite furniture store. It was located on the corner of North High and Vine Street, a short distance north of downtown, hence it came to be called “the Short North” by taxicab dispatchers.

How well I remember wandering around inside that store while my mother ordered drapes and various items of furniture. Although most of the apartments at the Cambridge Arms were unfurnished, a few of them were decorated and furnished with the help of my mother.

PART II

While we were waiting for a streetcar, I was fidgeting around like any eight-year-old would, but I was also keeping an eagle eye on my brother. In case you forgot, we were standing in front of Howald's Furniture Store located at 34 N. High Street in downtown Columbus. The year was 1932. Waiting for a streetcar, that's what we were doing. My mother, my brother, and me.

David was in the ninth grade at Franklin Junior High School. I was in the third grade at Douglas Elementary. David brought home all A grade cards. Mine were spotted with a few B's and C's, especially in arithmetic. Even at that age, I was in awe of my brother's intellect. As I’ve mentioned before, I was behind the door when the brains were passed out. All of his teachers recognized that my brother was something special. And, my mother! Oh, my God! My mother thought he could do no wrong.

Now, don't misunderstand me. I was well-loved, well-fed, well-clothed, and well-shod. My biggest worry was that I might have smelly feet. Speaking of feet, our mother used to take us to Gilbert's Shoe Store which was on East Town Street in the Central Market District. They even had an x-ray machine to make sure your shoes were a good fit.

Some more thoughts about my brother just danced into my head. He would not only religiously bring home his school books every day, he would lug armloads of books from the school library. Biographies and books about famous philosophers, and he would talk to our mother about them and they would read them together. Many a night, I would go to bed with the droning of their voices in the other room lulling me to sleep.

I'll tell you how smart my brother was – and remember we're talking about a 15-year-old kid. My brother, David (since grown old and died, by the way) could whistle the exact notes from dozens of symphonies and operas.

Our mother knew she had something special on her hands. That's why I didn't resent any special treatment he might get. I swear she probably thought he was going to grow up to become president of the United States, or maybe become another Albert Einstein, or, at the very least, a university professor at some famous university like Yale or Harvard.

Me? I guess I was just going along for the ride. Even way back then, I found out that there are many advantages in not being the center of attention. I wouldn't have had it any other way.

While my brother was basking in the limelight, I would just go off by myself with a Big Little Book or a pulp magazine. Or, more than once, I would find a newspaper or magazine with ads for women's fancy undergarments and do what I did best of all.

Well, I've been digressing too long.

It was a cloudless summer day and so hot you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. That was one of my grandmother's favorite expressions, and that was where we were headed, to pay my grandparents a Sunday visit. And, as I mentioned before, I was keeping a close eye on that 15-year-old brother of mine. He was standing near one of the store's plate glass windows, with his back to me, and he had taken something out of his pants pocket . He was behaving funny, acting as if he didn't want me to see what he was doing.

That just made me all the more curious, of course, and so I moved around to the other side of him to get a better look. Then I saw what he was doing. He had a little magnifying glass, the kind that came with stamp collecting outfits, and he was focusing a ray of bright sunlight onto the drapes that were hanging inside the show-window. Suddenly, a brown spot appeared on the cloth and as I watched with widening eyes it became black and emitted a wisp of smoke.

Oh, my God! A tongue of flame appeared out of nowhere, instantly grew bigger, all red and orange and yellow with evil-looking streaks of blue. Then without warning, the flames raced up the drape, jumped to other drapes that were framing the display of furniture and suddenly the entire window was on fire.

A passerby, a slender Thurberish-looking young man took one look at the conflagration, then ran down the street shouting “Fire! Fire! Fire!” at the top of his lungs.

PART III

The Thurberish-looking man ran down the street to a fire alarm box, all the while yelling “Fire! Fire! Fire!” at the top of his lungs. My mother who had turned deathly pale was hissing at my brother to follow her up High Street to the next streetcar stop. Then she almost jerked my arm out of its socket as she pulled me along after her.

Luckily, our streetcar came along just in the nick of time. We were climbing aboard as the first fire engines came racing past us. My face was pressed to the window as more and more of them went careening by. They seemed to be coming from all directions: pumpers, hook-and-ladders, fire chief cars. The whole shebang. And the streetcar we were on kept grinding to a stop as new equipment kept arriving. What a blast for an eight-year-old kid to be at the scene of the fire – right in the middle of things, you might say.

Finally, we left all the hubbub behind us, and it was clear sailing out Goodale Avenue to Northwest Boulevard. Being a Sunday, we practically had the car to ourselves. My mother was distraught-looking and tight-lipped during the entire ride. She was obviously confronted with a situation she had never imagined happening in her wildest dreams. The result was that none of us said anything. After all, what was there to say?

For my part, I had a lot to think about, including the fact that sometimes it wasn’t all that bad being the younger brother. When we arrived at our stop, we got off and walked the short distance up the street to my grandparent’s duplex.
“I’m a nervous wreck!” were my mother’s first words to my grandmother.

“What on earth’s the matter, Lucille?” my grandmother responded with obvious concern. “Let’s go in the kitchen, and I’ll tell you all about it,” my mother said with a sigh. They went in the kitchen, my brother had disappeared somewhere with one of his beloved books, and I was left for the time being in the connecting living and dining rooms with my grandfather. I should explain something about my grandfather. Bootleg whiskey and cigarettes had done him in when he was only in his mid-fifties. From a handsome and debonair traveling salesman, a series of strokes had reduced him to a pitiful shell of his former self. When he wasn’t in bed, he could barely hobble to the bathroom with the use of a cane. The rest of the time, disgruntled and distraught, he spent slouched in an easy chair in the living room. I had experienced the whack of his cane on the back of my legs more than once, so I was especially careful to give him wide berth.

I knew I had to get out of there or go bonkers, so I headed for the front porch and some fresh air. I had a lot to think about. The fire, of course. My grades at school. My financial situation – at the time, I think it was about fifty cents, more or less. And, there were other things equally important, like whether my feet smelled bad. That was always high on my list of things to worry about. And whether my stockings had holes in the heels. Don’t think little kids don’t have their worries. They surely do.

After we ate dinner, we said goodbye to my grandparents and took a streetcar back downtown. There were still a couple of fire engines hanging around the still smoking front end of the furniture store. The Journal Night Green had just hit the streets and the newspaper men were yelling: “Read all about the four alarm fire downtown!” We bought a paper, jumped in a taxi and rode home in silence.

So, that’s pretty much the story of the mysterious furniture store fire in downtown Columbus. The authorities never figured out what started the blaze, but they came close. They speculated that it might have been caused by faulty wiring, or the late afternoon sun. Close, but close only counts in horseshoes. Maybe some good came from the fire. Maybe, in its aftermath, they had a big fire sale and made a lot of money. Who knows? After all, those were depression days.

The above events happened when I was barely eight years old. But I remember them as vividly as if they had happened yesterday. And, I wouldn’t be telling this little story if my brother were still alive. I wouldn’t have dared.

