THE WAPAKONETA THAT I KNOW

 

In Part Five of a recent series that I posted in The Southern Yankee entitled Maybe Thomas Wolfe Was Right…Maybe You Can’t, I stated the following:

Being an expatriate is not an easy matter. Unless you truly have the soul of a nomadic vagabond, you are always torn between where you’re from and where you are. And being an expat for an extended period of time complicates this matter still further, because you are always a foreigner where you make your new home, no matter how integrated into that society you might become. But when you return “home”, you find that you are seen as a foreigner there too, or at least as a sort of prodigal son, who no longer has a right to call that birthplace your home.

So many times I’ve had people say to me, you left so you have no right to an opinion. Or, you’ve been gone so long that you no longer think like us. Or, you don’t even live here, so what the hell do you care about this or that. Little do they know that no matter how accustomed and “at home” you might become in your chosen environment, the “homing instinct” that reminds you constantly of “where you came from” never goes away.

But then again, while the place you’ve adopted becomes the place you are familiar with on an everyday basis, your place of origin becomes an image frozen in your mind and heart. It isn’t, then, a daily recording of reality as it happens, but a sepia snapshot of how it used to be, in an era that now only comes alive in your mind, but that no longer exists as it was. It’s only through daily contact—whether virtually or in person—that you can hope to have a clear vision of “home” as it is now, and not, as the song goes, just “visions of what used to be.”

This is, in a nutshell, the theme contained in a new book of non-fiction stories that I’ve just published entitled, precisely, Visions of What Used to Be. Fellow Buckeyes will recognize the title as a line from the traditional Beautiful Ohio Waltz, the original chorus of which goes:

Drifting with the current down a moonlit stream,
While above the Heavens in their glory gleam,
And the stars on high
Twinkle in the sky,
Seeming in a paradise of love divine,
Dreaming of a pair of eyes that looked in mine.
Beautiful Ohio, in dreams again I see
Visions of what used to be.

Adopted as the Ohio State Song, the lyrics were modified in 1989, but the version above was the original, penned in 1918 by Ballard McDonald.

I felt the title was fitting and proper, since the Ohio, and indeed, the Wapakoneta that live on in my memories no longer exist. I’ve had more than one self-imposed mission in my nearly half-century career as a journalist and free-lance writer. But not the least of these is what I’ve tried to achieve in writing this book—namely, to seek to capture, as sincerely and authentically as possible, the era in which I grew from childhood to adulthood.

When (if) you reach my age, it can be a stark realization to find that from your salad days in the sixties and seventies—which still seem like “only yesterday” when I recall them—to the present is twenty years longer than the period from World War I (which we considered “the olden days”) to the year of my birth, four years after the end of World War II. And it’s only thirty years less than the period from the end of the Civil War until the year of my birth!

It’s little wonder, then, that young to middle-aged people of today would find it hard to fathom what it was like for us growing up, and growing to maturity, in a world without personal computers, smartphones, credit cards, the Internet, the World Wide Web, cable and satellite TV, Netflix, MP3 (and 4), hybrid cars, e-books and Wikipedia. Lifestyles and technology—technology that vastly affects our daily lives—have so changed over the course of the past half-century that people in their twenties and thirties must ask themselves “how we lived” and “how we didn’t die of boredom.”

Tell them, by way of response, that we had radio, hi-fi, black and white and later color TV (three or four channels seemed like plenty), land lines (which we just called telephones) at home and public phone booths in the street, libraries and bookstores, movie theaters, savings accounts, manual and “modern” electric typewriters, gasoline that cost as little as twenty cents a gallon, World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica, and they look at you as if you were speaking in Martian.

As a writer, then, I’ve always felt it was my pleasant duty to document those other times, in the most personal way possible, not as an historian, but as a story-teller. Because if those times now only live in the minds and hearts of the survivors of my generation, then one of my literary missions should be to collect and transmit those memories to others, so that they live on, rather than dying with us when our time comes. And that’s how this book was born.

It is currently available on Amazon in both print and e-book formats:

 https://www.amazon.com/VISIONS-WHAT-USED-Dan-Newland/dp/B09WPZVTDP/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1649376237&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/VISIONS-WHAT-USED-Dan-Newland-ebook/dp/B09WYC2LY8/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1649376237&sr=1-1

The print version of the book will shortly also be available for purchase in Wapakoneta at Casa Chic, State & Local, and Image Masters.

I hope all of you enjoy reading it, and I look forward to hearing from you, whether here or on Facebook.