The Shadow, Astounding Stories, a Murder, a Friendship – and Meeting Les Wexner – May 2005

I was about 11 or 12 years old when my widowed mother took a break from renting rooms to students and we moved into a four-unit apartment building across from the OSU campus. There were usually three of us, including my mother and my older brother David. Sometimes my maternal grandmother "Da" lived near us, but now she lived in the same building. She was like a satellite, always orbiting around us, always somewhere near.

Mrs. MaGill and her son Harry Jr. lived in another of the apartments. Mrs. MaGill was an attractive widow, a school teacher at the Open-Air School that once existed off Neil Avenue north of the campus. She and my mother got to know each other a bit. And I remember Mrs. MaGill telling my mother she had recently had a date with a fellow teacher.

"Did he take you out to dinner?" my mother asked.

"No, he took me to a nudist camp," Mrs. MaGill replied.

My mother's mouth fell open. "You didn't take your clothes off, did you?"

"When in Rome do as the Romans do," Mrs. MaGill smiled sweetly.

I'm not sure how my mother reacted to Mrs. MaGill's cool presence of mind. I'm sure she didn't laugh. Maybe she fainted.

Harry Jr. was a likable kid, studious, a couple of years older than I was at the time. But what I really liked about him, he showed me how to stretch Japanese tissue tight and wrinkle-free onto my miserable looking model airplanes.

Oh, and he was also influential in upgrading my pulp magazine diet from Sky Fighters and The Shadow to Astounding Stories and a other sci-fi publications.

I vividly recall the day when Mrs. MaGill told my mother how her husband, Harry MaGill, died. They were living in Hillsboro where Mr. MaGill was a deputy sheriff. One night late, the phone rang, and he was told to get downtown; the hardware store was being burglarized, and he was needed in a hurry.

It seems there were two brothers – the Boggs brothers – in the hardware store. Well, to make a long story short, the building was surrounded by the police and there was some gunfire. Mr. MaGill was mortally wounded; and after a swift trial, the Boggs brothers went to prison, condemned to spend the rest of their lives behind bars. All of this happened in the early '30s.

Now zoom forward into the future. World War II is history. I’ve come home from the navy, finished college, and I'm working for myself as a small publisher downtown where I share a suite of penthouse offices at 16 East Broad Street. Dirt cheap rent for a prime location, just steps from Broad and High, located in the same building as the famous Marzetti's Restaurant.

Many mornings, after finding a parking spot, I had a habit of stopping at Jack and Benny's, a breakfast and lunch counter kind of place located on the same corner as my office. As a matter of fact, it was owned by Benny Klein, the proprietor of Benny Klein's Steak House, located right around the corner on High Street.

Benny was a real character, an émigré from Cleveland, where he'd made his money in pickles – you know, sweet, sour, dill, those kinds – a stocky Edward G. Robinson look-alike with a handshake that could crush rocks. One day. He introduced me to Sam Shepherd and his bride, Adrianne, who had gotten married earlier that day in Chicago.

Back to Jack and Benny's. One day I say down at the counter next to a pleasant looking, white-haired gentleman with twinkling blue eyes, an ingratiating smile, and we struck up a conversation. over the next couple of years I encountered him frequently and we became good friends.

He was a conduit for all kinds of Broad and High gossip and always lent a patient ear for my own problems. Despite his age, he had been married just a few years and had a young daughter. He had learned the real estate business, and sometimes he did this or that job for Benny Klein. His name was Doc Boggs. The Doc Boggs I've been telling you about.

One summer morning, Doc introduced me to a skinny little kid who had dropped out of college to work downtown in a men's store. Doc said, "Tommy, I want you to meet Les Wexner." And I said, "Glad to know you, Les."

Once I loaned Les five bucks for lunch and carfare. He paid me back. Promptly. Sort of a shame, when you think about it. Might have accumulated into a lot of money over the years.

Another time, Les asked if he could sell ads for me. I think I dissuaded him from the enterprise. My thought was that he wasn't aggressive enough. He was a very quiet kind of young man. Well- mannered, but quiet.

Toward the end of the summer, Les stopped coming in Jack and Benny's and I inquired about him. Doc said that Les' parents had bought him a womens apparel store that had been on the block in the Kingsdale Shopping Center. For something like $18,000. I remember whistling and saying, "Oh, my gosh, there goes the family money." Well, as you might know, I couldn't have been more wrong.

But there was one thing I did right. Never once over all that time did I ever intimate to my friend Doc that I was aware of his past. Not once, because I counted Doc Boggs among my best friends.

I also knew that a few years before I met him, a deputy sheriff on his death bed had testified that Harry MaGill had actually been killed in a crossfire, accidentally shot down by one of his own friends.

The Boggs Brothers had been exonerated and released from prison. What had started out as a small town youthful caper and ended in stark tragedy had eventually ended on a happier note.

Memory does play tricks. If my recollections of any of the events recounted here are inaccurate, or if you can add an interesting note, I would appreciate hearing from you.

The Yummy Man - April 2005

The Talmud is an ancient Hebrew book of civil and religious laws and precepts of wisdom. It is written there that we see things not as they are, but as we are.

Perhaps it is also written in that book that the basic tenets of life don't change much from one generation to another. The more things change, the more they stay the same. At least, that would be my guess.

When I was ten or eleven years old, during the warm weather months there was a Yummy Man who cruised through our neighborhood every afternoon. For those of you who might have difficulty figuring out what a Yummy man might be, let me explain.

A Yummy man was a kind of Good Humor man, a peddler of ice cream treats and frozen confections. His vehicle was a large tricycle. The seat upon which he perched was behind a large insulated box and a handlebar with bells arranged along its length.

The insulated box had a hatch door on the top which gave the Yummy Man access to all the goodies inside: Popsicles, Fudgsicles, Drumsticks, Creamsicles and, of course, plain old ice cream bars.

But we kids were in on a secret that the average person – especially our parents – had no inkling of. A secret not about cold treats but sizzling hot ones, creations to excite the minds and imaginations of pre-pubescent boys.

Snuggled down there amidst all those goodies was a brown paper sack which was full of dirty cartoon books. Pardon me, what I mean to say is that they were sexy cartoon books. Little 10- or 12-page jobs, stapled together, about three by five inches in size.

Depicted across those scanty pages were graphic sexual episodes involving plagiarized cartoon characters. Popular characters, such as Maggie and Jigs, Dick Tracy (and Tess), and Blondie and Dagwood. Comic strip people like that.

The plots were as miniscule as the men's endowments were unbelievably large. Capable either of giving young boys painful inferiority complexes or, more hopefully, a sensational and exciting new world to look forward to.

Price of the cartoon books? Two-bits. Twenty-five cents. That was when a quarter was a substantial piece of change and not to be thrown around indiscriminately by a twelve-year-old boy. By comparison, an ice cream bar or Popsicle was a nickel.

So you can see, we're talking sizable money here. Maybe the day's profits from a paper route.

Here lately, as we charge into the 21st century, with all kinds of sexual matters in the news, I've wondered about the paradoxical nature of our sexuality. It's very confusing, isn't it? Mixed signals and all the rest.

Life was much simpler when I was a kid.

Anyhow, as I said at the onset, it all depends on how you look at something. We see things not as they are, says the Talmud, but as we are.

This is the way I see them. When I look back on those good ol' days, I like to think we might have been the only boys in the whole world who got you-know-whats when we heard the sound of bells.

My Buddy Bruce Part III - March 2005

During the ‘70s, the Dell was one of Bruce’s favorite hangouts. The restaurant and bar, owned by Dick and Dee Johnston, was located on Parsons Avenue just a couple blocks off East Broad Street.

Much like a cabaret, the popular spot featured the Dell Singers who entertained weekend patrons with songs from Broadway musicals.

There was also a piano bar presided over by Janet O’Brien, and an open mike that attracted talented and not-so-talented singers like a dark alley attracts lovelorn cats.

All of this musical activity was of great interest to my friend Bruce who had a lot of musical talent himself. He played the piano and was the proud owner of a solid cherry grand piano.

I only heard him sing once, but he was good at that too. It was one evening at the Dell when Janet took a break. He sat there at the keyboard with all the confidence in the world as his finger picked out the melody to “Mack the Knife.”

Then he started to sing. In a low, sort of gravelly voice, he whispered the words to the song. He sounded like a pro. Like he’d been singing for years on the radio, in the movies. He was that good!

Bruce had another quality that made talking to him enjoyable. He was good at remembering obscure trivia. For instance, he knew that John Dillinger was shot and killed outside the Biograph Theatre in Chicago and that he was betrayed by the mysterious Lady in Red. That kind of stuff.

It’s hard for me to remember the events of Bruce’s life in chronological order because I only saw him every once in a while. I do know that in his earlier days he had a pizza concession at the State Fair. Then, a few years later, he met a gal who was a police officer. He took a shine to her and before you know it they got hitched.

I met her once, and the impression I got was that she was straight-as-an-arrow, no-nonsense, law ‘n’ order, conservative type of woman. Pretty, but hard as flint.

She had a couple of kids by a previous marriage, and then she and Bruce had one of their own, a boy who joined the Navy when he grew up. I met him once. He was a nice kid, a lot like his father.

One evening Bruce and his wife were having dinner at Presutti’s, enjoying the music of a little combo that was playing there. Presutti’s was a fashionable, family-owned restaurant located at 1692 West Fifth Ave. During a break in the music, they invited the leader of the group over to their table for a drink.

During their conversation, the band leader mentioned they were staying at a nearby motel.

“We have a big house,” Bruce’s wife piped up, “Why don’t you fellows stay with us until you find something more permanent?”

He stepped away from the table and conferred with the other two members of the group. To say that they recognized a good thing when they saw it would be understating the fact. So, they all moved in for an extended stay – about six weeks or more.

A short time after that, Bruce came home unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon and heard noises coming from the second floor. When he went upstairs to investigate he found the band leader in bed with his wife.

He hardly had time to splutter, “What the hell’s going on here?” when the two lovers jumped out of bed and began beating up on him – and don’t forget that his wife was a policewoman!
Bruce ended up in the emergency room with assorted bruises and abrasions, a broken bone or two and a black eye.

Shortly afterwards, his wife moved out, ditched Bruce and the kids, started smoking funny cigarettes and took off for Texas with Mr. Hot Pants Combo. She lived down there until she died, went through a number of men, even married several of them.

Bruce, of course, never forgave her. He might have met her briefly once when she was in Columbus, but there was no love lost between them.

A few years before he died, Bruce started working on a musical, writing the lyrics and the music. My memory falters, but I know it was based on some widely known classical story.

Something like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, or maybe The Adventures of Robin Hood. No, no! That’s already been done. Now I remember what it was!

Edgar Allan Poe.

On first thought an unlikely subject. But why not? Poe led a kind of mysterious, colorful life.

I read some of the lyrics, and they were really good. Needless to say, it wasn’t published. Over the years, Bruce wrote dozens of songs and none of them were picked up. What a shame.

In the long run, it was cigarettes that killed him. He tried to quit many times, but they had a hold on him. Even after bypass surgery, he continued to puff on his beloved ciggies.

Bruce died in November of 1993 at the age of 67, all alone in the house on Neil Avenue. He didn’t even have an obituary in the daily paper.

Just fell through the cracks, you might say.

My Buddy Bruce Part II - February 2005

After losing touch with Bruce for a good number of years, I suddenly started running into him downtown, and at Costello's, a friendly neighborhood bar in the Thurber Village shopping center on Neil Avenue.

I saw him mostly at Costello’s, and we gradually renewed a friendship that dated all the way back to junior high school at Everett, which we both attended, although Bruce moved on to Central High School while I went over to North High after graduating from Everett. Central was located downtown in the building that is now occupied by COSI. It had a good reputation for manual arts, among other things. It was in this building that Emerson Burkhart painted a controversial mural the principle later painted over because it was too upbeat – it showed kids jitterbugging and all that kind of immoral behavior!

Anyway, I was happy to spend time with Bruce again after all those years apart. Interestingly, he would dye his hair coal-black, other times he would let it grow out gray. It was like knowing two people. But, the way I look at it, who cares what people do to enhance their appearance? They've been doing it all the way back to the ancient Egyptians, probably further, probably back to the caves when some bloke discovered he looked better with mud in his hair.

I always enjoyed talking to Bruce because he was one of those guys who had what I consider to be a kind of inner wisdom. No benefit of a college degree or any of that stuff, just sort of a sardonic way of looking at life with a wry sense of humor to see him through the hard times.

He was sort of a James Dean type, living on the ragged edge of things. He had been abandoned as a baby. His aunt took him in and looked after him all the way through high school. As a matter of fact, except for an interlude of a few years when he got married, he lived with her until she died. Bruce and his two married sisters inherited the big house on Neil Avenue after her death, and Bruce lived there a good many years afterward.

Her name, by the way, was Miss Higgins, and she taught English at Everett Junior High School. She was an excellent teacher and a positive influence on the many children who went through her classes.

Bruce wasn't very religious, at least in the conventional sense. He hadn't gone to church for years, and whenever we came close to talking about anything religious, he would just shrug and say he didn't believe in heaven and, as far as he was concerned, hell was right here on earth.

That would always get a rise out of me. I would say, “Aw, come on, Bruce, you don't mean that!”

Well, he might not have been religious, but he did believe in ghosts! Claimed there was one right there in the big old brick house he lived in on Neil Avenue.

It was apparently a female ghost because her name was Hannah. He claimed he could hear her walking around in the dark like she was looking for something. In the middle of the night. Night after night, he would hear her footsteps and the eerie sound of squeaky floorboards.

Sometimes when Hannah was in a devilish mood, she would go in the bathroom and unroll the toilet paper. Spin it right off its little cardboard tube until there was a spiraled heap of it on the floor.

“I always figured Hannah was harmless,” Bruce confided to me one time. “I thought she might have been a schoolteacher when she was part of this world.”

He would get a big grin on his face and lift his beer in a toast. “Here's to Hannah,” he would say, “the ghostess with the mostess!”

I never asked him if he thought Hannah might be the ghost of his aunt – coming back to keep an eye on him, you know. But, I guess not, or he would surely have mentioned it. I forget Miss Higgin's first name, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Hannah.

I mentioned here previously how every winter Bruce made homemade peanut brittle and chocolate-covered almonds, packaged them, and sold them to patrons of the bars he frequented. Then he saw a classified ad in the New York Times for ladies lingerie at wholesale prices. He sent away for a batch of the frilly garments and, thus armed, launched himself on a new career. Or, at least, a summertime replacement for the lagging candy sales, toting his goods around to go-go bars and strip joints to sell to dancers.

Once when we were having a few beers together, he told me much of what had been going on during the time I hadn't seen him. For instance, he said that he was married for a few years to a lady police officer. She had been married once before and had a couple of boys. Then she and Bruce had a boy of their own.

He was a bright kid, and after he got out of high school, he joined the Navy.

My Buddy Bruce Part I - January 2005

Bruce used to hang out at Costello's, a friendly neighborhood bar that was located in the old Thurber Village Shopping Center on Neil Avenue. He didn't drive so he walked from the big Victorian house where he lived at Seventh and Neil.

In his last years Bruce looked a lot older than he was, probably because he had undergone triple bypass surgery. But you had to say this for Bruce: Even when he wasn't feeling on top of the world, he looked debonair and dapper. I used to kid him that he looked like the playwright Noel Coward.

Bruce drank Budweiser on tap, which at the time was eighty-five cents a glass. His usual routine was to arrive at Costello's early and leave late. When I would walk in and find him seated at the bar, I could always tell at a glance how long he had been there because he had a habit of lining up the dimes and nickels he got back in change like toy soldiers on parade.

When Bruce died in November of 1993 at the age of 67, there was no obituary in the Columbus Dispatch, or anywhere else. He just fell through the cracks.

A lot of people knew Bruce as “the candy man.” Every winter, he made peanut brittle and chocolate-covered almonds. Mouth-watering good, and he wasn't always jacking the prices up every chance he got. He packaged his goods – that's what he called his candy – in little white boxes or neat plastic bags.

He had gold labels printed up that said “Flytown Candy Company,” and placed them on each box or bag. “Nothing but the best,” he would say with a wink and a smile.
He would lug a big grocery sack of his goods into the bar, and before the evening was over they were all be sold. He would occasionally pass samples around to stimulate business, but he really didn't need to do that. Many of his old customers placed orders with him way ahead of time.

I can't begin to tell you how good Bruce's candy was. Maybe it was because it was so darned fresh – and made right there in his kitchen with loving care and top quality ingredients.
I enjoyed the peanut brittle and the chocolate-covered almonds. The peanut brittle was full of flavor and so crunchy you wouldn't believe it. Honest to God, it was hard to stop eating one piece after another.

Costello's wasn't the only place where Bruce sold his candy. He would visit plenty of other places, most of them downtown, close to the bus lines, you know, because he didn't drive. Places like Benny Klein's Steak House near Broad and High. He had quite a few customers there.

One of the bartenders at the Neil House used to buy two or three bags of his peanut brittle. The Neil House was a wonderfully comfortable hotel right across from the State Capitol on High Street.. Such a shame it was torn down by a bunch of blunder-headed developers, now forever gone along with a lot of other historic buildings in downtown Columbus.

Bruce even had a couple of customers at the Maramor, one of Columbus' most elite dining spots. That’s a laugh, because the Maramor made and packaged their own brand of candy and sold it over the counter. Pretty good stuff it was, too. Just not as flavorful as Bruce's goods.

Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's – that’s when Bruce's candy making venture went into high gear. Maybe even to Easter. After that, he put away all the pots and pans until another holiday season rolled around.

Earlier in life, Bruce had a number of jobs around town. Once he operated a little pizza place up Olentangy River Road near Dodridge Street. It was located in an old red brick building that had once been a little schoolhouse - or a church.

At one time or another, he worked in pizza parlors and places like that for other people. I would occasionally see him about town, but I didn't know him all that well back then.
Anyhow, during the period I knew Bruce best – the Costello days I call them – after the candy season was over, he turned to other ways of making a living.

He didn't need much money because his sisters helped support him, and he lived in his big Neil Avenue house rent-free. So, what did he do? Hold onto your hat! You'll find this a hoot! This kindly silver-haired gentle soul with the ingratiating smile would sell ladies undergarments to waitresses who worked in some of the places he frequented – and that's not all!

Back in the good ol' days there used to be two or three go-go bars downtown. He would go in those horrible (ha-ha!) dimly lit places, lugging his bag of goods and sell them to the dancers.

The girls would flock around him as he emptied all these goodies onto a table. They would rummage through all these flimsy unmentionables, often taking one item or another into the women's room to try on.

Once when I was with him, I warned him that the gals weren't bringing back all they left with.

That didn't seem to bother him too much.

I think he said something like, “It goes with the territory.” That reminded me of Willy Lowman's similar remark in “Death of a Salesman.”

December 2004

In the aftermath of this year's sensational gridiron victory over the University of Michigan, I thought back to another – although almost unknown – happy time when, by comparative scores, a raggedy bunch of seventh and eighth-graders here in Columbus celebrated another victory over the Maize and the Blue.

And, to say that it was one of the happiest days of my life due to the fact that I had a hand in the victory would be an understatement.

So, friends, in the aftermath of this latest heartening victory, I will share that long ago experience with you.

During the years that I attended Everett Junior High School, a classmate of mine, Jimmy Reeder, organized a bunch of us kids into a sandlot football team. This was in the days way back before junior leagues and that kind of stuff.

If we had seen a parent coming to one of our games, we would have run for cover in fear that we had done something wrong.

We named ourselves the River Rats because we played our games in the OSU fields down along the Olentangy River, and we scheduled games with kids from nearby schools.

Sometimes we played on the OSU polo field which definitely had its hazards if you got tackled and landed in a pile of you-know-what.

A few of us had helmets, most did not. The same was true of shoulders pads, football shoes, padded pants, and jerseys. Mostly not. We recognized the kids on our team because we had to.

Jimmy was captain of our team and he played various positions in the backfield. Not hard to do because there were only seven or eight guys on each side.

Howard Yerges Jr., the son of an All-American at the University of Michigan, was our quarterback.

We played ten minute quarters and we usually cajoled a couple of high school guys to officiate.

During our second year of existence, the Yerges family moved over to Grandview, and Howard started his own team. I can't remember what they called themselves.
It wasn't long, however, before we had a game scheduled with them.

I'll never forget that overcast Saturday morning as long as I live. It was along toward the end of October, and as we pedaled our bikes over to Grandview it started to drizzle.

We played on one of the high school athletic fields. There were no goal posts. Points after a touchdown were made by trying to run the ball into the end zone.

For most of the game we wallowed around on the muddy field without either team scoring.

Finally, with time running out, less than a minute left, we had the ball somewhere around mid-field. In our huddle, Jimmy told me to run deep, get behind the defenders, cut to the right, and he would throw me a pass.

Well, that's what I did. I ran clear down to the goal line, but, for some reason, I cut to the left - and what do you know! There was the ball spiraling right into my outstretched arms.

I caught it and stepped into the end zone. Six points! And, can you believe it, as we were celebrating, Jimmy said, “I thought I told you to cut to the right.”

“Good thing I didn't,” I quickly replied with a smirk. About then I saw Howard Yerges take off his helmet, slam it into the ground, get on his bike and disappear down the street. There had been tears streaming down his face and I couldn't help but feel sorry for him.

The rest of his team called it quits, and the officials said we won the game by default since the last few seconds of the game were never played.

There's a postscript to this story.

Years later, after high school and a tour of duty in the Navy, I got married at the beginning of my senior year at Ohio State.

One afternoon my wife Jeanne and I were walking across the oval toward High Street after witnessing a University of Michigan team clobber Ohio State 21 to 0.

The Michigan quarterback? Howard Yerges.

That's how, by comparative scores, the River Rats from Columbus, Ohio, beat the mighty University of Michigan football team.

It's a stretch, but what the heck!

November 2004

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap ...”

Those are the opening words of The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger, one of my literary heroes and a man still alive, living in his own carefully crafted world somewhere out in the wooded hills near Cornish, New Hampshire.

Whether or not I had a lousy childhood would depend on the way you look at it. My father died in a horrible accident when I was four years old. That was lousy. We were poor, but managed to get by. That was a little lousy. My mother was innovative, caring and a great cook. That was good. My brother and I were both healthy. That was great. He was really smart, but I was behind the door when the brains were passed out. That was good for him, but lousy for me.

As I wrote last month, much of my childhood was spent living around the university district, ten years of it right across the street from the campus on West Eleventh Avenue. That was really a positive experience, and it left me with a lot of swell memories - none of them lousy.

Here are a few memories I will share with you.

Back then there were not as many buildings on the campus. Take the women's dormitories, for example: Neil Hall, Mack Hall, and Baker Hall. That was it.

Because of the limited number of buildings, there was much less light pollution. I could walk across the street and go a few steps beyond the street lights and I would be in almost total darkness.

A couple of my friends like Rex Blair and Johnny Gardener would sometimes join me out there as we tried to learn the names of the brightest stars, planets, and constellations. Sometimes a student or two would join in and help us find some elusive configuration in the sky.

Oh, how the stars would sparkle back then! Something that city kids today know nothing about.

And, speaking of stars reminds me of the astronomy professor's girlfriend, a good-looking lanky redhead who lived somewhere around the neighborhood. Over on Tenth Avenue, I think. A lot of afternoons she would walk her Great Dane, a particularly ferocious beast with slavering jowls who enjoyed nothing more than chasing young kids around the block and scaring them half to death. I remember one time I ended up sitting on top of a car roof during a pursuit until she came along and called him off.

Almost as far back as I can remember, I had one kind of a job or another. Everything from selling magazines like Liberty and the Saturday Evening Post. I would have a bag of them over my shoulder, not to speak of the one I had in my hand, and I would walk alongside a student extolling the virtues of the publication until they relented and purchased a copy, probably just to get rid of me.

When I was a little older, I had paper routes. Oh boy, did I ever have paper routes. Sometimes the Columbus Dispatch, sometimes the Columbus Citizen. At various times, I had routes that extended from High Street to Perry Street, and from the campus all the way south to Third Avenue. Back in those days, they had neighborhood sub-stations, which were wooden buildings, little more than sheds, where all the carriers would pick up their papers after school.

Eventually, with money in my pocket, I experienced the heady feeling of growing independence and the power associated with buying my own stuff. Soda, candy and ice cream confections, sure. You can bet the folks at Berry's Drug Store, a friendly place on the northwest corner of West Tenth and High Street, were assured of their cut. It was like a tithe. A lot of it going to the candy counter, a huge amount to the soda fountain for banana splits, malted milks and sodas, not to speak of flavored cokes. And, as I got older, I spent more and more at the magazine rack.

The reading material was wonderful! What an escape from the mostly dull stuff I had to read at school! The pulp magazines were the ones that captured my imagination the most. Magazines like The Shadow, which celebrated the exploits of Lamont Cranston, and there was Doc Savage and a whole slew of detective magazines.

Another genre of these reader-friendly publications were the aviation magazines featuring action-packed stories of the World War I era. One title I remember was Sky Fighters, the stories within its pages were guaranteed to roil the blood of any young teenager.

There were the Sci-Fi magazines, publications like Astounding Stories, Amazing Stories and, yes, even Weird Stories, which boasted the fanciful work of some truly exceptional writers, H. P. Lovecraft, to name one.

Finally, as I have written before, in my junior and senior years, I clerked in the produce department of the original Big Bear Store on West Lane Avenue. Now I was really in the chips and, among other things, I could purchase my own clothes. And, where else but Moe Glassman's, a really sharp men's clothing store located on the east side of High across the street from Berry's Drug Store. At long last I could pick out my own clothes without parental interference.

Now, I was really living!

(To be continued)

(From the October 2004 issue)

There was a period in my life between the ages of ten and eighteen when I must have been one of the luckiest kids in the world.

During that time, I went to three good schools: Ninth Avenue Elementary, Everett Junior High, and North High. Not only that, I had some great teachers who made a lasting impression on my life. And, talk about an exciting environment to grow up in, my mother, brother David, and I lived right across the street from the sprawling campus of the Ohio State University.

So many memories come rushing back as I think about those impressionable days of my boyhood. If you bear with me, I will try to share some of them with you.

My widowed mother took roomers to help make ends meet and, from my youthful perspective, even that was immensely interesting and an education unto itself.

To this day, I still remember some of our roomers - mostly students, but a few professors and at least one librarian.

I remember one professor who would frequently visit a bar or two before coming home. One evening he couldn't quite make it up the steps to his room on the second floor. What he really ended up doing was falling up the steps. He was down on his knees crawling up one riser at a time when my mother encountered him. You can bet your bottom dollar the sparks really flew as she gave him a piece of her mind along with his eviction notice on the spot. Poor guy.

The bells of Orson Hall, like a metronome, marked off all of those boyhood years. Seldom was I out of earshot of their melodious tolling as they announced each quarter hour.

That picturesque old building was located on the north edge of Mirror Lake hollow and housed the archeology museum, classrooms, and the departmental library.

Every now and then, I got up the nerve to venture into the cavernous first floor which housed the museum. There I would gawk at a model of a giant dinosaur skeleton, and a lot of bones and other relics of the earth's ancient past. I was very impressed, I can tell you that. A Mrs. DeSelm, the mother of a high school classmate of mine, was the departmental librarian.

In the springtime, a favorite activity was joining the crowds on the oval to watch the ROTC reviews.

ROTC meant Reserve Officer's Training Corps. Back then, most male students were required to take at least two or three credit hours of military training per quarter.

The reviews were more like parades, and mighty impressive they were, what with the cadets dressed in their spiffy full-dress dark blue uniforms with white belts.

During the warm months, I would sometimes wander down to the picturesque amphitheater near Mirror Lake, where Elsie Kittle was busy rehearsing here students for a Shakespearian production.

All of the participants were coeds and I would sit there in awe at how adept the gals were in filling all the roles &endash; especially those of villainous men.

For me, the highlight of their season was the dress rehearsal, which was free and just as good as the regular paid performances that followed on ensuing evenings. So, there I would be, soaking it all up, back somewhere in the years when I was between twelve and sixteen.

And guess what? Way back then I was publishing a little neighborhood newspaper. It was called The Item and consisted of three or four 8 1/2" by 11" pages printed on a pan of hectograph jelly.

Sometimes - when we managed to agree on the paper's policy - I had a partner in this enterprise. He was a pleasant fellow named Jimmy McVicker who lived on a part of West Tenth Avenue that has long since been torn down. Jimmy's father worked for a national news service and his mother wrote romantic novels.

I guess I should mention here that I owed a debt of gratitude to my brother David, who was seven years older that me.

By everyone's reckoning David was brilliant - in the genius category - and our mother scrimped and saved to put him through University School, which was located at Woodruff and High.

Because of his scholastic abilities, David occupied the center of my mother's attention and she pinned a lot of her dreams on him.

Can you see the beauty of this situation for me? If not, let me fill you in.

I was free to roam. I was free to come and go pretty much as I wanted. The great OSU campus was my front yard, and the neighborhood was my back yard.

David got the glory, but I had freedom. I'll give you an example. One time, when I was seventeen, one of the Dodge brothers stopped by our house and I slipped out the back door with him and we made our way down High Street to the old Palm Gardens nightclub.

This was a cozy little place where Dean Martin once did a gig before he became famous. It was located about where Kroger's is today.

At any rate, I had a pocketful of money from my Dispatch route and my friend and I had quite an evening.

In one night, I had my first beer and saw my first naked lady!.

(to be continued)

(From the Sept. '04 issue)

From the very beginning, the contest was unfair. The baby deer was very little and, by comparison, my car was huge.

I first spotted the fawn when I came around a bend in the Clear Creek road. He was standing in the middle of the road about four car lengths away. I hit the brakes and the car skidded on the loose gravel, then spun around in a cloud of dust.

When I stopped, he was not more than a car length away. He had turned a bit sideways, as though to brace himself against the impending impact.

After such a rude introduction, I was sure that neither one of us knew exactly what was the proper thing to do. So, for about thirty seconds, we didn't do anything. The truth is, I think we both needed a little more time to gather our wits about us.

With a great sigh of relief, I continued to look out the car window at the little fellow. He, in turn, looked up at me with his big, unblinking amber eyes.

His coat was the color of buckwheat honey, decorated with irregular spots of white along the flanks. He was really cute.

I don't know whether he was frozen with fright, or just unaware of the peril he had been in. I suspected the latter, but changed my mind when I saw that he was trembling.

Maybe another ten seconds went by. He seemed to be getting over the shakes and making tentative moves to escape his predicament. The problem was he didn't know what to do first - so he compromised and did a little dance, backward, then forward, like a minuet. I noticed that every now and then his knees would buckle.

About this time, I became aware of the doe - his mother - when I heard her soft barking and bleating. She was not more than twenty-five yards away, secluded in tall grasses and blackberry tangles, difficult to see because of her subtle coloring and the flickering patterns of tree shadows. Her eyes were fixed on the little scene in the middle of the road.

I believe she was trying to tell her little offspring what to do, but I don't think her message was getting through. Although he seemed to have mostly gotten over the shakes, I got the impression he was still trying to decide what to do first.

Evidently thinking that discretion might be the better part of valor, he continued his little dance, scampering about in a little circle. Then, when he should have been looking at his mother, he would stop and look at me.

Every now and then his knees would buckle.

Finally, at long last, mustering all his courage, he ran right by the side of my car, teetered down the road a short distance, then darted into the brush and disappeared.

That was the last I saw of him.

About then, off in a nearby meadow, I saw another adult deer, then another, and another. They stood with ears erect, then suddenly raced away, their graceful bodies sailing over the ground, snow-white tails bobbing up and down. It was as if they were celebrating.

As I started up the car, a multitude of thoughts passed through my mind.

The most important one was that in a time when indifference and death are so casually accepted, somehow - luckily- I had contributed to life.

On the way home my heart was thumping a happy tune - like a melody rolling out of an old-fashioned player-piano.

It had been a good day!

 

(From the Aug. '04 issue)

Some of my fondest boyhood memories are of my mother's cooking.

Picture this: A platter of spareribs , browned to perfection, the succulent meat so tender it is practically falling off the ribs. On the side, baked sauerkraut, tart and tasty but sweetened with a dash of brown sugar, In a casserole dish, homemade scalloped potatoes, creamy, golden brown and, oh, so good. Another dish was heaped with broccoli, or maybe green beans. For dessert, there would be a thick slice of ripe Honeydew melon.

For Easter dinner we frequently had leg of lam with the traditional mint jelly, and for sides something like a baking dish of scalloped corn and, maybe another dish of candied carrots.

For Thanksgiving there would be a small turkey, basted in its own juices, roasted until succulent and tender. There would be a casserole dish heaped with yams that had been topped with marshmallows and placed under the broiler until melted. Two or three different vegetables, some of them in a cream sauce would round out the menu, not counting the homemade pumpkin pie.

It goes without saying that cornbread would accompany many of these meals.

Looking back on it, I'm still amazed at my mother's ingenuity and creative ability in the kitchen.

Off and on, we would have typical southern dishes, the kind she had grown up with.

Some of them were tasty, others I wasn't all that fond of.

Grits, for instance.

I could take them or leave them.

Another was black-eyed peas.

Not bad if I was starving/

She would usually serve them with a dab of butter on top, but sometimes we had the option of drowning the in syrup.

One of her favorite dishes was scalloped oysters. Not a food I would ordinarily enjoy, but the way she prepared them, they were sensational.

Oh, we had plenty of hamburgers for lunch or dinner, but my mother didn't call them hamburgers. They were "meat patties" consisting of upper round steak custom ground for her by the butcher.

On the other hand, I can never remember much junk food around, not even goodies like doughnuts, or most soft drinks - with the exception of Vernor's Ginger Ale. It goes without saying, there were no alcoholic beverages, After all, remember, it was just my mother, my brother, and me.

Getting back to the meat patties for a minute, if were having them for dinner, they would be accompanied by Idaho baked potatoes, a vegetable, and maybe a salad. There would be plenty of butter for the baked potatoes, and a dash of salt and pepper. Unfortunately, it was before scour cream made its way to Columbus,

Some of the dishes my mother came up with would sometimes prompt a "yuck!" from this sometimes rebellious kid.

Calves liver, for instance. But it would look so delicious, and smell so wonderful, that I would give in and taste it. And after the first taste, well, yes Mom, I'll have some more. Mother would always specify to the butcher that she wanted baby calves liver. For supper, she would fry it either with bacon or sliced onions.

These are the kinds of meals I'm talking about. Memorable. And she would put theme together on a limited budget. Of course, these were depression days and everything was selling at rock-bottom prices. By the same token, money was as scarce as hen's teeth, but she made do.

Mother was a wonder, and I wish I had her back so I could tell her so.

Funny thing, though.

She never mastered the art of Italian cooking.

Spaghetti, for instance.

She cooked her spaghetti in a big pot with all the ingredients thrown in. It was soup.

Good though!

When we lived in the University District, one of my mother's favorite grocery stores was the King Avenue market. It was located right about where Viking Carryout is today. She especially liked their selection of meat.

There was a Mykrantz Drug Story over where Dragonfly neo-v cuisine is currently located. It had a soda fountain and everything.

Another friendly place where my mother shopped was the Weiss Sisters' Red and White store. It was located on either Hunter or Highland Avenue a couple of blocks south of West Eleventh. And, there was a small Kroger store on the west side of High Street between Ten and Eleventh avenues.

Amazingly, none of these place were self-serve. In other words, a clerk would take your order and fetch everything for you, the possible exception being produce where you could help choose what went into your market basket.

My mother was a very particular shopper and she would keep an eagle-eye on everything she ordered.

Sometimes, when we could afford it, we would eat Sunday dinner at a very nice restaurant at the corner of Tenth and Neil. I think it was called the Campus-Neil. Or, sometimes we would go up on High Street and eat at the Dutch Tavern. No relation to the Dutch Café. And, a lot of times, we would walk over to Pomerine Hall, which overlooked Mirror Lake. They had a cafeteria with good food at affordable prices.

As the old song goes, "Those were the good ol' days," and you can bet your bottom dollar I'll never forget them!

 

 

(From the July '04 issue)

The Great Depression didn't scare my plucky mother one bit. Once we moved up to the University District, she set about renting our spare rooms to students. In the big houses that we usually lived in, that meant as many as two or three rooms rented out, maybe more if the house had a finished third.

From my point of view, it was pretty exciting having all these strangers come and go. Most of them were undergraduates, but occasionally we would get somebody working on a Masters or a Ph.D. Mostly they were men, but every once in a while a woman would settle into a room. And, of course, if she was pretty, I would fall in love with her, although I probably would have fainted if she had asked me what time it was because I was so bashful.

We even had professors, mostly quiet intellectual types, but I do remember a couple of oddballs, including one who drank too much, so Mother eventually had to ask him to leave.

Until I became old enough to acquire a paper route, I settled for selling packages of seeds door-to-door, and magazines such as Collier's, the Saturday Evening Post, and Ladies' Home Journal.

Evenings we would gather around our faithful Clarion radio and listen to all the bad news about unemployment and World War I veterans selling apples, and the latest measures that President Roosevelt was proposing to combat the bad times.

To tell the truth, the never-ending news of people killing each other around the world made for more exciting listening.

Back in the '30s, Japan was rampaging through China, Italy invaded Ethiopia, and the Spanish Civil War was draining the vitality of that nation - all of this bloodshed over territory and to gain economic advantage, or to put down a rival religion, or to force their own national creed down somebody else's throat. I still have the war scrapbooks that I faithfully kept for many years.

For relief from all this bad news, after dinner we would listen to our favorite shows, the likes of Amos 'n' Andy, The Shadow, Fibber McGee and Molly, and the Green Hornet. And, I dare not forget to mention some of the other great comedians of that era, such as Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Jack Benny, and Joe Penner, to name a few.

I swear my mother must have had Gypsy blood. If she wasn't entirely pleased with one house, we would up and move to another. Maybe live there for a year or two, then move somewhere else.

In such a fashion, we lived in two separate places on Neil Avenue, two on West Tenth Avenue, one on Hunter Street, and two on West Tenth Avenue. Those are the ones I remember.

Off and on, if we had a spare room, my orbiting grandmother, "Da," would live with us for awhile. She was a stern disciplinarian, so I was careful never to get her riled up. I remember one time I must not have been careful enough because she bent my arm behind my back and wrestled me to the ground - all the while chewing me out for whatever it was I had done. Come to think of it, my magazine manager had stopped by to collect and I didn't have quite enough money to pay him in full. Must have spent a little too much for candy that week.

My grandmother was a very superstitious woman. I can remember she and my mother screaming and yelling at each other one time because my mother wanted to start a trip on a Friday. She wanted to take my brother and me up to Chicago to see our paternal grandparents.

"You'll never make it back to Columbus alive!" my grandmother wailed.

"Don't be silly," my mother laughed, "the trains are perfectly safe."

"The children will be killed," Da shot back, "Or kidnapped!"

And so it went, their voices rising by the minute, until they were standing there face to face screaming at each other.

I can't even remember now whether we left that day or not. Chances are we didn't. Chances are my mother gave in to ignorance and superstition just to quiet Da down.

I forget most of my grandmother's other superstitious fears, but I do remember that if you have to return home for something you have forgotten, it's important to sit down before you leave again. It might even help to toss a dash of salt over your shoulder.

Never walk under a ladder, and of course, she would have added that it was just plain common sense not to let a black cat cross your path.

I'll say this for my grandmother though. True to her southern heritage, she was a mighty fine cook, and she passed a lot of that cooking knowledge on to my mother.

Fried apples, a breakfast specialty of hers, were so good they'd make your mouth drool just thinking about them.

Thus it was that the years passed and I slid through the educational system - Ninth Avenue Elementary, Everett Junior High and, finally, North High School.

In the Ninth grade, I had gotten interested in bird study, and for all practical purposes, I was oblivious to everything else.

(To be continued)

 

 

(From the June '04 issue)

With my mother on a vacation to Chicago
to see my father's family.

The nine-story building featured a tearoom off the lobby, uniformed bellhops, automatic elevators, a two-level parking garage, and an easily accessible rooftop from which I could look out over the city in all directions.

My mother was a couragous woman, as well as a survivor in the truest sense of the word. I say this in spite of the fact that she was a chronic worrywart and, in her last years on Earth, fearful of the inevitable end - even though she was an extremely religious woman, brought up as a Carmelite, a fundamentalist religious sect of the South. My feeling is that none of us ever figures out every nuance of what another person's life is about, not to speak of our own.

"When the going gets tough, the tough get going," the old adage says, and my mother fit that description to a T. Widowed when she was in her early thirties with two young boys to care for, and little in the way of money, she soon demonstrated that she was capable of making her own way in this world.

My mother was brought up in Nashville, Tennessee, and went to Ward-Belmont, a girls' finishing school. There she learned the rudiments of proper English and all the social graces, but not much else. Don't forget, in those days not many women pursued careers outside the home.

Fortunately, soon after my dad died, she heard that the owners of an apartment building on First Avenue in Grandview were looking for a manager. In spite of the fact she had absolutely no work experience, on sheer gumption, she applied for the job, and got it. A rent-free apartment went with the modest salary, and she was on her way to self-support.

And, guess what?

She did such a good job that the owners of the building, the Huntington National Bank, offered her a much better position at their newly acquired Parkview Apartments on East Broad Street, opposite Franklin Park. It was a pretty spiffy place in those days. Dr. Melvin Croaty, the famous goiter specialist lived right next door to the building we lived in. And Webb Hunting-ton and his family lived in the apartment below us.

This was a big step up. A nicer rent-free apartment with utilities paid, a better salary, and other amenities such as complimentary laundry service, and dairy and bakery products.

Well, she did such a good job that she attracted the attention of the John Hancock Insurance Company which had just purchased the Cambridge Arms, Columbus' premier high-rise apartment building at the time. So we moved again.

The nine-story building featured a tearoom off the lobby, uniformed bellhops, automatic elevators, a two-level parking garage, and an easily accessible rooftop from which I could look out over the city in all directions. I would take it all in: Beyond the surrounding houses, past the church steeples along Broad Street, all the way to the AIU Building, which the Lincoln-LeVeque Building was called in those days. I swear I could see all the way to the fairgrounds and the buildings on the Ohio State University campus.

Boy, did I ever have fun while we lived there. Plenty of action. I got to know the bellhops and would be all ears when they'd gossip about the tenants.

I went to Douglas Elementary School, which I liked a lot. The old red brick building had a big cylindrical fire escape attached to one wall. James Thurber once attended school there.

Because I wanted a paper route but I was too young to go to a sub-station to pick up my papers, Mother called up the Circulation Department of the Dispatch and talked to the manager, a Mister Thomas.

Soon a Dispatch delivery truck was dropping off a roll of papers every day in front of the building. My route consisted of the apartments in the building and the stately homes along East Broad Street for a block or two in each direction. Two of the Dispatch Wolfe boys lived in the building with their young wives and were on my route.

Mother had gained a lot of self-confidence and was becoming ever more proficient in her job. She showed apartments to prospective tenants, listened patiently to those who had complaints, hired maintenance people for the endless task of keeping the building functioning properly, and painters every time an apartment needed refurbishing. Not only that, she was becoming ever more proficient at interior de-corating, which included everything from selecting wall colors to purchasing draperies and carpeting.

Of course, she also had the never-ending job of running a household for our small family, which meant everything from grocery shopping and cooking, to keeping my brother and I reasonably well-clothed and shod, not to speak of trying to keep some semblance of law and order when my brother and I were fighting over one thing or another.

Those were depression years and up to this point Mother had been unbelievably lucky. But then the axe fell.

To save money, the owners decided to let the tearoom manager show apartments, and Mother was without a job.

So we set about packing. Cups, saucers, and dinner plates were wrapped in newspapers and put in a couple of wooden barrels, along with silverware, bric-a-brac, pots and pans and whatever else that we could tuck in. Books were boxed, linen bundled, clothing crammed in a couple of wardrobe trunks, and - Whew! - we were ready for the moving van.

Hand in hand, we climbed aboard a streetcar and headed for our next adventure. Mother had rented a big house in the University District, and we were going to rent rooms to students.

 

(To be continued)

 

(From the May '04 issue)

As I grow older, I find myself thinking more and more of beloved family members who have departed this earthly vale. For instance, hardly a day goes by that I don't think of my mother who died in 1988 or my brother who passed away in 2001.

Actually, I have had long practice at this kind of retrospective looking back over my shoulder. My father died in an accident when I was only 4 years old. I barely remember him, just little snippets of memory, but I often think of him and wonder what he was really like, and I try my best to be a credit to him.

My mother as a young woman.

My Tennessee-born mother was just a few weeks shy of 95 when she passed away. Over a period of several months before her death, she suffered two massive strokes and probably others less discernible. During that time, she remained in the hospital for extended stays, most often in intensive care.

The first stroke disrupted her ability to speak clearly, robbed her of the ability to think clearly, and left her in a state that my brother described as "bewildered," but which the doctors referred to as dementia.

During the last month or two of her life, it had been difficult for me to honestly say whether our mother recognized us or not. My brother, David, said she did. I wasn't so sure.

Other times, she would react violently, lashing out with one arm or another at hospital personnel when her bed was being made up or when the catheter or IV was being changed.

This kind of spectacle was heartbreaking to behold and was the reason I sometimes felt she was better off asleep or comatose, whichever it might have been. At such times, I would picture in my mind a studio portrait taken in Nashville when she was about seventeen and a raven-haired beauty. In the photograph, she was wearing a white blouse with a single strand of pearls around her slender neck. Soft inquiring eyes met the camera lens with the hint of a demure smile.

I had a theory about my mother's behavior in the hospital. It wasn't unbearable pain alone that she was suffering, but an obsessive fear of the unknown coupled with an extreme aversion to any and all violations of her person.

I remember back to the '60s when I took her to University Hospital after she slipped on an icy pavement in downtown Columbus.

I will never forget that experience, the extreme anxiety she displayed, and what seemed to me to be a complete lack of self-control. Hysteria would be a more accurate description. Carefully I helped her from my car into the brightly lit hospital corridor of the emergency room. The tortured, helpless look of a trapped animal was written on her face.

"My back is broken," she wailed.

"If your back was broken, you wouldn't be walking," I tried to reassure her.

"I am hardly walking," she gasped, hanging heavier than ever on my arm, then almost falling so that I had to hold her sagging body up with both hands.

"It's probably my hip," she cried out, "I've broken my hip. Either that or I've hurt myself internally."

At the admissions desk she had little patience with the questions put to her. "My name is Lucille Thomson," she panted, a wild expression on her face as she stared accusingly at her interrogator. "I fell on the ice. I'm hurt! I don't know what my social security number is. I need medical attention before I die!"

I found myself torn between the realization that some questions had to be asked, my concern that she might have some serious injury, and my extreme embarrassment at the way she was behaving.

I helped with some of the needed information, then steered her down the hall for a series of x-rays - which confirmed that she had no broken bones. The examining doctor reassured her that she had suffered nothing more than a contusion which would probably result in some tenderness and a bruise.

All of the old traits, I realized, were alive and well during her last days some 20 years later. When it came to doctors and hospitals, she was one of the world's greatest cowards, afraid to swallow an aspirin tablet without crushing it up, afraid to go outdoors without covering her head, afraid of the rain, the snow, the lightning, deathly afraid of dogs, afraid of flying (she never stepped foot in an airplane), afraid of the dark, afraid of the unknown, the partly known, and most of the known.

Protecting herself from what she perceived as an alien world was her pride, a shield she wore like a suit of clanking quixotic armor - the helmet and all the various parts of which were her gentility, her southern upbringing, and her disdain of modern times.

She detested - no, make that dreaded - the very idea of doctors, nurses and aides invading the private domain of her body. And there was another overriding abhorrence, one she wrapped about her like a tight cloak. That was the thought of growing old. She despised the thought of growing old, the fact that she was getting old. She hated the expression "senior citizen." To the bitter end, she rebelled at the ravages and debilitation of old age.

Now, at the end of her life, she was like a collected butterfly, stuck on a pin and exposed to the eyes and probing fingers of countless strangers. I think that these final invasions of her privacy were equal to any pain that she might have suffered.

Something else needs to be said. Although it's true that she was fearful of the ravages of old age and death, she was fearless in facing the everyday obstacles of life. That famous line by Dylan Thomas - Rage, rage against the dying of the light - reflects the kind of defiance and strength she possessed that keeps her alive in my memory still. Again and again, she returns to those familiar places I've given her to become the beloved mother she once was.

 

(To be continued)

 

 

(From the April '04 issue)

The Fish Man

By Tom Thomson

I had heard a lot about Milton Trautman before I ever met him. As a matter of fact, I purchased his book, The Birds of Buckeye Lake, Ohio, at the Bibliophile, which used to be adjacent to Long's Book Store at Fifteenth and High.

I referred to that book so often, I probably succeeded in reading it a hundred times. In my opinion, it was - and still is - one of the finest regional studies of birds ever written. My only complaint with the book is a nagging suspicion th